At this point, I’d feel more comfortable if Covid hosted a press conference on how to protect us from the government.
– Zuby
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People tend to believe things that further their personal interests, and universities are no exception. Wokification succeeded largely because it gave a lot of different people a lot of different things that they wanted. It gave the increasingly powerful university administration a reason to hire more administrators to manage diversity and ensure its forward march. Self-propagation is the highest goal of administrators everywhere. Wokeness also became a useful tool in ongoing turf wars between administrators and faculty. Diversity is a simple metric via which the administration can interfere with faculty hiring and academic operations; new diversity hires know who is buttering their bread and remain loyal to the administrators whose policies brought them in. For the increasingly mediocre and incapable faculty who now teach at even the most august American schools, the woke circus has its own attractions. It provides distraction from the unrelenting demands of objectivity and originality, and permits a pleasing, self-righteous indulgence in moral scolding. In Woke Studies, the answers are always predetermined and it is very easy to get anything published, provided you say the right things. For students, Wokeness has still other attractions—as a font of easy coursework, as an opportunity for social networking, and as a locus for the periodic ritual entertainment of false moral outrages and protests. – The indispensable Eugyppius December 1st, 2021 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population. – Joel Kotkin, in an article riddled with laughable notions mixed with on-the-money observations. November 25th, 2021 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
Judgement – via Bad Cattitude. Read the whole thing. November 24th, 2021 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Things descended into absurdity when A. abruptly asked:
I was totally dismayed by her open cluelessness. Had she slept through these world-historical moments? Did she have no idea that lockdowns were demonstrably imported from China, with the help of the WHO and other actors? Was her implication that all these restrictions had arisen in spontaneous response to conditions, and that everything must therefore be in order? In any event, she called me “naive,” because I naturally answered her question with “yes.” A. and B. are both intelligent and competent people in their fields, and I value both for different reasons. Nevertheless, they are swimming in these currents as if hypnotised, like countless others, and with their complicity our country has devolved into a dystopian dictatorship. November 20th, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 10th, 2021 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The fact that Chinese state media so widely shared a particularly credulous New Yorker article by Peter Hessler about China’s coronavirus response did not escape China expert Geremie Barmé, who cautioned its author that it reminded him of “another American journalist, a man who reported from another authoritarian country nearly a century ago … Walter Duranty …” November 8th, 2021 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Two months ago an education activist told a small group in Virginia that people don’t yet understand that Americans’ relationship with public schools changed during the pandemic. For the first time ever, on Zoom, parents overheard what is being taught, how, and what’s not taught, and they didn’t like what they heard. The schools had been affected by, maybe captured by, woke cultural assumptions that had filtered down from higher-ed institutions and the education establishment. The parents were home in the pandemic and not distracted. They didn’t want their children taught harmful nonsense, especially at the expense of the basics.” – Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), pondering the losses by the Democrats in the recent Virginia elections. A state that was going “blue”, has gone “red”, and the promotion of Critical Race Theory in public, state schools is a part of why. Maybe the pushback is also a victory for a new breed of scholars and writers who are starting to seriously hammer CRT and parts of the “woke” movement, such as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and John McWhorter, or in the UK, the likes of Douglas Murray. This episode also highlights why much of the Left loathes school choice. November 5th, 2021 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Capitalism isn’t perfect, but there is no perfect system, and fantasies of a world in which there are no conflicts, no borders, no pollutants, no waste, and no crime are simply that: fantasies. Capitalism has been the best means ever devised of mitigating these problems – betting everything on an unfounded pipe dream is dangerous, illogical and should not be entertained in the 21st century. It may not sound exciting but the change we need will not come from revolution, but controlled, steady and logical improvements to our existing society.” – Joshua Taggart, writing in response to the latest pollutant to come out of the brain of George Monbiot. (I hadn’t heard from Mr Monbiot lately, but he’s still there, calling for some sort of totalitarian order where growth and material advancement are strictly regulated, by people such as him. He really is quite something.) November 2nd, 2021 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
COP26 will help to consolidate this neo-aristocracy. And, bizarrely, the left will cheer it on. The left once said: ‘We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance… We do not call for a limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’ (Sylvia Pankhurst.) Now it pleads with the super-rich to come up with more and more creative ideas for how to rein in the filthy habits and material dreams of the masses. What a disaster. It isn’t climate change that poses the largest threat to humanity in the early 21st century. It’s the bourgeoisie’s loss of faith in its historic project, and its arrogant generalisation of that loss of faith into a new ‘green’ ideology we must all bow down before. A revolt against environmentalism is arguably the most necessary cause of our age. Who’s in? November 1st, 2021 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Decarbonising our economy is the Greenies’ equivalent of the Soviet collectivisation of agriculture, or the Great Leap Forward. With similar effects. October 31st, 2021 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“COP26, not as an event but as the beginning of a process, has the potential to provoke revolution. Not certainly and not in the immediate future; but the unfolding future of climate totalitarianism, already fairly clearly delineated in the plans of governments, is the one phenomenon that anyone with an historian’s insight will identify as a conceivable long-term cause of revolution. What shape such a revolution might take, whether purely political or violent, would probably vary according to the culture of any society in which it occurred. If politicians do not heed the warning signs that will eventually proliferate, future historians may compare the assembling of COP26 to the convening of the Estates General in France, in 1789.” Read the whole thing. If you are from Glasgow, please don’t take offence. October 27th, 2021 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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