A message to trans people:
I’m a biological essentialist about sex — your sex is a given of your chromosomes and organs, and I will never actually believe that you can invert it by choice.
I am, however, conditionally willing not to challenge your weird Gnostic beliefs on this point, and to treat you as the sex you “identify” as anyway. Here are the conditions:
1. You must be good at passing. If you can’t present a convincing pretense, it’s neither in my interest nor anyone else’s to help you prop up an unconvincing one.
2. You must be harmless. Most obviously, you must not use your “identification” to prey on others, whether directly by violence or by using the physical advantage of your sex to overwhelm them in sports, or in any other way. And if you’re told you’re unwelcome in a bathroom or changing room, it’s on you to not impose.
3. You must be modest. Your desire to role-play as M or F does not entitle you to violate prevailing norms about where, and to whom, you expose your genitals. If you aren’t polite enough to refrain from this, I won’t be even a bit polite to you.
4. Children are off-limits. The moment you engage in behavior that seems intended to confuse or indoctrinate them, you enter the category of “predator” and stay there. My response to sexual predation on children only begins with rejection and rudeness.
5. If you try to use the force of law to gain what equal and voluntary negotiation with individuals won’t give you, you also enter the category of “predator” and stay there.
The meta-rule is: the more your behavior imposes costs on others, the less polite and accepting I will be. If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-07-28.
November 5, 2024
QotD: “If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others”
November 3, 2024
The end of the “cheap streaming era” is at hand
Ted Gioia explains why your streaming services are going to be jacking up their prices — if they haven’t already done so:
I got a request to explain why streaming subscription prices are so damned high — and getting higher.
This came in response to a chart I shared two days ago:
And it’s not just Disney.
All the streaming platforms are jacking up prices. I still subscribe to five different streaming services—down from six previously. Every one of them raised prices this year, and always by more than the inflation rate.
Here’s what Spotify is doing:
What’s going on? And will it continue?
I recently described this as an “endgame strategy” — but that might be confusing to readers.
Endgame is a term drawn from chess, where it refers to a body of wisdom about the final moves on the board. But business is like chess, so I frequently analyzed endgame situations back in my days at the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey.
I now see these endgame strategies getting implemented in various media, entertainment, and streaming businesses. But almost nobody inside those businesses wants to talk about it.
So let me lay it out for you.
The Entertainment Industry Is Adopting an Endgame Mindset
You pursue an “endgame” strategy when demand for your business hits a wall, and it’s hard to attract new customers. The most typical endgame strategy is to cut back investment into new products and services, while raising prices sharply.
You’re willing to accept some loss of customers, because you’re now squeezing more profit-per-user out of your remaining consumers — who stick with you out of loyalty or habit or inertia.
These are your sheep, ready to be shorn.
Profit per customer is now the key metric driving your business. It’s more important than innovation or growth or artistry or any of those old fashioned ideas.
That’s why, for example, Netflix won’t share data on the number of subscribers anymore. They claim this is no longer relevant to their business model — and they aren’t lying.
Price increases are now the engine of their business.
QotD: Minutemen
Granted, there’s not necessarily much overlap between the two groups. But one has supplanted the other in the mass media, the public imagination, and the affection of the right-wing radio hosts — and so help me, I think I miss the days when I felt a certain kinship with the crazies.
Jesse Walker, “More ’90s Nostalgia”, Hit and Run, 2005-07-28.
November 1, 2024
End of typical US political discussion – “I can’t even talk to you about this stuff — you’re so irrational!”
Chris Bray on the widespread phenomenon of progressives who “can’t even” their way out of political discussions that don’t confirm their priors:
In a long thread on his many discussions over the last year with Trump and Harris supporters, a Daily Wire editor drops this contrast down in the middle:
I live in a deep blue zone, and I have these vibes-and-racism conversations several times a week. I learned today, face-to-face, that Donald Trump hates everyone who isn’t white. I mean, he despises them. All of them. These conversations go like this:
A: Trump is SUCH a fucking racist, man, he hates everyone who isn’t white, how can you even support someone like that?
B: Why is he racist?
A: Are you being serious right now? C’mon, man!
B: No, but why is he racist?
A: I can’t believe you’re defending him!
B: Okay, look: Donald Trump has already been the president for four years. What would you say were the top three racist policies he implemented?
A: You know what, I’m done with this discussion.
B: I’d settle for one really good one. What big racist policy did he implement?
A: I can’t even talk to you about this stuff — you’re so irrational!
Over and over and over and over again, these conversations hit the “I can’t even talk to you about this stuff” moment, the hard shutdown.
- What evidence can you offer for that view?
- [cognitive program shuts down]
Certain trigger terms warn you that the shutdown is moments away: conspiracy theory, disinformation, “what are you even talking about?” This personal observation about social interaction applies equally well to CNN panel discussions, by the way.
I’ve written before that I had a conversation just after the 2016 election in which I was asked how I could support someone who was going to put my own friends and family in the camps, man, he’s gonna put us in the fucking camps!
Eight years later, and after four years of a Trump presidency in which no one went to the camps, Trump can’t be allowed to return to the White House because, guess what, he’ll send us all to the camps:
FN M249S semiauto for military collectors
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jul 10, 2024In 2015, FN USA introduced a Military Collector product line — semiautomatic versions of their military contract small arms. These were the M4, M16, and — most interestingly — the M249 SAW. The SAW is a version of FN’s Minimi light machine gun, developed in 1974 and adopted by the US in 1982. The semiauto version, designated M249S, is exactly the same as the military M249 but adapted to fire from a closed bolt in semiautomatic only, making it a non-NFA item like any other semiautomatic rifle. The semiauto conversion as done by essentially chopping off the back of the bolt carrier to act as a linear hammer, thus allowing the use of the original style of trigger mechanism. Since its introduction in 2016, FN USA has made more than 10,000 of these rifles, truly proving the depth of American collector interest in this sort of thing (much to the surprise of the Belgian FN administration …).
(more…)
QotD: J.D. Vance, a Führer for the rest of us
Expert: JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism
Quoted for the lulz. Ol’ JD, a Führer for the rest of us.
But since we’re here … a fascinating footnote in Jaynes informs us that schizophrenics, who Jaynes thinks might be throwbacks to the “bicameral mind”, have no problem with “diffused identity” or whatever the term was. Jaynes hypothesizes that ancient, preconscious peoples didn’t see images of their gods in cult objects; they saw the actual, physical gods. We unicameral people can’t wrap our heads around it, since there are lots of statues and they can’t ALL be god — even if we grant that the biggest statue in the best temple can be god, or if we allow that the black meteorite or whatever is really god to them, still, god can’t be diffused like that: Either your statue is god or mine is; or neither of them are, but they can’t both be.
Schizophrenics, at least according to Jaynes, would be down with that. He notes that you can put two guys who think they’re Napoleon in the same padded cell, and you don’t get a schizo bum fight, you get complete agreement: They’re both Napoleon, somehow. The law of the excluded middle, personal identity version, simply doesn’t apply.
And since my hypothesis is that smartphones are re-decameralizing (it’s a word) us at Ludicrous Speed, well … here you go. Donald Trump is Hitler, but J.D. Vance is somehow also Hitler. It’s not like the real, historical Hitler lacked for shitty, evil underlings — J.D could easily be Heinrich Himmler or somebody. But no, he’s gotta be Hitler, the same way Trump has to be Hitler, and if that means they’re somehow both Hitler, well … there it is. Bicamerality for the win.
Severian, “Catching Up With the Crazies”, Founding Questions, 2024-07-29.
October 31, 2024
The US federal election goes into garbage time
Lauren Smith on the latest attempt by Joe Biden to suck the oxygen out of the room (Kamala Harris was also speaking while Biden’s “gaffe” grabbed the media’s full attention):
US president Joe Biden has re-emerged from wherever he was being hidden to hand Donald Trump an incredible, accidental boost. In a rare public appearance, he branded Trump’s supporters “garbage“.
For some reason, the president decided to wade into the row over a joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend. Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”, sparking some confected outrage among those pretending not to know he was joking. In response, while speaking to Hispanic advocacy group Voto Latino, Biden said: “The only garbage I see floating out here is [Trump’s] supporters”.
The Republicans have understandably seized on the remark. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, slammed it as “disgusting”. Florida senator Marco Rubio repeated the smear to Trump supporters at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania last night, to furious boos from the crowd.
The White House then rushed to try to retract the comments. Today, in a statement on X, Biden claimed that he was actually talking about the “hateful rhetoric” being “spewed” at the rally, not about Trump’s supporters themselves. That, he says, is “all I meant to say”.
But that is plainly not what he said. And everyone can guess it’s probably not what he meant, either. As Trump pointed out at the Allentown rally yesterday, Biden’s “garbage” gaffe is highly reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “deplorables” outburst. During her 2016 presidential campaign, she described “half” of Trump’s supporters as “racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic”, saying they all belonged in a “basket of deplorables”. It was a blunder that many, including Clinton herself, believe cost her the election.
Jim Treacher investigates what he calls “the Case of the Planted Apostrophe” as the bulk of the legacy media rallied to try to cover up, mitigate, or explain away Biden’s “garbage” comment:
I think I heard something about MSNBC intercutting footage from the ’39 rally with the Trump rally? I haven’t watched that network since they fired Olbermann, but it sounds like something they’d do.
Little did they all know what a gift they were about to be handed. One of the speakers at the rally was comedian and Kill Tony podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe, and everybody lost their minds about this joke:
Perfect. The headline wrote itself: TRUMP RALLY BASHES PUERTO RICANS!!!
If Trump wanted to convince everyone he’s not a bigot, Hinchcliffe certainly didn’t do him any favors. Even though, as a few lonesome bloggers shouted into the wilderness, it was a joke.1
The entire journalism industry then spent 48 solid hours pouncing and seizing on Hinchcliffe’s unfortunate wisecrack. “See? Do you see how racist they are? They’re just so … so … racist!!”
Oh, they were so happy.
But they forgot one thing: Grandpa Joe is still around.
And he wants to help.
Emphasis mine:
The Puerto Rican that I know, or Puerto Rico where I’m, in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable.
Oops.
Yes, Joe Biden just called Trump supporters “garbage”. It’s the only clear sentence in that whole paragraph of gibberish.
There are maybe six million Puerto Ricans in America. In 2020, there were something like 75 million Trump voters. I’m no mathematician, but that’s a lot more. If alienating the first group is bad, then alienating the second group is much, much worse.
No matter how much Joe Scarborough hates them.
If a dumb joke by a podcast host matters, then so does the sitting president of the United States telling tens of millions of voters that they’re “garbage”.
1. The journos are now digging into Hinchcliffe’s voting history. They’re investigating a comedian for telling a joke. And they wonder why we hate them.
Nine Types of Trick-or-Treat Houses
It’s a Southern Thing
Published Oct 23, 2018Halloween is coming. Which one will you be?
#SoTrueYall #itsasouthernthing
QotD: How to increase your Barbarism Quotient (BQ)
The digital barbarians have for now made themselves illegible to the hyper-surveillance, algorithmic discipline, and intrusive analytics that loom like the hundred-eyed Argos over all online interactions. In fact, insofar as a key technique of the cyber-panopticon is the construction of predictive models of user behavior, to be unpredictable is an important component of being ungovernable. The other option is to hide.
Hiding is a strategy that some people attempt offline as well, either by building a compound in the woods or by adopting protective coloration and hiding in plain sight. But as the bots grow ever more omniscient, hiding gets more expensive and less effective. Another classic barbarian-inspired strategy is to maximize mobility, and indeed contemporary economic and technological conditions seem ripe for a renaissance of nomadism. But the trouble with always being ready to pack your bags is it makes it hard for anybody to count on you.1 Is there anything that can be done for those of us who want to live marginally more barbarically, but still sip lattes and put down roots? Yes, because the ultimate lesson of Scott’s book is that barbarism is really more of a state of mind that can be practiced anywhere. Three brief examples of ways to increase your Barbarism Quotient (BQ), suitable for the discerning urban barbarian:
- Keep your identity small. Paul Graham once said this, but we can go much further. An expansive identity implies its contrapositive: a similarly expansive set of ideas, behaviors, and lifestyles which we cannot adopt without incurring psychic damage. This limits our space for action, and makes us easier for the machines to predict and for the man to control. Better far to figure out what you really care about, figure out what the real red lines are, and convert everything else from a non-negotiable into a piece of the optimization frontier. The ethnic and cultural mutability of barbarous peoples is an example of this kind of suppleness, but there are other sorts of mutability that can be useful too.
- The great Boston T. Party once declared: “it’s better to have $1,000 of ammunition in your garage than $1,000 in your bank account; but it’s even better to have only $100 of ammunition in your garage and $900 of practice.” A lot of would-be modern barbarians daydream about burying gold bars in the ground or sewing them into the lining of their clothes (like the barbarians of yore hiding their tubers in the ground), but Mr. Party’s insight generalizes well here. Physical gold is admittedly a less legible form of wealth than T-bills or CBDC; but skills, knowledge, and relationships are even harder to seize than bullion, and even easier to transport across borders. The wise barbarian judiciously transmutes a fixed percentage of his financial capital into human capital. Nothing improves your ultimate BATNA like having friends or being useful.
- Barbarians have a deserved reputation for not taking too kindly to strangers, but this xenophobia and clannishness is tactical. For the hill dweller, most strangers are in one way or another the representatives of hostile alien entities that are out to conscript, tax, and subjugate. The situation for we cosmopolitan, urban, dare I say urbane barbarians is a little bit different. We’ve already reached an accommodation with centralized despotic states, having found the advantages they offer to be worth the tradeoffs. Be that as it may, states have a tendency to try to unilaterally change the terms of the deal. To protect ourselves from this form of encroachment, the correct attitude is not xenophobia, but rather paranoia. The toolkit of modern states is to direct all our enthusiasm towards the Current Thing whilst deadening our senses towards everything else. “We had no idea it could get this bad” is a recurring theme in testimonies given by survivors of oppression and genocide, to which a family culture of “they really are out to get us” is a salutary corrective. Every pinprick ought to raise an alarm, because it could be the prick that precedes the onset of anesthesia. Finally, the cultured barbarian remembers that states are not the only hostile, alien entities waiting for us in the night with drooling jaws.
I could come up with a dozen more such practices, inspired by the hill people Scott documents, and ready for incorporation into the family culture you’re creating. But barbarism is a state of mind, and reflecting on how to keep yourself distinct and aloof from the fat, decadent agriculturalists is part of it. So read this book, and then begin carving out your cultural mountain fastness or your ideological swamp hideout. The barbarians are within the gates, they live among us, and we welcome you to join our ranks.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-16.
1. Unless, that is, you all move together. If somebody wants to pitch me on peripatetic cyber-gypsy life, I am all ears.
October 30, 2024
Less than a week of increasingly desperate measures left to go …
I’m referring to the antics of the major US political parties as the formal date of the US election heaves into sight. On the one hand, Theophilus Chilton characterizes the Democrats as “cornered animals”:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 
.
With just about a week left before Election Day, things have definitely been heating up. At this point, it’s pretty apparent that all of the indicators are in Trump’s favour — and this is driving the Democrats absolutely nuts (even more than they usually are). A month ago, one could have definitely made the case that Kamala Harris had a good chance of winning. Now, that seems pretty far-fetched outside of the Democrats figuring out a way to fraud the vote so hard that they can overcome their ever-worsening situation in basically every swing state. As we enter this final week, Trump definitely has the momentum and is conducting an upbeat, optimistic campaign. Meanwhile, Kamala and her surrogates seem palpably despondent, screaming at their microphones and rolling out one ill-conceived “October surprise” after another at an increasingly frenetic pace.
That this is the case seems to find a lot of varying data points to support it. Public-facing polling is always subject to a healthy dose of skepticism (“… gonna need to see some internals there, bub”), but even that seems to have moved in the direction of a possible outright Trumpian popular vote victory. It’s obvious where both campaigns’ internal polling is trending, as Trump heads to states like New Mexico and Virginia to expand the slate of contested states while Kamala does damage control in bright Blue urban centres where her party’s early voting numbers have collapsed. Republicans have been overperforming bigly in every swing state’s early voting. Newspapers like the Washington Post and techbros like Jeff Bezos (with access to tons of relevant Big Data) are starting to make nice with Trump because their information is pointing them in that direction. At a demotic level, Trump supporters appear loud and energised in all sorts of places where Trump support has not been traditionally robust, while Kamala’s supporters seem dejected and subdued — when they’re not angrily screaming at small children. On and on, the “non-traditional” indicators keep pointing in the same direction.
At this point, it’s pretty obvious that there is a preference cascade that is moving in Trump’s direction.
Now, if we were dealing with normal people, getting the kind of feedback that an electoral loss like this represents would cause the Left to step back and reassess what they’re doing. They’d take a moment to “look in the mirror”, so to speak. But understand that we are not dealing with normal people. Losing elections (or at least losing the actual voting, the “election” is a different matter altogether) does not send them the same message it sends to everyone else. Instead of introspection, it merely generates anger. It tells them that they need to screech harder, steal harder, and smash harder. After all, these people are on the Right Side of History and anyone who opposes them is a “fascist” and a Nazi (their actual closing argument this week, by the way). And as we all know, heroes like Indiana Jones punch Nazis. If the election is lost, it’s not because the Democrats ran an absolutely clueless, tone-deaf campaign that basically only appealed to wine aunts, gay men, and twenty-something sluts. It’s because Trump is a Russian asset and his supporters accessed a secret reservoir of racism, sexism, and transphobia like it was some kind of evil superpower that allowed them to scurrilously subvert the Good People in America. In other words, the Left will only double down on their own intrinsic madness.
I mean, this isn’t just a theory — we’re already starting to see this pattern of behaviour take place even though Harris hasn’t even lost yet. Celebrities are already starting up with their bidecadal threats to leave the country if their candidate loses. Keith Olbermann wants Elon Musk to be arrested and lose all of his government contracts for the crime of not suppressing oppositional speech on X like it used to be censored back in the old days. The ever-amusing Will Stancil is gloompilling and appears to be on the verge of either suicide or a murder spree. These people are not well. Not at all.
On the other hand, Trump is not only Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin re-incarnated with his red-hatted brownshirts terrorizing the land … he’s literally the Devil:
My current prediction — based on the average of the Trump v Harris opinion polls at Real Clear Politics — is that President Trump will win both the popular vote and the Electoral College in the 2024 election. This prediction is not only based on President Trump now effectively tying with Vice-President Harris in the average of polls, but even more on that VP Harris has never polled as well as Secretary Clinton did at the relevant points in the 2016 campaign.
What reading this Substack Note brought out very clearly was how very different this US Presidential election seems to folk on the two sides of a deeply politically polarised polity.
On the VP Harris side, the salient view is some version of “how can you even consider voting for That Man!?” This is usually attached to a whole list of sins and other claims, of varying accuracy. This is the Trump-The-Devil view. The election is all about Trump and how appalling he is, both as a person and as a political figure. Sure there are other issues (e.g. climate change, abortion) but the lead and focus is how awful Trump is.
To deal with the reality that President Trump has already been President, there is regularly extra focus on his personal Devilness plus various claims about how a second Trump Presidency would be so much worse, for whatever reasons.
Back in the 2016 campaign, it was noted that Trump’s supporters treated what he said seriously but not literally, while his opponents treated his words literally but not seriously. That is, his opponents focused on Trump’s erratic connection to accuracy in his statements but did not take the political pressure points he mobilised anywhere near as seriously. Those were simply ignored and/or dropped into “the bigotry, so ignore” box. Conversely, his supporters were being mobilised by precisely those political pressure points.
The focus on President Trump’s willingness to say things for their rhetorical effect rather than their accuracy loses some of its moral high ground, given how willing President Trump’s opponents have been willing to make statements about him for rhetorical effect, rather than accuracy.
The Korean War 019 – The Chinese Threat Revealed! – October 29, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 29 Oct 2024Communist Chinese forces make themselves known on the battlefield in a big way, and openly engage UN troops for the first time. What was supposed to be a stroll to the Chinese border turns into a week-long nightmare. How do the South Koreans of ROK II Corps perform in battle against this new threat? And how will Douglas MacArthur and his staff respond?
Chapters
01:07 Reaching the Yalu
02:29 The Chinese Strike
06:16 The West
07:43 Eighth Army Response
14:26 Summary
(more…)
QotD: The right to bear arms
Whether one agrees or disagrees with it, the Second Amendment is usually interpreted in these latter days as an axiom of and about political character — an expression of republican political thought, a prescription for a equilibrium of power in which the armed people are at least equal in might to the organized forces of government.
It is all these things. But it is something more, because the Founders regarded political character and individual ethical character as inseparable. They had a clear notion of the individual virtues necessary collectively to a free people. They did not merely regard the habit of bearing arms as a political virtue, but as a direct promoter of personal virtue.
The Founders had been successful armed revolutionaries. Every one of them had had repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices, in grave knowledge of the consequences of failure. They desired that the people of their infant nation should always cultivate that kind of ethical maturity, the keen sense of individual moral responsibility that they had personally learned from using lethal force in defense of their liberty.
Accordingly, firearms were prohibited only to those intended to be kept powerless and infantilized. American gun prohibitions have their origins in racist legislation designed to disarm slaves and black freedmen. The wording of that legislation repays study; it was designed not merely to deny blacks the political power of arms but to prevent them from aspiring to the dignity of free men.
The dignity of free men (and, as we would properly add today, free women). That is a phrase that bears thinking on. As the twentieth century draws to a close, it sounds archaic. Our discourse has nearly lost the concept that the health of the res publica is founded on private virtue. Too many of us contemplate a president who preaches family values and responsibility to the nation while committing adultery and perjury, and don’t see a contradiction.
But Thomas Jefferson’s question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801, still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because “the dignity of a free (wo)man” consists in being competent to govern one’s self, and in knowing, down to the core of one’s self, that one is so competent
Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.
October 28, 2024
QotD: Democracy as theatre
One thing we are learning about modern democracy is that it is a myth. The people are not in charge. They get to vote on things and select representatives, but those representative don’t actually represent the interests of the people, who voted them into their positions. The office holders in a modern democracy represent the interests of the money-men who sponsored them. Politicians in a democracy are like prize fighters, in that they are controlled by a management team.
Like a prize fighter, one of the demands placed upon a modern politician is that he must at all times seek the attention of the public. Much of what we see in our modern democracies is false drama, designed to gain attention. This is why women have proven to be so successful as politicians. Women are naturally gifted with the ability to get attention, especially through false drama. It turns out that democracy is a form of governance modelled on the beauty pageant.
This is the point of the impeachment fiasco. The Democrats are the party of girls and gay men, so they naturally seek drama. Trump’s great sin is that he is a great showman, so he gets all the attention. Impeachment allows the vagina party to one-up him and force him to pay attention to them. If you look at the people celebrating in the streets, it’s lesbians and middle-aged woman. They are not celebrating because they hate Trump. They are happy someone is noticing them.
The Z Man, “Impeaching Democracy”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-19.
October 27, 2024
The Great Demobilization: How the Allied Armies Were Sent Home
World War Two
Published 26 Oct 2024After the war, the Allies face the new challenge how to bring home the tens of millions of troops they have deployed across the globe. Today Indy examines this massive logistical effort, looking at the American Operation Magic Carpet, the British government’s slow but steady approach, and the devastation that Soviet troops returned home to.
(more…)
Whittier College as a small-scale model of the decline of higher education
At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter returns to the state of higher education in the west, this time looking at the plight of Whittier College which appears to be well along in a death spiral:
Whittier College’s most famous graduate, Richard M. Nixon, 1 June 1972.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.
While I like to jump around subject matter here, in order to keep myself – and you – from getting bored, one topic that I return to regularly (as a dog returns to his vomit, as a sow returns to her mire) is the ongoing polycrisis in higher ed. You may have noticed, as I just wrote about this a week ago. Academia Is Women’s Work created a bit of a buzz. It seems to have struck a nerve with a lot of people, both with those who have observed the same things that I’ve noticed, and who had the same “ah-hah!” moment that I did once the phenomenon of male flight was connected to the myriad symptoms of academic decay that we all know so well; and with those (mainly women, naturally) who reacted with sputtering outrage – misogynist! incel! – when my Xitter thread on the subject went viral and broke containment in the basedosphere. Despite quite a few hostile eyeballs on the thread, the only thing they could find to correct was a grammatical typo (*its!) in the opening tweet.
When writing about the DIEvory Tower I usually keep it very general, as the problems are systemic, affecting the entire sector, and the view from orbit avoids giving the impression that the issues are specific to any one institution. But a couple of stories recently came to my attention which are simply too perfect not to share with you. Each of them provides a sort of holographic totality of the academic polycrisis, illustrating all of the afflictions in specific, personalized detail.
[…]
The title of this article really says it all: “Plunging enrollment, financial woes, trustee exodus. Whittier College confronts crisis“. It’s a bit out of date now – it was published about a year and a half ago – but the subject matter remains timeless. It has everything: infrastructural decay, forced diversity, incompetent and corrupt administration, a terrified faculty, accusations of racism, collapsing enrolment, angry alumni, reduced donations, budgetary problems. It’s all there.
Whittier College is a small liberal arts school in California, founded in the 19th century by abolitionist Quakers, and known mainly for being President Richard Nixon’s alma mater. It has seen better days:
[T]he once-bustling quad is often all but empty these days, students say, and inside the Wanberg Hall dormitory, carpets smell musty, the Wi-Fi is spotty, and 25 students share two restrooms with toilets that frequently break down and take ages to fix. The eerie quiet outside and fetid bathrooms inside are signs of the turmoil roiling one of California’s oldest liberal arts colleges.
Imagine spending $49,000 a year to use fetid bathrooms.
Enrolment and revenue have both collapsed over a very short timespan:
Since 2018, enrollment has plummeted by about 35%, from 1,853 students to about 1,200, according to college figures. Annual revenue has plunged by 29% over roughly the same period, audited financial statements show. … This term, faculty report the number of undergraduates is just 1,027.
The athletics programs are being sacrificed:
Partly to save money, Whittier cut football and three other sports programs last year.
One of the other teams that got shut down was lacrosse, which is a very white sport. Sheer coincidence, probably. “Partly to save money,” though, huh.
The president of Whittier College is one Linda Oubré. Oubré has an MBA from Harvard Business School, previously served as a dean at College of Business at San Francisco State University, has worked as a consultant, was president of a teeth-whitening spa, and is also – and this surely the most important line item on her curriculum vitae – professionally qualified as a black woman. Given these impeccable credentials, it will be no surprise to learn that Whittier’s problems commenced immediately upon Oubré taking the helm.
[…]
Oubré is very concerned about people doing racisms:
For a decade, more than half of Whittier’s undergraduates have been people of color. But in an hour-long talk at a South by Southwest education conference earlier this month, Oubré told attendees she encountered attitudes at Whittier such as, “‘We can’t have too many Hispanics,’ whatever, fill in the blank, ‘because the white kids won’t be comfortable’.”
It seems very unlikely that any of the faculty at a contemporary liberal arts college would have dared to suggest that the potential discomfort of white students was something to be avoided – yes, I’m saying that I think Oubré just made that up – but it’s revealing that she thinks that saying that people saying that the white kids might be uncomfortable with too much diversity is an own. The white kids are supposed to be uncomfortable! Also: a greater-than-fifty-percent non-white student body, in a country that is (for now) majority white, is apparently an insufficient level of diversity. Sufficient diversity is zero white people. But we already knew that.
