That is a function of narcissism. The key giveaway in fact.
It is an act. A rehearsed performance designed to protect the wounded child inside. It's purpose is to stave off the self analysis healthy people embrace.
In another era they'd be denouncing Jews or heretics. They wear their opinions and righteous indignation as a disguise. That's why the Claudine Gays seem so insubstantial when prodded. There is nothing there but the performance.
Not necessarily. But they are propagated by them. The narcissist seeks to project an image of superiority. Your reasoned concerns about climate policy or immigration is because you don't see the bigger picture unlike them.
To be fair, that kind of narcissism operates on all sides of the political chasm. Even the left has some reasoned concerns that should be treated with some respect. It's the will to dominate and extinguish other perspectives that evinces the narcissism. I like to remind people of that from time to time. Of course the left is in power right now so the domination and censorship from that side is the most obvious.
But does the left genuinely embrace the concerns associated with leftism, or are those issues just narcissistic stilts to tower over normal people with an ersatz moral superiority? Consider how leftists have abandoned the poor in favor of intersectionality, or how women's rights are trumped by transgenderism.
I should have said "popular entertainment." TV, movies, comics. They write horrible characters--always the hero and villain at the same time--and get angry when people dislike their unlikeable self inserts.
They view their "identity" as "victimhood." An excuse to keep an enormous chip on their shoulder and treat everyone else badly. "You think you have it tough, huh Whitey?" "Only we women suffer this way. Men have it so easy." Envy, resentment and self pity are the cardinal virtues of Wokeism.
It's no longer about celebrating the accomplishments of certain American subcultures or women in the fine arts. It's not about being happy and grateful for what has been achieved and trying to better themselves and help others to do likewise because of the new opportunities.
It's about continuing to be a loser with a built in excuse. Even those who rise to the top like Dr. Gay know they don't have to put in the effort and justify being the beneficiaries of Tokenism by citing "White privilege."
Only we women suffer this way. Men have it so easy."
Really? Men have it easy? Men wake up early, go to work, stay long hours at work, provide for the woman, the children, and the pets. Men forsake sleep, sex, and joy to provide what’s needed.
Before the modern age, men went to war to protect women. All woman had to do was keep the house and care for the kid. If she wanted to work, that was fine.
But, women are mercenaries. They have very little loyalty. If the local men were to lose a war, the women would go with the victors, leaving the local men to die.
Without Identity, one inevitably devolves into Self-Hatred (of varying types). This makes all other higher pursuits (religious, social, etc) Moot. So, one should DETEST those who show Self-hatred; because it is ultimately Anti-human & Pro-Djinn & Demonkind.
Plus, many come from cultures where strength is admired. I won't name names, but we have enough experience from our imperial adventures to know today's hands-off approach is not respected. They see us as dominated by our women. They'd have a lot more respect if we hanged the rapists and child molesters in their ranks.
Women are drawn to strength, and women are famously poor at introspection. They react. The feelz rule all. An astonishingly poor mechanism to determine immigration policy in an era of government-sanctioned anti-male feminism that has us on the back foot. We are made to look unimpressive while those with limited prospects trigger older parts of their brains.
I strongly suspect that this is deliberate. Say what you will about them, the regime understands human psychology fantastically well.
Which is no reason for us not to understand it, and apply that knowledge. Why are men on the back foot? Feminism. Why is feminism ascendant? Largely because men are on their back foot. Stop behaving submissively, and start projecting dominance, and female instinctive drives will take over and they'll fall back into line.
Suffering invokes empathy, even sympathy, in a normal human.
Weakness breeds contempt, and chosen weakness awakens a fury and a hatred like none other, since it by evoking recognition (anyone can choose to be weak) it gives the onlooker a taste of the self-loathing and perversion of the soul that is self-chosen weakness.
The real ingredients of a strong identity are one's place in one's family, church, and community. Modernity dissolves these things, and that is what has opened up the need in atomized people to embrace weak substitutes for identity, such as one's perceived oppression, handicaps, and desire to stick one's dick into mens' anuses or furfriends or Funko Pops or whatnot. (Sex and perhaps nation/race should be a part of one's identity, insofar as they define one's roles among one's peers, but not all the victimhood and defiance the Marxists have encrusted on top of them. Regarding race, it's obviously best to go through life unaware that there are any other races.)
If people could return to having strong local bonds of family and community, few of them would have the desire to fashion cheap synthetic "identities." But at the minimum, that would require a return to small-town living, an end to TV and cellphones and online video, and probably the strange disappearance from media, government, and activism of those of whom Jesus said, "You are of your father the devil: and the desires of your father you will do."
We used to stand on the shoulders of giant so we might see farther than them. Now we gleefully hack away at their ankles so the midwits don't feel small in their shadows.
I suggest dropping the use of the term "identity" - it has nothing to do with that word. The correct term would be race. Race-based hiring practices. Race-based politics. Race-based entertainment media content - go look at anything produced by Hollywood/Disney post-2010 and tell me I'm wrong (please tell me I'm wrong because I don't want to be right!).
Claudine Gay is a race-hire. She is hired to be a magical negro. nothing more. Any black american should be outraged at the inherent racist condescension on display.
Another thing. John, did you notice that all her abstracts are structured the exact same way? Completely formulaic. It immediately made me think of the postmodernism generator. Maybe she actually used something akin to that?
Judging by the comic book industry in the US, we're coming up to the finish soon, re: Culture War and the woke having the upper hand. Now, using military analogies, this is typically the time when a western military would slow their roll and offer negotiating terms. That is a deadly mistake. Instead we, meaning anyone opposing the PC-woke-DEI-you-know-what-I-mean-agendas, must think russian: when the enemy falters, increase the pressure. If he collapses, hound him. If he routs, run him down.
The woke Napoleons have arrived at Moscow, and now Moscow is burning. The woke Wehrmacht has faltered at Prokhorovka. Now is the time to attack, rund the into to the ground - everywhere - and wipe them out.
It's like fighting. You don't aim the punch at the other guy's chin. You aim it at a foot behond his head - followthrough, you know?
We can do this by keeping the pressure on, and showing support for, those public figures who in our various nations says "No!" in any way to the Cosmopolit (Globalist for youngsters) Jagganatha.
On the identify vs race question, the former term is more general, which is useful as it encompasses hiring done on the basis of sex - a considerable component of the ideology.
The analogy with Napoleon in Moscow is spot on. I don't think the fall of woke will be a gradual, grinding process. Instead, they will reach the apex of their power, and then collapse like a wave approaching shore.
So long as the opposition doesn't go back to grilling the moment the woke falter, that is.
On the surface, "identity" was launched as a collect-all shorthand. In reality, the term was chosen to hide reality: race-based politics, essentially the same as those of nazi-Germany.
Therefore, refusing to use "identity" and instead insisting on using race or sex or sexual preference or whatever brings to light the real issue.
"We embrace diversity as part of our hiring practices" sounds positive; "We always consider the race of applicants when hiring" sounds horrible.
It's the same as with negro -> black people -> persons of colour ->? Or "eminent domain" sounding better than "naked theft by the governement" or "unwilling penis-receptacle" for "rape victim".
No matter how you adapt, you will be "in the wrong" and the real issue will be obfuscated.
Commonly racism was understood to erase the identity of an individual by lumping them into a group. "All Black people are alike." Funny how that's the very result of CRT and "diversity." John Doe is not valued for being John Doe but for belonging to "Oppressed Victim Group" as a black or brown or sexual deviant. If he is White and finds women attractive he's out of luck. A great way to dehumanize everyone and turn us against each other.
But DOCTORRR!!! Claudine Gay’s ‘identity’ is not simply based on race, but on the victimhood ‘intersectionality’ of being a woman, a lesbian, an imbecile (life is hard. It’s even harder if you are stupid —John Wayne) and very possibly ‘identifying’ (and certainly ‘presenting’) as a gerbil.
Im going to use the term fake and Gay more often henceforth. This is no longer to be construed as a reference to homosexuality, which might be offensive, but to Claudine Gay who has been proven fake in the manner most characteristic of this sclerotic DIEing regime.
I assure you that any consilience between things I say and reddit norms is both coincidental and regrettable. I've avoided that insufferable place since Aaron Swartz' departure.
The university system was actually begun by the Catholic church in the Middle Ages. In the US, it has evolved into a system for students to prove that they can lie and grovel well enough to fit in as employees of corporations, the government, and the education system itself.
Agreed. This is how I learned to stop worrying about these leftist abominations. They are and will be the victims of their own creations. Let them eat leftism.
Well, yes, but the prestige universities in the US (especially Harvard) were founded by Puritans. As the religion of their descendants evolved from Calvinism to Universalism to today's crypto-Calvinist worldview the universities reflect, or often lead, that evolution. The common thread is it's always a lifelong struggle to prove to themselves and each other that they are part of the Elect.
Yes, I didn't intend to imply that U.S universities retain any connection to Catholicism, but rather perhaps to comment on how far they have diverged from their origins. And yes, brilliant observation: Elect = Elites. Leftism is in large part a quasi-religion, entailing a struggle to attain higher social status, which makes their claim that leftists desire a classless society of equality/'equity' especially hypocritical.
I think that part of the reason why our current elites are so retarded is because they reject the notion of eliteness. What kind of aristocrats would you have if they hated the very notion of aristocracy? Aristocrats that embrace absolute egalitarianism display the worst attributes of elites (snobbishness, narcissism, indulgence, decadence, etc.) while having very few of the positive characteristics of aristocrats (noblesse oblige, Christian charity, quality leadership, long-term planning, military vigour, stewardship, etc.).
People slowly but surely rediscovering the original meaning of the "few bad apples" idiom, which has been turned completely on its head by bad apples and the evaporation of agricultural competence over the past 100 years.
The signs of rot were there decades ago. The whole exercise since then has been fruitlessly (pun intended) debating which was the first bad apple and which apples might still be intact, as a way to distract oneself from the rot's rapid spread. The correct solution, as in the idiom's original meaning, was to cut the loss and burn the whole bunch, then identify how it happened and make sure that never happened again.
Bingo. While I suspect things could still have been salvaged several decades ago with some judicious firings and/or firing squads, it's been past the point of saving for many years. Although I'm fairness, this has only become obvious fairly recently.
I'm not so sure they could have been. The subtler point of the "bad apples" idiom is about the visible vs. the invisible. If one apple is visibly rotted, that means it's had quite a while - several weeks at least - to reach that point. You can't even be sure that's where it started, and not simply that it's the first one you noticed. Meanwhile the mold is working invisibly on numerous others, and the only way to know which is to cut them open and look, at which point they're ruined anyway. The rot you see on the surface is always, only, ever the tip of a vast iceberg of corruption; it's the fruiting body of the organism, which only develops in the final mature stage of its lifecycle.
I don't think exterminatus is the right answer. To push the apple metaphor, usually a fungal growth is the manifestation of conditions that facilitate its growth (e.g. dampness). Take the apples out of the wet barrel and most of them can be saved. [I guess I'm trying to be the voice of humanism in this corner of the internet, recognizing the problem while looking for the most humanitarian way of solving it. I realize I'm contradicting my initial comment somewhat, but as you can see I'm trying to work this out.] I think the answer is to look for the right way to reformat our social landscape so that most of the apples can be saved. I think the sword is necessary only in very limited cases. At least I hope so.
Certainly not talking about literal swords here, to be clear.
To go with the apple analogy, the first thing is to take them out of the bin and spread them out. This is a direct analogy to closing the universities: dissolve the containers, remove the contents, examine them, and keep whatever isn't rotten.
This will happen naturally if the banking system doesn't completely implode soon (or something else even worse occurs). Wasn't Musk proposing to create his own university in Texas? I haven't followed up on that story, but if he is successful, you'll see a lot of copy-cats, a lot of new tech-focused colleges and universities starting up in the next decade. This will decimate the old academic institutions, who will be unable to compete as long as they are being led by Fake and Gay. (This is good news whatever your feelings are about Musk, a complex person if there ever was one.)
John, a guilty confession - I have a giant schaden-boner as a result of a petty personal grudge against those pretentious d-bags on the north side of the Charles over the whole L’Affaire de Gay. So this was like milk and honey for me.
Thank you. It’s been obvious for a looooonnnnngggg time that meritocracy was gone in the academe, but it took the most recent shitshow to drive a stake through its vampiric heart.
The rot goes back close to a century. Academia has called weird noises "music" and splotches of paint "Art" and Circular Flow Theory "economics" going way back.
Endowment funds should be taxed or spent down. No non profit should survive without fund replenishment from living donors. The dead vote should be limited to Chicago mayor elections.
Thanks for your round-up of examples of STEM research that's not different from looking for phlogiston or ether. Places like Unz.com are full of smug midwits saying that our cultural problems are due to people wasting time in bullshit humanities, when they should invest their high IQ's in STEM. I usually point out to them a remark of Hermann Hesse (either in or about The Glass Bead Game) that when truth, presumably the subject of the humanities, is degraded -- "there is no truth" (postmodernism) or "truth is what benefits the proletariat" (Marxism) -- then soon the engineer's calculations go astray, and the bridges start falling down. When you abandon "soft" subjects like philosophy or politics to the Left, don't be surprised when the Left dominates academia. That relates to your second point, about DEI as such (AA hires, PC topics of research) but your first point shows that even STEM is now largely bullshit. So you have students not capable of real scientific research, but that's OK, because they're not allowed to do that anyway. There's no real difference btw a Foucault "scholar" and a physicist "exploring string theory".
Exactly. Far from a decorative embellishment, the humanities are foundational - everything, including science and engineering, rests upon them. Even from a historical perspective, language came before mathematics, and philosophy before aerospace engineering. This is not accidental.
Incredible that they spend every waking moment thinking about their identity and still manage to have zero self awareness.
“A man wrapped in himself is a small package indeed.”
Very good. Who said that?
I wish I knew. I went searching for who coined the phrase, but no one seems to know.
Mark Twain, probably.
Quote Investigator has an article about its origin. (I just looked.)
It's listed as anonymous, appearing in US papers in the 1910s.
Teach me to write before reading - Freeq already mentioned it.
That is a function of narcissism. The key giveaway in fact.
It is an act. A rehearsed performance designed to protect the wounded child inside. It's purpose is to stave off the self analysis healthy people embrace.
In another era they'd be denouncing Jews or heretics. They wear their opinions and righteous indignation as a disguise. That's why the Claudine Gays seem so insubstantial when prodded. There is nothing there but the performance.
It's obvious that all the popular stories now are written by narcissists.
Not necessarily. But they are propagated by them. The narcissist seeks to project an image of superiority. Your reasoned concerns about climate policy or immigration is because you don't see the bigger picture unlike them.
To be fair, that kind of narcissism operates on all sides of the political chasm. Even the left has some reasoned concerns that should be treated with some respect. It's the will to dominate and extinguish other perspectives that evinces the narcissism. I like to remind people of that from time to time. Of course the left is in power right now so the domination and censorship from that side is the most obvious.
But does the left genuinely embrace the concerns associated with leftism, or are those issues just narcissistic stilts to tower over normal people with an ersatz moral superiority? Consider how leftists have abandoned the poor in favor of intersectionality, or how women's rights are trumped by transgenderism.
I should have said "popular entertainment." TV, movies, comics. They write horrible characters--always the hero and villain at the same time--and get angry when people dislike their unlikeable self inserts.
But the MSM is run by them too.
They view their "identity" as "victimhood." An excuse to keep an enormous chip on their shoulder and treat everyone else badly. "You think you have it tough, huh Whitey?" "Only we women suffer this way. Men have it so easy." Envy, resentment and self pity are the cardinal virtues of Wokeism.
It's no longer about celebrating the accomplishments of certain American subcultures or women in the fine arts. It's not about being happy and grateful for what has been achieved and trying to better themselves and help others to do likewise because of the new opportunities.
It's about continuing to be a loser with a built in excuse. Even those who rise to the top like Dr. Gay know they don't have to put in the effort and justify being the beneficiaries of Tokenism by citing "White privilege."
Victimhood is Privilege.
Only we women suffer this way. Men have it so easy."
Really? Men have it easy? Men wake up early, go to work, stay long hours at work, provide for the woman, the children, and the pets. Men forsake sleep, sex, and joy to provide what’s needed.
Before the modern age, men went to war to protect women. All woman had to do was keep the house and care for the kid. If she wanted to work, that was fine.
But, women are mercenaries. They have very little loyalty. If the local men were to lose a war, the women would go with the victors, leaving the local men to die.
Please note the quotes. And the rest of my comment.
You did a great job. I just had to add my two cents to it.
Without Identity, one inevitably devolves into Self-Hatred (of varying types). This makes all other higher pursuits (religious, social, etc) Moot. So, one should DETEST those who show Self-hatred; because it is ultimately Anti-human & Pro-Djinn & Demonkind.
I'm convinced that the anti-white attitudes of so many immigrants is precisely a function of white ethnomasochism.
How can one have anything but contempt for those who hate themselves? Either it's a manipulative act, which is contemptible; or it's genuine
... which is contemptible.
It's the Demon possession.
Sometimes it's very obvious: Their eyes give it away. It's normally some younger (i.e. few centuries old) Djinn possessing the poor fool.
Even so, I blame the Human for being so weak & feckless as to let themselves get posessed like that. They need an Exorcism; nothing less.
Plus, many come from cultures where strength is admired. I won't name names, but we have enough experience from our imperial adventures to know today's hands-off approach is not respected. They see us as dominated by our women. They'd have a lot more respect if we hanged the rapists and child molesters in their ranks.
Meanwhile it says a great deal that our women are so eager to protect their rapists.
Women are drawn to strength, and women are famously poor at introspection. They react. The feelz rule all. An astonishingly poor mechanism to determine immigration policy in an era of government-sanctioned anti-male feminism that has us on the back foot. We are made to look unimpressive while those with limited prospects trigger older parts of their brains.
I strongly suspect that this is deliberate. Say what you will about them, the regime understands human psychology fantastically well.
Which is no reason for us not to understand it, and apply that knowledge. Why are men on the back foot? Feminism. Why is feminism ascendant? Largely because men are on their back foot. Stop behaving submissively, and start projecting dominance, and female instinctive drives will take over and they'll fall back into line.
Suffering invokes empathy, even sympathy, in a normal human.
Weakness breeds contempt, and chosen weakness awakens a fury and a hatred like none other, since it by evoking recognition (anyone can choose to be weak) it gives the onlooker a taste of the self-loathing and perversion of the soul that is self-chosen weakness.
Nice quote
Spot on.
Yes. It was their manipulative pornography of suffering that first led me to detest the left, even before I could put it into words.
The self-righteous lack self-awareness.
The real ingredients of a strong identity are one's place in one's family, church, and community. Modernity dissolves these things, and that is what has opened up the need in atomized people to embrace weak substitutes for identity, such as one's perceived oppression, handicaps, and desire to stick one's dick into mens' anuses or furfriends or Funko Pops or whatnot. (Sex and perhaps nation/race should be a part of one's identity, insofar as they define one's roles among one's peers, but not all the victimhood and defiance the Marxists have encrusted on top of them. Regarding race, it's obviously best to go through life unaware that there are any other races.)
If people could return to having strong local bonds of family and community, few of them would have the desire to fashion cheap synthetic "identities." But at the minimum, that would require a return to small-town living, an end to TV and cellphones and online video, and probably the strange disappearance from media, government, and activism of those of whom Jesus said, "You are of your father the devil: and the desires of your father you will do."
Benjamin Franklin - John Ruskin - Harry Emerson Fosdick - Mae A Byrnes - Dan Crawford
No one really knows.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/03/07/bundle/
Nice sleuthing
We used to stand on the shoulders of giant so we might see farther than them. Now we gleefully hack away at their ankles so the midwits don't feel small in their shadows.
👌
I suggest dropping the use of the term "identity" - it has nothing to do with that word. The correct term would be race. Race-based hiring practices. Race-based politics. Race-based entertainment media content - go look at anything produced by Hollywood/Disney post-2010 and tell me I'm wrong (please tell me I'm wrong because I don't want to be right!).
Claudine Gay is a race-hire. She is hired to be a magical negro. nothing more. Any black american should be outraged at the inherent racist condescension on display.
Another thing. John, did you notice that all her abstracts are structured the exact same way? Completely formulaic. It immediately made me think of the postmodernism generator. Maybe she actually used something akin to that?
(https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/)
Judging by the comic book industry in the US, we're coming up to the finish soon, re: Culture War and the woke having the upper hand. Now, using military analogies, this is typically the time when a western military would slow their roll and offer negotiating terms. That is a deadly mistake. Instead we, meaning anyone opposing the PC-woke-DEI-you-know-what-I-mean-agendas, must think russian: when the enemy falters, increase the pressure. If he collapses, hound him. If he routs, run him down.
The woke Napoleons have arrived at Moscow, and now Moscow is burning. The woke Wehrmacht has faltered at Prokhorovka. Now is the time to attack, rund the into to the ground - everywhere - and wipe them out.
It's like fighting. You don't aim the punch at the other guy's chin. You aim it at a foot behond his head - followthrough, you know?
We can do this by keeping the pressure on, and showing support for, those public figures who in our various nations says "No!" in any way to the Cosmopolit (Globalist for youngsters) Jagganatha.
On the identify vs race question, the former term is more general, which is useful as it encompasses hiring done on the basis of sex - a considerable component of the ideology.
The analogy with Napoleon in Moscow is spot on. I don't think the fall of woke will be a gradual, grinding process. Instead, they will reach the apex of their power, and then collapse like a wave approaching shore.
So long as the opposition doesn't go back to grilling the moment the woke falter, that is.
On the surface, "identity" was launched as a collect-all shorthand. In reality, the term was chosen to hide reality: race-based politics, essentially the same as those of nazi-Germany.
Therefore, refusing to use "identity" and instead insisting on using race or sex or sexual preference or whatever brings to light the real issue.
"We embrace diversity as part of our hiring practices" sounds positive; "We always consider the race of applicants when hiring" sounds horrible.
It's the same as with negro -> black people -> persons of colour ->? Or "eminent domain" sounding better than "naked theft by the governement" or "unwilling penis-receptacle" for "rape victim".
No matter how you adapt, you will be "in the wrong" and the real issue will be obfuscated.
That's a very good point. Plain speech is rhetorically powerful.
Commonly racism was understood to erase the identity of an individual by lumping them into a group. "All Black people are alike." Funny how that's the very result of CRT and "diversity." John Doe is not valued for being John Doe but for belonging to "Oppressed Victim Group" as a black or brown or sexual deviant. If he is White and finds women attractive he's out of luck. A great way to dehumanize everyone and turn us against each other.
Which is largely the point. That, and reducing native majority populations to morally defenseless helotry.
Can't be anti-racist without being racist in the first place.
It's like matter and antimatter.
But DOCTORRR!!! Claudine Gay’s ‘identity’ is not simply based on race, but on the victimhood ‘intersectionality’ of being a woman, a lesbian, an imbecile (life is hard. It’s even harder if you are stupid —John Wayne) and very possibly ‘identifying’ (and certainly ‘presenting’) as a gerbil.
A gerbil. Lmao.
She's not a lesbian. She's married to a white academic named Christopher Afendulis and they have a teenage mulatto son.
The turkey baster begs to differ!
Im going to use the term fake and Gay more often henceforth. This is no longer to be construed as a reference to homosexuality, which might be offensive, but to Claudine Gay who has been proven fake in the manner most characteristic of this sclerotic DIEing regime.
How did I miss this obvious connection?
Makes a decent meme:
https://patrick.net/post/1380546/2023-12-06-harvard-has-lost-all-credibility?start=41#comment-2020788
Nice.
Bravo, Sir!
Thanks. I wish I could come up with wording or an image that had even more bite to it.
I assure you that any consilience between things I say and reddit norms is both coincidental and regrettable. I've avoided that insufferable place since Aaron Swartz' departure.
What's a "Reddit"?
Lolol!
Haha quality!
The university system was actually begun by the Catholic church in the Middle Ages. In the US, it has evolved into a system for students to prove that they can lie and grovel well enough to fit in as employees of corporations, the government, and the education system itself.
This is why I don't mind these morons making a meal out of everything.
Their fuck-ups are coming in so fast now, it's just a matter of time before their world collides with reality.
Agreed. This is how I learned to stop worrying about these leftist abominations. They are and will be the victims of their own creations. Let them eat leftism.
Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake. Or, as the case may be, an endless sequence of them.
Well, yes, but the prestige universities in the US (especially Harvard) were founded by Puritans. As the religion of their descendants evolved from Calvinism to Universalism to today's crypto-Calvinist worldview the universities reflect, or often lead, that evolution. The common thread is it's always a lifelong struggle to prove to themselves and each other that they are part of the Elect.
Yes, I didn't intend to imply that U.S universities retain any connection to Catholicism, but rather perhaps to comment on how far they have diverged from their origins. And yes, brilliant observation: Elect = Elites. Leftism is in large part a quasi-religion, entailing a struggle to attain higher social status, which makes their claim that leftists desire a classless society of equality/'equity' especially hypocritical.
Arguably, the Ivies, which started as Puritan seminaries, haven't really diverged that far at all.
I think that part of the reason why our current elites are so retarded is because they reject the notion of eliteness. What kind of aristocrats would you have if they hated the very notion of aristocracy? Aristocrats that embrace absolute egalitarianism display the worst attributes of elites (snobbishness, narcissism, indulgence, decadence, etc.) while having very few of the positive characteristics of aristocrats (noblesse oblige, Christian charity, quality leadership, long-term planning, military vigour, stewardship, etc.).
That’s part of the problem. Their purported egalitarianism feeds into their narcissism and leads to a compounding feedback loop.
They were founded as seminaries. Many so founded have collapsed into secular incoherence.
People slowly but surely rediscovering the original meaning of the "few bad apples" idiom, which has been turned completely on its head by bad apples and the evaporation of agricultural competence over the past 100 years.
The signs of rot were there decades ago. The whole exercise since then has been fruitlessly (pun intended) debating which was the first bad apple and which apples might still be intact, as a way to distract oneself from the rot's rapid spread. The correct solution, as in the idiom's original meaning, was to cut the loss and burn the whole bunch, then identify how it happened and make sure that never happened again.
Bingo. While I suspect things could still have been salvaged several decades ago with some judicious firings and/or firing squads, it's been past the point of saving for many years. Although I'm fairness, this has only become obvious fairly recently.
I'm not so sure they could have been. The subtler point of the "bad apples" idiom is about the visible vs. the invisible. If one apple is visibly rotted, that means it's had quite a while - several weeks at least - to reach that point. You can't even be sure that's where it started, and not simply that it's the first one you noticed. Meanwhile the mold is working invisibly on numerous others, and the only way to know which is to cut them open and look, at which point they're ruined anyway. The rot you see on the surface is always, only, ever the tip of a vast iceberg of corruption; it's the fruiting body of the organism, which only develops in the final mature stage of its lifecycle.
And this is why Inquisitors have the power of exterminatus.
I don't think exterminatus is the right answer. To push the apple metaphor, usually a fungal growth is the manifestation of conditions that facilitate its growth (e.g. dampness). Take the apples out of the wet barrel and most of them can be saved. [I guess I'm trying to be the voice of humanism in this corner of the internet, recognizing the problem while looking for the most humanitarian way of solving it. I realize I'm contradicting my initial comment somewhat, but as you can see I'm trying to work this out.] I think the answer is to look for the right way to reformat our social landscape so that most of the apples can be saved. I think the sword is necessary only in very limited cases. At least I hope so.
Certainly not talking about literal swords here, to be clear.
To go with the apple analogy, the first thing is to take them out of the bin and spread them out. This is a direct analogy to closing the universities: dissolve the containers, remove the contents, examine them, and keep whatever isn't rotten.
This will happen naturally if the banking system doesn't completely implode soon (or something else even worse occurs). Wasn't Musk proposing to create his own university in Texas? I haven't followed up on that story, but if he is successful, you'll see a lot of copy-cats, a lot of new tech-focused colleges and universities starting up in the next decade. This will decimate the old academic institutions, who will be unable to compete as long as they are being led by Fake and Gay. (This is good news whatever your feelings are about Musk, a complex person if there ever was one.)
Well, if we don't snuff out these lunatics now, we will be trapped on this planet until our sun burns out. And there will be no Imperium of man.
"...700 Faculty Urge Against Gay’s Removal..."
I guess we know who else practiced plagiarism.
YEP.
Exactly!
John, a guilty confession - I have a giant schaden-boner as a result of a petty personal grudge against those pretentious d-bags on the north side of the Charles over the whole L’Affaire de Gay. So this was like milk and honey for me.
Thank you. It’s been obvious for a looooonnnnngggg time that meritocracy was gone in the academe, but it took the most recent shitshow to drive a stake through its vampiric heart.
Wonderful.
My reaction to all of this can also be characterized as "stop, I can only get so hard."
Schaden-boner!
Well if that isn't the word for 2024, I don't know what is.
You two crack me up. Thx for early morning chuckles!
Okay, maybe I was overstating it (ever so slightly) when I called it "giant" but that was meant to include depth of feeling, too. ;-)
The rot goes back close to a century. Academia has called weird noises "music" and splotches of paint "Art" and Circular Flow Theory "economics" going way back.
Endowment funds should be taxed or spent down. No non profit should survive without fund replenishment from living donors. The dead vote should be limited to Chicago mayor elections.
The endowments should be confiscated and used to pay off student loans.
At the very least, federal student loans should never go to well endowed universities. Let the universities invest in their students.
And let students declare bankruptcy from such loans if they get a crappy education. Skin in the Game, Baby!
If unis had to cover the loans of students who can't actually get a job they'd be a lot more careful about who they admitted and what they taught.
There should be no federal student loans, ever, for any reason.
Thanks for your round-up of examples of STEM research that's not different from looking for phlogiston or ether. Places like Unz.com are full of smug midwits saying that our cultural problems are due to people wasting time in bullshit humanities, when they should invest their high IQ's in STEM. I usually point out to them a remark of Hermann Hesse (either in or about The Glass Bead Game) that when truth, presumably the subject of the humanities, is degraded -- "there is no truth" (postmodernism) or "truth is what benefits the proletariat" (Marxism) -- then soon the engineer's calculations go astray, and the bridges start falling down. When you abandon "soft" subjects like philosophy or politics to the Left, don't be surprised when the Left dominates academia. That relates to your second point, about DEI as such (AA hires, PC topics of research) but your first point shows that even STEM is now largely bullshit. So you have students not capable of real scientific research, but that's OK, because they're not allowed to do that anyway. There's no real difference btw a Foucault "scholar" and a physicist "exploring string theory".
Exactly. Far from a decorative embellishment, the humanities are foundational - everything, including science and engineering, rests upon them. Even from a historical perspective, language came before mathematics, and philosophy before aerospace engineering. This is not accidental.
Math is hard, and racist. So much for STEM.
Damn, your writing is like an arrow shot straight into the withered blackened heart of academia.
I love it.
One of these days I will distill the perfect Amazonian neurotoxin that will finally put the beast down.