Megan McArdle: The Interview that Exposes Academia's Cluelessness (A Must-Read!)

No time to discuss this right now, but I say: read it and follow the links.

   I'm not sure that Anth is actually the worst offender...that I don't care much about. The real problem is that the problem of lightweight Lysenkoism is such a massive problem in academia. And the interview with the President of the American Anthropological Association is, indeed, both representative and embarrassing. Professor Rouse comes across as a clueless, sophistical Lysenkoist...which I guess is better than a clever sophistical Lysenkoist, really...

   Stupid ideas in the service of bad politics has taken over the academy. This is a crisis. There was more caterwauling in the media over the relatively minor threat of teaching creationism in biology courses back in the '90s. That would have been stupid, and I spoke out against it publicly...but it was nothing like what we've seen in the academy since the '80s... It was bad then, and it's catastrophic now.

   The comments on the McArdle story are instructive--they are so idiotic and clueless that I couldn't read more than a few...but it tells you where the mind of the average progressive's at...

Here's a link to the Boghossian et al. report

Inez Feltzscher Stepman: The Quietly Competent Side of the Trump Administration

Agreed.
Eliminating the doctrine of disparate impact seems to me to be one of the most important things the administration could do. I certainly hope it comes before the Supremes while there is still a sane majority there--who knows what the future holds?
Nuking DEI is also very important--though it's also important to realize that DEI is just a catspaw. The real problem is institutional capture by the radical left. (In academia, anyway--the only institution I can speak of with any authority.) DEI was just a broadening of the left's "diversity" ploy that's decades old. Before that, it was "multiculturalism." Now they're turning to "decolonialism." Their tactic is to come up with happy-sounding rubrics to advance their radical doctrines. I'm sure they're already at work producing new ones. Making up and redefining words is something they're good at--and it's been bizarrely effective for them. But that's a whole different topic, really... Also, of course, we have plenty of evidence that, in academia, at least, only the "Diversity," "equity" and "inclusion" language is being abandoned--the ideas and policies remain, under different words (e.g. "justice," "belonging," "access.") My own institution is still pushing "equity", apparently confident that it can get away with that one so long as the other two aren't conjoined with it.

Basic Logic: An Honest Review of Women's Suffrage

I'm certainly not convinced...but a lot of this is plausible and coheres with a lot of what we know:

HMD: The Scourge of Teen Takeovers

link

I continue to think that the central aspect of the left's insanity is its refusal to acknowledge plain facts. Everyone knows what's going on here...except for leftists...secure in their echo chamber...

They have an almost superhuman ability to simply ignore facts that are right in front of their noses.

It'd be funny--if it weren't so repulsively idiotic--that they continue to try to blame such stuff on the pandemic...

HMD:

Democratic elites have been telegraphing a message to black teens: as victims of white oppression, you are not responsible for your misbehavior. Theft is a reasonable response to a rapacious economic system; violence in the name of racial justice is understandable. The average teen may not follow politics closely, but the sentiment behind Brandon Johnson’s 2025 pronouncement about law enforcement (“It is racist; it is immoral; it is unholy—and it is not the way to drive violence down”) is widespread enough to penetrate even the hermetic world of teen culture.

and:

Teen takeovers are not a mystery. They are the predictable result of a culture that increasingly refuses to hold lawbreakers responsible for antisocial behavior, especially if those lawbreakers are black. Every institution that once imposed discipline—the family, the schools, the juvenile-justice system, the police, even public opinion—has been weakened. Despite elite hopes, government programs cannot substitute for the habits of self-control and respect for law that make civil society possible, however. Until those habits are restored, Americans should expect more takeovers and a widening divide between jurisdictions willing to enforce basic norms and those that are not.

When I was young, I though that it was conservatives who refused to face facts, and liberals (which we had then) who were intellectually honest and willing to recognize unpleasant truths. I honestly don't know whether that was ever true...but that's the way it seemed to me.

Now, of course, it is just the opposite.

Conservatives today aren't intellectually pure as the driven snow by any stretch of the imagination...but the left has simply come unhinged...

Peter van Buren: Why the Dems Can't Kick the "Trans" Obsession

Look, this is a litmus test. Transgender ideology is a set of obvious, undeniably-false falsehoods, contrary to science and ordinary human experience, similar to Night is when the sun is up, Puppies are adult dogs, or Most people are left-handed... No one believes that women have penises on the basis of good reasons. Most who do believe it believe it because the party has told them to--and they have, over years of being on the left, developed the ability to more-or-less believe on command. Most female transgenders who believe it believe it for roughly such reasons--transgenderism among women and girls is typically a social contagion. Most male transgenders are fetishists with autogynophilia...and they believe it (if they really do) as part of a fetish. Many lefties don't believe it at all--they just pretend to in order to remain a member of the cult in good standing...to avoid excommunication and "cancellation"...

   So long as Dems maintain their commitment to transgenderism, they're unfit to be elected on account of woketarian madness. If they refuse to back off of even the most obviously false, obviously insane dogma of Woketerianism, you shouldn't even consider giving them your vote...and we haven't yet even mentioned the boatload of other idiocies they've accepted as tenets of their tribe...

   One of the delusional beliefs on the contemporary left is that it is the right that has radicalized. In fact, of course, the right has moderated, perhaps most notably on non-heterosexuals and same-sex marriage. The right moved left--i.e. toward the center--as the left rocketed leftward--i.e. toward the lunatic fringe. The left is so radical it doesn't even know where it's been moving...it can't even admit its own radicalization... Maybe this is what it has against the DSA insurgents...they admit they're radical...though they don't disagree much with the contemporary Democrat mainstream... Or maybe it's because they mean it when they say, e.g., Defund the police...whereas the Democrat party picked it up as a fashionable slogan...which they did, to some extent, support with practical measures...but they doubt it enough to at least have the good sense to motte-and-bailey it when pressed...and now deny that they ever even mouthed the words...

   Oh, and: let's not forget that the Democrats' embrace of transanity has led to the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of thousands or tens of thousands of children in this country alone... I'm more interested in the madness at the theoretical level...but that madness has had horrific practical consequences... If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities...

RIP Mitch McConnell [NO!!!!], Lindsey Graham

[LOL how the hell did I get the idea that McConnell was dead??? He is not. Congrats on being alive, Senator!]

Without McConnell, Merrick Garland would be a Supreme rather than Gorsuch. (Obama and Biden are already responsible for the three worst justices on the court--one of whom seems barely qualified, another of whom seems outright unqualified...all of whom were chosen for DEI reasons...)

Perhaps Graham's finest moment, IMO, came during the Kavanaugh hearings. Dude was absolutely right on. It was a disgusting spectacle.

RIP to both.

Lott: Trump's Immigration Enforcement (and Other Policies) Really is (are) Slashing Violent Crime

B...b...but...the Undocumented commit 10,000% less crime than AmeriKKKans!!!!!!

Ed Kilgore: The Dems' "Long-Awaited Pivot to the Left?" [sic]; or Rejection of the Dem Establishment?

What I want to do here is nitpick at a fantastically loony suggestion embedded in the following:

The big debate raging among Democrats this year is whether the renewed energy being exhibited by the progressive wing of the party reflects an ideological development or something else. Unsurprisingly, there are many voices suggesting a long-awaited “pivot to the left” by Democrats is finally underway, as Ben Davis, a Democratic Socialist who worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, wrote in The Guardian:

After the last month, Democratic leadership should be seriously taking stock of their position. The energy is on their left. The people are on their left. Democrats want fighters, and they want a politics rooted in the collective struggles of the masses, not decided in smoke-filled rooms. We still need moderate Democrats to win those pesky median voters, for now. But the party’s leadership is deeply out of touch with its base. A leftist wave is cresting across the country. [my emphasis]

 LOLOLOLOLOLOL

A long-awaited pivot to the left????

How far fucking left are you thinking there is left to go?

They're barely balancing on the left edge of sanity as it is...

It is beyond any serious question that the Dems lurched far to the left over the course of the last decade+. It makes little sense to suggest that anyone has been waiting for any such a thing...

Unless, of course, you don't think they lurched far enough...

...or:

Want them to move leftward economically, too.

I think it's probably both...but mostly the latter.

Many Dems are incapable of recognizing/admitting how far left they went...but there's just not a lot of left left, socially speaking, after Women have penises, DEI, mass censorship campaigns and quasi-open borders...

What they seem to want now is for the party go socialist, too.

Or at least what they often mistakenly think is socialism--a Nordic-style expansive social safety net / welfare state...

See, I think economic leftism, confused and disastrous as it usually is, is at least sane--unlike the "Great Awokening." We want socialism is the sophomoric battle cry of losers and the economically uneducated...but, unlike Women have penises and Abolish the police, it's not outright nuts.

Miranda Devine: Democrats Haven't Learned a Thing from the Biden Fiasco

link

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this all to me is that anyone would put a pudgy, doughy pic of himself like that on a hook-up app... 

WSJ: How the Smithsonian Lost America's Plot

Nothing about this surprises me.

I haven't read the report yet, so in some sense I reserve judgment. But I'd actually be surprised if it weren't generally right. A by-now-familiar mishmash of leftist political ideas, derived largely from now-rather outdated Continental philosophy, French literary theory, feminism, postmodernism, and critical theory has become the quasi-official ideology of the intellectual left. These ideas are pretty thin gruel, but they cohere with leftist politics, and they're easy to master. Once you learn a few names and a few simple rhetorical moves, you're set. You can pretend to understand the philosophical underpinnings of any subject, even if you've never read a word of Aristotle or Descartes. It takes little training and even less brains to simply issue an accusation of racism (or sexism...or "transmisogynoir" or WTF ever...) against anything you dislike or disagree with. Name-drop Fanon or Judith Butler. Memorize a few quip-templates like "As Foucault has shown, everything is power," or "It is long past time that we decolonize x." It's much more demanding and time-consuming to refute such bullshit than it is to introduce it into a discussion. And it generally functions like one of those smoke bombs villains deploy in comics and movies--when dialectically cornered, just throw some of that into the discussion and escape in the confusion...

Such ideas are fine to discuss in philosophy seminars--though the time would be better spent on almost anything else. Part of the problem is that the ideas are so poorly-justified and of such low quality. It's more like a collection of curiosities. But to dogmatically accept such curiosities as orthodoxy across so many areas is madness. Bad ideas are one thing. Unquestioned orthodoxies are another. The two together are very bad indeed.