Quotulatiousness

April 25, 2021

The causes and effects of “ostrich parasitic syndrome”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay on Canadian academic Gad Saad, who sometimes lets his “inner honey badger” get out on social media:

Gad Saad 2010 JMSB Faculty Portrait

Saad, 57, is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Montreal’s Concordia University. His domain is evolutionary psychology as applied to business — a niche field, to be sure. He’s written such papers as “Gender differences in information search strategies for a Christmas gift,” and “Menstrual cycle effects on prosocial orientation, gift giving and charitable giving,” which provide valuable information to guide marketing strategies.

You’d be hard pressed to find any academic in Canada who’s more deeply steeped in knowledge about the ineluctable differences between the sexes. (Speaking of “the sexes,” business schools may be the last places left in academia to use those words to designate men and women and acknowledge their differences. Perhaps because their students want to succeed in the real world.)

[…]

Since then, Saad has understood the absolute necessity for critical thinking and freedom of speech. In the present, unhealthy climate, feelings rule, while critical thinking’s value declines daily. Just as our immune systems are designed to cope with novel intruders or atrophy, if we live in an intellectual bubble — as university students do now, rarely confronting opposing views — our cognitive immune systems atrophy, Saad says.

The consequence is what Saad calls “ostrich parasitic syndrome” (OPS). This disorder, in his words, “causes a person to deny realities that are otherwise as clear as the existence of gravity.” Science, reason, infinite data, common sense — all are rejected.

Cognitively disarmed, OPS sufferers accept alternate realities: climate change is “related to terrorism” (Bill Nye, the “science guy”); it is “gross and racist” to suggest Islam is connected to Islamism (Ben Affleck); the Israeli military “dehumanizes” Palestinian women by choosing not to rape them (not a typo: this was the thrust of an award-winning thesis by a radically leftist Israeli sociologist); men can literally be women (nearly everyone says this now, for fear of being labelled transphobic).

It used to be that you could “stand off on the sidelines” when you called out postmodern BS. No longer. There’s no middle ground anymore. You call out the BS or you keep schtum. If you choose the former, as Saad’s writing and actions demonstrate, you need to cultivate your own inner honey badger. Nothing else works.

April 2, 2021

QotD: Sex and the grad student lifestyle

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For normal women, getting laid is a two-step process:

  • Show up; and
  • Bring beer.

For 75-90% of women under 40, step 2 is optional. It would’ve been for Chloe. Especially in a bar full of grad students, who despite their extensive academic training on “the rhetorics of hegemony” and whatnot, still aren’t quite sure how the naughty bits fit together. She might’ve had to draw the guy a map, but surely that’s no problem for someone so assertively in control of her own sexuality as was Chloe …

And that’s just normal people, who know what pronouns to use and never hesitate when choosing a public restroom. The real freakazoids actually have it much easier, since loudly proclaiming a deviant sexuality is a status symbol in the ivory tower. Perhaps your deepest, most secret fetish involves cocktail onions and a Shop-Vac … and let me stop you right there, I do NOT wanna know, I’m only bringing this up to say that hey, I sympathize, love is real and you’re having a hard time finding yours.
You should consider academia, my friend, where not only are such things not shameful, but they’re positively celebrated. If you’ve actually got video of yourself doing the nasty under those conditions, they’ll pretty much hand you a PhD in Performance Art on the spot …

… and yet, nobody does.

I’m not saying people don’t have sex in grad school. If I myself wasn’t getting my ashes hauled every day in the ivory tower, I assure you it wasn’t for lack of trying. What I am saying is that academia is the only place on earth where not only is your fetish — whatever it is — not shameful, but easily satisfied. Those of us who actually enjoy the missionary position with committed partners of the opposite-sex used to joke that ours was the only sexual deviancy so perverse, you’d be shunned by all your colleagues if you admitted to it. These people, on the other hand, talk like their gonads rule their lives, but they never actually do anything about it.

I have no idea why, but finding out would tell us a lot about the psychology of the average Leftist.

Severian, “Gettin’ Busy in College Town”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-04.

March 12, 2021

QotD: The modern university campus

Filed under: Education, Food, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you haven’t been on campus lately, visit your local citadel of learning. Don’t just drive through; spend some time there. On the surface, things look lovely — ivy covered walls, dorms like 5 star hotels, trendy boutiques selling stuff you can’t afford to buy, undergraduates wearing more than your week’s take-home pay. Light poles and store walls are covered with flyers for causes only the very wealthy and very idle could possibly care about. In short, it’s heaven …

… but pretty soon you’ll notice that it’s a very battered, grimy sort of heaven. Nobody’s from there, nobody stays there, everyone’s just passing through on the way to something better. Certainly including the faculty: Every single professor not currently at Harvard thinks knows xzhe deserves to be at Harvard, and will get there someday. Everything’s on-demand in a college town, because everything’s rented. That “distressed” look hipsters love so much isn’t an affectation on campus; it’s a logical outcome of the transient lifestyle. Why fix a pothole, paint a building, trim a tree, teach a class anyone could ever actually use? Anyone who complains will be gone next semester anyway.

Get yours before it’s gone, and if that means skipping town one day ahead of the bill collectors, remember: Capitalism is evil.

It’s not just campus, either. The rest of the lifestyle is just as evanescent, just as ugly. Think of the food. Whatever you do, you can’t eat what the Normals eat, drink what the Normals drink. Here again, foodie culture isn’t a hipster affectation on campus. It’s deadly serious status-jockeying with your temporary — always temporary — peers. You’ve got to win now, because next semester they’ll be gone, probably to Harvard, those cheating, ass-kissing bastards. Sure, it looks, smells, and tastes like cold dog puke, but at least you’re the first to eat it!

Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.

March 10, 2021

QotD: Honest mottoes for university majors

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Art: One of the best majors for entry into fun, exciting, aesthetically interesting and intellectually engaging jobs, assuming that you’re a woman in the seventies and also independently wealthy.

Art History: Spending 4 years of your life getting wasted and bullshitting about the art of dead white men is less fun than it sounds. Less employable than philosophy.

Biology: All the stresses and high workloads of a STEM major, none of the employability of a STEM major. On the plus side, very little math.

Biomedical Engineering: 90% of your peers are here because they want to become doctors. Statistically, most of them will flunk out by sophomore year or change to easier majors. But you’re different, right? Right?

Business: Easy major that sounds practically relevant (Hint: it isn’t).

Chemistry: I hope you like graduate school.

Communications: The second best major for joining a dying field.

Computer Science: Is programming your passion? Want to learn how to write good, maintainable, bug-free programs? Want to be up to date on the latest frameworks and debugging tools? LOL. What is this, a trade school? Nah, you’ll spend 4 years of your life doing actually important stuff, like proving the Turing Completeness of your toaster. Still employable, for some reason.

Creative Writing: You can communicate your angst in a lot of creative and interesting ways! Don’t worry, you won’t run out of angst anytime soon.

Economics: The least Marxist of the social sciences. Come because you want to learn how the world actually works. We don’t teach undergrads that, but we do teach you to solve fun puzzles with hard math! If by “fun puzzles” you mean “IS-LM models” and by “hard math” you mean “basic calculus.”

Education: The less said, the better.

English: Please tell me you double-majored in Education.

Geology: Come because you like rocks and “saving the planet,” leave to join a petroleum company.

History: Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do know history are unlikely to do much better, since they have the decision-making prowess of the type of person who majored in history.

Kinesiology: Enter, ye of absolutely non-existent academic ambition.

Mathematics: I hope you didn’t take this major because you liked numbers. Most of your professors can’t count past 10.

Nursing: All the stresses of med school, minus all the prestige. But hey, you can actually get a job!

Philosophy: Come in as a freshman asking dumb, ill-formed questions like “What is the meaning of life?” Come out 4–6 years later asking deep, sophisticated questions like: “What is ‘is’ in the Hegelian dialectic of the Kantian framework in a postmodern age?”

Physics: You get to do a lot of math.

Pre-Law: Statistically, the major that leads to having one of the lowest possible LSAT scores.

Psychology: A recent study (n = 13, p = .04999) says that psychology majors are smarter, hotter, richer and more statistically savvy than every other major. That study will probably fail to replicate, but hey. So will just about everything else you remember from class.

Sociology: Learn about how society is fucked. Also, Marx is great.

Linchuan Zhang, “If college majors had honest mottos, what would they be?”, Quora, 2018-01-08.

February 24, 2021

Solzhenitsyn was far from the first to warn about the evils of Soviet rule

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple had a discussion recently with a Marxist professor:

Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.

The professor was an intelligent man, and probably cultivated too. How was it possible, in the Year of Our Lord 2021, for such a person still to believe that, until the advent of Stalin, the Russian revolution was a good thing, to be emulated or repeated elsewhere?

How could anyone of his intelligence fail to realise that, though as ever there was much wrong with the world, attempts to put everything right at once by the implementation of petty intellectual schemes are fraught with danger, and have a history of mass slaughter behind them?

I think the answer must lie in the psychology of religion: when religious faith is replaced by a philosophy that prides itself on its rationality, it soon turns religious in the worst possible sense. it becomes an atheist theocracy.

Everything was known about the Soviet Union from the first. It is simply not true that Solzhenitsyn revealed anything to the West that, in essence, was not, or could not have been, known before.

I have, in desultory fashion for a number of decades, been collecting books about Russia and the Soviet Union from just before the Revolution until the Second World War, and while it is true that many of them are laudatory, with titles that now seem hilarious to us such as The Soviet Union Fights Neurosis, a very large number books of various genres, from essays to histories to memoirs to novels and short stories, were published that exposed the viciousness of Bolshevism from the very first — a viciousness that anyone with any imagination could have anticipated from Lenin’s literary style alone.

Leninist viciousness was viciousness of a new and more thoroughgoing type that acted on the mind as a virus acts on a computer (viciousness, both actual and potential, is, alas, a constant of human history because of our flawed nature).

Solzhenitsyn was right about the difference between Macbeth, who from personal ambition killed people, but only a few, and the ideologically-motivated mass-killings of the Soviet Union and elsewhere — the difference being precisely in the effect of ideology.
But what was really different about Solzhenitsyn, apart from his literary talent, was that Western intellectuals were now prepared to believe what he said, whereas shortly before they had rejected as mere propaganda evidence of a very similar nature produced by others.

It was so startling to meet someone who still believed that a “pure” revolution could take place, and that such a person was teaching history of all things, in a reputable, or at any rate reputed, university, that, like Karl Kraus confronted by Hitler, I could think of nothing to say.

I had no idea whether he still taught undergraduates, or whether in doing so he suppressed at least some of his views (as a judge is supposed to suppress his own private opinions): but I confess that the charge against Socrates, that of corrupting youth, came into my mind.

February 22, 2021

QotD: Modern academic “life”

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The point of all this isn’t just more academia-bashing (fun as that is, and thank you Jesus for early retirement). The point is: Life deals people bad hands. Many, perhaps most, of the people I know in academia are there because they really can’t do anything else — a combination of (as they feel it) genes and circumstance has landed them there, and while it looks like a really cushy upper-middle-class life materially, spiritually it’s the pits, because it’s aesthetically awful. The Classical Greek adage that the Good is the True is the Beautiful might not be factually accurate, but it sure feels right …

… and never more than to people who know themselves un-beautiful, therefore not good, therefore false, and locked in it. Forever.

These people hate us, not because we’re better looking, more socially skilled, or whatever — this is, after all, the Internet — but because we’ve got options. We’re not all fighting over who gets to be Big Fish in an ever-shrinking pond. We’re different things to different people; we haven’t collapsed our social context down to faculty mixers and the one or two non-hamplanet grad students who are silly enough to apply each semester. We can go days, maybe even weeks, without obsessively comparing ourselves to our peers. We don’t care that we’re not “Chad” or “Stacy,” because we’ve got other settings on the emotional dial than “smugness” and “jealousy.”

But we need to start caring. I don’t mean getting obsessive over our appearance. I mean that, since this is in many ways an aesthetic battle, aesthetics will help us win. I half-jokingly suggested a “Normal Guy Uniform” a while back – an all-white ball cap with the New England Patriots’ logo on it. I’m not really kidding now. The Left wins, in large part, because they’re fugly losers that no normal person could possibly consider a threat … until they bash your skull in, or get you fired, or send a SWAT team to your house.

Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.

February 2, 2021

When the self-defined elites achieved class consciousness

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Rotten Chestnuts Severian adds to his ongoing series of posts identifying areas where Marx was right:

“Jay Gould’s Private Bowling Alley.” Financier and stock speculator Jay Gould is depicted on Wall Street, using bowling balls titled “trickery,” “false reports,” “private press” and “general unscrupulousness” to knock down bowling pins labeled as “operator,” “broker,” “banker,” “inexperienced investor,” etc. A slate shows Gould’s controlling holdings in various corporations, including Western Union, Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad.
From the cover of Puck magazine Vol. XI, No 264 via Wikimedia Commons.

… I liken Karl Marx to one of those bird-masked medieval Plague doctors — he sees the pathology clearly, indeed far faster and better than anyone else, but his proposed “cure” is far likelier to kill you than the actual disease. Worse, what makes Marx’s cure especially lethal is what ends up making his diagnosis essentially right: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The proletariat is achieving class consciousness, all right — look no further than the GameStop “short squeeze” for proof. But the only reason the proles are achieving class consciousness is because the “capitalists” forced them to, just like Marx said they would. The Elite and the Bureaucracy (usually, but not always, a distinction without a difference) finally achieved class consciousness through the combination of NAFTA and the Louvre Accords. Starting around 1990, then, the Elite self-consciously embraced their role as rootless, stateless, jet-setting parasites (with the wannabe-Elites in the Media, academia, and the bureaucracies signing up for tours of duty as fart-catchers, both to bask in reflected glory and in hopes of being promoted).
In short, our “Capitalists” — really, “financial-ists” or “spreadsheet gangsters,” since they don’t actually make anything, they just bust out existing firms via debt manipulation — behave exactly as Marx described factory owners behaving all the way back in the First Industrial Revolution.

In my naivete, I used to think Marx’s ranting was hyperbole. I cited the example of Andrew Carnegie — a real bastard in his youth, who went on to be one of the world’s great philanthropists. That’s human behavior, I said, as opposed to the bloodthirsty caricature of Marx’s fantasies … but I was wrong, comrades. Carnegie happily would’ve sold his fellow Americans down the river, just as Bezos, Gates, and the rest of the pirates-in-neckties are happily selling us down the river now. Only two things prevented it back then: one structural, one cultural.

The structural one is simply technology, and therefore uninteresting. Britain’s “free traders” — you know, the Jardine-Matheson types who started the Opium Wars for fun and profit — would’ve happily outsourced Britain’s entire industrial base to China if they hadn’t been hampered by wind speed. By the time this was technically feasible — which is about 1860, if you’re keeping score — simple inertia had taken over. They didn’t retool until they had to, at which point instant communications and modern ships … well, you know the rest. Like I said, it’s vital, but boring.

The cultural one is much more interesting. You might be tempted to say, as I did, that Jardine and Matheson were always on the lookout for #1, of course, but were sincere British patriots for all that, just as Carnegie for all his faults was an authentic American. I doubt it, comrades. I sincerely doubt it. What kept these guys in check wasn’t patriotism, or even culture. Rather, it was fear.

January 29, 2021

Costs of keeping Biden’s promise to forgive student debt

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan consider the frequently issued campaign promise by Joe Biden and what it will cost to implement:

Given the results of the recent election, it should come as no surprise that we’re poised for the next big expansion: student debt forgiveness, a promise Joe Biden made frequently as he campaigned for the presidency. Like the big ideas that came before it, this idea will cost us more than we can afford from day one, and far more than its proponents will admit. Biden’s plan as currently envisioned would cost over $300 billion. But that’s just this year. The plan will set in motion unintended consequences that will doubtlessly persist for generations.

First, next year’s crop of new students will — understandably — demand that their loans be forgiven too. And so will those of the year after that, and so on. This program will quickly become a sort of college UBI, where the government just hands out $10,000 to every college student. Some argue that if this results in a better educated populace, then it’s worth the cost. But it won’t result in a better educated populace; it will result in a whole bunch of students majoring in things the market doesn’t value, and another batch simply taking a four-year vacation on the taxpayer’s dime. Heretofore, graduates knew they needed marketable skills in order to repay their college loans. But when student loans are forgiven as a matter of course, graduates bear no cost for wasting our collective resources by studying things the market doesn’t value, or by not studying at all.

Data sources: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, National Center for Education Statistics.

Second, colleges and universities will respond to this new reality by raising tuition commensurately. Tuition and fees were a pretty constant 18 to 19 percent of family income from the 1960s until 1978. In 1965, the federal government started guaranteeing student loans. In 1973, Congress established Sallie Mae and charged it with providing subsidized students loans. And by 1978, tuition and fees had started a steady march to 45 percent of family income today. When the government makes it less painful for students to borrow, whether by guaranteeing, subsidizing, or forgiving loans, it takes away some of the pain of student borrowing, which makes it easier for colleges and universities to raise tuition.

Third, expect many taxpayers to cry foul. Homeowners will quite sensibly wonder why the government is not forgiving their mortgages. After all, student loans add up to about $1.4 trillion, while American mortgages total more than $16 trillion. If relieving students from the burden of their debts is a good idea, it should be an even better idea to relieve homeowners of theirs.

What about students who worked multiple jobs or attended less prestigious schools so they could avoid going into debt? Why aren’t they being rewarded? What about students who diligently paid off their debt and are now debt free? Will they receive nothing? What about, fantastically, people in the trades? Is it reasonable to charge people — via the higher taxes loan forgiveness will bring — who did not go to college to subsidize those who do? Regardless of the answers to these questions, implementing this plan will be fraught with difficulty.

Ancient Aryans: The History of Crackpot N@zi Archaeology

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Humour, Science, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 22 Nov 2019

Thanks to Indiana Jones, everybody knows that German archaeologists in the 1930s were searching for occult ancient artifacts … but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In this educational video, I explore how the N@zis turned the discipline of prehistoric archaeology into a cog in their propaganda machine, and how their crazy conspiracy theories about lost civilizations continue to haunt us to this day.

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#WW2 #Archaeology #History

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January 15, 2021

QotD: Capitalism and socialism, viewed from Harvard in 1942

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Joseph Schumpeter] suggested [that] capitalism’s greatest strength — its propensity for “creative destruction” — is also a source of weakness. Disruption may be the process that clears out the obsolescent and fosters the advent of the new, but precisely for that reason it can never be universally loved. Second, capitalism itself tends toward oligopoly, not perfect competition. The more concentrated economic power becomes, the harder it is to legitimize the system, especially in America, where “big business” tends to get confused with “monopoly.” Third, capitalism “creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest” — namely, intellectuals. (Here was the influence of Harvard; Schumpeter knew whereof he spoke.) Finally, Schumpeter noted, socialism is politically irresistible to bureaucrats and democratic politicians.

The idea that socialism would ultimately prevail over capitalism was quite a widespread view — especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It persisted throughout the Cold War. “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive,” wrote Paul Samuelson, Schumpeter’s pupil, in the 1961 edition of his economics textbook — a sentence that still appeared in the 1989 edition. In successive editions, Samuelson’s hugely influential book carried a chart projecting that the gross national product of the Soviet Union would exceed that of the United States at some point between 1984 and 1997. The 1967 edition suggested that the great overtaking could happen as early as 1977. By the 1980 edition, the timeframe for this great overtaking had been moved forward to 2002–12. The graph was quietly dropped after the 1980 edition.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

December 11, 2020

“Politically correct language … seemed like a nice, polite, and Canadian sort of thing to do”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Meaghie Champion discusses politically correct language in The Line:

Source: https://www.deviantart.com/blamethe1st/art/Statist-And-Anarchist-063-Political-Correctness-589944623

I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s. I have never lived in a world without what we now call “political correctness” — typically understood to mean using a kind of stilted and artificial language in order to atone for the disadvantages and slights suffered by marginalized groups and avoid inflicting new ones. Politically correct language required more effort to communicate, but it seemed like that effort was worth it to not offend people. It seemed like a nice, polite, and Canadian sort of thing to do.

I went along with political correctness out of a sincere desire to be accommodating to disadvantaged and dis-enfranchised groups. This became especially true after I learned about the “Sapir Whorf theory of psycho neurolinguistics.” The theory suggests that language shapes our perception of reality; that by altering the way we talk, we can shift the way we think — and, thus, collectively, we can shape reality itself. From this, it seemed logical to “de-gender” language or stop using stereotypes. It seemed like a small ask. Maybe I personally couldn’t solve big problems that concerned me as a good liberal … i.e. things like poverty or world hunger, but I could be nice in how I expressed myself and try to use language that everybody was using to be equitable and more fair.

What I didn’t understand, then, was that this precedent set a trap in which many good, well-intentioned liberals are finding themselves stuck. It’s no longer about ameliorating past sins: there is a project afoot to re-make the English language. The purpose of this project is to re-engineer how people think about certain subjects like gender, sex, and race, while skipping the necessary prerequisites of persuasion and logic. Conservative positions are declared off limits, even bigoted, simply by shaping the way we are allowed to talk about them.

Right now, even as I type this, there is a veritable army of academics hard at work on what they call “de-colonizing” and “de-gendering” language at many universities and colleges. There are tens of thousands of activists and academics in universities and online organizing and pushing for ever-changing rules to be enforced as it relates to the English language. It’s a multi-million-dollar industry in academia and woke corporatism. And it’s already starting to spill over into government regulations and enforcement.

I love the English language. I have been a voracious reader since childhood. I thrill at well-spoken and written prose and poetry. A finely turned witticism or fantastic mot juste can break my heart with its perfection. Further, I’m First Nations, and that love of the English language has also carried me into a love of the study of my tribal cradle tongue “Hul’qumi’num.” Shouldn’t I, as a First Nations person, be in favour of de-colonizing the English language? No. No, I do not think so. I have little patience or regard for any effort that makes language a less workable and functional tool of human endeavour. I identify strongly as a writer, and I take this assault upon the tool with which I conduct my craft very personally.

November 20, 2020

The political danger if the “chumps” unite

Filed under: Economics, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, James B. Meigs describes what he calls the “Chump Effect” in American politics:

Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking at the Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 9 June, 2019.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

Last January, a small but telling exchange took place at an Elizabeth Warren campaign event in Grimes, Iowa. At the time, Warren was attracting support from the Democratic Party’s left flank, with her bulging portfolio of progressive proposals. “Warren Has a Plan for That” read her campaign T-shirts. The biggest buzz surrounded her $1.25 trillion plan to pay off student-loan debt for most Americans.

A man approached Warren with a question. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money [so that] she doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?”

“Of course not,” Warren replied.

“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?”

A video of the exchange went viral. It summed up the frustration many feel over the way progressive policies so often benefit select groups, while subtly undermining others. Saving money to send your children to college used to be considered a hallmark of middle-class responsibility. By subsidizing people who run up large debts, Warren’s policy would penalize those who took that responsibility seriously. “You’re laughing at me,” the man said, when Warren seemed to wave off his concerns. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. We did the right thing and we get screwed.”

That father was expressing an emotion growing more common these days: he felt like a chump. Feeling like a chump doesn’t just mean being upset that your taxes are rising or annoyed that you’re missing out on some windfall. It’s more visceral than that. People feel like chumps when they believe that they’ve played a game by the rules, only to discover that the game is rigged. Not only are they losing, they realize, but their good sportsmanship is being exploited. The players flouting the rules are the ones who get the trophy. Like that Iowa dad, the chumps of modern America feel that the life choices they’re most proud of — working hard, taking care of their families, being good citizens — aren’t just undervalued, but scorned.

The word “chump” probably derives from an ancient Norse term for a stump or large chunk of wood. The modern word “blockhead” comes to mind, which — no coincidence — was Lucy’s favorite label for the too-trusting Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip. Lucy never tired of snatching away the football; Charlie fell for it every time. We all know the feeling: when you’re inching forward in the freeway exit lane, say, and another driver flies past and swerves onto the ramp at the last second; when your child has to complete her college-entrance exams within a designated time period, but your neighbor’s child gets twice as long because of a suddenly diagnosed “learning disability”; when you pay extra to have your pet travel in the airplane’s cargo hold but the yipping poodle across the aisle, an “emotional-support animal,” gets to ride on its owner’s lap for free. You didn’t know that you could get an emotional-support card just by claiming an anxiety disorder and paying a fee to an online agency? What are you — a chump?

November 18, 2020

QotD: Feminism and gender equality

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It takes one’s breath away to watch feminist women at work. At the same time that they denounce traditional stereotypes they conform to them. If at the back of your sexist mind you think that women are emotional, you listen agape as professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT comes out with the threat that she will be sick if she has to hear too much of what she doesn’t agree with. If you think women are suggestible, you hear it said that the mere suggestion of an innate inequality in women will keep them from stirring themselves to excel. While denouncing the feminine mystique, feminists behave as if they were devoted to it. They are women who assert their independence but still depend on men to keep women secure and comfortable while admiring their independence. Even in the gender-neutral society, men are expected by feminists to open doors for women. If men do not, they are intimidating women.

Thus the issue of Summers’s supposedly intimidating style of governance is really the issue of the political correctness by which Summers has been intimidated. Political correctness is the leading form of intimidation in all of American education today, and this incident at Harvard is a pure case of it. The phrase has been around since the 1980s, and the media have become bored with it. But the fact of political correctness is before us in the refusal of feminist women professors even to consider the possibility that women might be at any natural disadvantage in mathematics as compared with men. No, more than that: They refuse to allow that possibility to be entertained even in a private meeting. And still more: They are not ashamed to be seen as suppressing any inquiry into such a possibility. For the demand that Summers be more “responsible” in what he says applies to any inquiry that he or anyone else might cite.

Harvey Mansfield, “Fear and Intimidation at Harvard”, Weekly Standard, 2005-03-07.

November 2, 2020

In the University of Michigan’s Sexual Health Certificate Program, “mainstream sexual health issues that affect wide swaths of the population, such as marriage, reproduction, and family life, were treated as niche topics”

Filed under: Education, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Tim Courtois explains what the University of Michigan’s Sexual Health Certificate Program is actually intended to teach:

When I signed up for the University of Michigan’s unique, year-long “Sexual Health Certificate Program” (SHCP), however, I truly did believe the experience would be both professionally and intellectually rewarding. I care about sexuality. I know that it is a fundamental component of the human search for joy and meaning. As a Michigan-based psychotherapist and licensed professional counselor, I wanted to deepen my understanding of sexuality, and become better equipped to provide care for the many clients who come to me with issues related to sexual health. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists sounded like the perfect fit for me, and the idea of becoming an AASECT-certified sex therapist appealed to me. I applied and was accepted for the 2019-2020 cohort. When I showed up, my class included participants from around the world — including Iceland, Egypt, Lebanon, and China — just as you’d expect at the kind of high-value, authoritative program that we all believed we’d signed up for.
The doubts started to creep in early, though — on day one, to be exact. Our first classroom module was titled “Sexual Attitude Reassessment.” I amused myself with the thought that this sounded like an unsettling euphemism for a brainwashing session. Sadly, that’s what it was.

It quickly became clear that the issue of sexuality — the ostensible subject — often would serve merely as a pretext for more general harangues about society, and the urgent need to remake it according to AASECT’s ideological blueprint. In a keynote lecture entitled “Why Fetishism Matters,” the speaker argued that the world we inhabit is socially constructed, and told us (with what now seems like admirable candor), “I’m not neutral. I’m here to recruit you to a particular point of view about how kink should be valued.” The same speaker said that he’d been accused of teaching students that any form of sexual behavior is acceptable as long as there is consent from all parties. “Yes, that’s exactly right,” he said. Clearly, our attitude “reassessment” was well underway.
From the get-go, the scientific content was mostly superficial, and was often undercut by claims that the very idea of truth is a harmful (and even oppressive) construct. The teaching was not so much impartial and informative as it was evangelistic. Yet it was also self-contradictory: Declarations that there are no real “correct” moral values were uttered (without irony) alongside absolutist proclamations about the correct way to understand sex — and morality.

As I learned, “Sexual Attitude Reassessment” (SAR) is an established term in the field, one that is often used to describe curriculum content that serves to educate sexual-health professionals about the wide range of sexual experiences that they may encounter among clients. The object is to ensure they won’t be shocked when such encounters occur, and to invite them to reassess their judgments and assumptions about various expressions of sexuality. These are valid and important goals. Unfortunately, the SAR in the SHCP descended into an exercise in overstimulation and desensitization — specifically, two full days of pornographic videos and interviews. At times, it felt like the famous brainwashing scene from A Clockwork Orange. There was a series of videos of people masturbating (one of which involved a strange interaction with a cat), a woman with “objectiphilia” who had a sexual attraction to her church pipe organ, various sadomasochistic acts, and a presentation on polyamory designed to make it clear that the polyamorous lifestyle is healthy, wholesome, and problem-free.

The focus on BDSM was a particular fixation throughout the program. In the SAR, we were shown videos of a woman meticulously applying genital clamps to the scrotum of a willing man, and a dominatrix teaching a class how to properly beat people while demonstrating on an eager participant. We also watched an interview with a sex-dungeon “dom” (the male equivalent of a dominatrix) who described one of his experiences: His client had instructed him, as the dom recounted it, “I want you to bind me and then beat me until I scream. And no matter how much I scream or beg you to stop, I want you to keep beating me.” The dom did as he was told, continuing the beatings through the customer’s begging and pleading, until the client went totally limp and silent, seeming to dissociate. At this point, the dom unbound the man, who then began to weep uncontrollably in the dom’s arms.

BDSM is a real and active sexual subculture, and I don’t object to its inclusion in the course materials. But I was shocked to see how much further the professors in the program took things, insisting that BDSM behaviors — up to and including the sexual “Fight Club” style of behavior described above — must be uncritically viewed as wholesome and beautiful. Students learned to sing from the same psalm book, with one memorably exclaiming “I’m so inspired by the wisdom and beauty in the BDSM community!” and insisting that the behavioral codes observed among BDSM participants can help us create a similar climate of safety and respect “in all our relationships.”

The program was focused on an agenda of “centering” the experience of minorities — in this case, sexual minorities. This meant that huge portions of time in class after class were spent focusing on BDSM, LGBTQIA+ issues, and polyamory, not to mention the obligatory discussions of oppression and privilege that were shoehorned into every discussion. Meanwhile, mainstream sexual health issues that affect wide swaths of the population, such as marriage, reproduction, and family life, were treated as niche topics. Further, while many Americans view sexuality through the prism of faith, religion hardly came up at all. And when it did, it was typically so that religious values could be denigrated. Even the few religious people in the program got the message: Whenever any made passing reference to their own observant religiosity, it was usually in a spirit of shame or penance.

In a few brief web searches to find a public domain or Creative Commons image to use for this post, I realized that web search engines offer “safe” options for a reason…

October 23, 2020

The British Library goes “woke”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren views this development with alarm and disdain:

British Library reading room.
Photo from the British Library website.

Did you know? That, “Racism is the creation of white people”?

Of course you did, if you are young, woke, and poorly educated, like the white woman who is now the British Library’s Chief Librarian. (“Liz Jolly.”) Her statement, in a video to staff last summer, promoting her Decolonizing Working Group, though perfectly acceptable to Guardian subscribers, was mocked by several African and Asiatic scholars who have depended upon that library’s resources over the years. Noting that history is more complicated than Ms Jolly was ever told, they criticized her as “pig ignorant,” &c.

But her explicitly racist “anti-racist” programme proceeds, with aggressive “anti-racist” exhibitions, new “anti-racist” signage, and so forth. The demand to de-acquisition authors who do not reinforce the current ideological stereotypes has not yet gathered to full force, but has started.

The capture of essentially all major cultural institutions by unhinged political fanatics with daddy issues, is among the signs of our times. Those who resist are driven out of employment; those who accede have a lock on the splendidly-paid positions, for which beleaguered taxpayers are billed. The consequences to Western Civ are not trifling.

Perhaps I am unfair to single out just the one career arts bureaucrat, when there are thousands to choose from. I may even be prejudiced, not only against white people, but against those of the scheduled races who have cooperated in trashing the institutional heritage of the Big Wen.

For London was my Athens, back in the day, and I take these things personally. My British Museum Library ticket was among my most cherished possessions, and the old Reading Room among my favourite haunts. I am now so old that I can remember when such places were ruled, and staffed, by respectably boring establishment types with Oxbridge degrees.

In a different context, we’ve seen just how eager Oxbridge types of the 1930s were eager to join the Soviet spy networks, so the change in establishment staff at non-explicitly communist establishments was only a matter of time…

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