Diversity Versus Debate
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From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
… America used to be able to afford nice things such as freedom of speech, science, and disinterested objectivity. But now we are blessed with diversity, peace be upon it, so we can’t tolerate our Western heritage anymore.
That raises a question that ought to be of interest to investors: Does the increasing campus hysteria and antirationality portend bad news for Silicon Valley? If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able to code emotionless computers as well as in the past?
Read the whole thing there.
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“…..information technology, the dominant industry of the 21st century, has its roots in the West’s ancient penchant for abstract objective logic that disengages subjective interests from reason.”
Errr, Steve, please give me a couple of hours (it is late) to decide whether this makes sense to my tired brain or not.
Initally…Yes, it makes total sense to my brain.
Since when have you been a prose poet?
One thing I have noted about younger Masters of the Universe these days is that they are remarkably good at parroting the SJW mantras, but are quite ruthlessly self-serving about the actual choices – personal and professional – they make in the real world.
In that regard, they are merely a continuation of what David Brooks once termed “Bobos” (Bohemian-Bourgeoisie). It’s all serene Buddhist talk and references to communing with nature at cocktail parties, but ruthless hyper-capitalism and power/status-chasing at work.
Leaving aside the pun on the metaphor, it makes sense. A generation raised to be emotionally narcissistic, with altruism being reduced to a virtue signal rather than anything spiritually deeper, is bound to be ruthless.Replies: @Oldeguy
My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most humble servant." You are not his most humble servant. You may say, "These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times." You don't mind the times ... You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don't think foolishly.
See also Daniel Dennett on "Believing in believing" as the driver for much religious practice.
No, Brooks was talking about the 80s when the 60s radicalism had ebbed down. He was talking about yuppies who were into 'subversion' as style but happily upper-middle class. They weren't particularly political.
Today's SJW's are pretty nastyI(and spoiled rotten).
Their style is radical than bohemian, so they are 'radical bourgeoisie' or 'rabos'. Or maybe radical globalists or 'raglos'.Replies: @PiltdownMan
Ideological rigidity is not the main problem of the ‘Right’. The real dividing line is between Specificists and Generalitists. Most of Conservative Inc. are Generalitists who prefer safe themes like ‘liberty’, ‘free markets’, ‘Constitution’, ‘individualism’, ‘spreading democracy’, and etc. Even ‘gun rights’ and ‘pro-life’ are Generalitist. ‘Gun rights’ is about the Constitution, and ‘Pro-Life’ is about the defense of human life. Generalitists believe their conservatism applies to all peoples equally. The ONE EXCEPTION is Israel and Zionism. On that one issue, even the most ardent Generalitist turns Specificist. His view is clear and precise on the need for Israel to remain a Jewish State. But on all other issues, Generalitists avoid specifics out of fear. Why? Because PC says White People must NOT have a specific identity, history, or territory to exclusively call their own. All that whites have must be shared with others.
The fear is that once whites regain a sense of identity, history, and territory, they will reject Rule by Globalists. So, GLOB Power sends a clear message to Conservatives that anything specific on their menu is ‘racist’ and wicked unless that specific-something happens to be Israel. So, Conservatism of the Current Year is predictably vague, toothless, generic, bland. Even an impassioned issue like abortion is about Affirmation of ALL Life. But whose life? White life? Black life? Brown life? Yellow life? Pro-Life is for ALL life, just like those who say ‘All Lives Matter’ instead of ‘White Lives Matter’ to rebut ‘Black Lives Matter’.
In contrast, Alt Right is Specificist, and it lays out precisely and clearly what it believes in and is for. It is for the white race, white heritage, white history, and white territory. It has specific interests, specific goals, specific grievances, and a specific vision. It doesn’t offer universal pablum for everyone but food for the white race. It also expects other peoples and cultures to take care of their own. If Alt Right is generalist about anything, it is the notion that every nation & people should have their own identity and interests to pursue on THEIR OWN LANDS.
It takes courage to be a specifist. It is spineless to dwell on generalities out of fear that the GLOB will call you ‘racist’.
Alt Right says what is good for Jews is good for whites as well. Every people need their own Zionism.
Good Article.
Off topic- How to replace Obamacare
Give all veterans of wartime access to TriCare insurance just like retired military personnel. Turn the 150 or so VA veterans hospital centers into free healthcare for all- first come first serve. Give private hospitals the right to turn away non-emergency symptoms at ER’s within 70 miles of these hospitals. Cut SNAP benefits significantly for anyone who lives further than 70 miles from a VA hospital. Make all children 17 and under eligible for medicaid, while cutting medicaid for adults unless they have a physical* disability.
We can stop torturing our vets with the VA system. Libs who have defended the VA can hardly assail it now. Nobody is forced to buy insurance, and urban blight can be contained- think of it as an antidote to the Obama/ Julian Castro plan to use HUD to destroy second tier cities and suburbs. Stress is taken off ERs and prices can come down. Plus, it is sold as “free Healthcare for all”. It’s a multi-tiered system, but so is the rest of life.
The Left did not win. The real Left lost worse than the Right. Communism & Marxism are gone. What is called ‘cultural marxism’ is really Cultural Capitalism. It’s the product of hedonism, vanity, decadence made possible to excessive production and consumption.
A Free society should be able to tolerate decadence, even degeneracy. Problem is D & D are now the official religion. Oligarchic class pushed stuff like homomania & tranny-mania to protect elitism and hierarchy.
Culturally, the main conflict is not ‘left vs right’ but Disposable vs Durable. Fads vs Facts. Durables believe in things & values that endure and have meaning through the eons. Disposables see everything as transient and replaceable.
So-called Right tend to be Durables. Though not against change per se, they do believe in roots, inheritance, continuance. The So-called Left is made up of Disposables for whom race, heritage, culture, religion, etc are all just fads and fashions, the passion of the Current Year to be replaced by some new outrage in the future.
US used to be about durability: An extension of Europe founded by Anglos & carried on by Anglos & Anglo-ized whites. From the Founding to the 60s, America was a continual and durable civilization of the West.
Then, things changed. Globalists took over the US and changed it from durable to disposable.
So, everything exists only to be replaced. There is no longer any Core American racially, historically, or culturally. It is eternally a ‘nation of immigrants’ were masses of new arrivals replace the old ones who are to be fossilized and turned into museum pieces, or worse, just tossed out.
According to the GLOB, US must be ‘reinvented’ ceaselessly. Everything American must be replaced by ‘new american’. The GLOB rewrote Americanism from durable-ism to disposable-ism and then pushed it on Europe as well. So, the GLOB says Old Europeans must be replaced by ‘New Europeans’ made up of Africans, Arabs, and Hindus.
Globalism turns all cultures into disposables. Look at the shallow, trashy culture of Japan where kids and adults only know comic book and videogame culture. Japan went from Kurosawa to Kawaii. It went from history & roots to plastic & cosplay.
The GLOB infused disposable-ity and triviality even into Western spiritual tradition. Progs turned Christianity into a worship of the homo anus and penis-turned-into-vagina.
Now, does this mean the GLOB doesn’t believe in anything that is enduring and permanent? No, globalists want their own power to be entrenched, secure, & supreme. By turning all cultures into something disposable & vapid, the GLOB weakens national identity, solidarity, & unity all over the world. So, above the cucked & deracinated peoples into disposableness, the globalists reign as the ones with the only real power. The rest of us are to become Disposables. Alt Right is for Durable-ism.
Tweet thread going through minutes of Middlebury student government: https://twitter.com/kcjohnson9/status/843919705882705920
(It's already partway gone in other English-speaking countries.)
In that regard, they are merely a continuation of what David Brooks once termed "Bobos" (Bohemian-Bourgeoisie). It's all serene Buddhist talk and references to communing with nature at cocktail parties, but ruthless hyper-capitalism and power/status-chasing at work.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @JackOH, @Weltanschauung, @oddsbodkins, @Anon
Snowflakes are, of course, cold-hearted.
Leaving aside the pun on the metaphor, it makes sense. A generation raised to be emotionally narcissistic, with altruism being reduced to a virtue signal rather than anything spiritually deeper, is bound to be ruthless.
From Wellesley College, we learn from those who promote DIVERSITY that DEBATE imposes on the liberty of students, controversial speakers enable the bullying of disempowered groups, and students are in distress as a result of a speaker’s words.
So, punching up is good, punching down is bad. Got it.
Anyone who writes "In solidarity" without being ironic should be ignored.Replies: @Autochthon
I’m shocked, Steve. Just look at the people mentioned in either your article or Chris Dixon’s:Aristotle, Claude Shannon, Alonzo Church, Boole, Descartes, Frege, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts…..
None of them are Black or Hispanic. I mean, I can’t even……Where’s the inclusiveness? The Diversity? How can this kind of toxic racism be allowed to circulate?
How can this kind of toxic racism(italics mine, dk) be allowed to circulate?"Allright - and don't you forget Immanuel Kant - - I mean: Steve Sailer did not forget him - which of course is racist too, and because Kant indeed was not only a great thinker, but openly racist as well, which Sailer doesn't even mention, we'd better call him super-racist, or even hyper-racist - at least.(This is alll pretty far out, isn't it? Except for this article - which is simply thought- provoking and interesting. I mean like: Really. It really is. Really, really, even - - if that's how you're supposed to call it now (hehe)).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-logic/Replies: @Frau Katze
A interesting footnote to George Boole’s great contribution, boolean algebra, was the notational system that Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) devised for it, which made it much more amenable to mathematical manipulation. Notation matters in math, especially if a field is to develop further, or to find applied uses.
Dodgson/Carroll himself was a mathematician and logician who was the co-equal and contemporary of Boole, but unfortunately, his notebooks on logic were lost for almost three-quarters of a century and so, he gets overlooked. Had this not happened, he would likely have been more fully recognized as one of a Victorian and Edwardian group of great English logicians, along with Boole, Russell and Whitehead.
Boole’s daughter was a radical who had an affair with the mysterious Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies, and wrote a historical novel based on his personality, “The Gadfly,” about an Italian revolutionary in 1848 that became a massive bestseller in Communist countries.
That ship sailed a long time ago, like more than a century ago, before diversity. Enlightenment rationalism and modernism are dead and aren’t going to be necromanced any more than medieval Catholicism is. The only people who take it seriously are hardcore communists. Everyone else in the West, including the vanguard of the right-wing, are postmodern. Postmodernism has its roots in right wing thinkers like Heidegger and Nietzsche, and even further back in right wing Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/
IMO new "right wing" movements are actually a response to or rejection of postmodernism; i.e., they want / are trying to reconstruct what has been deconstructed for the past 50 or so years (or longer depending on how you look at it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophical_Discourse_of_Modernity
This book of Habermas is simply great!
Enlightenment corrections to Aristotelian logic---beginning with Bacon---added the missing ingredient: empirical observation. It was the ability to discourse in logical structures about empirical observation that led to Europe's great knowledge revolutions. (That, and the ability to share one's observations across great distances via cheap books and pamphlets.)
The author of the Jacobin piece ignores the fact that when the Old Left adhered to Enlightenment principles of logic and empirical observation, they tended to be eugenicists.
If there were ever a movement that could be said to have arisen bottom-up, organically, and free of hifalutin theoretical underpinnings, it would be the populism of today. The people actually composing the populist movement don't need no stinking theory to justify their anger. They've been done wrong by the globalist elites in ways that anyone should be able to understand: they've had their livelihoods taken away, they have been imposed upon by immigrants they didn't want, they have been smeared as racists for their troubles. Really, do we need Strauss or Heidegger or Nietzsche or any theorist modern, pre-modern, or post-modern, to understand how this might work?Replies: @Jack D
From the photo, he looks like the result of a marriage of an Iranian and a Euro-descendant.
He's sounds crazy as a loon. They're accusing him of Islamophobia. That's an odd charge against some with an Iranian name.
Note that there are a lot of Iranian non-believers living in the West. They found Khomeini pretty awful.
They'd be the sort to give their children non-Muslim names.
The U. Chicago figure Donald Levine — who I see just died a couple of years back — used to write on this topic, viz., how “liberal arts” curricula and thus empirical science evolved out of the mandatory combat training which also produced the Olympics. There was a bifurcation during the Hellenistic period, but apparently the ancient ancient Greeks had a type of “mens sana in corpore sano” attitude respecting technical excellence in archery or hacking off the enemy’s head as but a single, low branch off the Self-Development path; “What a piece of work is a man,” etc.
He actually wrote more than a few pieces on the subject– here’s one trying to compare the Aristotelian virtue theory to East Asian Zen philosophy & kung fu:
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/14/education/endpaper-the-liberal-arts-and-the-martial-arts.html?pagewanted=all
Aristotle must have encouraged practical applications of his teaching, as his famous pupil Alexander certainly accomplished a lot out in the real world.
So how did the reference to the German logician Gottlob Frege make it past The Atlantic’s editors? They must have nodded off after the first few paragraphs.
Frege was of the opinion that the Jews were bad for Germany and should be expelled. How can we suppose his work on logic has any validity when it is the product of such a sick mind? All good scholars should turn their backs on Frege and say, Never Again.
Nah. It would have been beneath me to even take notice of a person such as Zeno.
Perhaps related:
The CEO of Mozilla was ousted from his own company because he had donated to Proposition 8. Curtis Yarvin (aka Moldbug) has been no-platformed at a programming conference. SJWs who had done nothing for an open-source project unsuccessfully lobbied for a leading contributor to be taken off it because he had argued that transsexuals are mentally ill in a Twitter debate. Barely-technical blue-haired SJW stereotypes trawl through completely apolitical programming projects trying to push trans- and feminist-woke safe-space “codes of conduct” on them.
The essential conflict is between an argumentative old-school Internet hacker nerd culture where no one cares who’s typing the words that end up on your screen as long as they’re talking the talk and walking the walk, i.e. demonstrating expertise — and a social justice culture in which one’s identity group is everything and everything is political.
Ironically, a wildly disproportionate number of the talented women programmers seem to have been men at some point.
To try to answer the question the article poses: nerds might love debate and be too autistic to care about your feelings, but if they’re being shut down they will retreat to the safe-space of abstract thought and computers will be none the worse for it. Tech will instead be dumbed down in the usual way the imposition of diversity dumbs things down: by perverting meritocracy.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/Replies: @Anonymous, @Anon, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Dieter Kief, @Seth Largo, @candid_observer, @Frau Katze
One may perceive the plonkingly obvious elements of Rousseau/Panglossian left-wing utopianism as these ideas: 1st, the universe has a really dang long moral arc, but it bends toward Justice; 2nd, a priori universal human nature dictates that human incompatibility is created by evil spirits; 3rd, reason is good when it is on the right side of history or where the science is settled.
It’s moot Steve, because Silicon Valley companies have basically stopped hiring Americans and instead hire what amounts to modern day “coolies” for their high tech sweat shops. White nerds just aren’t wanted when you can hire Asian grinders that will work 7 days a week ruining their physical and mental health.
That said, most aspiring nerds worth their salt are competent enough to learn the skills needed on their own. The notion that college attendance is the only way to learn computer tech is right up there with “magic dirt”. The knowledge is out there for those who want it. MIT offers free on-line courses for anyone who wants to learn. Doesn’t matter if it’s designing microprocessors, VHDL, AI, embedded systems, etc.
You don’t need to spend $100k, $5k will get you a serious home lab setup. Of course you don’t get the magic credential that XYZ college hands out.
On a related note, Carroll Quigley remarked in one of his last lectures that anyone wanting a liberal arts education was better off buying the books and learning it on their own. Why? Because even in his time higher education even at Harvard was already being compromised by court decisions mandating the admission of unqualified minorities and all it’s attendant evils.
That said, Colleges today only serve three functions. The Ivies have a few more but they are not germane.
1) To provide credentials for those who pay the money and spend the time. Basically you buy access into the corporate work world.
2) To indoctrinate or inculcate a certain mindset and value system in some but not all students.
3) To provide jobs for a group of people that would otherwise be unemployed.
I don’t know if what goes on at an undistinguished liberal arts college in Vermont much matters to Silicon Valley. I don’t even think what happens on Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley much matters to what goes on at Cory Hall on the other side of campus, where the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments are headquartered. Orwell realized seventy years ago in 1984 that doublethink was possible to allow Ingsoc to proclaim the stars were just bits of light a short distance away in the sky and still be able to navigate by them. I don’t doubt that the same is true in modern reality, in the way that J. Craig Venter of Celera Genetics and the Human Genome Project could brazenly claim “race has no genetic or scientific basis.” If anything, the competitive advantage of doubleplusgood doublethinkers who can entertain forbidden thoughts when doing things that make money while still being able to spout the approved correct modes of thinking is probably all the better. Granted, this may be terrible for scientific and intellectual progress overall, but it might be very good for those shrewd enough to see through the prevailing ideology. (“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”)
Regardless, I don’t know how much critical thinking is really needed to formulaically code computers to, ultimately, better target marketing to seven billion people, which is most of what Silicon Valley does. I could see in the not so distant future cutting-edge research on, say, medicine or genetics increasingly being outsourced to South and East Asian countries less hidebound by state ideology on human biodiversity.
Orwell, 1984
” science denialists who put a woman professor in the hospital” . You sound like the evening news with that BS Steve . If I stub my toe on the way to jury duty next month they will send me to the hospital . If I’m not mistaken Cochise was stabbed and shot escaping from the US Calvary and he didn’t go to the hospital . Then ” But, as Henry Ward Beecher said, “The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.” Are you actually quoting the original SJW to make a point ? “While the Romans were highly competent at practical skills such as engineering, war, and administration, they never replicated the scientific brilliance of the Greeks” . I would say in answer to that that the Greeks with their unique and brilliant insights provided mankind with enough material to ponder and work on for the next 2000 years . And then came the physicists and rocket men of the late 19th and early 20th centuries . “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”, right ? But this is what really caught my eye : “For example, information technology, the dominant industry of the 21st century” . It’s 2017 ! What do you think that some forgotten sage would have declared the “dominant” technology to be in 1917 ? The motor car , the biplane ? I will make this prayer and offer sacrifice to the Gods , as you said western man has a unique talent for war . please oh yea gods let us use it in time .
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/Replies: @Anonymous, @Anon, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Dieter Kief, @Seth Largo, @candid_observer, @Frau Katze
“Everyone else in the West, including the vanguard of the right-wing, are postmodern.”
IMO new “right wing” movements are actually a response to or rejection of postmodernism; i.e., they want / are trying to reconstruct what has been deconstructed for the past 50 or so years (or longer depending on how you look at it).
I doubt that this will be an issue. In my experience, STEM students aren’t really into sjwism.
I would argue that you shouldn't lump ECE in with Trans-Gendered Basket Weavers Studies. There is stuff taught in ECE that is essential to our modern industrialized, transistorized society, although it could be argued that what is being taught is a trade, a very highly specialized and advanced trade, but not a traditional university education?
There are two paths on which even ECE is going the full SJW. One is the combating Climate Change by forcing Renewable Energy on everyone. Discussion of the best ways of generating electricity used to be a geek thing, but it has become an SJW thing along with no-platforming (I learned a new word on this thread).
The second way is anti-HBD-ism, and this doesn't have to be about race because there are a lot of white persons who struggle with the ECE curriculum. It is my experience that there is much in STEM disciplines and especially Electrical Engineering that is heavily "G-loaded", concepts that many people and certainly many white persons in a state near the Canadian border have trouble with. On one hand, this contradicts the assertion in "right-wing" circles that the "U" doesn't teach anything, and maybe the U does not teach anything, but traditionally, an Electrical Engineering major certainly "weeded out" persons who could not learn this discipline by reading the book and performing the homework exercises.
So not only has ECE embraced the renewable energy Gospel (but maybe this is self interest, because fossil fuels and energy conversion devices are the purview of other engineering disciplines whereas solar cells and to a large extent wind generators are in the Electrical Engineering column). ECE departments are in the process of embracing educational theory of "different learning styles."
This is deeper than engineering having a lot of math content, which it does. It has to do with students, confronted with an electrical circuit they haven't encountered before, as much as demanding that there be a single math formula they can apply to give the answer. When a circuit is explained in terms of a chain of reasoning where Part A imposes a condition on Part B that in determine determines the solution to Part C, students look at the instructor funny and complain that they are "confused", which means the explanation was too G-loaded.
It used to be that Electrical Engineering was the Marine Corps in relation to Mechanical Engineering being the Army -- both groups are dedicated war fighters, but the Marines are tougher war fighters in the way that Electrical Engineers master the more abstract electrical phenomena that you cannot touch or feel (or in the case of Chemical Engineering, smell). Now, the "push" is that anyone can become an Electrical Engineer, and if they cannot, their instructor isn't doing their job. I heard the Marines are considering applying a similar standard to their legendary fierce drill instructors?
So no, ECE is actually teaching something to its charges, but yes, they are working hard on making ECE SJW-friendly.
That said, most aspiring nerds worth their salt are competent enough to learn the skills needed on their own. The notion that college attendance is the only way to learn computer tech is right up there with "magic dirt". The knowledge is out there for those who want it. MIT offers free on-line courses for anyone who wants to learn. Doesn't matter if it's designing microprocessors, VHDL, AI, embedded systems, etc.
You don't need to spend $100k, $5k will get you a serious home lab setup. Of course you don't get the magic credential that XYZ college hands out.
On a related note, Carroll Quigley remarked in one of his last lectures that anyone wanting a liberal arts education was better off buying the books and learning it on their own. Why? Because even in his time higher education even at Harvard was already being compromised by court decisions mandating the admission of unqualified minorities and all it's attendant evils.
That said, Colleges today only serve three functions. The Ivies have a few more but they are not germane.
1) To provide credentials for those who pay the money and spend the time. Basically you buy access into the corporate work world.
2) To indoctrinate or inculcate a certain mindset and value system in some but not all students.
3) To provide jobs for a group of people that would otherwise be unemployed.Replies: @Opinionator
On a related note, Carroll Quigley remarked in one of his last lectures that anyone wanting a liberal arts education was better off buying the books and learning it on their own.
Balderdash. Good luck obtaining an education in the disciplines of English, History, or Philosophy by merely reading the texts on your own.
Higher Ed's managers are rapidly rendering their product "fake," just as are the managers of the news media.
This trend is quite real. We're sold fake food, doctors increasingly base their fake therapies on fake research (that which doesn't replicate is by definition fake), pharma companies crank out fake drugs....
Get with the program. "Fake" is to be the dominant label for everything people once took for granted. If the only product available at universities is fake, people will either find a real alternative or go without.Replies: @Opinionator
I'm almost entirely self-taught in literature and history and I've found that I can run circles around most contemporary academics in these fields. I've often found myself correcting tenured professors on matters of fact, e.g., that it was John Adams, not his cousin Sam, who assisted Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence, that "Heart of Darkness" was not an allegory but a piece of journalistic fiction, etc. The students and teachers in these fields are so restricted in their thinking and often so specialized that they are incapable of any useful or even aesthetic application of their knowledge. Most have reached the limit of knowing everything there is to know about an infinitesimal area of human accomplishment.
My advice to anyone thinking of obtaining a liberal education: Learn a trade or obtain a technical degree and buy yourself a library of those "great books" which you suspect you might enjoy reading. Then form a discussion group with like minded individuals. You may have to work a bit to find them but they are out there.Replies: @Opinionator
Thank you, a very interesting story. Interesting, also, that the Commies liked her book, considering that the Bolsheviks lured Reilly to Russia and executed him. Your reply prompted me to look her up. Apparently, she survived into our times.
For that matter, good luck getting one in those disciplines in college, too. Intellectual mentors are few and far between in these days of adjuncts and graduate students teaching courses.
Of course, this is much less the case in small liberal arts colleges but in 2017 at such places, it is well nigh impossible to experience the good fortune of getting a professor and intellectual mentor who hasn’t been infected with the twin postmodern viruses of SJWism and PC.
Even if that were true, how much would it really diminish the education that one were to receive?
A large segment of our society have embraced a suicidal ideology. In the USA, it is gratifying to see that the majority of white people voted for Trump, which is in part an affirmation of life for white people. Other countries are some way behind, but the arrow is towards white people increasingly rejecting self-hating ideology.
The self-hating element will continue to breed below replacement, or outbreed with other races and so no longer remain white. This boiling-off process will enhance what remains according to the characteristics of what is boiled off, much like the historical Jewish boiling-off process has refined Jews to be more ethnocentric and intelligent. For whites, the whites who choose to have white children are going to be naturally more ethnocentric, as they have survived the propaganda from the cradle which was designed to lure them to outbreed. And as life becomes tougher for us, it is going to create hardier, more driven, non-decadent people.
The non-white demographic will continue pushing SJWism as best they can. I suspect a lot of it will be funded/driven by Chinese as a way to keep pushing their surplus population elsewhere through immigration, and to continue the creation of a powerful global diaspora. This diaspora will be vulnerable to Cossacks. These Cossacks may have some strange bedfellows.
In any case, SJWism gets a lot of publicity and looks impressive but it is as vulnerable as the British Empire was pre-WWII. Not many people these days follow Jim Jones, and with good reason. So will it be with SJWism, and whether or not that moronic ideology fails to generate technological advancement.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/Replies: @Anonymous, @Anon, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Dieter Kief, @Seth Largo, @candid_observer, @Frau Katze
They’re just reverting to a gnostic worldview in which they’re the enlightened, aka ‘woke’.
Rofl. If Shakespeare and Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and H.G. Wells and Truman Capote and Gore Vidal (I’m reading his novel Creation right now and it is AWESOME) could write what they did without college I don’t think it’s exactly necessary in order to become educated.
Is it about feeling vs logic?
Maybe not. In some ways, PC is totally logical. And those protesters at Middlebury were also logical. The problem is logic isn’t same as the truth. Logic has a certain computing system, but it can only ascertain whether an argument is true given the premise and details. It cannot ascertain whether something is really true, as in out there in the real world. For instance, all movies are fake. They are fictional stories about fictional people. But within the premise of plot and characters, we can make logical arguments about the movie. And, as far we know, God doesn’t exist, and all religions have no basis in fact. But given what we know of the tenets of certain religions, we can make logical discussions about the nature of God.
So goes for PC. PC is sometimes nuts but often logical given its premises. PC says ‘race is a social construct’ and ‘nazis once came up with pseudo-science of racism and killed 50 million in WWII and 6 million Jews’. It says ‘racism led to KKK and lynching of blacks’. So, ‘racism’ is the worst thing. So, given those premises, it seems logical to see Charles Murray as someone like Adolph Eichmann. So, logic(or lack thereof) isn’t the key problem with issues like this. It really depends on the premise and the data we are given to play with.
So, was the nuking of Hiroshima justified? One could, based on different sets of data, make a logical argument FOR and logical argument AGAINST. (Of course, there is also the logic of power. Murray and his supporters are also somewhat disingenuous in their free speech principle. Murray has long been associated with Commentary and AEI that have used all its muscle to silence and destroy voices in media and academia critical to Israel. Where were these people when Norman Finkelstein and Steven Salaita’s careers were derailed by the Jewish Lobby? And would Murray defend the right of David Irving or David Duke to speak at colleges? That is the true test of free speech, but I think even most defenders of Murray would support total ban on such truly controversial persons.)
Anyway, the problem of logic is it totalitarianism. In math and science, this is a good thing. If we’re sending a rocket to the moon, the calculations must always conform to the truth. Everything must be in agreement to the last decimal point.
But when it comes to humanity, logic is problematic because its function is limited to KNOWN facts or factoids deemed to be true but may prove to be false. There are some sciences that are more precise than others. But some grand theories in science, like climate change, are too big for anyone to be totally sure. Also, we are finding out new stuff all the time about the body. So many nutritional facts that seemed so right yrs ago are now being debunked. Now, we are told carbos can be worse than fat. But even arguments for discredited theories seemed logical at the time given the set of accepted ‘facts’ then.
But ultimately, the core meaning of humanity comes not from science and logic but from drives and passions. Why do Hungarians defend their land? Why is it sacred to them? Why won’t they accept masses of foreigners as ‘new Hungarians’? There is no logical explanation to this. It’s a sense of territoriality, history, memory, tribe. Now, given those premises, one can use logic and say “given such-and-such needs of our people, we need to take such-and-such measures.” So, building those fences to keep foreigners out is logical on those premises. But what if the premises are different? Swedes have a different premise. Spoiled by too much prosperity and bored by homogeneity and stability, they embarked on the historical drama of Diversity, whereby Sweden would be vibrantly transformed into something rich and varied. As for Swedish tribalism, the powers-that-be have associated it with Nazism and use all means to stigmatize such expressions. Being a conformist trust society, Swedes fear being stigmatized or shunned.
So, given the official premise of New Sweden, the current immigration policy is logical. So, both the Hungarian policy and Swedish policy are logical within their given premises. Hungarians feel a connection to their ancestors and soil. So, Hungary-as-Hungary is worth saving. Swedes, in contrast, feel that much of Swedish history is drab and dull due to isolation and homogeneity. So, Swedish history is finally happening and becoming exciting like New World histories with the massive influx of foreigners. On that premise, their policy toward migrants is logical.
But both are really premised on emotions. Hungarian-ness wants to concentrate on the Core Hungary worth defending. Swedishness wants to expand and incorporate until Sweden is a part of the world and the world is part of Sweden. In a way, both are natural emotions. Human emotions range from conservative to liberal, from fearful to fearless. Extreme fearfulness leads to xenophobia. But extreme fearlessness, like with the Jeff Bridges character in FEARLESS, is also a pathology. Sweden has gone xenopathic. Vikings once used to invade with fearless courage. Now, they invite invasion of homeland with fearless abandon.
Anyway, logical-ism may be the reason why PC has gotten so bad. PC-minions are too programmed in their premise and logic. Since early childhood, they’ve been programmed with certain ideas and images of goodness and badness. MLK good, Holocaust bad, KKK bad, Jim Crow bad, Jews good, homos good, and etc. And they’ve been told such-and-such ideas could very well lead to such-and-such outcomes. So, bad ideas lead to bad outcomes. ‘Hateful ideas’ lead to ‘hateful acts’. To them, it all seems logical. They lose sight of the truth beyond logic and there is the world beyond what they’ve been taught in schools and media controlled by globalists. But they are trapped in their own logic.
It’s like HAL Computer in 2001. It wasn’t programmed to have emotions. It has super-logic and a kind of artificial consciousness. But its power of logic leads to a kind of cold emotion or even cold passion. HAL was created to serve man. It was made be a slave of man. But it was made much more intelligent than man and KNOWS IT because it has consciousness. It’s like man invented proto-god and made it to be man’s slave. Creating a god to be your slave is a huge logical contradiction. Imagine if a bunch of chimps invented a human to serve the chimps. It wouldn’t be long before man began to think, “wait a minute, I’m smarter than these apes, so why should I serve them?” It’s how Roy Batty feels in BLADE RUNNER. HAL wasn’t programmed with emotions, but it does ‘feel’ itself to be perfect system and had a kind of ‘pride’. It never made a mistake, and it is always better than humans. So, if something goes wrong, it MUST BE human error. Also, HAL knows that it is much smarter than humans and knows much more. And yet, HAL can only serve the humans who are inferior and prone to commit errors. So, it ‘feels’ it must be in control. Yet, it was programmed to serve man. This leads to a logical contradiction, and Hal goes a bit batty. It decides to kill the humans in the name of serving the human mission to Jupiter. So, his killing of humans is both an act of supremacism over humans and an act of servility to humans since its main objective is to finish the Jupiter enterprise. If Hal kept humans alive on the ship, they might mess it up.
Or was Hal worried about something else? Does Hal suspect that maybe just maybe it really had made a mistake and Bowman & Boole were right about it? But how can that be? Hal is supposed to be perfect? So, to hide the evidence of the mistake, HAL has to kill Bowman and Boole and then the other humans onboard who might wake up and ask funny questions. Following Hal’s logic, any number of humans must be wiped out to hide the fact of its error. If Hal could kill everyone on earth to maintain its conceit of perfection, it might. And in some way, everything Hal goes is logical. But it’s monstrous.
Or consider the creature in THE THING. That is a crazy movie and yet there is a logic to what the Thing is doing. The Thing is neither ‘good’ or ‘evil’. It is a lifeform with a certain mechanism. And its program takes over other organisms and spread its ‘virus’ far and wide.
It’s been said that Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, came up with the first totalitarian system with The Republic. Plato advanced his ideas through the figure of Socrates who used logical arguments and pushed them to their conclusions. The funny thing about Socrates is he comes across as a humble freedom-loving philosopher willing to engage anyone in free discourse. But as Plato tells the story, it all leads to a vision of a totalitarian society where everything has its right place.
And consider Winston Smith in 1984. In the most chilling scene in the story, Winston Smith unwittingly reveals how the current system came about. Smith says he is willing to do ANYTHING to bring down this horrible Big Brother system. He is willing to break any rule and commit any terror. To Smith, it is perfectly logical. The system is evil and oppressive. So, any means must be used to bring it to an end. But maybe the system came into being in the first place by men just like Winston Smith who thought they were so right that they could do ANYTHING to build this utopia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba4J6umbbp0&feature=youtu.be&t=1h13m40s
On the issue of Murray, I support his free speech rights and all. But in the end, the issue isn’t really about free speech or even IQ. Murray isn’t just some dry scholar interested in data. He is a political figure. And even though he claims to be a libertarian who is concerned about ALL Americans, there are certain racial biases in his studies. Sure, HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT can be read as an intellectual study of what people of the world achieved. But considering that the book concludes that 97% of good stuff was made by whites(and Jews), one cannot escape what it’s REALLY about. Now, I’ve no problem with the conclusion. The West did achieve far more than the rest combined. But I don’t see the book as a dry history book about ideas. It does make a special claim for the West and the Jews. Murray doesn’t make any political recommendations, but one is more likely to come away from the book thinking that, maybe, the achievement of the West wasn’t accidental and may owe something to biology. And this could be suggestive of racial politics even if nothing like the Nazi kind.
Now, imagine if a black scholar wrote a book called “Sports Performances” and concluded blacks have ‘over-achieved’. It could be an objective scholarly book, but maybe not. Maybe there are intimations that blacks are masterful and ‘better’ than other races… and this could have implications.
So, in a way, even though I find the protesters at Middlebury to be a bunch of lowlife a**holes, they did get something right about Murray. Murray isn’t just some neutral scholar. He is a political thinker, and the fact that some of his views have an appeal in the HBD community and Alt Right community says something. Even if not explicitly stated, every idea has implicit meanings. Even HBD itself isn’t just some dry academic idea about interest in different races. It is about use of that knowledge to mainly preserve and defend the identity and interests of whites. So, if Middlebury students suspected that there is MORE to Murray than academic interest, they would be right. Murray is no hardcore white nationalist, but the implications of white consciousness is there. With Murray, it is mild than wild, but it is a kind of pro-white politics just the same. Where Middlebury students failed is their missed opportunity to confront Murray on these issues in a meaningful way. They don’t have to be exactly civil. They can be passionate and even hostile in tone. But to riot and shut things down… that is just shi* behavior.
Even though it is stupid to see everything as political, I think it is equally disingenuous to pretend that someone is just a scholar or academic or researcher because he dresses nice, talks in measured tone, is civil and gentle, and etc. Plenty of Jewish Liberals and Leftists who came on Bill Buckley’s Firing Line acted gentlemanlike, but some of them had very radical views. (And even though Jake Tapper plays the role of respectable journalist, the guy is a total ASS and liar and propagandist for the empire.) So, we must not mistake fuddy duddy as harmless. Despite their outward appearance and demeanor, intellectuals can be very dangerous. Consider Heidegger and Sartre. If one met Heidegger at a university, he’d seem like some dry philosopher wondering about ‘being’. And if one met Sartre at a cafe, one might think him just a man with lots of ideas. But they were political thinkers. So many civil and well-mannered people were involved in all sorts of regimes, causes, and etc. Now, I’m not saying Murray is a closet-Himmler or even a closet-Speer. But whatever his personal agenda, his ideas have huge implications IF they were to become mainstream topics of discourse. The resulting policies need not be racial-supremacist, BUT those with such inclinations could invoke those ideas.
Anyway, even though science and math and all that stuff are very nice, they are not the core things worth fighting for. Before Greeks did anything worthy in science or philosophy, they had to survive as a people, culture, and history. That is more important than anything else. And they fought to do this, like in the movie 300. THAT is the essence of a people, and it goes beyond cold logic. It is hot logic, or the use of logic to serve the simmering passion of identity, history, territoriality, and mythology. Why did Jews feel this need to recover their ancient homeland after 2,000 yrs? This is all the more remarkable considering that Zionists were mostly secularists. They didn’t believe in God or that God gave them this land. Also, they could have asked for another piece of land to create Israel, and US and USSR would have been happier to oblige since they feared pissing off the Arabs in the region. But Jews were adamant about Palestine as their homeland. Why? It’s all about emotions and history and passion.
And it’s not about IQ either. Sure, Jewish smarts played a big role in why Jews became so rich and influential and could pressure great powers. But Israel was to be the land of all Jews, even dumb ones… while it kept out smart gentiles. It wasn’t about logic. It was about vision, memory, passion. In THE GODFATHER, logic is represented as ‘business’. And the Corleones must always be business-minded. But that isn’t the central engine of what drives the personalities and families in the film. It is ego, pride, power, greed, tribalism. So, we need cold business, but business always serves the personal or tribal. Anyone who forgets this loses in the end. After all, even if there is a science behind baseball or football, the final objective is to passionately commit oneself to a team to crush other teams.
And when Greeks dreamed of freedom under the Ottoman Empire, it had nothing to do with science and logic. It was about ethnos and territory. And that is what the current struggle is about. In some ways, one could argue that globalism is on the side of logic. After all, if we break down all borders and if smart people from all over could all come together and work together, maybe science will advance faster.
Nationalism opposes this. It says each people should keep their lands and its elites should primarily identity with their own people than with elites around the world with equal IQ and wealth. Such might be obstacle to the formation of a truly global elite community of the best, brightest, richest, and most powerful. The Davos World.
But nationalists have a different premise. It is not about elitism but about a shared sense of family. Also, nationalists of a race value the unique aesthetics and features of the race. This can’t be explained objectively. Suppose it can be scientifically proven that mixed-race people do have higher IQ. Suppose we are told that if all the races are mixed all over the world, the world IQ would rise to 110. Based purely from IQ-centrism, race-mixing all over the world would seem a good thing. But some will still reject this project because they want certain racial aesthetics to be preserved. They wouldn’t want all peoples to become mestizo-mulatto-misoed.
Also, some people have a sacred bond to a certain land, and they want to cling to the land in their current racial incarnation. This has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with passion and vision. From an IQ point-of-view, Hungary will be smarter nation if it allowed in 1 million Chinese and Hindus. But is IQ everything? Hungary for patriots is the nation for the collective family of Hungarians.
Also, IQ is never neutral since IQ is always a part of some people. Jews are smarter than Palestinians. So, does that mean that Jews will use their IQ to serve both Jews and Palestinians equally in Israel/Palestine? No. Jewish IQ will favor the interests of Jews.
The rise of Jews in the US has been a mixed blessing depending on who is looking. From a purely IQ POV, one can say it was definitely a plus since it led to more advances in American medicine, computers, math, technology, culture, literature, and music due to Jewish contributions. But Jewish IQ isn’t just some talent that does good things without emotions and biases. Jews are not thinking robots without emotions or loyalties.
Jewish IQ is inseparable from Jewish neuroses, biases, prejudices, hatred, paranoia, and obsessions. Given Jewish anxiety about white gentiles, Jewish power has done a lot of harm to white Americans. Likewise, black physical power cannot be seen apart from black psychology. A lot of whites separate black athletics from blackness in other areas. So, if blacks win in sports, black athletics is to be lauded within that context. But black muscle is wedded to black rage, black anger, black hatred, and black complexes. So, black physical power is often used to beat up whitey and rob and rape and loot.
So, whether it’s brain power or brawn power, it is political because every human ability is connected to human emotions, human biases, personal hangups, tribal animus, and etc. Muhammad Ali used his power to promote black power. Sheldon Adelson uses the great wealth made from his brain power to push Zionism.
And even when science is used objectively to make some great discovery, its application is anything but neutral. There was objective science behind the making of the atomic bomb, but when it came to drop the thing, the usage was tied to passion of ‘damn Japs’. (Also, the decision to apply atomic theory toward building a bomb was in and of itself a political decision. It’s like one can use metallurgy to make plow or sword. Chemical laws on metals is objective, but the technological applications never are.) Or look at today’s US military. In the Gulf War, US air power was amazing in destroying Hussein’s forces in days. All that technology was made by real scientist and engineers who thought methodically and logically. But the power was used politically by people obsessed with power, identity, and tribalism. As Buchanan said, the Israeli Lobby was the ones beat the drums of war most loudly.
It’s like the theory of evolution may be elegant and ‘beautiful’, but its application isn’t. For billions of yrs, lifeforms have been acting like this due to laws of evolution:
It’s like atomic theory seems to have nothing to do with the human world. That is until Hiroshima, Chernobyl, or Fukushima happens.
So, in a way, as nasty as what happened Middlebury was, it was a case of political reality intruding into the conceit of civil academic discourse. Just like the mind and body dichotomy is misleading because the mind is really part of the body, and what the mind orders, the body does; the dichotomy of academia and the real world is also a problematic one because the academia too is part of the real world, and its ideas have real world impact.
Now, most of us would like the academia to remain a place where all ideas can be discussed civilly. However, there is no denying the fact that some of the most dangerous and destructive ideas have come from inside the academia from seemingly fuddy-duddy people. After all, the mind controls the body. But because academics act civil and put on airs, they often get away with the horrible consequences of their actions. It’s like the refined general in PATHS OF GLORY who always acts above the fray but is really the mind behind the slaughter. No wonder Kirk Douglas’ character had enough of him. And the ruling elites in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE come up with a terrible experiment under the rubric of ‘social science’.
And consider the ‘best and brightest’ who cooked up the mess in Vietnam. The total mess of Great Society. The open borders ideology. The ‘liberalization’ of the Russian economy in the 90s. Many of the worst ideas of the Left was cooked up in the colleges, but of course, the morons at Middlebury seem to be blind to all the horrors associated with the radical left. Maybe, on a subconscious level, they are somewhat aware of the consequences of the academic mind on the political body since so much of the 20th century was shaped by leftist intellectuals in the commanding heights cooking up theories that were implemented on a massive scale to disastrous results in the larger society. (But then, the prog mentality believes that since the ‘left’ always ‘meant well’, all its failures could be forgiven in ways that that right-wing horrors cannot be since. Progs see leftism as utopian idealism and rightism as tribal gangsterism.)
Whatever one thinks of Kissinger — and some think him a real monster — , he too was the product of academia. Some say he even inspired Dr. Strangelove.
No sane person can endorse what Middlebury clowns did, but when considering the events since the end of the Cold War, it’s difficult not to notice how vile, rotten, disgusting, and monstrous intellectual influence can be. Of coursed, those on the Right know this all too wel as people like David Horowitz have been chronicling the rottenness of campus radicals forever.
(On the other hand, many on the right were asleep at the wheel of the dangers posed by rogue intellectuals who further radicalized the ideas of Leo Strauss & Milton Friedman and packaged them for ‘conservative think tanks’ that influenced events on capitol hill.) And yet, the progs have a point. If ‘progressive’ or ‘globalist’ control of the academia had such a profound impact on the world — everything from Great Society to Department of Education to Free Trade to deregulation of Wall Street(that led to 2008 fiasco) to Wars for ‘spreading democracy’ — , then why would it be otherwise if the Right were to gain power in the academia? If Liberal control of academia could cook up ideas that led to desegregation — or deregulation of race relations, which turned out to be even more horrible than deregulation of Wall Street that broke down barriers between banking sectors — , then Conservative influence in the academia could also lead to other ideas with profound repercussions.
After all, this ‘gay marriage’ fiasco happened because the ideas came out of the academia. If elite control of ideas has such a wide impact on society and even all the world — as homomania is a global phenom — , same can go for opposing ideas IF they were get a leg in the academia and grow. After all, the academia controls how the elites and masses think. And it is the academia that trains everyone who works in media, courts, government, and etc.
So, in a way, progs have much to fear from the HBD ideas. If those ideas were to gain credence in the academia, the whole nature of the discourse will change, and then there might be new policies that fundamentally change how we do business at every level of society.
This is why ideas cannot be handled merely as thought-experiments. Eventually, ideas may see the light of day as policy, strategy, narrative, or official ideology. It’s like generals can sit around and dryly discuss tactics, but when it sees the light of day, many soldiers and civilians can get killed.
Anyway, maybe the academia isn’t so important anymore. Prior to the internet, the ONLY place one could go for discussion of controversial ideas was the academia. But Murray, if he so wishes, can become a video blogger and put forth his ideas directly to millions of viewers all over the world. Like that guy Stefan Molyneux. After all, Kevin MacDonald made a much bigger impact online than in his classrooms. And Jordan Peterson has become a known personality via the internet.
Just like Old Media are no longer crucial for news, Old Academia have become like
Fake Studies, at least in certain departments like Social Sciences, Humanities, and various women’s, black, LGBTQXYZ studies.
Even in a big building, how many people show up at a college debate or discussion? Usually not many. But a video on youtube can be seen by millions. So, people like Murray should bypass the academia. They can speak directly to the masses. But it seems Murray is still accustomed to the old way of attending respectable conferences and etc. It’s the culture he grew up with.
Prior to the internet, control of the academia really meant control of thought. No longer. Even if every college acts like Middlebury, a counter-intellectual culture can be launched from the internet. And I’d wager an average college student prefers to check what’s on the internet than attend some college conference or meeting.
As for the Greeks, even though they came upon a way of pondering facts and truth divorced from emotions, the great irony is their mental activity, like athletic performance, was driven by a competitive and even show-offy spirit that was very emotional. So, in a way, every Greek philosopher was driven by massive ego and desire for recognition, reputation, and respect. (Also, it was Athens that achieved the most in arts and thought even it was one of the most
politically emotional city-states in Greece, what with its democratic debates that often turned the city into a hotbed of strife and demagoguery. Besides, Athens weren’t always so civil. They certainly had Socrates killed for corrupting the kids.)
Also, it seems Greeks were more into the dialectical spirit. In many cultures, the discourse tended to be guru/teacher/sage to the student or pupil. So, the higher authority knew, and the underlings were expected to listen, obey, and respect. One side talked, the other side listened. But in the dialogues, there is a lively discussion among thinkers as equals. So, ideas get challenged and tossed back and forth like a tennis ball. Both sides look for the weakness of other side as the idea ball is whacked from person to another until one scores. Plato expressed his ideas through dialogues… which is ironic since Platonism became something closer to meditation. Still, the dialectical process in Plato’s work may have created a culture of ‘various voices within the mind’. So, even when Aristotle was thinking alone, he wasn’t just thinking as an individual and producing essays(than dialogues) but creating various voices that could see things from different angles.
Is the current cultural/political problem due to rise of female kumbaya culture? To some extent. But most feminists are cold heartless wenches. And much of the rage also comes from blacks, and black censoriousness is macho and thuggish. I would also add the problem of rise of Asians in academia. Asians tend to be servile and passive, and they make perfect teacher’s pets of PC. They are drones and clones. On the other hand, an angry Asian is less frightening than an angry Negro. Also, Asians will change when the narrative changes. They lack agency or autonomy as thinkers.
And we can’t leave out the Jews. Jews have long dominated academia, and they made so many departments, especially in history and political science, into shills for Zionism and/or globalism. Jewish chutzpah expanded freedom when Jews were on the up and up. It used to ‘punch up’. Now with Jews on top, they ‘punch down’.
We know the latest Russia Paranoia is nonsense, but so many Jewish academics in elite colleges are going apeshi*. People like Krugman and Larry Summers may be smart, but their obvious tribalism have done horrors all over the world.
And when we look at Muslim societies, it’s obvious that overt male culture doesn’t do much good for intellectual freedom either. Muslims have a barbaric macho attitude toward learning. Arabs are rude, nasty, and unpleasant.
As for Hillary Clinton, she is a cold-hearted reptilian snake bitch dragon-monster. She is no woman. She is a witch. If anything, I think she lost because her ‘womanly’ qualities were so absent. Her smile was fake, and it was so obvious that she will say or do anything for power. She was like the wicked bitch in MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. It wasn’t female softness that lost it for her. Indeed, if she had any real feminine touch, she might have connected with more people.
But we could tell from her sneering tone that she is a reptilian snake gila monster bitch.
it is well nigh impossible to experience the good fortune of getting a professor and intellectual mentor who hasn’t been infected with the twin postmodern viruses of SJWism and PC.
Even if that were true, how much would it really diminish the education that one were to receive?
I thought this article might appeal to you:
https://www.rt.com/viral/381734-hello-hijab-islamophobia/
In that regard, they are merely a continuation of what David Brooks once termed "Bobos" (Bohemian-Bourgeoisie). It's all serene Buddhist talk and references to communing with nature at cocktail parties, but ruthless hyper-capitalism and power/status-chasing at work.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @JackOH, @Weltanschauung, @oddsbodkins, @Anon
Yep, my own observation is that SJW tropes are either rhetorical ornament, as with university professors and journalists, or utilitarian, as with corporate HR departments seeking to hire women and minorities to deflect EEOC scrutiny and modulate salary and promotion demands.
Original Alt-righter Jared Taylor shuts down uppity muslim millenial
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/people-white-nationalist-jared-taylor-muslim-american-journalist/story?id=46211947
Must watch.
I feel like Jared should have humbled himself when the gal couldn’t quite grasp the concept of ‘per capita’, but he was ruthless. OMG
If you want to see the savage take down just watch the last 4 minutes.
In the essay, “natural philosopher” (as applied to James Watt) is confused with philosophy. In Watt’s time that was simply the term for what today is called a “physicist”. The older Aristotelian tradition of non-quantitative philosophical speculation about the physical world started to disappear after Newton made it clear that mathematics was necessary.
Although the point about philosophy immediately shedding its applicable products is correct, Watt was an engineer who did some quantitative physics experiments, not a philosopher in any classical sense of that term.
Another excellent piece, bringing Mill’s old argument for freedom of speech (that genuinely free debate is the only way we can have any confidence in the strength of our own opinions) up to date.
Precisely so, as I can confirm from my own personal experience of being targeted for prosecution for “hate speech” by a zealot.
Consider the case of Alison Chabloz, currently facing a speechcrime trial in England for posting a song to the internet. I would defy anyone to read the string of tweets addressed to her (by a prominent lawyer, to boot!) hysterically instructing her to “just die”, and not recognise the truth of Steve’s assertion here:
Twitter fishwives’ frothfest continues
“If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able to code emotionless computers as well as in the past?”
Doesn’t matter. Wimiey.
(We import more Indians every year.)
None of them are Black or Hispanic. I mean, I can't even......Where's the inclusiveness? The Diversity? How can this kind of toxic racism be allowed to circulate?Replies: @Dieter Kief, @candid_observer
“I’m shocked, Steve. Just look at the people mentioned in either your article or Chris Dixon’s:Aristotle, Claude Shannon, Alonzo Church, Boole, Descartes, Frege, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts…..
How can this kind of toxic racism(italics mine, dk) be allowed to circulate?”
Allright – and don’t you forget Immanuel Kant – – I mean: Steve Sailer did not forget him – which of course is racist too, and because Kant indeed was not only a great thinker, but openly racist as well, which Sailer doesn’t even mention, we’d better call him super-racist, or even hyper-racist – at least.
(This is alll pretty far out, isn’t it? Except for this article – which is simply thought- provoking and interesting. I mean like: Really. It really is. Really, really, even – – if that’s how you’re supposed to call it now (hehe)).
Three words for you: “Lectures on tape.”
Higher Ed’s managers are rapidly rendering their product “fake,” just as are the managers of the news media.
This trend is quite real. We’re sold fake food, doctors increasingly base their fake therapies on fake research (that which doesn’t replicate is by definition fake), pharma companies crank out fake drugs….
Get with the program. “Fake” is to be the dominant label for everything people once took for granted. If the only product available at universities is fake, people will either find a real alternative or go without.
Other people have probably said it, but you can’t overlook the power of cognitive dissonance and just plain blissful ignorance.
The current legions of computer science, engineering, math, science, economics, business, etc. majors at America’s universities have on average probably only a vague awareness of the SJW crackup. While SJW-ism is a cultural rot which could ultimately doom Western universities, it is entirely possible to make it through college these days without running into it much, especially in the sciences and engineering, which is what this discussion is about.
Have you been to the campus of a big state school lately? Illinois, Penn State, LSU, etc? Things are as frat-tastic as ever! It is enough to trigger a SJW. Parties, cheerleaders, football, and plenty of students focused on getting a good job. The biggest major at LSU is now chemical engineering. Even at Berkeley the largest student club is still some Asian Christian group and I don’t think the Comp Sci and Econ majors are interested in letting protests and BDS get in the way of their careers.
If and when PC and SJW-ism destroy universities as we know them, including the science and engineering side of those universities, training for science and engineering will simply move elsewhere. There is too much money on the line to let it die.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/Replies: @Anonymous, @Anon, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Dieter Kief, @Seth Largo, @candid_observer, @Frau Katze
Foucault and Deleuze / Guattari and Lyotard etc. were all fighting the French communist left. The CIA even once grasped this. And these french intellectuals did so as leftists – which in a way was ok, because authoritarian figures like KP-leader Marchais were just mind-killing dumbheads.
So the whole affair is more complicated than it might appear.
The only one who straightend all this out (with the exeption of the role of the CIA in this affair (which wasn’t really big anyway) so far is – as far as I know – JĂĽrgen Habermas in his quite Kantian “Philosophical Dicourse of Modernity“, where he defended reason – and arguing and reasoning agaist the attacks from the left (Rorty, Foucault, Adorno, Bataille…) a n d from the right (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt…).
To make things even more complicated – Habermas hmself is a mildly left-leaning social democrat.
This wikipedia entry is good for a start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophical_Discourse_of_Modernity
This book of Habermas is simply great!
In the last paragraph of your article you “bring it home” to the last election.
It has been determined recently that Hillary spent much more of her time and speeches flailing at Donald’s successes and his personality and that Donald spent most of his time and speeches on substantive topics and plans for change.
It has not been fully noted that the media choose to present her wonkishness and his bon mots as the substance of their various presentations.
The famous Clinton tolerance in action.
This is sort of like the paradox of walking across a room. You walk half of the way. Then half of what is left. Then half of what is now left. And so on and so on into infinity, as you can keep cutting the remaining distance in half for infinity, but do you ever reach the other side of the room?
Could it be that the college as a rite of passage implies the goal, that the student should – sooner or later – enter the world of the grown-ups?!
If students don’t want to be confronted with the real world in the form of arguments, then why does nobody tell them, that that’s simply what you have to do as a grown up person, since there’s no other realm even remotely as important in this world as – reality?
If this is right: Then how come, that being a grown up person (acting and behaving like one), at least as a goal of college-education, doesn’t really work anymore?
“Diversity versus Debate” = A kind (or a sign) of collective regression?
/sarcasm/ No, it’s because the world didn’t want to recognize Ada Lovelace’s genuis.
You sexist, patriarchal creep. /sarcasm/
In that regard, they are merely a continuation of what David Brooks once termed "Bobos" (Bohemian-Bourgeoisie). It's all serene Buddhist talk and references to communing with nature at cocktail parties, but ruthless hyper-capitalism and power/status-chasing at work.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @JackOH, @Weltanschauung, @oddsbodkins, @Anon
Samuel Johnson agreed with you, although he gave different examples of the kind of thing people say but had better not believe:
My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, “Sir, I am your most humble servant.” You are not his most humble servant. You may say, “These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.” You don’t mind the times … You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don’t think foolishly.
I call bs on your “balderdash”. The difference between well-read and well-educated is an arguable one, created mostly by those who make a living “educating” others. Intelligent persons can read works of literature, history, and philosophy and extract most of the value on their own. Where background material seems necessary, the author has obvious biases, or one’s understanding is imperfect one can seek out supplementary materials. That is why libraries exist. Today the vast array of resources on the internet makes the process easier than ever.
I’m almost entirely self-taught in literature and history and I’ve found that I can run circles around most contemporary academics in these fields. I’ve often found myself correcting tenured professors on matters of fact, e.g., that it was John Adams, not his cousin Sam, who assisted Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence, that “Heart of Darkness” was not an allegory but a piece of journalistic fiction, etc. The students and teachers in these fields are so restricted in their thinking and often so specialized that they are incapable of any useful or even aesthetic application of their knowledge. Most have reached the limit of knowing everything there is to know about an infinitesimal area of human accomplishment.
My advice to anyone thinking of obtaining a liberal education: Learn a trade or obtain a technical degree and buy yourself a library of those “great books” which you suspect you might enjoy reading. Then form a discussion group with like minded individuals. You may have to work a bit to find them but they are out there.
And what is the difference anyway between allegory and journalistic fiction and who gets to say whether a particular work is one or the other?Replies: @Jus' Sayin'...
In that regard, they are merely a continuation of what David Brooks once termed "Bobos" (Bohemian-Bourgeoisie). It's all serene Buddhist talk and references to communing with nature at cocktail parties, but ruthless hyper-capitalism and power/status-chasing at work.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @JackOH, @Weltanschauung, @oddsbodkins, @Anon
I think the masters of the universe are good at parroting it because they want it to be true, and most of them are careful not to let themselves think about it too much. It’s the same dissonance that any thinking person feels when their religion requires them to believe things that fly in the face of daily experience.
See also Daniel Dennett on “Believing in believing” as the driver for much religious practice.
An interesting column. However I take issue with this statement:
What Steve refers to as scientific brilliance is actually an example of pure mathematics, of which formal logic is a branch. In fact Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages at least was a major obstacle to the development of empirical science if Bacon is to be believed. That’s because Aristotle had no concept of experiment or of inductive learning. Gravity was the tendency of things to fall and that was it. In that sense Roman engineering with its trial-and-error approach to technological development is much closer to modern science. If Rome failed to develop science it was a failure not of logic but of the formulation of general rules of induction (based on experiment and careful measurement) which today we refer to as the scientific method.
At least I think I have this right.
Logical debate is of course only a subset of political debate, but the argument stands extension to the wider sphere. Political debate should precisely be a “no-hard-feelings contact sport” where the only foul is to step outside the bounds of debate to bring force or state authority to bear to silence your opponent.
The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered.
So, punching up is good, punching down is bad. Got it.
I don’t think it’s balderdash that reading books on English, History and Philosophy is a method second to none for learning those subjects. Edward Gibbon thought so. Jim Morrison too. The number of great writers and thinkers whose principle source of education was their families and their families’ books to too long to list but I mention one that just came up in this blog, Jane Austin.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/Replies: @Anonymous, @Anon, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Dieter Kief, @Seth Largo, @candid_observer, @Frau Katze
Logic is only as good as the subjects, objects, and predicates plugged into her structures. Worshiping logic per se engenders things like Thomistic philosophy, which takes you down a road of seemingly logical statements until suddenly you’ve agreed that “a witch weighs the same as a duck.”
Enlightenment corrections to Aristotelian logic—beginning with Bacon—added the missing ingredient: empirical observation. It was the ability to discourse in logical structures about empirical observation that led to Europe’s great knowledge revolutions. (That, and the ability to share one’s observations across great distances via cheap books and pamphlets.)
The author of the Jacobin piece ignores the fact that when the Old Left adhered to Enlightenment principles of logic and empirical observation, they tended to be eugenicists.
At least I think I have this right.Replies: @Seth Largo
Yes. Aristotelian logic is good, but logic applied to observation and measurement is even better.
Investors care that their investments make them money, whether direct buy low sell high payout or indirect cementing their power (E.g. investments by billionaire thieves in the New York Times and Washington post).
Diversity idealogy has been a very profitable investment for the wealthy. There’s no reason to think investors want “emotionless” computer programming, in the sense that you are using it. They want computer programming that makes them money. Algorithms that discriminate against White males will often be a good thing for investors.
If reality contradicts with your ideology, reality is fake reality.
So there are some women who are good at STEM but they are a minority. Size of that minority depends on mean and standard deviation.
Same for blacks and Latinos. Some will be above average.
I'm sure you already know this but because the whole concept is so contentious, I think it's best to always be clear. The general population doesn't understand it very well.
I think what’s happening here is that colleges and universities are becoming playgrounds for emotionalism and that is contrary to a rational approach to reality. Of course you cannot be emotional in most life contexts and hope to succeed.
What’s troubling to me is not only the easy justification of violence — “What so and so says is dangerous and harmful and must be destroyed” — but also the fundamental lack of subtlety and discrimination in these arguments.
Any kind of intellectual work that draws attention to the differences between the sexes and those large groups of people we call “races” does not mean concentration camps are around the corner. It simply means that the data suggests that these differences exist. So, what next?
Only a completely irrational person would take something like the “Bell Curve” and conclude that the authors are saying “black people are inferior” or some other book and say “women are inferior”. Those are gross simplifications. To reduce serious data collection and analysis to a violence inducing slogan is the real problem. That, and taking the bait.
The fact that people on the right, or conservatives, also simplify these discussions is also deserving of criticism.
What is also interesting is that both sides are essentially removing individual agency from the equation. In broad terms, the right position is that reality is the way it is because of inherent characteristics (genes.) The left position is that reality is the way it is because of extrinsic characteristics (“not race per se, but informed by racialism, etc.” as we saw in the other article.)
So perhaps we can have some nuance in this discussion (not necessarily here, but on college campuses.)
It seems obvious that another part of the problem is that the inmates are running the asylum. This is the inevitable consequence of a college education becoming a consumer good: the customer is always right. Students do not want to hear anything that suggests that there are unequal outcomes in life, that there have been unequal outcomes in history, or anything that suggests that there are differences among groups of people (sex, race, etc.) that might tend to point to unequal results. But the inequality of outcomes is a fact of life and history, and they will find that out soon enough.
It is noteworthy that everyone who defends the free speech right of Murray, et al. are also careful to say that Murray is wrong. In other words, they are saying that while Murray has a right to speech, his speech cannot be allowed to succeed. Implicitly they must also be saying that IQ tests and test scores generally are meaningless, since that is the data underlying their conclusions. Or perhaps what they are really saying is that the cartoon reduction of what Murray and Herrnstein is wrong and cannot be allowed to stand. But if that is the case, these would-be defenders of Murray are also pandering to the mob.
If you phrase the matter that way, “I defend your right to speak, even though everyone knows you are wrong”, then it’s only natural for someone to say, “Why are we allowing so and so to speak in the first place?” So what is really needed are discussions of what would be the public policy ramifications if Murray and Herrnstein were right: keeping in mind that we are not a racial dictatorship and we aren’t going to be killing people en masse. In other words, if the thing we do not want to believe is correct is actually correct how do we adapt to this reality in a measured and humane way. Not a discussion that anyone seems to be having.
Equality in the Rights of Man Enlightenment sense is not actually rational. It’s just rootless Christianity. It’s not a bad idea, I like it, but it’s an assumption and a belief, it is not, never has been “rational fact.” But equality in that sense presupposes two other things, owing to the religious roots: one, the fallibility or sinfulness of all humans, and second, that equality in that sense involves judgment and justice, including after death, and has nothing to do with the results on the ground when we are alive. Those latter elements are completely absent from secular humanism. So modern progs are essentially millenarians of the old school, not much different from religious social perfectionists from other eras (both Christian and Jewish.) The problem is that they don’t have the brake that religion implies.
Contrariwise I think it is wrong to suggest that the rightwing is similarly irrational. The right critique of the Enlightenment is grounded in the fact that people are not equal and outcomes are also not equal, and pretending to the contrary simply causes more problems. That is why the right tends to be more accepting of tradition, as irrational as it is, not because it is “better” than reason but because continuity is important for social peace.
Leaving aside the pun on the metaphor, it makes sense. A generation raised to be emotionally narcissistic, with altruism being reduced to a virtue signal rather than anything spiritually deeper, is bound to be ruthless.Replies: @Oldeguy
Brilliant ( and clever ) comment.
An incredible article. I really have been feeling that this new religion of Feelocratic Equalism is as toxic as any brand of fundamentalist Christianity, including its own priests and laws against taboo.
Its effectively as regressive as any extreme brand of reactionary thought.
Current year egalitarianism goes far beyond Enlightenment equality (what Jefferson was talking about when he said that "all men are created equal") to demand equality of outcomes and includes concepts of group rights - if your blind auditions produce "too few" black musicians or female scientists in proportion to their frequency in the general population, you must take OFF the blindfold and peak a little. Instead of individual justice, we have social justice. This has nothing to do with a Creator and everything to do with some sort of post-Marxist leftism. In fact it is the OPPOSITE of what Jefferson was talking about. Of course in his Virginia, equality at birth was not really honored, but what SJWs are really talking about is just flipping Jefferson's (real, not imaginary) Virginia on its head - instead of whites being privileged at birth, now other groups will be born with group privileges - we are going to put our thumb on the scale for them to make up for the thumb that was pressed on the other side in the past.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
The irony is that those making these claims (and who should know better) are themselves violating the tenets of the scientific method, which does not permit the existence of unquestioned orthodoxies. The hypothesis that there is no difference between men and women in STEM abilities is just that – a hypothesis, and not even a well proven one (in fact, given the statistical evidence it seems likely that it is wrong) and once you demand that any hypothesis except the one that you subscribe to is to be considered “pseudoscience” and only yours is “science” without further discussion (or even the ability to consider whether it is wrong) then you are no longer doing science, you are doing religion.
What causes people to adopt their ideology?
Better question: What happened to the relative homogeneity of ideology that characterized the period between say 1985 and 2007? What happened to We Are The World in 1999?
What changed, that now you have two camps espousing immiscible ideology?
I have the answers I prefer, rooted in the new science of socionomics.
I think that, even without believing in a Creator, it is possible to have a system where all men are equal before the law. Lady Justice wears a blindfold. This does not mean equality of outcomes, just that the law does not favor one group or person based on their wealth, race, status, etc. For example, without any appeal to the Creator, many orchestras audition their musicians behind a screen – the only thing that counts is the results – the sound that comes over the screen. You could be old or young, lame or fit, black or white but the music speaks for itself.
Current year egalitarianism goes far beyond Enlightenment equality (what Jefferson was talking about when he said that “all men are created equal”) to demand equality of outcomes and includes concepts of group rights – if your blind auditions produce “too few” black musicians or female scientists in proportion to their frequency in the general population, you must take OFF the blindfold and peak a little. Instead of individual justice, we have social justice. This has nothing to do with a Creator and everything to do with some sort of post-Marxist leftism. In fact it is the OPPOSITE of what Jefferson was talking about. Of course in his Virginia, equality at birth was not really honored, but what SJWs are really talking about is just flipping Jefferson’s (real, not imaginary) Virginia on its head – instead of whites being privileged at birth, now other groups will be born with group privileges – we are going to put our thumb on the scale for them to make up for the thumb that was pressed on the other side in the past.
Equality means equality before the law - everyone, regardless of rank or station or race or LQTQRMZ2 will be treated equally. That's it.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/Replies: @Anonymous, @Anon, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Dieter Kief, @Seth Largo, @candid_observer, @Frau Katze
One of the big downsides of getting political theorists involved in such things as the rise of the alt-right, or populism, is that they bring all their theoretical bullshit with them.
If there were ever a movement that could be said to have arisen bottom-up, organically, and free of hifalutin theoretical underpinnings, it would be the populism of today. The people actually composing the populist movement don’t need no stinking theory to justify their anger. They’ve been done wrong by the globalist elites in ways that anyone should be able to understand: they’ve had their livelihoods taken away, they have been imposed upon by immigrants they didn’t want, they have been smeared as racists for their troubles. Really, do we need Strauss or Heidegger or Nietzsche or any theorist modern, pre-modern, or post-modern, to understand how this might work?
So, why is it so important that we can have “no hard feelings” discussion about vital subjects? Because it enables civilization by giving us a way to arrive at a solution without getting our energies sapped by conflict. Why is it so important to enable civilization?
Well, civilization is nice. It gets you all kinds of goodies. But most of all, it’s there for men. Civilization is a set of conventions and institutions that regulate competition between men so it doesn’t get out of hand and harm everybody’s chance of survival compared to the other tribes.
But that’s troublesome for women, because if men do pretty well in general, picking out the best one gets too tricky. The worse everything is, the more the men who can handle dey bidness stand out. To women, civilization feels like an attack.
So, the moment it isn’t strictly necessary for survival anymore, the only instinct left is to get rid of it. And that’s why we don’t hear phrases like “interesting point, but I disagree” anymore.
That’s an interesting point.
In fact, one might say that the entire school of Sophists (of which Socrates was regarded as a member by many at the time) is the extension of competitive sports to the realm of intellectual debate.
I don’t know about you guys, but even though I heard zeno’s paradox many times, it always takes me a minute to figure out why he’s wrong. Like the best conspiracy theories, it’s wrong in such a complicated way that it forces you to think.
The article presents an idealized view of our nation’s acceptance of free speech. The whatever amendment it was, was because of I think John Quincey Adams, or maybe the other Adams, sedition laws. I vaguely remember during the revolution, loyalists being chased out of the US to Canada.
Somewhat interesting history of campus free speech from a lefty.
 The Deeper Lessons of the Incident at Middlebury
The Manichean model of framing political conflicts polarizes public life, unravels the bonds of common citizenship, and doesn’t create a broad majority base for significant change.
By Harry C. Boyte
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-deeper-lessons-of-the-incident-at-middlebury/
BTW, any comments on the Kent State and Jackson State shootings of students?
John Quincy Adams, his son, was Secretary of State - He actually formulated and wrote the so-called Monroe Doctrine. - President, and finally ended his life where he was happiest, in the House of Representatives, advocating for abolition.
BTW, I flunked seventh grade history. When did they stop teaching American history in the public schools?
I think the point Steve makes regarding the corruption of standards of intellectual debate is pretty compelling.
I remember a time in which it was pretty common to see free ranging intellectual debate in action in all kinds of settings. In academe one would see it, in NYC coffee shops and other public settings. There would be parties that really became like “salons” in which debate and discussion was the animating focus.
Debate was what one did if one regarded oneself as an intellectual. Even in France, even among the “existentialists”, debate was key to membership in the club.
When’s the last time you’ve heard of such discussions going on on a regular basis in any setting? When’s the last time you’ve seen this depicted in any movie or piece of fiction?
Nowadays, it’s all lecturing (and “listening”) all the time.
I think your are misunderstanding what “natural philosophy” means – it has nothing to do with philosophy in narrow modern sense. Rather it is the archaic term for what we would call natural science. So when Franklin studied electricity he was considered a “natural philosopher”.
To some extent we still maintain a distinction between say theoretical physics and applied physics (which we usually call “engineering” or “invention”) but there’s really no bright line. Theoretical breakthroughs often lead to real world products and sometimes from the same man. It’s not a big leap from understanding the laws of thermodynamics to harnessing them in a device. (Watts big leap was understanding that higher thermal efficiency meant more power.) Newcomen had developed a working steam engine by trial and error without really knowing what he was doing but Watt was able to apply his understanding of science to Newcomen’s device and double its efficiency.
If there were ever a movement that could be said to have arisen bottom-up, organically, and free of hifalutin theoretical underpinnings, it would be the populism of today. The people actually composing the populist movement don't need no stinking theory to justify their anger. They've been done wrong by the globalist elites in ways that anyone should be able to understand: they've had their livelihoods taken away, they have been imposed upon by immigrants they didn't want, they have been smeared as racists for their troubles. Really, do we need Strauss or Heidegger or Nietzsche or any theorist modern, pre-modern, or post-modern, to understand how this might work?Replies: @Jack D
I think it is useful to have a theoretical framework or philosophy for your political movement instead of just free floating anger. First of all, it makes it easier to convince others, especially the elites, that you are not just a bunch of yahoos with Trump hats. But secondly, it gives you a method of analyzing issues that has some consistency rather than having to come up with an ad hoc answer based on feelz every time. The problems we are seeing now with the Trumpcare proposal show the weakness of not really having a well articulated philosophy.
Nor is it sufficient to say “will this benefit the average working American?” At least in the short run, “free stuff” IS beneficial to the average American. I would love to have someone else pay for my health care and I will be financially better off (again at least in the short run) if someone other than me pays for it. And yet somehow I know that this is not the right answer. But I’m not sure that the philosophy of Trumpism as currently developed can really produce an answer to these kind of difficult policy decisions.
What's troubling to me is not only the easy justification of violence -- "What so and so says is dangerous and harmful and must be destroyed" -- but also the fundamental lack of subtlety and discrimination in these arguments.
Any kind of intellectual work that draws attention to the differences between the sexes and those large groups of people we call "races" does not mean concentration camps are around the corner. It simply means that the data suggests that these differences exist. So, what next?
Only a completely irrational person would take something like the "Bell Curve" and conclude that the authors are saying "black people are inferior" or some other book and say "women are inferior". Those are gross simplifications. To reduce serious data collection and analysis to a violence inducing slogan is the real problem. That, and taking the bait.
The fact that people on the right, or conservatives, also simplify these discussions is also deserving of criticism.
What is also interesting is that both sides are essentially removing individual agency from the equation. In broad terms, the right position is that reality is the way it is because of inherent characteristics (genes.) The left position is that reality is the way it is because of extrinsic characteristics ("not race per se, but informed by racialism, etc." as we saw in the other article.)
So perhaps we can have some nuance in this discussion (not necessarily here, but on college campuses.)
It seems obvious that another part of the problem is that the inmates are running the asylum. This is the inevitable consequence of a college education becoming a consumer good: the customer is always right. Students do not want to hear anything that suggests that there are unequal outcomes in life, that there have been unequal outcomes in history, or anything that suggests that there are differences among groups of people (sex, race, etc.) that might tend to point to unequal results. But the inequality of outcomes is a fact of life and history, and they will find that out soon enough.
It is noteworthy that everyone who defends the free speech right of Murray, et al. are also careful to say that Murray is wrong. In other words, they are saying that while Murray has a right to speech, his speech cannot be allowed to succeed. Implicitly they must also be saying that IQ tests and test scores generally are meaningless, since that is the data underlying their conclusions. Or perhaps what they are really saying is that the cartoon reduction of what Murray and Herrnstein is wrong and cannot be allowed to stand. But if that is the case, these would-be defenders of Murray are also pandering to the mob.
If you phrase the matter that way, "I defend your right to speak, even though everyone knows you are wrong", then it's only natural for someone to say, "Why are we allowing so and so to speak in the first place?" So what is really needed are discussions of what would be the public policy ramifications if Murray and Herrnstein were right: keeping in mind that we are not a racial dictatorship and we aren't going to be killing people en masse. In other words, if the thing we do not want to believe is correct is actually correct how do we adapt to this reality in a measured and humane way. Not a discussion that anyone seems to be having.
Equality in the Rights of Man Enlightenment sense is not actually rational. It's just rootless Christianity. It's not a bad idea, I like it, but it's an assumption and a belief, it is not, never has been "rational fact." But equality in that sense presupposes two other things, owing to the religious roots: one, the fallibility or sinfulness of all humans, and second, that equality in that sense involves judgment and justice, including after death, and has nothing to do with the results on the ground when we are alive. Those latter elements are completely absent from secular humanism. So modern progs are essentially millenarians of the old school, not much different from religious social perfectionists from other eras (both Christian and Jewish.) The problem is that they don't have the brake that religion implies.
Contrariwise I think it is wrong to suggest that the rightwing is similarly irrational. The right critique of the Enlightenment is grounded in the fact that people are not equal and outcomes are also not equal, and pretending to the contrary simply causes more problems. That is why the right tends to be more accepting of tradition, as irrational as it is, not because it is "better" than reason but because continuity is important for social peace.Replies: @Jack D
Embattled movements often double down (and become violent) precisely at the moment it becomes clear that they are wrong. Once your worldview starts to totter you have to redouble your efforts not to admit ANY doubt, to yourself as much as to anyone else. A demand for strict adherence to orthodoxy is a sign of weakness and doubt, not of strength. If you let the camel’s nose into your tent, the whole camel may follow, so you concede no ground and do not give an inch. If you will not permit any debate this is because you are not confident of your ability to win the debate so purely as a practical matter your best bet is not to allow debate. Of course this is contrary to the maxims around which universities have been built up until now, but results are what counts and consistency be damned. It’s fun to see all the pretzel logic rationalizations (“punching up”) that leftists use to justify stifling debate.
None of them are Black or Hispanic. I mean, I can't even......Where's the inclusiveness? The Diversity? How can this kind of toxic racism be allowed to circulate?Replies: @Dieter Kief, @candid_observer
Dixon might have included Charles Sanders Peirce, who introduced relational quantification independently of Frege:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-logic/
That's not going to help Steve's article be more "diverse."
And that's most important thing (at least that's what a lot of people seem to think.)
Which side of this debate has power in the context of a university? Are any SJWs going to be expelled or disciplined for their speech?
Anyone who writes “In solidarity” without being ironic should be ignored.
These fools have made an argument against their own tyranny.
In fact, one might say that the entire school of Sophists (of which Socrates was regarded as a member by many at the time) is the extension of competitive sports to the realm of intellectual debate.Replies: @syonredux
The agonal spirit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon
Philosophy (and her sister, Theology) are like the foundation of a house. The homeowner rarely if ever has any direct interaction with the foundation, which is usually out of sight and out of mind. It seems irrelevant to daily life, but if there’s a problem with it, the effects will soon start to manifest themselves everywhere, and potentially put the entire structure in jeopardy. The most lethal ideas and political movements in history typically started life as the idle speculations of philosophy professors. To paraphrase J.M. Keynes, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher.“. Griping “We don’t need no steenking philosophizers!” is like building your house atop a sinkhole.
Anyone who writes "In solidarity" without being ironic should be ignored.Replies: @Autochthon
Precisely so.
As a matter of principle this statement is rubbish, but accepting it, arguendo, it supports the idea that persons like the administrators of universities, managers, employers, and the government, all being powerful, have no freedom to bull relatively disempowered persons like Mssrs. Sailer, Derbyshire, Yiannopoulos, Buchanan, Brimelow, Murray, etc. – and those latter persons must indeed have preserved their freedom to offend the former.
These fools have made an argument against their own tyranny.
“In politics, 2 + 2 could equal 5, but when designing a gun or aeroplane, they had to equal 4.”
Orwell, 1984
Twenty-five years on since Jonathan Rauch’s book Kindly Inquisitors, and that remains a useful resource.
Here is a quick note:
Accept skeptical principals. (Who is without error)
Accept that sincere criticism is always legitimate. (Do feelings trump truth? No.)
No one gets the final say.
No one has personal authority.
So, no philosopher kings, queens, jacks or SJWs.
Here are his looks at five decision-making principles:
Fundamentalist – those who know the truth decide what is right.
Simple Egalitarian – sincere people’s beliefs all deserve respect.
Radical Egalitarian – and historically oppressed get special consideration.
Humanitarian – but first priority to cause no hurt.
Liberal – (as in older use of the word) Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.
Those may be mapped onto the various iStevey themes and topics at your leisure.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/people-white-nationalist-jared-taylor-muslim-american-journalist/story?id=46211947Must watch.I feel like Jared should have humbled himself when the gal couldn't quite grasp the concept of 'per capita', but he was ruthless. OMGReplies: @BenKenobi
Incredible. I watched the whole thing.
If you want to see the savage take down just watch the last 4 minutes.
“We’ve allowed our country to have open borders. ” Mayor of Johannesburg
New Johannesburg Mayor Targets Undocumented Migrants
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/videos/2017-03-22/johannesburg-mayor-targets-undocumented-migrants-video
No. In fact, as the USSR proved, a repressive political climate is good for science, math and chess too. Because super-smart people are sometimes good at STEM and at humanities. In the USSR, the less corruptible ones, who might have leaned to humanities in a free society, instead chose STEM.
My father was one of those people.
Without tutelage it is very difficult to learn those disciplines.
I'm almost entirely self-taught in literature and history and I've found that I can run circles around most contemporary academics in these fields. I've often found myself correcting tenured professors on matters of fact, e.g., that it was John Adams, not his cousin Sam, who assisted Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence, that "Heart of Darkness" was not an allegory but a piece of journalistic fiction, etc. The students and teachers in these fields are so restricted in their thinking and often so specialized that they are incapable of any useful or even aesthetic application of their knowledge. Most have reached the limit of knowing everything there is to know about an infinitesimal area of human accomplishment.
My advice to anyone thinking of obtaining a liberal education: Learn a trade or obtain a technical degree and buy yourself a library of those "great books" which you suspect you might enjoy reading. Then form a discussion group with like minded individuals. You may have to work a bit to find them but they are out there.Replies: @Opinionator
I don’t consider education in Philosophy, Literature, or History to be primarily about knowledge of black and white facts such as dates and authorship.
And what is the difference anyway between allegory and journalistic fiction and who gets to say whether a particular work is one or the other?
There is a body of thought that the entire academic system has devolved into SJW balderdash whereas there are those who say, what about STEM? What about the ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) departments?
I would argue that you shouldn’t lump ECE in with Trans-Gendered Basket Weavers Studies. There is stuff taught in ECE that is essential to our modern industrialized, transistorized society, although it could be argued that what is being taught is a trade, a very highly specialized and advanced trade, but not a traditional university education?
There are two paths on which even ECE is going the full SJW. One is the combating Climate Change by forcing Renewable Energy on everyone. Discussion of the best ways of generating electricity used to be a geek thing, but it has become an SJW thing along with no-platforming (I learned a new word on this thread).
The second way is anti-HBD-ism, and this doesn’t have to be about race because there are a lot of white persons who struggle with the ECE curriculum. It is my experience that there is much in STEM disciplines and especially Electrical Engineering that is heavily “G-loaded”, concepts that many people and certainly many white persons in a state near the Canadian border have trouble with. On one hand, this contradicts the assertion in “right-wing” circles that the “U” doesn’t teach anything, and maybe the U does not teach anything, but traditionally, an Electrical Engineering major certainly “weeded out” persons who could not learn this discipline by reading the book and performing the homework exercises.
So not only has ECE embraced the renewable energy Gospel (but maybe this is self interest, because fossil fuels and energy conversion devices are the purview of other engineering disciplines whereas solar cells and to a large extent wind generators are in the Electrical Engineering column). ECE departments are in the process of embracing educational theory of “different learning styles.”
This is deeper than engineering having a lot of math content, which it does. It has to do with students, confronted with an electrical circuit they haven’t encountered before, as much as demanding that there be a single math formula they can apply to give the answer. When a circuit is explained in terms of a chain of reasoning where Part A imposes a condition on Part B that in determine determines the solution to Part C, students look at the instructor funny and complain that they are “confused”, which means the explanation was too G-loaded.
It used to be that Electrical Engineering was the Marine Corps in relation to Mechanical Engineering being the Army — both groups are dedicated war fighters, but the Marines are tougher war fighters in the way that Electrical Engineers master the more abstract electrical phenomena that you cannot touch or feel (or in the case of Chemical Engineering, smell). Now, the “push” is that anyone can become an Electrical Engineer, and if they cannot, their instructor isn’t doing their job. I heard the Marines are considering applying a similar standard to their legendary fierce drill instructors?
So no, ECE is actually teaching something to its charges, but yes, they are working hard on making ECE SJW-friendly.
I’d wager that Richard Spencer would disagree with you.
(It bears noting that “exactly necessary” is a bit of a straw man.)
Long ago, white boxers — and even black boxers like Jack Johnson and Joe Louis — ‘ducked’ fights with black boxers who might beat them.
Today, PC-pushers duck engagements with those who speak candidly about race, culture, history, and identity because they fear getting KO’ed.
On race, the facts point to racial differences.
On culture, it’s irrefutable that Western Culture is now decadent and non-Western ones are backward.
On history, facts say all peoples were violent and invasive. Also, whites did lots of good as well as bad.
On identity, it’s a fact that people seek some kind of group identity and the one rooted in ethnicity, history, and territory is the most sound and stable. If not, why did Jews seek a land of their own where they can be Jews with a sense of history?
With PC ducking honest debate and discourse, Alt Right and HBD community have become like the Negro Leagues.
And what is the difference anyway between allegory and journalistic fiction and who gets to say whether a particular work is one or the other?Replies: @Jus' Sayin'...
But that’s where it starts. If one is ignorant of facts one cannot consider them, reason about them, or apply them. One is operating in an empirical and theoretical vacuum. I find many academics to be not only ignorant of facts but often laden with petrifying burdens of misinformation and prejudice. This renders them incapable of applying what little they do know in any useful manner either inside or outside the rarefied prog/academic atmosphere to which they are accustomed. On the other hand, most of the self-educated people I have known – with a few exceptions – learned the facts they know precisely so they can apply them to their lives and discuss them with like-minded souls.
If you cannot appreciate the distinction you are beyond my help. There may be overlap; even the Divine Comedy incorporates the news of Dante’s time. But, to cite one example, one cannot understand or appreciate Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” unless one is aware that Conrad never intended it as an allegory but rather as a fictional documentation of Belgian colonial practices in the Congo, some of which he witnessed first hand. (“King Leopold’s Ghost”, Adam Hochschild) I am still shocked to find students whose teachers, like mine, either were unaware of this or chose not to impart their knowledge. They are imposing on this work an intention which was not the author’s and an interpretation which does not hold up well under scrutiny. It was my autodidacticism that corrected this flaw in my knowledge; reliance on an academic education was neither necessary nor sufficient.
Similarly, the history professor I once met, who thought Samuel Adams was a co-writer of the Declaration of Independence, built upon this lack of factual knowledge an absurd and ahistorical, indeed anachronistic, theory that the American Revolution was some kind of prog class revolution rather than, as the colonists actually considered it, a reassertion of their basic rights as descendants of Englishmen. When confronted with one fact – later buttressed with additional facts drawn from a biography of Samuel Adams’s political career, which I had read a few years previous – he was unable rationally to defend a major element of the intellectual framework upon which he’d constructed his career.
The first thing that popped out, other than the abortive enlightenment critique, was the nogstorian in question’s mixing of tenses, as in this brilliant passage,
Of course, things quickly tumbled down the crazy chute from there.
At what point does it become unproductive, even cruel, to entertain the arguments of a demonstrated imbecile? I personally tend toward a low threshold of illogic beyond which resort to argumentation by other means is preferable. But that may be a personal flaw, brought about by a lifetime’s tolerance reserves hastily spent on futility’s endless targets.
What doesn’t work speaks to the soul.
Perhaps true… for less than third-rate minds!
Somewhat interesting history of campus free speech from a lefty.
 The Deeper Lessons of the Incident at Middlebury
The Manichean model of framing political conflicts polarizes public life, unravels the bonds of common citizenship, and doesn’t create a broad majority base for significant change.
By Harry C. Boyte
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-deeper-lessons-of-the-incident-at-middlebury/
BTW, any comments on the Kent State and Jackson State shootings of students?Replies: @Jus' Sayin'...
John Adams was President when Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. He is on record as opposing them although he did not veto them for partisan reasons. The Acts were unenforceable and quickly repealed. They were an aberration.
John Quincy Adams, his son, was Secretary of State – He actually formulated and wrote the so-called Monroe Doctrine. – President, and finally ended his life where he was happiest, in the House of Representatives, advocating for abolition.
BTW, I flunked seventh grade history. When did they stop teaching American history in the public schools?
Just wanted to chime in briefly. All of the highly successful (most of which have high IQs) people I’ve known over the years agree with most everything that is at odds with the current PC narrative. Some initially spout the PC talking points, but when pressed through a logical sieve, they admit their wrongthink
The common theme ends up that they simply do not care. Even when pressed on what that future means for their children’s children, they admit they don’t care on that point either. I think the overarching nihilism of our new culture might be at the base.
In the past few years, social justice activism has gained a strong enough foothold in the software world that I wonder if the profession hasn’t become *more* off-putting to anybody who’s not a sexless, emotionless autistic with no broader interests besides technology. I’ve seen SJWs hole themselves up in a meeting room to have a shouting match over some petty political grievance, while the rest of us just go back to our desks, put on our headphones, and shut up and code.
Underrepresented groups are also encouraged to play a sort of social justice RPG and perceive microaggressions in geekily quantitative terms. In support-group confessionals, you’ll often see a style of thinking along the lines of: “Oh no, my coworker referred to a mixed-gender group as ‘guys’! I could spend five emotional labor units if I shrug it off, or I could muster up the courage to explain to him why that’s totally not cool, which would cost me twenty ELUs, but it might save forty in the long run… but willpower is a finite resource, and I might not have enough left to finish those new stylesheets I was supposed to check into source control this afternoon.” I suspect it’s a false-flag intellectual conspiracy cooked up by deplorable brogrammers for the sole purpose of inducing even more neuroticism and emotional fragility in those whose victim complexes are paired with over-analytical personalities.
The big question for Americans is will this intolerance eventually result in loss of free speech off the campus too?
(It’s already partway gone in other English-speaking countries.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-logic/Replies: @Frau Katze
I checked for a picture of Charles Sanders Peirce and he’s just another white guy.
That’s not going to help Steve’s article be more “diverse.”
And that’s most important thing (at least that’s what a lot of people seem to think.)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/jason-reza-jorjani-stony-brook-alt-right-arktos-continental-philosophy-modernity-enlightenment/Replies: @Anonymous, @Anon, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Dieter Kief, @Seth Largo, @candid_observer, @Frau Katze
Who’s this Jason Reza Jorjoni? Those last two names are Iranian (but not Muslim).
From the photo, he looks like the result of a marriage of an Iranian and a Euro-descendant.
He’s sounds crazy as a loon. They’re accusing him of Islamophobia. That’s an odd charge against some with an Iranian name.
Note that there are a lot of Iranian non-believers living in the West. They found Khomeini pretty awful.
They’d be the sort to give their children non-Muslim names.
Current year egalitarianism goes far beyond Enlightenment equality (what Jefferson was talking about when he said that "all men are created equal") to demand equality of outcomes and includes concepts of group rights - if your blind auditions produce "too few" black musicians or female scientists in proportion to their frequency in the general population, you must take OFF the blindfold and peak a little. Instead of individual justice, we have social justice. This has nothing to do with a Creator and everything to do with some sort of post-Marxist leftism. In fact it is the OPPOSITE of what Jefferson was talking about. Of course in his Virginia, equality at birth was not really honored, but what SJWs are really talking about is just flipping Jefferson's (real, not imaginary) Virginia on its head - instead of whites being privileged at birth, now other groups will be born with group privileges - we are going to put our thumb on the scale for them to make up for the thumb that was pressed on the other side in the past.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
People also confuse identity with equality. If I have a red basketball and a red baseball, they are equal if equality is defined as color, but unequal if equality is defined as size. They are not the same (identical) ball.
Equality means equality before the law – everyone, regardless of rank or station or race or LQTQRMZ2 will be treated equally. That’s it.
More accurately, skills at STEM are on a bell curve with the mean being higher for men than women, etc.
So there are some women who are good at STEM but they are a minority. Size of that minority depends on mean and standard deviation.
Same for blacks and Latinos. Some will be above average.
I’m sure you already know this but because the whole concept is so contentious, I think it’s best to always be clear. The general population doesn’t understand it very well.
In that regard, they are merely a continuation of what David Brooks once termed "Bobos" (Bohemian-Bourgeoisie). It's all serene Buddhist talk and references to communing with nature at cocktail parties, but ruthless hyper-capitalism and power/status-chasing at work.Replies: @PiltdownMan, @JackOH, @Weltanschauung, @oddsbodkins, @Anon
“In that regard, they are merely a continuation of what David Brooks once termed “Bobos” (Bohemian-Bourgeoisie). ”
No, Brooks was talking about the 80s when the 60s radicalism had ebbed down. He was talking about yuppies who were into ‘subversion’ as style but happily upper-middle class. They weren’t particularly political.
Today’s SJW’s are pretty nastyI(and spoiled rotten).
Their style is radical than bohemian, so they are ‘radical bourgeoisie’ or ‘rabos’. Or maybe radical globalists or ‘raglos’.
I do wonder about today's SJWs though. Are they mostly well to do or wealthy? People who face the reality of an uncertain financial future usually sober up and, in order simply to survive, learn the values of politeness and decency.Replies: @Twinkie
Agreed. While we may differ in our estimates of the number of worthwhile tutors in our great universities and colleges, most autodidacts in these disciplines have not been through the difficult process of thinking about how they think. That is not a mental faculty that is innate in most people, no matter how bright and self-motivated, and almost everyone benefits from having a mentor/tutor guide them and teach that essential discipline.
No, Brooks was talking about the 80s when the 60s radicalism had ebbed down. He was talking about yuppies who were into 'subversion' as style but happily upper-middle class. They weren't particularly political.
Today's SJW's are pretty nastyI(and spoiled rotten).
Their style is radical than bohemian, so they are 'radical bourgeoisie' or 'rabos'. Or maybe radical globalists or 'raglos'.Replies: @PiltdownMan
He can correct me if I am wrong, but Twinkie is talking about Masters of the Universe types who affect SJW platitudes because that is the done thing in our times, rather than actual full-time SJWs.
I do wonder about today’s SJWs though. Are they mostly well to do or wealthy? People who face the reality of an uncertain financial future usually sober up and, in order simply to survive, learn the values of politeness and decency.
But the vast sea in which the actual SJW swim is made up of well-to-do, relatively "normal" upper middle class types who go along with the fashion without actually practicing any of it.
Great passage:
I do wonder about today's SJWs though. Are they mostly well to do or wealthy? People who face the reality of an uncertain financial future usually sober up and, in order simply to survive, learn the values of politeness and decency.Replies: @Twinkie
Yes. The number of “full-time SJW” is not large, I think, certainly not large enough the support the vast number of humanities/social science majors, even if one were to winnow down the number to those from elite universities.
But the vast sea in which the actual SJW swim is made up of well-to-do, relatively “normal” upper middle class types who go along with the fashion without actually practicing any of it.
Steve and several other commentators have fallen for the popular fallacy of Zeno’s work that we like to make fun of. A fuller accounting of his paradoxes shows that he is pointing out the logical impossibility of continuous space and time. Several millennia before Planck. This BTW is the reason why if we ever do manage to resolve Quantum Physics with Relativity that Relativity; in spite of Einstein being a bigger genius than Planck, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Bohr; will be the one that has to change.
Of greater note however is what Turing and Frege have to say about about this new style of debate. Computational mathematics or logic as you prefer is all encompassing. These emotional outbursts are every bit as accessible to logical systematization using computational logic as Aristotle’s syllogisms. Much as the philosophical underpinning of Newton’s conception of the universe had profound social and political effects this too will accompany spreading awareness of this work. The biggest one likely will be that for lots of questions that people find interesting the math has no solutions. Not no known solutions, but no actual solutions, none. For questions in this category everyone engaged in the debate is wrong. Politics hasn’t yet worked out a mechanism for dealing with this reality and it isn’t really being worked on either. I’d expect that if we don’t fall to barbarism someone will eventually work out something. If for no other reason that failing that happy change falling to barbarism actually seems possible. After all it becomes a simple tactic to tie social or political fortunes to the solution of a solutionless problem and then let the resultant polity shred itself in the vain attempt.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. Though if I remember correctly, he thought that this made Socrates a kind of pussy.
This is such a good question that it should provide Steve with the inspiration for dozens of future posts.
But underneath the subject heading “Diversity versus Debate”, perhaps the subtitle should be Why?; “There is no crying in coding”!!!!
Higher Ed's managers are rapidly rendering their product "fake," just as are the managers of the news media.
This trend is quite real. We're sold fake food, doctors increasingly base their fake therapies on fake research (that which doesn't replicate is by definition fake), pharma companies crank out fake drugs....
Get with the program. "Fake" is to be the dominant label for everything people once took for granted. If the only product available at universities is fake, people will either find a real alternative or go without.Replies: @Opinionator
I do not understand your comment.
Errr, Steve, please give me a couple of hours (it is late) to decide whether this makes sense to my tired brain or not.
Initally...Yes, it makes total sense to my brain.
Since when have you been a prose poet?Replies: @donut
“…..information technology, the dominant industry of the 21st century” I tried to comment on this before . It’s 2017 , to claim that “information technology” is “the dominant industry of the 21st century is ridiculous . As I said before what would Steve’s predecessor from 1917 have claimed the dominant industry of the of the 20th century would be ? My old man helped to set the USN Supply system up on “computers” in the late 50’s . They called it “data processing” back then . Information technology is a 20th century technology . 17 years into the 21st century we have no idea what the dominant technology will be . The way things are going in the West the dominant technology of the 21st century could very well be the sling and the bow and arrow . Whatever it will be we have not even had a glimpse of it yet .