Religion and political ideals replaced with dogma that has turned beliefs into hate crimes - "We are going through a great mass derangement... Various explanations have been given, usually involving Donald Trump, Brexit, or both. But these explanations don’t get to the root cause of what is happening. For beneath all the day-to-day madnesses – over race, sex, sexuality, gender and the rest – are much greater movements and much bigger events. Even the origin of this mass derangement is rarely acknowledged. This is the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives about our existence have collapsed. Religion went first, falling away from the 19th Century onwards. Then, over the past century, the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies followed. In the latter part of the 20th Century, we entered the post-modern era, defined by its suspicion towards grand narratives. However, nature abhors a vacuum. People in today’s wealthy Western democracies could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have no explanation for what we are doing here and no story to give life purpose. The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich and have fun – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years has been to live in a permanent state of outrage. To find meaning by waging constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question to which the answer has only just been altered. The bewildering speed of this process has been principally caused by the Silicon Valley giants (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook). They have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’. But today’s wars of ideas are not random – they are consistently being fought in a new and particular direction... The purpose – unwitting in some people, deliberate in others – is nothing less than to embed a new religion into our societies... it is only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia. The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’ and ‘identity group politics’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology... The speed at which the ‘social justice’ causes have taken over everyday life is staggering. Once-obscure phrases such as ‘LGBTQ’, ‘white privilege’, ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘transphobia’ are suddenly heard everywhere – even though in the words of mathematician Eric Weinstein, they were ‘all made up about 20 minutes ago’. The policing of these issues is an even more recent phenomenon. Researchers found that phrases like ‘triggered’ and ‘feeling unsafe’ only spiked in usage from 2013 onwards... having worked out what it wanted, the new religion took a further half-decade to work out how to impose its credo on non-believers. But it has done so with frightening success... Such rhetoric exacerbates existing divisions and creates new ones. For what purpose? Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other... one thing that everybody has begun to sense in recent years is that a set of tripwires have been laid across the culture. Among the first tripwires was anything to do with homosexuality. In the latter half of the 20th Century, there was a fight for gay equality which rightly succeeded in reversing a terrible historic injustice. Then, the war having been won, it didn’t stop. Indeed it began morphing. GLB (Gay, Lesbian, Bi) became LGB so as not to diminish lesbians. Then a T for ‘trans’ and a Q for ‘queer’ or ‘questioning’ got added. Then the movement behaved – in victory – as its opponents once did, as oppressors. When the boot was on the other foot, something ugly happened. A decade ago, almost nobody was supportive of gay marriage. Even gay rights group Stonewall wasn’t in favour. Now it’s a central tenet of modern liberalism. To fail the gay marriage test – only years after almost everybody failed it – is to put yourself beyond the pale. People may agree with or disagree with gay marriage. But to shift mores so fast needs to be done with sensitivity and deep thought. Yet we engage in neither. Other issues followed a similar pattern... Why, when women had broken through more glass ceilings than at any other time, did talk of ‘the patriarchy’ seep out of feminist fringes and into popular culture? In a similar fashion, the civil rights movement in America, which started to right the most appalling of all historic wrongs, looked like it was moving towards some hoped-for resolution. Again, near the point of victory everything soured. Just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric started suggesting things had never been worse. The most recent tripwire addition, and most toxic of all of them, is the trans issue. It affects the fewest number of people, but is nevertheless fought over with an almost unequalled ferocity and rage. Women who have got on the wrong side of the issue, including notable feminists like Julie Bindel and Suzanne Moore, have been hounded by people who used to be men... Everyone knows what they will be called if their foot nicks against society’s new tripwires. Bigot, homophobe, sexist, misogynist, racist and transphobe are for starters. To avoid these accusations, citizens must prove their commitment to fashionable causes. How might somebody demonstrate virtue in this new world? By being ‘anti-racist’, clearly. By being an ‘ally’ to LGBT people, obviously. By stressing how ardent your desire is to bring down the patriarchy. And this creates a situation where public avowals of loyalty to the system must be made regardless of whether it’s needed. It’s an extension of a problem in liberalism identified by the late political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon, the warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for more glorious fights. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons, he may eventually be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining dragons... As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true... We face not just a future of ever-greater atomisation, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances – including the good ones – grows more likely."
From 2019, from The Madness of Crowds. As Dawkins observed, the retreat of Christianity has opened the way to worse
Dr Jordan B Peterson on X - "This is exactly how elite "liberals" think. @mcuban They downplay the absolute pathology of the radical fringe all the time. All of them I have met--and that's many--do the same thing. For example, te DEI: "They don't really mean "equity"; they mean "equality of outcome"" And Mark Cuban in the appended clip: "imagine how many people would have to be complicit" Yes Mark. Try imagining exactly that. All the psychologists. All the social workers. All the nurses. And the bloody butchering "surgeons." All the idiot virtue-signaling wilfully blind pandering politicians on @TheDemocrats allying themselves with the psychopaths, narcissists and predators. Imagine just that. And then ask yourself "could I possibly be that blind?" And then go back to your comfortable numbnessand wait for the next shoe to drop. As it certainly will."
Meme - Elon Musk @elonmusk: "Cis is a heterophobic word. Shame on anyone who uses it."
Richard Hanania @RichardHana...: "We should repurpose it like the N word. What up, my cis?"
The Matthew Principle @MattPri...: "Only cis people are allowed to say it. If any non-cis person says it they get fired from their job."
Elon Musk @elonmusk: "Exactly"
UC Berkeley accused of segregation by allegedly banning whites from community farm - "The University of California at Berkeley is under fire for allegedly banning white residents from using a community farm on Saturdays in a move one critic slammed as “systemic racism.” The university told The Post it is investigating claims that the “Gill Tract Community Farm” in nearby Albany offered its space on Saturday exclusively to “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color,” after a complaint with the US Department of Education by the Mountain States Legal Foundation... “Preventing Caucasians from accessing Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources Farm on Saturdays is a clear violation of Title VI, which bars educational institutions from engaging in or allowing race discrimination,” added Trachman, a UC-Berkeley alumnus himself. He said the feds should open a sweeping audit of every UC-Berkeley program to ferret out what he claimed was “systemic racism.”... The complaint includes an email from a farm program manager telling someone, “Saturdays are exclusively BIPOC. Exceptions have only been made for events that are BIPOC-centered and with plenty of advance notice and planning.” “I trust you stand in solidarity with upholding boundaries around that safe and sacred space,” the farm manager said... a federal discrimination complaint was filed against a Minnesota college scholarship named after George Floyd that is only available to black students. The complainant in that case, the Equal Protection Project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, has also filed claims of discrimination against other race-based exclusionary or preference programs, including against the SUNY Buffalo Law School and Medical School."
Democracy dies when freedom of speech is restricted - "Imagine if someone had told you back in the 1980s that in the future the Tories would proudly host a pro-homosexual movement at their annual conference, and that the left would be screaming in fury from the sidelines and demanding that these hateful, dangerous homosexuals be silenced. You wouldn’t have believed it... At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, the LGB Alliance has been given a stall, and all hell threatens to break loose. Leftists who loathe the LGB Alliance for its criticisms of the ideology of transgenderism accuse the Tories of hosting a ‘hate group’. Hilariously, they claim the Nasty Party’s welcoming of the LGB Alliance is of a piece with its homophobic agenda of the 1980s, when in truth it’s the woke agitators determined to shut down the LGB Alliance who are behaving like those old red-faced enforcers of Clause 28 who could not abide the idea of homosexuality being talked about in certain spaces... The hatred for the LGB Alliance sums up how illiberal and divisive the politics of identity has become. ‘Cancel culture is a myth’, many on the left claim, in which case perhaps they’d like to explain why they devote so much furious energy to trying to cancel the LGB Alliance... We’ve entered a new era of woke homophobia. It’s no longer God-botherers who angrily chastise anyone who argues that same-sex attraction is fine – it’s Queer Studies graduates. So thoroughly has the cult of transgenderism washed over a new generation of activists that they can tolerate no discussion at all of the reality of sex, including same-sex love... The broader backdrop to this latest explosion of rage against a ‘hate group’ is the left’s almost complete abandonment of the ideal of freedom of speech. It isn’t only the LGB Alliance that the guardians of woke thought have been fuming against this week – there’s the Sun, too. When Keir Starmer wrote a piece for the Sun on supermarket shortages, the Labour left flipped. Predictably, Liverpool-based leftists laid into Starmer. (Many Liverpudlians still boycott the Sun over its iffy coverage of the Hillsborough disaster. Though, given that was 32 years ago, and that the Sun has apologised, isn’t it time they moved on?) Corbynistas berated Keir, too. No decent leftie would be seen dead in ‘the Scum’, say these people who had no problem whatsoever with Jeremy Corbyn getting money for appearing on Press TV, which has links with the Iranian state. Well, what’s hosting a show on a TV channel connected to a misogynistic, homophobic theocracy compared with writing for a newspaper read by people who work on building sites? The left’s loathing of the Sun is snobbery masquerading as radicalism. It is their fear of the malleable masses that makes them dread what the Sun publishes."
The Psychology of Progressive Hostility - "When I disagree with a conservative friend or colleague on some political issue, I have no fear of speaking my mind. I talk, they listen, they respond, I talk some more, and at the end of it we get along just as we always have. But I’ve discovered that when a progressive friend says something with which I disagree or that I know to be incorrect, I’m hesitant to point it out. This hesitancy is a consequence of the different treatment one tends to receive from those on the Right and Left when expressing a difference of opinion... Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists – now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs – have come to be known as getting ‘triggered.’ This term originally applied to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but activists have adopted it to describe the anxiety and discomfort they experience when they are exposed to views with which they disagree. “Fuck free speech!” one group of social justice advocates recently told Vice Media, as if this justified the growing belief among university students that conservatives should be prevented from speaking on college campuses. It’s no secret that, with the rise of the triggered progressive, university professors are increasingly intimidated by their own students... So how and why have these activists become so intolerant and horrible to deal with? Part of this hostility can be explained by a wilful ignorance and incuriosity about ideas with which they disagree. Every so often, a progressive friend will peruse my bookshelf in a thought-police sort of fashion. What happens next is fairly predictable. Once they realize that Malinowski’s Melanesian epic The Sexual Life of Savages doesn’t include any erotic pictures, they will turn their attention to the Ayn Rand collection. “Why do you have these?” they ask with an air of indignation, holding up a copy of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. “Have you ever read her?” I will ask. “No,” they reliably respond. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill once explained that, “The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own.” Mill held that unless we carefully study the views of those with whom we disagree, we will never really know what they’re right or wrong about. “He who knows only his own side of the case,” Mill wrote in his 1859 book On Liberty, “knows little of that.” Our opponents could be right for all we know or care, because they may know a fact or offer an argument we’ve never thought to consider. And even if they aren’t right, Mill points out that specks of truth may exist among their falsehoods which can guide our minds in new directions. Sprinkled throughout what I regard as Rand’s erroneous theory of Objectivism, are moments of penetrating insight... The world is more complex than we can imagine, and every new point of view we encounter can enrich our understanding even if we don’t embrace it entirely. But this comes with the risk of self-effacement and growing uncertainty... one of the concepts most ridiculed by philosophers in recent decades has been the notion of ‘social justice,’ which has received such a beating that the Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek once remarked that shame should fall upon people who still defend the idea. But ask any self-described social justice advocate to name a critic of the very idea of social justice, and they will likely draw a blank. Criticisms of social justice are routinely swept under the carpet in an environment where students are asked to embrace the concept hand-on-heart, as if no reasonable or legitimate objections had ever existed. A whole raft of brilliant philosophers and Nobel Prize-winning economists lean to the right. The problem is that these people tend to go into business or enter academic fields like engineering, economics, and mathematics. They have therefore surrendered the humanities and what philosopher Roger Scruton has called the ‘fake fields’ of gender and ethnic studies to their political opponents on the Left, who relish their role as the unchallenged shapers of student minds... People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand. Haidt’s research echoes arguments made by Thomas Sowell in A Conflict of Visions and Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate. Both Sowell and Pinker contend that conservatives see an unfortunate world of moral trade-offs in which every moral judgment comes with costs that must be properly balanced. Progressives, on the other hand, seem to be blind to, or in denial about, these trade-offs, whether economic and social; theirs is a utopian or unconstrained vision, in which every moral grievance must be immediately extinguished until we have perfected society. This is why conservatives don’t tend to express the same emotional hostility as the Left; a deeper grasp of the world’s complexity has the effect of encouraging intellectual humility. The conservative hears the progressive’s latest demands and says, “I can see how you might come to that conclusion, but I think you’ve overlooked the following…” In contrast, the progressive hears the conservative and thinks, “I have no idea why you would believe that. You’re probably a racist.”... Fashionable theories, such as those advanced by Jacques Derrida, teach students that all text and language is structured by power, so any argument from someone in a position of ‘gendered’ or ‘racial’ power can be disregarded, whatever its logical validity. By reinforcing this premise with a heavily left-biased education, university educators have created a Frankenstein generation of fanatical students, and are now finding that they are unable to force the genie they’ve conjured back into its bottle"
Basically people hate what they do not understand, and people destroy what they hate. And left wingers don't understand non-left wingers, since they have a simplistic view of the world
Hayek: Social Justice Demands the Unequal Treatment of Individuals - "“Everybody talks about social justice, but if you ask people exactly what they mean by social justice, what they accept as justice, nobody knows,” Hayek said. “I’ve been trying for the last twenty years, asking people ‘What exactly are your principles?’” If one Googles the term social justice, this is what one finds: Social Justice (noun): Justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. From this definition, one quickly sees a fundamental difference between justice and social justice. To Aristotle, Cicero, and America’s Founding Fathers, justice applies to individuals. To social justice advocates, justice is collective. Implicit in social justice doctrine is the idea that improper imbalances in wealth and privilege must be corrected. But how? Hayek knew very well. During his interview with Buckley (video below), he explained to a young Jeff Greenfield (13:00) that social justice demands treating people unequally."
MRU fires professor who espoused benefits of residential schools and criticized BLM movement - "Frances Widdowson had been an associate professor at Mount Royal University in the department of economics, justice and policy studies since 2008... MRU provided a lengthier statement on Tuesday evening that said it is committed to fostering expression and free speech, and strives to be a model for allowing opposing viewpoints to coexist. However, it said, academic freedom "does not justify harassment or discrimination." "Mount Royal employees have the right to work in an environment that is respectful and free from harassment," it read in part... Widdowson said Wednesday the university has "failed to implement the campus free speech policy they were required to adopt by the Alberta government in 2019." "Instead, Mount Royal University is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars policing Twitter while at the same time raising tuition and cutting back on program delivery," Widdowson said. "The Alberta government, the Mount Royal University Board of Governors, and the public should be very concerned about the mismanagement of public tax dollars by the current administration. "As these matters are slated for arbitration, these violations of government directives designed to prevent illiberal activists from abusing power will become a matter of public record."... David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, says it's rare for tenured professors to be fired, as the bar for what could be considered grounds for dismissal is high. "Tenure is basically a guarantee that the only reason you can be let go from your position at a university or college is for just cause — that is, you engaged in gross negligence or misconduct""
To left wingers, hearing ideas they disagree with is "harassment"
As a Latina Vegan, I’m Decolonizing a Cruel & Racist Food System
As usual, this is short on details about how to resolve the conflicting demands of environmentalists, while condemning white people
Opinion: Why almost everyone is wrong about racism - "the Italians dominated fishing fleets around the world, unlike the Swiss. Was “systemic” racism against the Swiss the reason? Or is the explanation that Switzerland has no coastline, while Italy is almost all coastline. Italians thus grew up with a natural advantage in fishing and enough of them made it their career to dominate the industry globally... the Toronto District School Board (TDSB)... [sent out a] 40-page document is entitled “Facilitating Critical Conversations: A Teaching Resource for Challenging Oppression in Toronto District School Board Classrooms.” Written by one teacher (with a specialization in hip-hop), two school principals, and an education consultant — but no economists or statisticians — the “oppression” guide makes bold claims... the TDSB document was withdrawn — for now — on the order of Ontario’s ministry of education. But the ideas it promotes will show up again. They are pervasive in universities and education bureaucracies. And they are wrong. Assuming differences in education or economic outcomes are due mainly to racism is monocausal and mistaken. It omits the effect of education levels, geography (rural citizens earn less than those in urban locations), culture, family dynamics, the length of time a new cohort has lived in a country and many other “inputs” into incomes and other outcomes. The Hoover Institution has summarized Thomas Sowell’s findings on “racism-explains-all-or-much” this way: “(Sowell) argues that discrimination has significantly less of a role to play in inequality than contemporary politicians give it credit for, and that something as incontrovertible as birth order of children has a more significant and statistically higher impact on success than discrimination.” Sowell’s own research has often found that family structure — whether a child has one or two parents, for instance — matters more than race. That only stands to reason: it’s easier to help your child with homework and much else if two parents are around. Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama pointed to the critical importance of family in a speech on Father’s Day 2008: “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”"
wanye on X - "When people tell you that they think there are no genetic differences between individual human beings, they’re telling you that they believe of themselves that if their upbringing had been just a little bit different, then they could have been as good at golf as Tiger Woods or as good at basketball as LeBron James or as good at math as a Fields winner or as great an author as Doestoevsky. It should only take about 1.2 seconds to realize that anybody who thinks this way is an insane, delusional narcissist."
don't ask what kind of music aka cooper carrasco on X - "every person in the entire world thinks there are genetic differences between individual human beings"
i/o on X - "California Department of Education Ethnic Studies Task Force report in 2021: "We reject the idea of natural gifts and talents.""
Aaron Sibarium on X - "NEW: During a mandatory "structural racism" class at UCLA medical school, a pro-Hamas guest speaker led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" and demanded that they bow down to "mama earth" for a prayer. We have obtained exclusive audio.🧵"
Conor Friedersdorf on X - "Everyone benefits from their society having better doctors. So it would be best for everyone if medical schools stopped wasting time forcing their students to sit through political sermons that, love or hate them, have no chance of making them better doctors."
i/o on X - "Even better would be to have medical schools that do not grossly discriminate against white and Asian applicants in favor of much less-qualified blacks and Hispanics and then blame racism for the inevitable lower graduation and board-pass rates of blacks and Hispanics."
Note G on X - "The unintended consequence is that academically bright black doctors will have a cloud around them."
Naturally, someone tried to pretend that this was learning about "long standing, widespread racial disparities in medical treatment"
wanye on X - "We already have a system that tries to put some distance between people and policy. We have the Senate and the EC and a Constitution that's hard to change and so on. Liberals are already attacking these things as "anti-democratic." I wouldn't do anything extreme, but I'd keep our existing "anti-democratic" systems, for sure. Where quite a lot my politics start and end is with the following proposition: "The Constitution is pretty good, we're lucky to have it, and attempts to change would be very unlikely to improve it on the whole." Where my head is at on this right now: Which party is more aligned with that view? Which party will appoint judges who hold that to be true? Because you probably have to vote for that party. I don't really love the obvious conclusion."
Samingo on X - "This confuses me, I don't see either party being interested in changing the constitution. There are the typical battles over interpretation but nothing new or extreme. Are you referencing Trump's attempt to overturn the election with fringe theories about electors?"
wanye on X - "Ibram X Kendi once proposed a Constitutional Amendment to create an oversight board with veto power over all federal, state, and local policy it determines to be racist; the power to investigate private entities it suspects of racism; and authority to monitor public officials for racist sentiments. You have to say this is insane to be allowed anywhere near public office. You have to say this *categorically*, without reservation or qualification. If any Democratic politicians on here want to assure me they think this is insane, then that would be great."
i/o on X - "Can an inanimate object be racist? An exciting new breakthrough in woke scholarship says "yes". "Racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts... that are in congruence with an oppressive system.""
Richard Hanania on X - "We talk about the rise in depression among teen girls since 2012, but liberalism is an even bigger predictor. Academics interpret this as conservatives are deluded. If the results were opposite they'd say liberalism is healthy and conservatism is a public health issue."
Meme - malini @alitlstrawberry: "oh wait brianna wu is WHITE? she definitely uses that chinese last name as a cover"
Readers added context: "Wu is her husband's surname. Nearly 4 in 5 American women take the surname of their husband after marriage."
No surprise she has a Palestinian flag and watermelon in her name
Video: Michigan School Employee Who Called for LGBT Lessons, Mocked Parents, Arrested for Pedophilia - "A Michigan public school employee who staunchly advocated for LGBT curricula to his district’s school board has been arrested as part of a police sting operation targeting local pedophiles. 41-year-old Eric Rohman, an employee of Mt. Pleasant Michigan’s public school system, was arrested as part of an Isabella County Sheriff’s Office sting operation that also saw two more alleged child predators put behind bars. According to local reports, Isabella County law enforcement was assisted in the sting by agents from the FBI and the Michigan State Police, among others. Along with two other men, “Eric Rohman, 41, of Mt. Pleasant [was] arrested at an undisclosed location,” local media reports. “All three were arrested for using a computer to commit a crime and accosting a minor for immoral purposes. Police allege that the three communicated over various social media apps with decoys posing as children. The three are accused of going to a location to have sex with a child, where they were arrested,” the report goes on to explain. The local media outlets failed to mention in their reports on the sting that Eric Rohman is an employee of Mt. Pleasant’s public school division. While it is unclear in which capacity he works, his own words imply that he is in a role with access to children. When school parents pushed back on the pro-LGBT curricula being peddled to their kids, which has been likened to a form of pedophilic public school grooming, Eric Rohman delivered an impassioned plea to the local school board in favor of “educating” children on homosexuality and transgenderism, even taunting parents at one point during his talk. Rohman, who boasted to the board and audience members that he is both “vaccinated” and a “proud member of the LGBTQIA community,” also donned a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt during his school board address... “I can tell you this – they are hungry for knowledge,” Rohman said of the children of Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, before directly taunting the parents in the crowd, some of whom appeared to get up and leave as Rohman spoke. “They are so hungry for knowledge that despite your words, your wishes, your values, they will learn on their own.” “They’re gonna do it anyway, no matter what you say or do,” Rohman went on to say of the children and his apparent hopes that they will join him in the “LGBTQIA community,” saying that they will do so “no matter how many candles you light, no matter how many rallies you hold.”"
