Deadly Batflu: THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!

 

The Supremes Do Not Seem To Be Getting Along

kinda interesting

5* '24 Shooting guard Ian Jackson Commits to Carolina

What???

I haven't heard anybody even mention this kid as a possibility. 

Scott Alexander: The Media Very Rarely Lies

You can see where this is going...so you can see why I agree: they much more commonly make stupid mistakes or mislead short of lying, strictly speaking.

No comment, though, on semi-comparing the NYT to Infowars...

Maximum Truth: The COVID Fudge Factor

Big if true.

Conclusions:
— Vaccines worked to prevent death. Really well, and as advertised. They held western death rates down despite elderly and obese populations.
— Lockdowns and restrictions were very effective only when combined with near-total travel bans, and when kept in place until full vaccination.
— It’s not clear that even the most effective anti-Covid restrictions pass a cost-benefit test, when it comes to freedom versus safety (10-15 days added to every life.) Everyone has their own preferences, and we should settle such differences democratically, without censoring and demonizing people.

Ruy Teixeira: From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism: A Democratic Story (Part 2)

link

Dems have gone so far to the left that they're losing their Old Guard.

Denying the Continental-Philosophy / Literary-Theoretic Roots of Political Correctness / Woketarianism // Trying to Link Analytic Philosophy to McCarthyism

I don't have any links for this right now, and I'm too lazy to dig them up. But I've seen two or three tweets recently that...and this is really weird...deny that the contemporary radical left has any roots in recent (postpostmodern or whatever the hell we might call it) Continental philosophy and "theory" (i.e. literary theory).

   Now...the link is, so far as I can tell, virtually undeniable. There's a well-known link between recent Continental philosophy and leftist politics. Gutting (I think) writes somewhere that the two have basically been inseparable since Sartre. There's no doubt that Marx looms large--gigantic--in both traditions. The pomo PC / Woketarian left's ceaseless, knee-jerk accusations of bigotry--with racism!, of course, being their current fave--seems pretty damn likely to derive from "the hermeneutics of suspicion...though I could be wrong about this. The incoherent morass of relativism, skepticism and nihilism seems prominent in both traditions--though the fashionable term now is "socially constructed"...a catastrophically terrible idea and term that has replaced 'relative', probably because it sounds kinda sciencey... Foucault's obsession with sex and power seems obviously to have influenced contemporary leftists--even if most can't say anything more about it than some incoherent nonsense like "everything is power!".  There's simply no doubt that recent Continental philosophy has been a massively important influence on contemporary left-of-liberal feminism--which is, basically, what feminism is now. And feminism spawned gender madness. Queer theory is undeniably a creature of Continental philosophy, and it has been a major influence on gender ideology and the left. Critical theory is a major component of Continental philosophy, and CRT is now the flagship philosophical theory of the left.

   The influence is so damn clear--especially clear to you if you lived through the paleo-PC era--that it just seems downright bizarre to deny it. 

   Hence the question naturally arises: what the heck is up?

   Is it a coincidence that there also seems to be some weird push afoot to link analytic philosophy to the extreme right--e.g. McCarthyism?

   I mean, analytic has always seemed reactionary to the Continentals...even though analytic philosophers lean strongly leftward themselves. Not--in the past, anyway--radically leftward like the Continentals...but strongly left. 

   I'd understand this if analytic philosophers had been standing up in any significant way against the wokification of the academy and the culture--but they have not been. They've rolled right over even on matters--like the definition of 'woman' and social constructionism--about which they ought to have expertise that runs anti-woketarian. 

   We have to hypothesize that something is up.

   Like all hypotheses, it might not pan out--but the facts cry out for an explanation.

   To be clear, I'm not an analytic philosopher "in the narrow sense" anymore--though I was raised in grad school to be sympathetic with it "in the broad sense"... But I try not to be tribal about such questions--obviously... Still, bias can creep in all over the place, for the weirdest reasons...

Weird Anti-Second-Amendment Weirdness

weird

Progressives Don't Want to Address the Threat from China Because RAAAAAAZZZZIIIIIZZZZMMMMM

These people have one (non-)argument.

Rufo: Recapturing Higher Education

Excellent news.

Noah Carl: Why Do Woke Activists Complain About Trivial Things?

link
Also, they're generally not too bright.

Taibbi: America Needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Russiagate

link

   The MSM's massive campaign of lies and stupidity should not be allowed to just slip quietly down the memory hole.

They spilled more ink and shrieked at greater length about any one fake Trumpian "scandal"..."loser" American war dead, injecting bleach, E. Jean Carroll's bullshit rape accusation, Mexican rapists, overfeedig fish, "very fine people"...than they have about their own idiocy and dishonesty re: Russiagate. About which they've been completely silent.

   Funny that the left has seized on "misinformation" and "disinformation" as the lead jargon for their newest campaign of deception, when the greatest disinformation campaign of the last decade was their own Russiagate.

   Hm. No...I almost forgot about: climate change, gender ideology, BLM race hysteria, everything in any way concerning Trump...  So Russiagate, the greatest dirty trick in American political history, would only come in about fourth or so.

Francis P. Simpa: "Why Should We Listen to Gates and Rice About Ukraine?"

link

I've long--though not always--had a high opinion of Rice. Mostly that dates back to just one instance in which she was honest about the (paucity of) evidence for invading Iraq. So that's not evidence about her expertise... See how cheap my respect is? 

Anyway.

I haven't read the piece because my VPN is messed up and I can't access the WaPo from home, and am too lazy to fix it. 

But will that keep me from commenting on it?

Noooooo...

I generally have a favorable opinion of the Biden administration's Ukraine strategy. In fact, I don't know what else we could reasonably do. However I do have a very bad feeling about further escalation. FWIW. Which is nothing.

It seems clear that we can't keep escalating forever without provoking a response.

Also I am inclined to agree that China is our biggest problem right now.

OTOH, we're already in the midst of it with Putin--and this is costing him a lot more than it's costing us. 

Bleed him dry seems like a very reasonable strategy.

OTOH, he has more to gain and more to lose than we have--so we'd expect him to be more committed.

I dunno man.

All I'm really saying is: I've been on board thus far, but I'm not wild about the suggestion to escalate--or quasi-escalate.

O'Neill: "The Woke War on Truth:" The Cambridge Dictionary Redefines 'Woman'

They could say that they're just descriptivists, and that the new usage is now common enough that it belongs in the dictionary. This could be true, but I'd bet money that they pulled the trigger more quickly on this one than they would have if conservatives had made an ideological push to redefine some term or other.

   Sidebar: they must have changed the definition of 'marriage'--probably some time ago. I wonder when...but not enough to look it up. In my view, though, there was enough indeterminacy in the meaning of 'marriage' to warrant or at least permit a change. (And: I'd bet that there was a change, and that the old definition included that it was a relation between a man and a woman...) There is no such indeterminacy in 'man' and 'woman.'

   Quickly: the new definition is utterly, ridiculously stupid. Here's the online version, with examples:

Woman:

An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth:

She was the first trans woman elected to a national office.

Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.

Aside from the other absurdities here: at no time in someone's life--so far as we know--does he or she have a different sex than he or she had at birth. Born male, die male; born female, die female. Of course they hedge with "said to have had." Was this person a different sex at birth? (Answer: no.) Or did someone falsely say that? (Answer: apparently.) 

   Finally:  someone who identifies as female?? No, not really...not, say, as a female dragon... So: as a human female. And: "as" an adult female--not a girl. So we're back to: a woman is someone who "lives and identifies as" an adult human female...i.e. a woman. So a woman is someone who "lives and identifies as" a woman... So a circular definition--and not merely in the sense that all definitions are interlinked with other definitions. The circle here is far too small. 

   Besides, I thought that "living as" a woman wasn't necessary? If Smith is male and "identifies as" a woman, but he doesn't "live as" one, the left's orthodoxy here is that he's a woman. In fact, for awhile--dunno whether this is still the loony orthodoxy--the line was that he'd always been a woman... Bruce Jenner, for example, was said to be a woman...always (except, I suppose, when he was a girl)--even when he was winning gold medals in the men's division of the Olympics, and even when he was fathering children. So the "living as" part is mere distraction. 

   Really finally: of course this doesn't make the left right about the issue. You can't make yourself right by getting all your buddies to use words differently--even if enough of you do it for long enough to make dictionaries change their entries. Get everybody to start using 'dog' to refer to cats, it won't turn cats into dogs; nor will it mean that cats have always been dogs.

Bivalent COVID-19 Vaccines: A Cautionary Tale

Boosters worthwhile only for older folks and others at high risk?

(via Healthy Skeptic)

Healthy Skeptic: Just When You Thought CV-19 Research Couldn't Get Any Worse: The Unvaxed Have More Car Wrecks!

 link

Carolina 80 - Louisville 59

Maybe the best bit: Bacot not only played, but started, ankle and all.

Love's all over the place.

It's great to get to get to see Dunn, Styles and Washington play serious minutes.

I really like what I'm seeing from RJ.

Medical Care for "Trans" Infants

and others.

Arendt Against Conformity

Something from the Nation that doesn't suck (?!)

IQ and University Major Again

From SATs.

Amid Backlash, Stanford Pulls "Harmful Language" List

Nice ambiguity in the subtitle:

The university’s effort to remove racist, violent and biased language from its website morphed into a PR disaster. Other colleges’ initiatives have fared better—perhaps because they are less transparent in their practices.

The intended meaning seems to be:  The language in question is genuinely "racist, violent and biased"...and Stanford had to back off of removing it. 

Democrat:Republican Faculty Ratio by Major

 

source

Konstantin Kisin on Climate Hysteria at the Oxford Union

 

Paul Ehrlich and Prophets of Doom, Past, Present and Future

I fell for the population bomb nonsense--though that wasn't the major source of my former position. I still find myself anxious about the population--my views about that simply aren't entirely rational. But, then, that could be said about any of my views, really. Yours too, probably. But my feelings about the population seem particularly resistant to evidence. So, though I don't think overpopulation is going to be the end of us...NGL...I kinda still feel like it just might be... Oh well.

   Anyway. 

   Climate apocalypticism is nuts--or so I currently think. I used to think we should just accept expert consensus on such matters. But we--or I--'ve learned that (a) you can't and (b) it's not as easy as we thought to even know what the consensus is, especially when the issue is controversial. And, with the ascendance of neo-PC / Woketarianism, we know that both scientific conclusions and reports about those conclusions are routinely distorted. So we end up having to think for ourselves about this stuff a lot more than we should have to...  Aside from all the other harms of climate hysteria, it may be causing widespread anxiety, especially among kids. And it's causing us to shoot for short-term moonshot solutions rather than the longer-term, incremental solutions that would be reasonable. This is the left's M.O.: fabricate or exaggerate a problem, spin up a story about it being a crisis, then ram through radical, left-wing policies while the iron is hot. Those policies will probably have been waiting in the wings--waiting for an excuse. The fabricated crisis is likely mere pretext...

   And finally: y'know, we will eventually run into an actual crisis... So crying wolf so often is likely not gonna help with that...

Republicans Pounce! on...Gas Stove Ban!

They're not going to take your gas stove and also they should take your gas stove because it's a loaded gun pointed at the head of Mother Earth and what about the children???????

   Obviously nobody's taking anybody's gas stove. The threat is that the CTRL-Left will try to ban them in new construction. 

   Because Climate Jesus is coming...and boy is he pissed... Also, if families with kids can't have 'em, then nobody can have 'em because...equity or something. 

    And, finally: if Republicans do something stupid, that's the story. If Democrats do something stupid, the Republican's reaction is the story.

   And really finally:  don't forget:  1 study = 0 studies.

Batflu Deaths by State Since mid-2020

Not sure what this means, but looks pretty bad for red states...

The Pandemic Is Still On: Please Continue Panicking

link

Banning Gas Stoves Is Good and Also Democrats Are Not Trying To Ban Them

By 2030:

"Gas stoves" do not exist, and nobody has ever wanted them.

"Vicarious Trauma:" The Next Rhetorical Strategy for Magnifying Sad Feelz?

link

Lysenkoism/Pseudoscience Watch: Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics

facepalm

Every one of these postpostmodernist grievance studies papers sounds the same and uses all the same sophistical arguments and general methods of reasoning. 

One of the many astonishing things about them is that--appearances to the contrary--they were not all written by the same AI chatbot...

Sohrab Ahmari: Race Was Invented By Liberals

False.

   This is a stupid strategy that many conservatives can't resist: accept critical petard theory in order to own the libs with their own ones. 

   Races are natural, biological kinds, though not of a terribly significant grade. A common recent leftist sophistry is to just deny the reality of inconvenient things: political correctness, cancel culture, Antifa, race...even, now, sex...all unreal... But also not. "Socially real"! The craptastic phrase 'socially constructed' and its cognates is part of the problem here. Among its other defects, it's used to mean unreal when that's convenient for the left...and not to mean that when that's convenient. It's basically an equivocation machine that gives them two different routes to rhetorical victory in every argument...and virtually guarantees to confuse any discussion it appears in. (Though Ahmari doesn't use the phrase, he might as well have.)

   How can someone's bullshit detector be so broken as to allow them to believe that no one noticed group differences in appearance among humans prior to the Enlightenment? 

   To the credit of the "the Enlightenment invented race" crowd, at least it's an actual, testable hypothesis--an improvement on their usual habit of offering unempirical, unfalsifiable gibberish... So here's a prediction of the theory: we should find no references to races prior to the Enlightenment. 

   Anybody wanna guess what the outcome of that test is?

Jacob Howland: How Universities Entered Cloud Cuckoo Land

Thinkery/Wokery, oh whatcha do t'me

Biden's Classified Documents and Double Standards

Double standards are pretty much SOP for politics, of course.

Heels 58 - Hoos 65

Yet another whippin' in C'ville...

Perhaps even worse, Bacot injured his ankle--apparently significantly.

Climate Apocalypse to End Life on Earth; Women and Girls Hardest Hit

Do you think these people ever listen to the bullshit they say?:

For women and girls around the world a changing climate means increased threats of gender-based violence.

A study in Kenya showed that domestic violence rose by 60% in areas that experienced extreme weather.https://t.co/bFFM0jnFQ3

— Samantha Power (@PowerUSAID) January 4, 2023

Vinay Prasad: Pandemic of Fear

link

Incidentally: still seems like masks don't work against respiratory viruses. But I'm so fed up with the CTRL-Left that I've lost my objectivity about it. I'm now actively rooting against masks. How stupid is that?

Eco-Leadership Barbie

You can't make this shit up.

MUST-READ Contemporary Progressive-Left Crazy in Yet Another Nutshell: Zeeshan Aleem, "How the Populist Left Has Become Vulnerable to the Populist Right"

Matt Taibi is incredulous.

As well he should be.

This right here really is a kind of instant classic. The contemporary crazy left in (yet another) nutshell. Not the hard philosophical left. There's no mumbo-jumbo about gender identity nor the oppressive essence of "whiteness," nor the social construction of math, nor any of that end of the crazy. This bullshit is all about how liberals who now criticize the left are evil and crazy and...and I want to stress that I am not making this up...:

"...funneling people from leftism to authoritarianism."

That's just a subtitle. So probably written by some jerkweed English major from Smith or whatever. Here are direct quotes from the essay itself:

   We’re seeing the formation of a pipeline that circumvents the center altogether — and directly connects left-wing to right-wing populism.
   A group of journalists and media personalities who once were at home on the far left has formed a niche but influential political subculture that encourages leftists to abandon leftism for the populist right.

   Assumption that need not be stated:  left: good, right: bad. Populism is good if it's on the left, bad if it's on the right. 

   But the subtitle really does capture one of the central delusions of the contemporary left: that it, somehow, is opposed to authoritarianism. Read through the nauseating Zeeshan piece to find out that the right and left are both, y'know, imperfect with respect to free speech! But, with respect to positions like open borders and "social inclusivity," the right is a bunch of Nazis, Tucker Carlson is a "white nationalist," and so on. It's the old lefty bullshit: there are only two kinds of issues: the ones on which the right is Nazis and the left is our savior, and the ones on which, y'know, we could all do better...though the right is still really worse. (Yes, yes, this same bullshit shows up on the other side, too...but it's become so fucking nauseating on the left that I can't be bothered to both-sides it right now...)

   Anyway.

   Nobody's funneling anybody "from the left into authoritarianism." The contemporary left is authoritarianism. Totalitarianism, actually.

   But this is a trope that the left has been playing for years: as they become more crazy and repulsive, they repel more people. Those so repelled have only three options:  (i) shut up and play along. (ii) Criticize the left from within--or nearby. (iii) Go over to the right. Very many choose the first one. If you choose the second, you will be vilified and cancelled--there's nothing the radical left hates more than a liberal. Except: a liberal they can't control. For many people, that leaves the right. And the right is basically the only place where one can now speak the truth about the whole gamut of lefty crazy from BLM to CRT to LGBTQRSTUV... Those who are constitutionally incapable of just standing by and oohing and ahing over the Emperor's new clothes almost have no choice but to go right. The cognitive dissonance of looking right at Bruce Jenner and proclaiming him a stunning and brave realio-trulio woman is just too much for some of us. We just aren't built that way. We can't look at cow and call it a horse. We can't pretend that universities are burbling cauldrons of racism. We can't stand among the cultists and play along as they worship the UFO beings or whatever. 

   Ok, I can't think about this anymore right now, not even to try to make some kind of point in conclusion.

Progressive Border Bullshit

These people are so deep in the groupthink that even when they try to write a reasonably sober news/opinion piece, it's almost unreadable. It's slanted at basically every point. And the unstated conclusion is, basically: amnesty. Sending illegals back across the border? Why, that's "straight from Donald Trump's playbook"! And that's supposed to be a refutation. Apparently it's finally ok to admit there's a border crisis...though, hai, no mention of who caused it... But that admission doesn't mean that we need to do anything hasty! Like: keep people out or send them back if they come in illegally. No way, Donald Trump! What's the alternative, tho...hmm...let me think...

   Why read something from MSDNC, you might ask? Well, it was on Real Clear Politics, and I try to read non-crazy lefty stuff...but, honestly, it's pretty hard to find non-crazy lefty stuff these days...

No, Kanye, Hitler Didn't Invent Highways

drags in parts, but mostly pretty damn funny:

Andy Kessler: The Voting Bloc Against Bossiness

YES

.

Incidentally, 'bossy' and its variants were declared "misogynistic" a few years back... Of course the left issues these proclamations on the thinnest, most implausible pretexts, and they frequently get bored and forget about them, or just outright change them. In the paleo-PC era, 'black' used to describe black people was declared politically incorrect. That one seeped out of universities into the media...saying "black" was verboten. That lasted for quite a long time--maybe as many as ten years...but eventually it faded away. Now we're not only supposed to use it, but we're supposed to capitalize it--and, of course, not capitalize 'white.' In my youth, 'colored people' was still a polite term. 'Person of color' was a phrase I only ever heard once in my early life, in high school, as a slightly jokey/derogatory way of referring to a black kid. Now, of course, 'colored person' might as well be the n-bomb...which nonblacks must not only not say but not mention, either! (Oblique reference is, apparently, still ok...but for how long? Perhaps the next diktat will be: nonblacks are not permitted to even indicate / reveal knowlege of the existence of the word...)  "Persons of color" is now virtually mandatory...though the left's fashions change quickly, and it may be in the process of replacement by "BIPOC," a ridiculous term. But ridiculous may be part of the point: one way you demonstrate your allegiance / submission to the left is by believing (or pretending to believe) absurdities. Another way is by using absurd terminology.

blah blah blah

John Sailer: DEI Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities

I had a long talk with Sailer recently about exactly this stuff. I think this is right on the money.

Julian Adorney: CRT Is Ideology Masquerading as Science

It's a tiny bit more complicated than this...but right.

Critical Theory generally views itself as having one foot in philosophy and one foot in social science. And social science views itself as science...a kind of science, anyway... There's at least some truth in both those views...but how much isn't clear. Social "science" is more like science the more toward the econ end you go...and more like a combination of bad philosophy and political activism the more toward the left wing of social science you go...where you'll find things like communication and sociology. Those fade into grievance studies (women's, gender, AFAM, "Latinx," etc.), which, like critical theory, seem to have one foot in the humanities and one foot in the (weak, politicized) social sciences. 

   Leaving critical theory in general aside for a second: CRT is a fusion of Continental-style, highly politicized, literary, obscurantist philosophy / literary theory...and left-wing, unscientific, politicized social "science." There's virtually no actual science in it. Its methods are literary and interpretive. It generally doesn't strive to make testable, empirical claims--let alone to test them. There's a fair bit of legal writing in CRT--which isn't nothing. But that's as rational / para-scientific as it gets. 

   The literary/interpretive methods favored by the left seek not to test the claims of the left, but to insulate them from disconfirmation--and even criticism. Much--bad--literary theory is a matter of taking an antecedently favored claim and spinning everything in its favor. Want Hamlet to be about homosexuality? With enough clever bullshit, that can be a Ph.D. thesis. I guarantee you that someone has written at least a paper with that theme. Want Moby Dick to represent capitalism? Again, by the standards of literary criticism, all it takes is some vaguely plausible spinning. Like a Freudian psychotherapist or a Leninist political theorist or a Lysenkoist biologist frantically spinning and stretching and nipping and tucking everything to fit the One True Theory, CRT scholars--generally "activist-scholars" are not out to find the truth. They're out to defend the faith. 

   Robin DiAngelo is a complete goddamned idiot, and that's all that really needs to be said about that.

   Adorney is wrong to assert that "how we organized and categorize the world is a human conception." There are differences between cheetahs and electrons and planets and quasars that we didn't make up. We recognize the differences. We don't make them up. (Assuming that's what he means by being a human conception...but God knows. I'm not harshing on him. But the claim is silly.)

   But, anyway: it's not that CRT is pure ideology. These things tend to be mixed. But there's so much ideology, dishonest interpretation, pseudoscience, obscurantism, and downright bullshit in it that any claim it has to being much more than ideology is tenuous at best. 

   Also, just a quick thought: I think it's a mistake to let these folks drag us down into the philosophical mud. If someone comes along with patently crazy theory and demands that (a) we radically reengineer society in accordance with it and (b) we must refute it in detail in order to refuse...we get to say fuck off. If Scientologists take over our institutions and try to turn them all into tentacles of The One True Faith, we get to simply refuse. We don't have to refute the view. We have no obligation to waste our time on it. The fact that it's a radical religion that wants to change everything is sufficient grounds for rejecting it. Now, the Scientologists are free to try to prove their view. But the burden of proof is squarely on them. And REEEEEEEEE is not an argument. Part of the left's tactics include relying on our rationalism to sideline us. They're busily destroying our institutions while we're frantically reading fucking Horkheimer in order to be able to understand their view in depth--better than they themselves do--in order to criticize it. If the USSR invades Europe, we don't have to refute Marx. Fuck Marx. And fuck you, commies. We get to reject radicalism because it's radicalism. We get to reject ideologies hostile to our entire worldview because they are hostile to our entire worldview. We don't have to have another reason. If the radicals want to sit down and patiently make their arguments, maybe they can convince us--but they'd have to do that. They don't get to set about destroying the world while demanding that we produce a detailed refutation of their view in order to stop them. This is the moral equivalent of war.

PEARL HARBOR + 9/11 x 1,000,000!!!!111

Look, the 2021 Capitol riot was an appalling, godawful national humiliation. Nauseating. Absolutely un-goddamn-believable. I've got no interest in minimizing or excusing it. 

   But NGL, getting a little tired of the left's panic pr0n about it.

Carolina 81 - Irish 64

Props to both teams. 

Fun game to watch.

We looked like we ought to look. Good D, among other things.

Caleb Love further secured a place in my heart when he went after the ND player who hard-fouled Puff.

White Supremacy is a Rainbow Coalition

link           Because pseudoscience means never having to say you've been refuted.

Jordan Peterson May Lose His License for Criticizing the Progressive Left

Medical mission creep was a problem long before the totalitarian left began taking over the country. And psychology has long been overly-influenced by--and overly influential on--the left. 

   As someone said on Twitter the other day: the DSM is starting to look more and more like the Necronomicon.

link

What's the Biden Administration Done Right?

I guess I'd say--recognizing my ignorance about geopolitics and foreign policy--that they've done a plausibly good job in Ukraine. I don't know what else we could really do, so I'm not sure how much credit to give them. I mean: make this as expensive as is practicable for Putin without risking American lives. Not to discount the importance of Ukranian lives... 

   Maybe their use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves was good? Doesn't seem so to me--but could be. Better would be: Keystone XL + drill, baby, drill. But I'm not sure those are competitors. Drawing down the SPR may have been necessary in the short term no matter what happened on those other fronts. 

   Thiessen's list seems plausible to me, though I don't understand a lot of the issues. I guess I had not been that clear on the link between passing the infrastructure bill and saving the filibuster...

Critical Walking Studies

Critical bullshit studies, more like:

   WalkingLab organizes international walking events, conducts research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborates with artists and scholars to realize site-specific walking research-creation events. WalkingLab acknowledges the traditional and unceded territories on which our work takes place. WalkingLab is accountable to Dylan Robinson’s insistence that land acknowledgements often operate from a politics of recognition and perpetuate settler colonial logics rather than disrupt them. As will be introduced through the podcast series WalkingLab asks walkers to consider where they are coming from in relation to Indigenous peoples and territories where they live and work, and to consider why a land acknowledgement is important to them.
   This introductory podcast will discuss the need for critical walking methodologies that trouble the often overused figure of the flaneur, and provide an overview of walking research-creation. You can find examples of this critical walking practice in subsequent podcasts.
   Walking has a long and diverse history in the social sciences and humanities. Recently, there is a sense of urgency and affirmation surrounding walking which is entangled with the desire to generate research and knowledge in situ, that is community-based, and that is attuned to more-than-human entanglements and encounters. In an era of complex social and political issues—such as climate change, capitalism, and forced migration, to name a few—there is an increasing demand for public and community action. Further, academics continue to grapple with ways to present research findings to non-academic audiences, while marginalized and oppressed people take up ways to transform and decolonize social and political space and institutions. To this end, walking has become more than a utilitarian or pedestrian mode of getting from place to place; walking is an ethical and political call to collective action.

LOOOOOOOL

Is this another grievance-studies-style hoax? Sokal 3? 

They really do cram in all the lefty buzzwords.

But my favorite brainless tidbit is "research creation." That's a fucking gem of academic-left bullshit.

David Sukoff: MMT Is Dead; It Must Now Be Buried For Good

A truly ridiculous theory.

Is It Racist To Like Big Butts?

Of course we already know the answer to any question of the form Is x racist?...

   This comes into conflict with Betteridge's Law in this case.

VDH: The Coup We Never Knew

It's like waking up in the Twilight Zone.

Andrew Tate

I never heard of this jerkweed before like a week ago. 

I don't know whether he's a sex-trafficker...but he's an asshat.

Think about how dim you have to be to get pw0nz0red by Greta Thunberg on Twitter. I mean really.

Men and masculinity are--obviously--under attack from the crazy left. The last thing we need is jerkoffs like this guy giving them ammunition. If all they were doing were criticizing guys like this Tate clown, I'd be on their side, actually.

The Free Press: Suppression of Alternative Theories of Alzheimer's in Medical Research

The Science!tm

"Decolonizing Epistemic Injustice"

Philosophy is becoming even more ridiculous.

The DEI-Industrial Complex

It's a grift.

"DEI" in Scientific Publications Up 4200% Since 2010

madness

DEI-Oriented Psychology of Math Organization Apologizes For Politically Incorrect Thought Expressed At Their Conference

One speaker admitted that boys have trouble in school, too...and that was one speaker too many...

Reversals in Psychology: A Window Into The Replication Crisis

link

And remember, kids: as Lee Jussim has pointed out: the replication crisis isn't really about replication; it's about the original, shitty science that can't be replicated.

HMD: The Myth of Systemic Racism in Policing

link

Robert P. George: The Woketarian Religion of Our "Secular" Universities

Ostensibly secular universities are actually deeply religious--their lives as punctuated and regulated by liturgies and rituals as any monastery. There's the land acknowledgment liturgy, the diversity statement ritual, the pronouns ritual. We have saints, demons, even holy months

— Robert P. George🇻🇦🇺🇸🪕 (@McCormickProf) December 30, 2022

Freddy deBoer: "Resilience: Another Thing We Can't Talk About"

Freddy deBoer just comes across as a likeable, thoughtful guy in everything I read by him. I think he's usually about 2/3 right and 1/3 wrong. And this is no exception. I haven't finished the Haight piece, and probably won't finish it this morning, so I'll just write this now, despite the fact that I'm foggy as hell and only read it once...brilliant decision... I don't see a lot of difference between the core of deBoer's and Haight's views. It seems--though, as a colleague of mine has pointed out, we need to see some numbers--that there is a kind of emotional crisis among young people. Or at least a notable problem. I agree with deBoer that that's a problem in itself, independently of any further, speculative effects about its effects on the nation and the economy. Contra deBoer, I do think that the shrillest and most politically-loaded reaches of this phenomenon does manifest itself as snowflakes--excessively, performatively fragile young people who exaggerate their victimhood and shriek about being in danger on university campuses when they hear that someone, somewhere, might be saying something at odds with the craziest views of the left. "YOU'RE KILLING US" is something one reads of them saying--a lot... Also contra deBoer: this is not about--or not merely about--dismissing (some legitimate) claims of discrimination. 

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The Progressive Slippery Slope

WSJ: The U.S. Government's Woke Indoctrination

Don't call it "training."

God I hate being right all the time...

"DEI" is a mechanism for institutionalizing hard-left, progressive identity politics ideas and policies.

All the words--"diversity," "equity," "inclusion"--are equivocal or dual-aspect. They sound like they might all mean something like fairness. But they don't. They sound like they might be politically neutral--things everyone might agree with. But they all have a place in the vast network of leftist insanity that gives them specifically illiberal-leftist meanings. And in their actual applications, they are all hard-left and anti-liberal. They're the public face of an insane, surreal, dystopian worldview. They have been specifically engineered to have a public face that sounds nice. And happy. And liberal. But each has an esoteric face as well. And, on the esoteric side, each has a role in the theory, as well as actual applications, that are irrationalist, antiliberal, neo-racist, anti-Western, anti-American and prope-Lysenkoist. How so many people vaguely on the left can be sanguine about a theory that, in effect, declares that black is white and 2+2=5, I will never understand. Some women just have penises, you see. What's the big deal? What kind of bigot thinks that only men have penises? Obviously anyone who hesitates in any way to accept that there are female penises needs more "diversity" "training"...  Race has absolutely nothing to do with biology either, bigot. It, too, is a matter of self-identification. Except, of course, it isn't. Just ask Rachel Dolezal. Oh and, inconsistency, it's also a matter of social roles. As everything is. Because something something social construction.

   But the important part is that this whole burbling cauldron of deranged psychopathy must be force-fed to the entire country at once. It may not be criticized. It may not be questioned. Impermissibility of rational assessment is a crucial component of the view. Thou shalt not doubt might as well be its first commandment. Of course everything outside the view must be automatically questioned--and those questions are deemed automatically fatal. But nothing within the view is to be questioned. Everything in the view. Nothing outside the view. Nothing against the view.

   Totalitarianism.