Rapper Lupe Fiasco is held up along with a handful of other rappers like Common, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli for their social-consciousness. When people want to push back against the argument that rap, as a musical genre, is inherently violent and anti-social, these Four Horseman are trotted out as evidence that it ain’t all that bad.
Fiasco differentiates himself by openly opposing Barack Obama. But he also shares Mos Def’s9/11 Trutherism*. Fiasco’s father was a member of the Black Panther party so the rapper probably inherited his dad’s Black Nationalist. His philosophy seems one of radical self-sufficiency. That’s just some background on Fiasco.
I just came across his most recent single called “Bitch Bad”. I enjoyed the beat; I think the message is well-intentioned and that the black community can’t be hurt if such a message is spread. I separate this from my overall feeling on Fiasco and his politics. Here’s the video and some thoughts afterward.
The video diminishes the song. The White Devil businessman is profiting off of black rappers and ho’s donning modern black face to appeal to their audience. Heard this one before. At Spin, Brandon Soderberg dislikes the song/video for different reasons. Like Fiasco, he also misses his intended mark. Soderberg complains about Fiasco’s “mansplaining”:
The whole thing is an impressive exercise in mansplaining. Its hook goes, “Bitch bad, woman good, lady better,” which sounds sweet and all, but does any female want to be called “a lady”? And although the song is a bit more complex than described above — or really, muddled — it is the umpteenth example of so-called “conscious” hip-hop replacing one type of misogyny with another.
Fiasco isn’t engaging in mansplaining just as modern rap is not a system whereby white capitalist entertainment moguls are forcing black entertainers to sell themselves out in order to appeal to largely white masses. Rap music is a “black-driven” genre. FUBU and all that. While rap is popular among whites as well, rap is a genre which rose organically from the black community. White businessmen and black businessmen alike have profited from its rise. But one reason that it is also not analogous to black face and minstrelsy is that many black rappers do actually live the same lifestyle which they represent through the genre.
In his video, Fiasco pokes fun at 50 Cent. The black face character crying at the end is shown peddling a vitamin drink – a reference to 50 Cent’s Vitamin Water brand – and also wearing the grill and bandana and carrying around a gun and a blunt. But 50 Cent was famously shot nine times. Like Tupac, this is a source of pride for the rapper. Many other rappers engage in questionable activities which land them in jail. Point being, rap is basically the music of life on the hard streets. Its violence is often defended on the grounds that rappers are only speaking on their subjective truth. That many whites shake their collective heads at the blacks who engage in this *and* the fact that black face and minstrel shows were ways in which white audiences once made fun of poor blacks does not mean that these white audiences are essentially the same. In black face, the white audience was endogenous; with rap, they are exogenous.
But just to handle the “mansplaining” charge leveled by Soderberg – as I understand it, “mansplaining” is when a man tells women (or persons perceivied as inferior) “the way things are” in a manner that indicates that he believes that the listeners are ignorant. The term carries this gendered connotation because it is believed that only men have such a sense of entitlement to engage others in this condescending manner. The thing here is that the use of the word “bitch” in rap has been a long-running debate. Tupac Shakur and C. Delores Tucker went back and forth on the issue. Tipper Gore fought to place labels on records with explicit lyrics. Misogyny in rap music has been addressed by many female rappers as well. Fiasco is merely throwing his own lyrical and rhetorical style to this stale debate.
It’s not mansplaining, and it’s not blackface. Overall it’s a completely vapid discussion because it is between two competing victimologies.
*My interest here isn’t whether or not 9/11 is what we are told it was…it is mostly that people who embrace Trutherism are pseudo-intellectuals. And that’s being gracious. As Fiasco says in the interview at that link: “I’m a proponent of critical thinking.” Vanguard shit right there, I tell ya.
Mansplaining mansplaining: Derogatory word used when a male figure who does not share your first principles posits explanations for phenomena which are different from your own. Also known as not being a fucking dumbass parrot.
Not to be confused with gaslighting, which is a phenomenon whereby feminists become so delusional about the world that they invented a term for their own cognitive dissonance.
No – it’s black consciousness. Unless he’s been advocating for the Boer in South Africa and rape vicims in Sweden. He is looking out for his people, which is fine. That doesn’t include everyone.
What poor and heavy handed propaganda in that video. Of course the message at the end is that whites are evil, even though the minstral was paid and he puts the blackface on himself. How evil – being paid to act. Our modern minstrals do exactly the same thing and are very happy to accept the money. In fact, it would be discrimination to withhold that from them, infringing on their personal choice.
Soderberg sees “mainsplaining.” I see Lupe taking the moral high ground.
My review: I’m not sure what to make of it, but I like where it is going.
My criticism: The black mainstream is going to drop the hammer on “moral rap.” They are so used to the ace-in-the-hole of the oppressed victim card that they can’t tolerate dissenters.
“My interest here isn’t whether or not 9/11 is what we are told it was…it is mostly that people who embrace Trutherism are pseudo-intellectuals.”
So says the pseudo-intellectual who insists on labeling all people with a certain belief with a derogatory, childish nickname like “Trutherism,” without ever directly addressing the nature of their beliefs.
C.R. – They’re people like the rest of us, not reptiles, but then you have leading religious figures like Sephardic leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef comparing gentiles to donkeys:
“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat.
According to Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews.
“In Israel, death has no dominion over them… With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money.
This is his servant… That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew,” Yosef said.
“Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.
“focus on one line that has almost nothing to do with the post and get really really pissed off about it. you probably think jews are reptiles as well.”
I’m not pissed. Just pointing out your clear hypocrisy.
And I will do so again here, as you have accused me of being anti-semitic with no evidence to back that up. You have hurled more invective into the ether in an attempt to avoid discussing anything substantive. The mark of a true pseudo-intellectual.
Black people hate responsibility even more than they hate white people. In this video, you see “the white man” responsible for “coercing” these black actors into humiliating acts for money and you see Lupe Fiasco dressed sharply implicitly admonishing the black actors for doing it thus placing responsibility on “those black people.”
Black people like jobs like acting, public speaking, hosting, singer etc. because they have irregular schedules, require minimal brain power, minimal physical labor, other people set up the “stage,” and it gets lots of attention. White people, mostly Irish, early on did blackface. Black people wanted to act at these venues so they adopted Irish surnames and increasingly took over black roles. The reality is the white creators of these roles were actually pretty superficial in their portrayal of black people. If they really wanted to go after black people there was plenty of material to do so and really hit hard. Black people know that the black community is worse off than what many white people think.
you see me address Trutherism and since you are a Truther you get ass hurt that i’m not embracing it. if you could read critically you would see that my argument is not about whether or not 9/11 happened the way most people think it did, just that the people who are Truthers (perhaps you?) are generally pseudo-intellectuals. they are not pseudo-intellectuals on the issue of Trutherism per se. they are merely dogmatic on that particular issue. there is just a big overlap. Fiasco is a Truther and his material is generally filled with pseudo-intellectual nonsense. he sounds like Michael Eric Dyson on wax.
as for you being an anti-semite…i just said you probably think the jews are reptiles. there’s a big overlap between Trutherism and believing stuff like that. so it would be on you to tell me if you believe that or not. if you are a Truther or not a Truther or you think Jews are reptiles or not, i don’t care that much either way.
what i do find fascinating is that you are try to mainstream Trutherism. burden of proof is on you buddy. you and other Truthers have a big uphill battle to prove what you believe. until then, you really shouldn’t get too shrill about people not believing you. you are the quacks until you come up with stronger evidence.
It’s nice to see that the first page of comments, not a single one agrees with Soderberg. Funny that Soderberg accuses Fiasco of “mainsplaining” when Fiasco’s statement is pretty damn feminist (in the old sense. Maybe the new sense, too.)
C.R.,
Impressive strawman there. You know absolutely nothing about me, yet in your replies you boldly state a number of characteristics that you believe I possess. Lets go through the list of slander:
1. I am a “trutherist” (I never said anything about my beliefs)
2. I believe that jews are reptiles (I never said anything about jews or reptiles)
3. I am “ass hurt” that you are not a “trutherist” (I never said anything about your beliefs one way or another)
4. I want to mainstream trutherism, and that is why I read blogs (I never even argued the point)
I will repeat my original reply, which is that you, sir, are a pseudo-intellectual. The proof is in the pudding.
all depends on how you’d define ‘pseudo-intellectual’. i’d never say something like “i’m a big proponent of critical thinking” as Fiasco did. that’s the type of empty vapid statement that pseudo-intellectuals say. if i’m a pseduo-intellectual i’m much less of one that someone like Fiasco.
but you are jumping too quickly on me calling Fiasco a pseudo-intellectual. you seem to be under the impression that i think he’s a pseudo because he’s also a Truther. as i wrote, these are correlated but they don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. he’s pretty clearly full of shit but he doesn’t even seem to be entertain the possibility that he might be. that’s a good indicator of pseudo-intellectualism.
so am i pseudo-intellectual? i don’t think i take myself seriously enough to be considered one. but to speak of strawmen, none of that list there indicates anything about pseudo-intellectualism. if i am wrong (i’m pretty sure you are a Truther or else you wouldn’t have keyed in on one minor point of this post) then i am just factually incorrect. there is a difference between being wrong and being a pseudo-intellectual. i could be wrong about my initial interpretation of you. not that we’d ever find out though.
CR said: “he’s pretty clearly full of shit but he doesn’t even seem to be entertain the possibility that he might be.”
No debate re: Fiasco, as I don’t know the man, but I could say the same about you in lieu of your remark that pseudo-intellectualism is correlated with “trutherism.” You have no evidence for this, and I’m willing to bet that your factual knowledge of 9/11 is fairly poor (as are most people’s).
On your mincing of words, I disagree: you are pseudo-intellectual because you claim knowledge absent serious examination, and you throw bombs and “otherize” those who disagree with you. Not just on 9/11, but elsewhere as well. Claiming factual knowledge without having any factual knowledge and shifting the burden of proof to the “other” is evidence of pseudo-intellectualism. True intellectuals do not need such defense mechanisms.
so you are a Truther. why are you trying to make me believe that you aren’t? you clearly have a dog in the fight but try to pass it off as objective criticism. this is why you took one sentence at the very end of my piece and have now beat it to death.
Chuck is not doing what he’s doing to be an intellectual. Or a pseudo-intellectual. An intellectual devotes his life to studying a body of knowledge, labors toward mastering it, and brings us closer to an understanding of the mystery of existence at first-cause level.
Chuck isn’t doing that. What Chuck is doing is being a journalist. A young one, one without formal training in the discipline and without sponsorship and inside contacts. And yet, he’s a better — a more credible — journalist that ones who work for major newspaper and tv news. Those “journalists” are court flatterers and propagandists and as such unworthy of the name journalist.
This is why bloggers have been stepping up, in particular alt-Right bloggers. I’d say Chuck is one of the best, after Steve Sailer.
CR, piece of advice. Calling someone like me a “truther” is like calling a black person a nigger. And it’s done for the same reasons.
I don’t care what your opinion is about 9/11. My opinion is mine, yours is yours. What bothers me is the label, the pejorative term, and the associated dismissal of the person. It’s really no different than saying “Nigger, get off my stage!”
You’ve teetered over into drama queen territory with that statement. “Nigger” is a pejorative aimed at black people, and black people can’t do anything about being black. If you are a Truther, nobody need know that you’re a whacko. You can keep that information to yourself. You are not automatically marginalized as a Truther if nobody actually knows that you are a Truther. There’s a big fucking difference and it’s laughable that you’d try to compare the two.
In reality, I don’t believe that every single Truther is a pseudo-intellectual. Many are though. I wrote a general statement because it was a throwaway at the bottom of the post and I didn’t think anyone would key in on that and make a big deal of it. If I could give you a hug and tell you it would be all right then I would.
CR, you couldn’t tell me what I think about 9/11 because I haven’t told you. I bet you couldn’t even outline what your vision of “truther” entails–what beliefs, etc, are incorporated within that rubric. All you know is that a truther is bad and that’s enough for you. You use the pejorative term “truther” to avoid having to think about any of it. “He’s a truther, so he’s stupid, let’s not listen to anything he says. Look at the funny truther, haha!”
CR, you say “You are not automatically marginalized as a Truther if nobody actually knows that you are a Truther.” Let’s replace “truther” with “Jew” and see how that sounds:
“You are not automatically marginalized as a Jew if nobody actually knows that you are a Jew.”
Your description of lupe, mos def, and others as “pseudo-intellectuals” is entirely correct. In fact, they’d be pseudo-intellectuals even if they weren’t 9/11 truthers, although that alone is probably sufficient. Take, for instance, this clip of Mos Def debating Iran’s nuclear program with Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie on Bill Maher’s show.
Mos Def’s argument reduces to repeating platitudes (“Oppenheimer was right”; “An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind; Martin Luther King said that”; “War is an environmental issue”). He goes off on irrelevant tangents, like what the definition of “religion” is. Hitchens and Rushdie wipe the floor with him. The sad thing is that Mos Def is largely right about this issue, although he’s incapable of articulating why. Rushdie’s claim that the Iranian political and military leadership want to “get their hands on nuclear weapons in order to use them” is absurd, as anyone can see if they reflect on the following four truths:
1. The political and military leaders of Iran, like every other group of political and military leaders in the history of the world, enjoy having power.
2. Iran’s leaders would rather have power over a country, with a population that they can order around, than a smoldering crater.
3. If Iran attacks Israel or the U.S. with nuclear weapons, Iran will cease to be a country and become a depopulated crater.
4. Iran’s leaders recognize (3).
It follows that if Iran wants nuclear weapons, they must want it for some other reason. Like, for example, to deter a U.S./Israeli attack. After all, recent history has made it abundantly clear that the only countries the United States has any reluctance to attack are the countries that have nuclear weapons (Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, etc., but not North Korea). Indeed, if you listen to serious government analysts in the U.S. and Israel, as opposed to propagandists on the news, they all recognize that if Iran wants nuclear weapons, it wants them for deterrence purposes, not to vaporize Tel Aviv.
I just explained in about 12 seconds why Rushdie’s and Hitchens’s claims are bald lies, but Mos Def couldn’t even muster this simple effort.
But I did like that “Black Star” album that he did with Talib Kweli.
so Trutherism is a religious tradition or an identity for you. that explains your dogmatism and your shrill defense of it. i’m pretty sure Trutherism isn’t quite as hard to explain as you imagine. that is the mark of a pseudo-intellectual though – making your philosophy or worldview seem mystical or out of reach of the establishment, the status quo, or average Joes. i’m not Englightened enough to grasp it, right?
but, again, “Truther” is not a pejorative the same way that jew or nigger is. It’s closer to being called a “Keynesian” a “liberal” or a “conservative”. There is not a deep-seated and long-running systematic oppression of Truthers. You don’t come from a long line of Truthers that you would feel strange about disowning just so that you could get a job. you’re being dramatic.
The difference between “Keynesian”, “liberal” and “truther” is that Keynesians and liberals by and large accept those terms for themselves. By contrast, nobody calls themselves a truther. The pejorative term “truther” is thrust upon people by opposing people who seek to otherize them. Again, very similar to the word “nigger”.
You continue to use the slur, and you have yet to show that you have any idea what a “truther” believes even though I’ve baited you twice. That’s proof enough for me that this conversation is going nowhere. I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about, and I think you like it that way.
willis, if you think that you being called a “truther” is equivalent to a black person being called a “nigger,” i don’t know what planet you live on. Also Al Qaeda totally did 9/11.
Run a search. See how many hit pieces about a person throw in the fact that they are a “truther”, with no further exposition of their beliefs. There are lots.
The fact that they are a “truther” is enough to make them a bad person.
There are certain topics that it would be a waste of time to debate in most circumstances. Everyone, including you, if you are at all sane, agrees with this, since no one thinks it is worth while to debate whether the moon is made of dairy products, or whether a family of wizards lives inside antonin scalia’s ass. In addition to these, I personally would include creationism and all its variants, holocaust denial, JFK assassination conspiracies, Obama birth certificate nonsense, 9/11 trutherism, and other similar cults. I do believe that conspiracies occur, and I do have opinions that others might lump in with the ones that I just enumerated. But I don’t think it should be controversial to say that some things are not worth debating in most circumstances. I happen to believe that Trutherism is one of them, and so I feel it’s fully justified to dismiss such a person by calling them a “truther”, if that is indeed what they are.
That said, these things may be worth debating in some circumstances, if only to discredit these ideas and prevent people from wasting their time on them. There exist well-reasoned critiques of the various 9/11 conspiracies, and if you’re interested in them, I’d start here:
Read especially the pieces by Manuel Garcia, Jr., a physicist with leftist political opinions. I sincerely wish you a speedy recovery from your unfortunate disorder.
Not a “truther” website by any means. It’s an archive of 9/11 news articles and data, organized comprehensively so that the full picture can be glimpsed rather than bits and pieces. I’d bet there’s lots of undisputed facts (that is, information that the government admits is true) that you both are unaware of.
I second PA’s comment about Chuck. Chuck has a lot of integrity as a journalist, I never get the impression he is saying something just to say it. He might hold back a little, in order not to alienate people, but I think that’s okay. I view mainstream journalism skeptically now, although I’ve noticed an improvement in some of it. I think having the internet as competition is the best thing to happen to them.
How vigorously you attack Truther as a slur pretty much connects the dots that you’re a truther. People without a dog in the fight would have let it go. Although if in 20 years you can go around calling each other trutha’s while forbidding the word for anybody who isn’t a trutha and labeling them as the most evil people in the world, I would be impressed.
Mansplaining mansplaining: Derogatory word used when a male figure who does not share your first principles posits explanations for phenomena which are different from your own. Also known as not being a fucking dumbass parrot.
Not to be confused with gaslighting, which is a phenomenon whereby feminists become so delusional about the world that they invented a term for their own cognitive dissonance.
Real shame there aren’t more black nationalists these days
The best rapper of all time supports Ron Paul:
http://www.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2011/09/30/krs-one-to-rock-the-ron-paul-revolution-tour
Social consciousness?
No – it’s black consciousness. Unless he’s been advocating for the Boer in South Africa and rape vicims in Sweden. He is looking out for his people, which is fine. That doesn’t include everyone.
What poor and heavy handed propaganda in that video. Of course the message at the end is that whites are evil, even though the minstral was paid and he puts the blackface on himself. How evil – being paid to act. Our modern minstrals do exactly the same thing and are very happy to accept the money. In fact, it would be discrimination to withhold that from them, infringing on their personal choice.
Soderberg sees “mainsplaining.” I see Lupe taking the moral high ground.
My review: I’m not sure what to make of it, but I like where it is going.
My criticism: The black mainstream is going to drop the hammer on “moral rap.” They are so used to the ace-in-the-hole of the oppressed victim card that they can’t tolerate dissenters.
PS Lupe is dressed in the style of Raphael Saddiq. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHyalVRUXrA
PPS Lupe’s message is in the style of Hopsin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRVOOwFNp5U
Grit,
thanks for the Hopsin link. Had heard the name but didn’t know what he was about.
“My interest here isn’t whether or not 9/11 is what we are told it was…it is mostly that people who embrace Trutherism are pseudo-intellectuals.”
So says the pseudo-intellectual who insists on labeling all people with a certain belief with a derogatory, childish nickname like “Trutherism,” without ever directly addressing the nature of their beliefs.
Pot, meet kettle.
focus on one line that has almost nothing to do with the post and get really really pissed off about it. you probably think jews are reptiles as well.
Weren’t the entire careers of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh (albeit reggae, not rap) based entirely upon “mansplaing”?
…Soderberg complains about Fiasco’s “mansplaining”:
Right, so to continue this game can we say Soderberg is “Whitesplaining” or “Jewsplaining” the po’ lil colored fella?
C.R. – They’re people like the rest of us, not reptiles, but then you have leading religious figures like Sephardic leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef comparing gentiles to donkeys:
“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat.
According to Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews.
“In Israel, death has no dominion over them… With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money.
This is his servant… That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew,” Yosef said.
“Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.
That is why gentiles were created,” he added.
http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=191782
“focus on one line that has almost nothing to do with the post and get really really pissed off about it. you probably think jews are reptiles as well.”
I’m not pissed. Just pointing out your clear hypocrisy.
And I will do so again here, as you have accused me of being anti-semitic with no evidence to back that up. You have hurled more invective into the ether in an attempt to avoid discussing anything substantive. The mark of a true pseudo-intellectual.
Black people hate responsibility even more than they hate white people. In this video, you see “the white man” responsible for “coercing” these black actors into humiliating acts for money and you see Lupe Fiasco dressed sharply implicitly admonishing the black actors for doing it thus placing responsibility on “those black people.”
Black people like jobs like acting, public speaking, hosting, singer etc. because they have irregular schedules, require minimal brain power, minimal physical labor, other people set up the “stage,” and it gets lots of attention. White people, mostly Irish, early on did blackface. Black people wanted to act at these venues so they adopted Irish surnames and increasingly took over black roles. The reality is the white creators of these roles were actually pretty superficial in their portrayal of black people. If they really wanted to go after black people there was plenty of material to do so and really hit hard. Black people know that the black community is worse off than what many white people think.
Video reminds me of that Spike Lee movie “Bamboozled”.
willis,
you see me address Trutherism and since you are a Truther you get ass hurt that i’m not embracing it. if you could read critically you would see that my argument is not about whether or not 9/11 happened the way most people think it did, just that the people who are Truthers (perhaps you?) are generally pseudo-intellectuals. they are not pseudo-intellectuals on the issue of Trutherism per se. they are merely dogmatic on that particular issue. there is just a big overlap. Fiasco is a Truther and his material is generally filled with pseudo-intellectual nonsense. he sounds like Michael Eric Dyson on wax.
as for you being an anti-semite…i just said you probably think the jews are reptiles. there’s a big overlap between Trutherism and believing stuff like that. so it would be on you to tell me if you believe that or not. if you are a Truther or not a Truther or you think Jews are reptiles or not, i don’t care that much either way.
what i do find fascinating is that you are try to mainstream Trutherism. burden of proof is on you buddy. you and other Truthers have a big uphill battle to prove what you believe. until then, you really shouldn’t get too shrill about people not believing you. you are the quacks until you come up with stronger evidence.
It’s nice to see that the first page of comments, not a single one agrees with Soderberg. Funny that Soderberg accuses Fiasco of “mainsplaining” when Fiasco’s statement is pretty damn feminist (in the old sense. Maybe the new sense, too.)
C.R.,
Impressive strawman there. You know absolutely nothing about me, yet in your replies you boldly state a number of characteristics that you believe I possess. Lets go through the list of slander:
1. I am a “trutherist” (I never said anything about my beliefs)
2. I believe that jews are reptiles (I never said anything about jews or reptiles)
3. I am “ass hurt” that you are not a “trutherist” (I never said anything about your beliefs one way or another)
4. I want to mainstream trutherism, and that is why I read blogs (I never even argued the point)
I will repeat my original reply, which is that you, sir, are a pseudo-intellectual. The proof is in the pudding.
willis,
all depends on how you’d define ‘pseudo-intellectual’. i’d never say something like “i’m a big proponent of critical thinking” as Fiasco did. that’s the type of empty vapid statement that pseudo-intellectuals say. if i’m a pseduo-intellectual i’m much less of one that someone like Fiasco.
but you are jumping too quickly on me calling Fiasco a pseudo-intellectual. you seem to be under the impression that i think he’s a pseudo because he’s also a Truther. as i wrote, these are correlated but they don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. he’s pretty clearly full of shit but he doesn’t even seem to be entertain the possibility that he might be. that’s a good indicator of pseudo-intellectualism.
so am i pseudo-intellectual? i don’t think i take myself seriously enough to be considered one. but to speak of strawmen, none of that list there indicates anything about pseudo-intellectualism. if i am wrong (i’m pretty sure you are a Truther or else you wouldn’t have keyed in on one minor point of this post) then i am just factually incorrect. there is a difference between being wrong and being a pseudo-intellectual. i could be wrong about my initial interpretation of you. not that we’d ever find out though.
CR said: “he’s pretty clearly full of shit but he doesn’t even seem to be entertain the possibility that he might be.”
No debate re: Fiasco, as I don’t know the man, but I could say the same about you in lieu of your remark that pseudo-intellectualism is correlated with “trutherism.” You have no evidence for this, and I’m willing to bet that your factual knowledge of 9/11 is fairly poor (as are most people’s).
On your mincing of words, I disagree: you are pseudo-intellectual because you claim knowledge absent serious examination, and you throw bombs and “otherize” those who disagree with you. Not just on 9/11, but elsewhere as well. Claiming factual knowledge without having any factual knowledge and shifting the burden of proof to the “other” is evidence of pseudo-intellectualism. True intellectuals do not need such defense mechanisms.
Being called a pseudo-intellectual isn’t an insult in a time when our actual [so-called] intellectuals are overwhelmingly delusional.
willis,
so you are a Truther. why are you trying to make me believe that you aren’t? you clearly have a dog in the fight but try to pass it off as objective criticism. this is why you took one sentence at the very end of my piece and have now beat it to death.
Chuck is not doing what he’s doing to be an intellectual. Or a pseudo-intellectual. An intellectual devotes his life to studying a body of knowledge, labors toward mastering it, and brings us closer to an understanding of the mystery of existence at first-cause level.
Chuck isn’t doing that. What Chuck is doing is being a journalist. A young one, one without formal training in the discipline and without sponsorship and inside contacts. And yet, he’s a better — a more credible — journalist that ones who work for major newspaper and tv news. Those “journalists” are court flatterers and propagandists and as such unworthy of the name journalist.
This is why bloggers have been stepping up, in particular alt-Right bloggers. I’d say Chuck is one of the best, after Steve Sailer.
CR, piece of advice. Calling someone like me a “truther” is like calling a black person a nigger. And it’s done for the same reasons.
I don’t care what your opinion is about 9/11. My opinion is mine, yours is yours. What bothers me is the label, the pejorative term, and the associated dismissal of the person. It’s really no different than saying “Nigger, get off my stage!”
You’ve teetered over into drama queen territory with that statement. “Nigger” is a pejorative aimed at black people, and black people can’t do anything about being black. If you are a Truther, nobody need know that you’re a whacko. You can keep that information to yourself. You are not automatically marginalized as a Truther if nobody actually knows that you are a Truther. There’s a big fucking difference and it’s laughable that you’d try to compare the two.
In reality, I don’t believe that every single Truther is a pseudo-intellectual. Many are though. I wrote a general statement because it was a throwaway at the bottom of the post and I didn’t think anyone would key in on that and make a big deal of it. If I could give you a hug and tell you it would be all right then I would.
CR, you couldn’t tell me what I think about 9/11 because I haven’t told you. I bet you couldn’t even outline what your vision of “truther” entails–what beliefs, etc, are incorporated within that rubric. All you know is that a truther is bad and that’s enough for you. You use the pejorative term “truther” to avoid having to think about any of it. “He’s a truther, so he’s stupid, let’s not listen to anything he says. Look at the funny truther, haha!”
CR, you say “You are not automatically marginalized as a Truther if nobody actually knows that you are a Truther.” Let’s replace “truther” with “Jew” and see how that sounds:
“You are not automatically marginalized as a Jew if nobody actually knows that you are a Jew.”
See the problem?
Your description of lupe, mos def, and others as “pseudo-intellectuals” is entirely correct. In fact, they’d be pseudo-intellectuals even if they weren’t 9/11 truthers, although that alone is probably sufficient. Take, for instance, this clip of Mos Def debating Iran’s nuclear program with Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie on Bill Maher’s show.
Mos Def’s argument reduces to repeating platitudes (“Oppenheimer was right”; “An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind; Martin Luther King said that”; “War is an environmental issue”). He goes off on irrelevant tangents, like what the definition of “religion” is. Hitchens and Rushdie wipe the floor with him. The sad thing is that Mos Def is largely right about this issue, although he’s incapable of articulating why. Rushdie’s claim that the Iranian political and military leadership want to “get their hands on nuclear weapons in order to use them” is absurd, as anyone can see if they reflect on the following four truths:
1. The political and military leaders of Iran, like every other group of political and military leaders in the history of the world, enjoy having power.
2. Iran’s leaders would rather have power over a country, with a population that they can order around, than a smoldering crater.
3. If Iran attacks Israel or the U.S. with nuclear weapons, Iran will cease to be a country and become a depopulated crater.
4. Iran’s leaders recognize (3).
It follows that if Iran wants nuclear weapons, they must want it for some other reason. Like, for example, to deter a U.S./Israeli attack. After all, recent history has made it abundantly clear that the only countries the United States has any reluctance to attack are the countries that have nuclear weapons (Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, etc., but not North Korea). Indeed, if you listen to serious government analysts in the U.S. and Israel, as opposed to propagandists on the news, they all recognize that if Iran wants nuclear weapons, it wants them for deterrence purposes, not to vaporize Tel Aviv.
I just explained in about 12 seconds why Rushdie’s and Hitchens’s claims are bald lies, but Mos Def couldn’t even muster this simple effort.
But I did like that “Black Star” album that he did with Talib Kweli.
willis,
so Trutherism is a religious tradition or an identity for you. that explains your dogmatism and your shrill defense of it. i’m pretty sure Trutherism isn’t quite as hard to explain as you imagine. that is the mark of a pseudo-intellectual though – making your philosophy or worldview seem mystical or out of reach of the establishment, the status quo, or average Joes. i’m not Englightened enough to grasp it, right?
but, again, “Truther” is not a pejorative the same way that jew or nigger is. It’s closer to being called a “Keynesian” a “liberal” or a “conservative”. There is not a deep-seated and long-running systematic oppression of Truthers. You don’t come from a long line of Truthers that you would feel strange about disowning just so that you could get a job. you’re being dramatic.
The difference between “Keynesian”, “liberal” and “truther” is that Keynesians and liberals by and large accept those terms for themselves. By contrast, nobody calls themselves a truther. The pejorative term “truther” is thrust upon people by opposing people who seek to otherize them. Again, very similar to the word “nigger”.
You continue to use the slur, and you have yet to show that you have any idea what a “truther” believes even though I’ve baited you twice. That’s proof enough for me that this conversation is going nowhere. I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about, and I think you like it that way.
willis, if you think that you being called a “truther” is equivalent to a black person being called a “nigger,” i don’t know what planet you live on. Also Al Qaeda totally did 9/11.
Run a search. See how many hit pieces about a person throw in the fact that they are a “truther”, with no further exposition of their beliefs. There are lots.
The fact that they are a “truther” is enough to make them a bad person.
everyone is so mean to the truthers. poor babies.
There are certain topics that it would be a waste of time to debate in most circumstances. Everyone, including you, if you are at all sane, agrees with this, since no one thinks it is worth while to debate whether the moon is made of dairy products, or whether a family of wizards lives inside antonin scalia’s ass. In addition to these, I personally would include creationism and all its variants, holocaust denial, JFK assassination conspiracies, Obama birth certificate nonsense, 9/11 trutherism, and other similar cults. I do believe that conspiracies occur, and I do have opinions that others might lump in with the ones that I just enumerated. But I don’t think it should be controversial to say that some things are not worth debating in most circumstances. I happen to believe that Trutherism is one of them, and so I feel it’s fully justified to dismiss such a person by calling them a “truther”, if that is indeed what they are.
That said, these things may be worth debating in some circumstances, if only to discredit these ideas and prevent people from wasting their time on them. There exist well-reasoned critiques of the various 9/11 conspiracies, and if you’re interested in them, I’d start here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/28/debunking-the-myths-of-9-11/
Read especially the pieces by Manuel Garcia, Jr., a physicist with leftist political opinions. I sincerely wish you a speedy recovery from your unfortunate disorder.
If we’re posting websites, I would start here: http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=911_project
Not a “truther” website by any means. It’s an archive of 9/11 news articles and data, organized comprehensively so that the full picture can be glimpsed rather than bits and pieces. I’d bet there’s lots of undisputed facts (that is, information that the government admits is true) that you both are unaware of.
I second PA’s comment about Chuck. Chuck has a lot of integrity as a journalist, I never get the impression he is saying something just to say it. He might hold back a little, in order not to alienate people, but I think that’s okay. I view mainstream journalism skeptically now, although I’ve noticed an improvement in some of it. I think having the internet as competition is the best thing to happen to them.
I think the best way to prevent being automatically marginalized is to discover that you are Jewish.
How vigorously you attack Truther as a slur pretty much connects the dots that you’re a truther. People without a dog in the fight would have let it go. Although if in 20 years you can go around calling each other trutha’s while forbidding the word for anybody who isn’t a trutha and labeling them as the most evil people in the world, I would be impressed.
The fact that any of you care whether I’m a “truther” proves my point, that the word is a slur.