Month: July 2020

by William Skink

While I have already put up one post today about Spider McKnight, someone with that kind of name really deserves probably at least TWO posts about them. It is a reflection of how cool and radical this person is.

At Linked-in, Spider has this to say:

I’m working on updating this profile. For now, just know that I am devoted to radical storytelling. Stories make connections and connections make change.

Change can be how things become different over time, hopefully for the better. Change can also be the coins left in your pocket after buying something like a coffee cup.

What kind of change is Spider McKnight going after?

In addition to owning Six Pony Hitch, which was the focus of my first post about Spider, this entrepreneur and RADICAL STORYTELLER also owns Crazy Love Co.

Do you live in Missoula’s exclusive Rattlesnake neighborhood and want to buy a coffee cup that says RATTLESNAKE with a bike on it? Spider has the coffee cup for you. Want some t-shirts that say LOVE LIKE A VETERAN or LOVE LIKE A LEGEND or LOVE LIKE A LOCAL (there is both a Missoula version of this t-shirt, and a general one), well, Spider has t-shirts for you.

Spider has so much crazy love, here is a crazy list to prove it:

We love manatees. And leaf blowers. And filmmakers. We love the environment and making things that are 100% post-consumer recycled. We love entrepreneurs. We love using water-based ink and never, ever using toxic chemicals on our t-shirts. We love Land Cruisers. And veterans. And Halloween. Just like everyone, we love lots of things. We love way more things than we hate. So why is it that the world is so focused on the bad things?

We started Crazy Love Co. to remind ourselves and others that when you focus on the people, places, and things that you love, you feel better. And you like others better. And you take care of our planet. And you are nicer. And, eventually, the world gets better for everyone.

What do you have Crazy Love for? In these grumpy times, it’s the best question to ask.

Love really is all we need.

If you are jobless and worried about the future, take a love strand from Spider’s love web. That is all you need.

Of course, it also helps to get taxpayer money from the TIF stash in these “grumpy times”.

Spider McKnight looks like a shameless huckster to me, peddling ubiquitous consulting services our local government is addicted to along with t-shirts and coffee cups.

But I’m glad this huckster swooped in so quickly to try and financially exploit racial injustice, because it allows me to use my figurative broom to sweep out another dark corner of our little valley.

I see you, Spider, and I am NOT impressed.

by William Skink

Six Pony Hitch is not a band name like Three Dog Night. Six Pony Hitch is a Brand Strategy and Design Agency in Missoula, Montana.

24 hours ago I had never heard of Six Pony Hitch, but thanks to this Missoulian article, I now know Six Pony Hitch exists, and there is apparently some fall out over a racial research project. Also, this agency was involved in getting paid to help develop the Missoula Downtown Plan.

Before getting into all that, let’s look at how SPH describes itself. Here is a screen shot from their website:

Discovering order in seeming chaos sounds like either a globalist wet dream or a dungeons and dragons quest. Whatever you can pitch to local government for some govt cheese, I guess.

Meshayla Cox of the Montana Racial Equity Project isn’t down with this research, stating “That research that we’re wanting to do is just stalling a process that needs to just happen already”. She goes on to say “We don’t have to take the time to prove that our experiences are real.”

I agree with Cox, this is a stalling process. And further more, why has Six Pony Hitch inserted itself into this conversation, especially since they’ve had a previous business relationship with the city of Missoula?

Here’s more from the article:

Many members of the public, in addition to comments submitted to the City Council via email, said they did not support the proposal for the research project. The proposal came through Six Pony Hitch from a team of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community members who include Wilena Old Person, Jamar Galbreath, Laurel Warner, Alex Kim, Ku’au Ahina, Brad Hall and also from Six Pony Hitch owner Spider McKnight, who is not BIPOC.

I was already having a hard time taking this brand strategy and design agency seriously with a name like Six Pony Hitch, but to expect me to further absorb the fact the person behind this thing has the name Spider McKnight? Come on, man, this is just to absurd.

How all this came about is further explained in the article:

A statement from Six Pony Hitch and LEARN Missoula read by Council President Bryan Von Lossberg stated that City Council reached out to Six Pony Hitch due to the firm’s status of being on the city’s preferred vendor list for communication and their work on the Downtown Master Plan.

Do you see the con going on here? Do you see the perpetrators of NEWSPEAK selling their wares?

I am glad to know more of the names of the players suckling government largesse and eagerly exploiting racial injustice, and I am glad they have names like Spider McKnight and Six Pony Hitch.

If you ever need the ponies to come to your rescue, here’s more about what they can do for you:

Whether we are helping you launch a new company onto the international stage, retooling branding gone wrong, solving internal communications and operations issues, or even creating new products, we can help you tackle the most difficult of issues.

Ok, Pony, you got systemic racism during a global pandemic. How much will that cost to “fix”? Asking for a broke-ass college town.

by William Skink

With cancel culture on steroids, the book White Fragility is getting a new surge of attention. Matt Taibbi is mystified by this because he has read the book and clearly understands how blazingly racist anti-racists can be. Here are some excerpts:

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

Yes, in three paragraphs Taibbi referenced both Hitler and anti-witch hysteria. Here’s more:

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.

With the Trump comparison Taibbi has hit the trifecta.

DiAngelo sounds just like the people lecturing City Council last week about how Missoula needs to decenter its whiteness. If readers recall, this effort is going to take taxpayer money and the growth of local government by creating a new job position.

Getting back to Taibbi’s piece, the most offensive example he cites is DiAngelo’s interpretation of how Jackie Robinson broke the race barrier in baseball. Here is DiAngelo’s take:

The story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible. Robinson is often celebrated as the first African American to break the color line…

While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, this story line depicts him as racially special, a black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: “Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”

And here is Taibbi’s takedown:

There is not a single baseball fan anywhere – literally not one, except perhaps Robin DiAngelo, I guess – who believes Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier because he “finally had what it took to play with whites.” Everyone familiar with this story understands that Robinson had to be exceptional, both as a player and as a human being, to confront the racist institution known as Major League Baseball. His story has always been understood as a complex, long-developing political tale about overcoming violent systemic oppression. For DiAngelo to suggest history should re-cast Robinson as “the first black man whites allowed to play major league baseball” is grotesque and profoundly belittling.

Robinson’s story moreover did not render “whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible.” It did the opposite. Robinson uncovered a generation of job inflation for mediocre white ballplayers in a dramatic example of “privilege” that was keenly understood by baseball fans of all races fifty years before White Fragility. Baseball statistics nerds have long been arguing about whether to put asterisks next to the records of white stars who never had to pitch to Josh Gibson, or hit against prime Satchel Paige or Webster McDonald. Robinson’s story, on every level, exposed and evangelized the truth about the very forces DiAngelo argues it rendered “invisible.”

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.

Read Taibbi’s whole article, it’s worth it.