University presidents facing an uphill battle against illiberalism - "Minouche Shafik resigned on Aug. 14 after serving at the helm of New York’s Columbia University for one year. Her appointment was cut short by what she described as a “period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.” It was reported that she faced opposition for her handling of anti-Israel protests and divisions, in particular her interventions to clear encampments from the campus and to remove protesters occupying one of the university buildings. She also dismissed three Columbia deans for antisemitic exchanges after the university’s Jewish community met to discuss the problems they encountered on campus. Instead of being lauded for decisiveness, she was driven from her job... a survey by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute finds that 30 per cent of Canadian university professors are willing to limit the academic freedom and to “cancel” colleagues who do not share their views on social justice issues; identity politics is often marked by intolerance; widespread discrimination is practiced or condoned in the name of DEI; university spaces that exclude white persons are set aside for students of colour; speakers whose views are deemed objectionable have been blocked or silenced; school boards burn books or cull them to remove undesirable titles including, surprisingly, Anne Frank’s diary; a Health Canada report blames capitalism, Western society, colonialism and white supremacy for climate change and negative health outcomes; school teachers are fired or otherwise disciplined for taking issue with orthodoxies; university officials bully a graduate student for showing her students a debate in which Jordan Peterson is a participant; and sensitivity readers seek to uncover offence in published books. The list goes on. What is particularly troubling is the co-option of officials into the illiberal trend — a cultural phenomenon that reflects the censorious and judgmental era in which we live. Schools, school boards, student leaders and university officials have been implicated here and some are quick to denounce those against whom they act as hateful, racist or phobic."
Peter MacKinnon: Illiberalism is a bigger threat to universities than administrative bloat - "Larger numbers committed to administration and regulation, with comparatively smaller numbers devoted to teaching and research, bring changes in culture to our universities. When you are paid to administer and regulate, you want to do just that and it can take you into contentious areas. Ordaining faculty hiring by race and gender is one example. Another comes from the University of Saskatchewan, whose administration announced on Sept. 24 that it is now compulsory for the university’s 1,000 faculty to undertake unconscious bias and anti-racism training. The consequence for not taking this training is exclusion from normal collegial processes relating to hiring, renewal, tenure, promotion and merit review — in other words being shut out from pre-existing rights to participate in collegial governance... Setting aside questions about how unconscious bias and anti-racism training is done, it is presumptuous to insist that it is needed by all faculty. University professors have years of experience in collegial decision-making; their deliberations are shared and sometimes checked by colleagues around the table. They were hired on the understanding that their tenure came with a right to participate in collegial governance. To deny them that right if they believe they do not need a new mandatory program on bias and anti-racism is demeaning. Changes in the makeup and disposition of their workforces make it important that we return to and re-emphasize the fundamental purposes of universities: teaching and research. They are not about pursuing social justice or advancing illiberal agendas. For every new activity or hire, the question should be asked: how does this advance teaching and research and the independence of the institution and its professoriate to carry them out? It is in answering this question that universities will regain the wide and non-partisan support they need to survive and thrive."
Damn far right! How can they believe that universities are for teaching and research and not for activism and "making the world a better place"?!
Thread by @GadSaad on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Earlier this week, I was approached by an off duty @rcmpgrcpolice officer who was a big fan. We briefly chatted about some of the lunacy going on at the RCMP. I'll share anonymously some of that lunacy shortly. It is UNBELIEVABLE. See the thread.
Dear white RCMP officers, recognize your white privilege, you utter a**holes. Tampon Tim @Tim_Walz will be happy to know that the RCMP will adhere to the policy of having tampons in men's bathrooms because men too can menstruate! Oh and when writing tickets etc, please make sure to give a pass to people of color. Lady Justice is apparently not so blind! I'm a Lebanese Jew, hence a "Jew of color." Can I speed with complete impunity? If you stop someone, do NOT misgender them."
Paul Heron on X - "American libs hate finding themselves involved in anything that smacks of Christianity. What they react against isn’t religion per se—they get on fine with Islam, Hinduism etc. But Christianity is what’s most powerful and profound in the tradition they self-consciously reject."
Thread by @feelsdesperate on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I think an important reason libs are so hostile to Christianity is that so much of social justice theology is borrowed from Christianity. Christianity has to be actively moved out of the way so that there is an empty space for social justice theology. Over the past few years people have said things to me like, ‘You don’t believe transgender people exist,’ or, ‘You don’t believe in anti-racism,’ and I didn’t understand what they really meant. On a deeper level they weren’t making an empirical claim or arguing for conceptual coherence. Rather, they were making a theological assertion. Not having an observant upbringing myself, I didn’t immediately recognize that intent because it wasn’t stated explicitly. Libs scoff at the miracles and supernatural occurrences in religious texts and so instead, to get to where they need to be, they depend on the teleology of History or ideological revelation that strips away ‘false consciousness’ or the personal transformation that occurs with *praxis.* Libs need many of the things religion provides though and so they become deeply attached to the social science and activism that allows them to ‘find their way back.’ Many assertions that are empirically falsifiable or mere politics become sacrosanct and deeply lodged and cannot be falsified. On these terms it is possible to have some sympathy for libs. Their self regard leads them to be alienated from the things that best satisfy deep and fundamental needs and the category errors they force themselves into often derange them. There can be no helping the libs though- if you bring these issues up even in the most polite and sympathetic terms they react with anger and hostility because it undercuts their sensitive and undeserved sense of superiority."
More parallels between left wing ideology and Christianity, and why they hate it
GG ends Quebec trip when reporters notice she can't speak French - "Question period on Wednesday devolved into a heated dispute over an alleged gay joke. It all started when Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was grilling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about a $9 million residence his government purchased for New York consul general Tom Clark. In a rote response, Trudeau said he was “engaging with international leaders on fighting climate change, on solving global crises, on standing up unequivocally for Ukraine.” This led to a heckle accusing Trudeau of “engaging” in the bathtub of the $9 million residence (it has a handcrafted copper soaker tub). Trudeau said this was a “homophobic” joke and “crap” – he had to apologize for the latter word, which is unparliamentary. If the Tories were indeed implying some act of sexual congress with the comment, it’s only been seven months since a similar comment in which the NDP’s Daniel Blaikie expressed concern in the House of Commons for “the tongues of certain Conservative members that I feared would get stuck in the backside of their leader as he exited the chamber.” Nobody accused Blaikie of being a homophobe, although he was asked to withdraw the comments."
Meme - Jesse Singal @jessesingal: "Wikipedia has fallen victim to the same enshitification as the rest of the internet. This is bullshit. Fleischman's whole point is that because people who can select against (Tay Sachs) or for (height, IQ) genes, eugenics is *already going on* and we should discuss it. Like any other institution that goes from being a reputable source of knowledge to just another politically captured mess spouting bullshit, Wikipedia is making itself obsolete."
"Diana Fleischman. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Diana Santos Fleischman (born April 22, 1981) is an American evolutionary psychologist who espouses eugenics. Her field of research includes the study of disgust, human sexuality, and hormones and behaviour. She is also involved in the natalism, effective altruism, animal welfare, and feminism movements."
Meme - Brett Cooper @imbrettcooper: "“why are men becoming right wing?!!!” exhibit A: see my husband’s text below shockingly, normal dudes want to be left alone and don’t enjoy being attacked 24/7 when they’re just trying to live their lives."
"You know what's depressing? Sitting at home working all day, trying to make my business successful while my dogs lay at my feet, trying to finish work in time to go to the gym, eat dinner with my wife, watch football, and go to bed at a reasonable hour. Meanwhile, the media and left wing politicians are labeling me as a white supremacist extreme MAGA Republican domestic terrorist who is a threat to democracy. when all I really want is for Bijan Robinson to score enough points for me to win fantasy this week"
Greg Lukianoff on X - "Convincing people that there is an exception to freedom of speech called “hate speech” has been one of the greatest marketing successes of the anti-free speech movement. I've been fighting it on campuses for almost 24 years now and it's a justification used all the time to target simply locally unpopular opinions, even factual ones."
Left wingers disapprove of hate facts
Understanding Identity Politics: The Good, The Bad, And The Bougie - "To correctly navigate identity politics, one must keep an important concept in mind—social capital. The mass appeal idpol has found in bourgeoisie circles is often rooted in the social capital that comes with identifying oneself as historically Othered. There is absolutely no debate that this social capital is very rightfully owed to the oppressed classes, but it has led to the rise of a unique phenomenon, especially in the hyper-online or Americanised left- invention of the Other. Another closely linked consequence is a bourgeoisie or an oppressor who feels left out of the social capital is then compelled to abandon all his privileges and focus only on the part of his identity that provides him with the said social capital. For example, Kamala Harris is a controversial figure in progressive circles but her identity as a woman of colour precedes her capacity to be an oppressor. This is also why identity politics has given rise to a diverse set of oppressors but has failed to emancipate the oppressed. In addition to this, when exhibition of virtues done via language sets you apart from the guilty majority, you create an individual brand for yourself based in righteousness. Positive social capital that comes with being a part of this brand attracts more people towards it and eventually leads to its corporate marketability. Corporate brands globally realise that the consumer closely defines his sense of self with these causes, and try to act as an extension for the consumer to exhibit this to the world. The rapid rise of incidents such as ‘queer baiting’ in India, esepcially by one popular demin brand, in the last 5 years should prove to be an example of the same."
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: ""Sure, these innate abilities can exist in other animals, but in humans most of the specific behaviors we exhibit (especially where there is variation among humans in these behaviors) can only be explained by social conditioning.""
Massimo @Rainmaker1973: "This beaver was orphaned and rescued as a newborn. Interestingly, it's showing the instinct to build a dam, even though no parent has ever passed this information to it."
Opinion | What Happened to Free Speech? - "Sixty years ago this month, the Free Speech Movement was born at the University of California, Berkeley. How is that working out?... Sadly, campus free speech has been lost since 1964... Even peaceful protests these days are now more about what you can’t say. What started as safe spaces and trigger warnings are now almost always one-way actions, cancellations and censorship of ideas progressives don’t like. Especially at Berkeley. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression recently posted their 2025 College Free Speech Rankings of 251 colleges. The University of Virginia is ranked No. 1 for free speech. Berkeley is 225. New York University, Columbia and Harvard are last. Great company. In 2017, Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos and David Horowitz had events canceled at Berkeley for “security concerns.” This February, a Berkeley pro-Israel event was postponed by protesters who broke into a building. Last week a member of Israel’s Knesset was harassed off stage at Berkeley by both left-wing Israeli and anti-Israel protesters. Some free-speech anniversary. Witness the naked hypocrisy: Free speech for me but not for thee. Progressives love to censor. In 2019 Kamala Harris told CNN that Facebook and Twitter “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop.” In August former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a Berkeley professor emeritus, wrote: “Regulators around the world should threaten [Elon] Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.” State Department employees were urged not to use “gendered terms,” such as “manpower,” “you guys” and even “mother/father” and “husband/wife.” Gov. Tim Walz told MSNBC in 2022, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy.” Uh, except for the First Amendment. This has empowered Brazil to ban Twitter, triggering protests. Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested near Paris. The George Soros-funded, U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index is used to censor others. Hong Kong has arrested editors and publisher Jimmy Lai. The U.K. is arresting citizens over social-media posts. Madness! It’s time for the U.S., left and right, to protect free speech as an absolute, a modern Free Speech Movement, and set an example for the rest of the world. Ironically, an “invisible sculpture” to free speech at Berkeley was proposed in 1989. Administrators agreed to it, so long as—you can’t make this stuff up—the Free Speech Movement wasn’t mentioned in the press release. It’s a patch of soil in Sproul Plaza surrounded by a granite circle inscribed: “This soil and the airspace extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.” I stood inside the invisible cylinder and shouted the first subversive thing that came to mind: “master bedroom.” Not my proudest moment. But I wasn’t thunderstruck. No censorship there, unlike, it seems, everywhere else these days."
Liz Truss: Too many Tories went ‘woke’ to win votes - "The former prime minister said that parts of her own party had adopted socially progressive policies in the hope it would make them more electable... she claimed there had been a “big push on woke” which had filtered out into the Civil Service, the BBC and the corporate world. She said: “I think the Equality Act in Britain was a major part of the country becoming more woke, the Gender Recognition Act and then these things have simply been used as a ratchet to make things worse. “But there’s been a cultural battle that Conservatives have failed to stand up to. “In fact, many Conservatives have simply gone along with it because they thought it was electorally advantageous to be seen as progressive. What we’ve seen is a shift from the establishment being fuddy-duddy conservatives to the establishment being the liberal Left.”... she admitted that it would have been a “tall order” for the Tories to triumph at the general election, and said the party’s best chance of victory would have been keeping Boris Johnson... “I lost my seat largely due to Reform. So Reform took a lot of my vote in South West Norfolk and I was frankly in quite a difficult position because I was running under a very orthodox Conservative Party while being an unorthodox Conservative myself. “That’s what happened to us in many similar seats. Because Reform did so well, Conservatives lost and Labour got in. I don’t believe the people of South West Norfolk actually consciously wanted a Labour MP. “They didn’t vote Labour because they were enthusiastic about the Labour Party, they voted Labour because they were fed up that we hadn’t delivered.”"
Thread by @peterboghossian on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Here’s a breakdown of: “Not all cultures are as valid as each other”. This thread will explain, in plain language, what disbelieving “not all cultures are equally valid” entails.
If you disbelieve the claim that “[Not] all cultures are as valid as each other,” then you believe, “All cultures are as valid as each other”. If you believe all cultures are as valid as each other, then you must believe that there is no objective, independent, non-perspectival way to make a judgment about a culture or cultural practice. If you believe this—and you must believe it if you disbelieve that all cultures are as valid as each other—then you can only advocate for positions like antiracism or rights for trans people from your own cultural perspective. You cannot advocate that these—or any other—values be adopted by societies apart from your own because their culture is equally valid to yours. You have no authority to make any moral claim and nobody from another culture should take you seriously, or even listen to you at all. But there are far deeper problems with this position:
1. You can only advocate for your position from your position. “All cultures are as valid as each other” is a “you claim”. Independent of how many people dis/believe it in your society, it’s subject to the same contradiction. It’s not based on anything other than your belief.
2a. All cultures are equally valid is a contradiction. Unless you’re trafficking in a bizarre notion of “valid,” to know they were equally valid you would need an objective standard by which to judge cultures. But you cannot believe that because you believe they’re equally valid.
2b. You also cannot simultaneously claim that all cultures are relative and that they are equally valid. They cannot be both relative and valid. If you have a standard to judge their validity then they cannot be relative.
You can attempt to “cheat” the logic of this by redefining “validity” in a nonstandard way, or claiming that you have some privileged access to moral knowledge, or by opting out of the law of noncontradiction (in other words, not caring that you’re a hypocrite.) This thread is based on Kemi Badenoch’s recent comments. The fact that this is even a discussion, nevertheless controversial, speaks to the failure of our schools (kids should have learned basic reasoning skills by the 6th grade) and the moral orthodoxy which has wormed its way into the minds of large swaths of the population.
For more here, see Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors
Karl Popper's "myth of the framework" is also a solid response to cultural relativism. It challenges the notion that people from different cultural backgrounds cannot critique each other's practices and beliefs due to insurmountable differences in their conceptual frameworks. Popper introduces the "myth of the framework" to describe the belief that communication and discussion between individuals of different cultural backgrounds is impossible because their underlying assumptions are fundamentally incompatible. (In fact, we do it all the time.) I hope this thread has added some clarity to Badenoch’s comments and the considerable confusion and misunderstanding surrounding them.
America is becoming less “woke” - "Regina Jackson and Saira Rao achieved a degree of fame at the height of the backlash in 2020 after police killed George Floyd... For a hefty fee, rich white women would hire the pair to help them confront unconscious biases at dinner parties that featured such ice-breakers as, “Raise your hand if you’re a racist.” Guests may often have broken down in tears when told that their claims to be colour-blind were simply another brick in the edifice of white supremacy, but there was lots of interest. The two women were featured in many news reports and made a film about their dinners, “Deconstructing Karen”, in which a guilt-stricken participant confesses, “I am a liberal white woman. We are absolutely the most dangerous women.” The media scrum has since subsided. The last “Race2Dinner” event took place a year ago. The pair now host screenings of the film instead. The problem, says Ms Rao, is not just that they are fed up with having to “sit across from a white person to tell them why they can’t use…the N-word”. It is also that public interest in matters of racial injustice has cooled. “The pulse of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-genocide, is dead. There is no pulse,” Ms Rao laments... discussion and espousal of woke views peaked in America in the early 2020s and have declined markedly since. The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business. Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22 and has been declining ever since (see charts). The only exception is corporate wokeness, which took off only after Mr Floyd’s murder, but has also retreated in the past year or two... Our analysis subsumes both the advocates and the denigrators of woke thinking, by looking at ideas and actions associated with this sort of activism, for good or for ill. It measures, for example, talk of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) in the corporate world, regardless of whether it is being invoked as a way to correct the under-representation of women and racial minorities or as an example of pious window-dressing. Some of the yardsticks we use apply only to the more doctrinaire form of woke activism, such as the number of drives to censure academics for views deemed offensive. Others capture only the more positive aspects of the movement, such as polling data on the proportion of Americans who worry about racial injustice. Either way, the results are consistent: America has passed “peak woke”... the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020... Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left... The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo... Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question. Opposition to trans students playing in sports teams that match their chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024... To corroborate the trend revealed by opinion polls, we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”... In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since... We found largely the same trend in television, by applying the same word-counting method to transcripts from ABC, MSNBC and Fox News from 2010 and 2023, and in books, using the titles of the 30 bestselling books each week between 2012 and the middle of this year... In academia, which is often thought of as a hotbed of wokeism, the trend is much the same. Calls for academics to be disciplined for their views, as documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, peaked in 2021 with a total of 222 reported incidents. (Many of these calls came from the right, not just from the left.)... the share of Americans who think that expressions of racist views should be restricted rose sharply between 2016 and 2021, reaching around 52%, and has since declined slightly, down to 49% in 2022. Teaching and research also seem to be shifting away from wokery, at least somewhat. The use of our set of 154 woke terms began to rise sharply in 2015 in papers on the social sciences collected by JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals. By 2022 the incidence of “intersectional”, “whiteness”, “oppression” and the like were at their peak. At our request, Jacob Light, an economist at Stanford University, counted the frequency of woke words in a collection of course catalogues from American universities. Classes that invoked woke terms in their name or synopsis rose by around 20% between 2010 and 2022, but remained stable last year. In part, academia’s retreat from wokeness has been ordained by law... Mentions of DEI in earnings calls shot up almost five-fold between the first and third quarters of 2020, in the aftermath of Mr Floyd’s death. They peaked in the second quarter of 2021, by which point they were 14 times more common than in early 2020, according to data from AlphaSense, a market-research company. They have since begun to drop sharply again... The number of people employed in DEI has fallen in the past few years... Although our analysis shows a clear subsidence in wokery, there are several reasons for caution. For one thing, although all our measures are below their peak, they remain well above the level of 2015 in almost every instance. What is more, in some respects, woke ideas may be less discussed simply because they have become broadly accepted. According to Gallup/Bentley University, 74% of Americans want businesses to promote diversity, whatever the troubles of DEI."
Meme - Stakeholder Consultant @echetus: "There is an ongoing effort to deny the antiquity of the English nation. 2027 will mark 1,100 years since the unification of England by Æthelstan. This anniversary should be appropriately celebrated.
"England is not a thousand years old" would've been a big surprise to the twelve men who had already been King of England by 1024"
Harry Brennan on X - "No way does 'the English nation' have any serious historical basis until 1066. Also the idea this person mocked in other posts, that what we would recognise as modern English identity truly emerged in the Tudor period, is very realistic and supportable"
Lin-Manuel Rwanda on X - "William Duke of Normandy famously arrived with a fleet at Nowhere to claim the throne of Nothing, based on connection to Nobody the Confessor in opposition to rival claimant Noone Nooneson, who was named by the aforementioned nonexistent king on his deathbed which didn’t exist.
Saint Augustine was sent in 597 by Pope Gregory to convert absolutely nobody to Christianity after he beheld two nonexistent slaves in a market and wasn’t captivated by their natural beauty because they didn’t exist and if they had would’ve had no racial characteristics at all."
habibi on X - "In August, AbdulRahman Hassan warned wicked women in a talk at the Darussalam mosque in Southall, a charity. If they wear perfume outside the home, they are no better than "fornicators". It's "very dangerous". He spent almost an hour dictating what women can wear and do. Bleak."
Islamophobia!