Verboten Realities
Lifted from the comments, here’s an interview with Professor Amy Wax. Topics touched on include academia’s practised unrealism, declining competence, and the seeming irrelevance of whether a thing is true:
You know, the word truth never appears in his op-ed… Usually, it was falsehoods that undermine trust, back in the good old days, and truth that supported trust. Now they’ve turned that completely on its head. Whether what I said is true or not seems completely irrelevant.
The discussion, at 24:45, of who gets to define extremism – and, very much related, The Party Of Shoplifting – is, I think, entertaining and rather on-the-money.
Update, via the comments:
The complaints against Professor Wax were compiled, with some enthusiasm, by the law school’s Dean, Theodore Ruger, who claims to have experienced “lasting trauma” after hearing Wax speak. This, remember, is a supposedly grown man. An intellectual.
Ruger’s improbable assertion echoed those of several students who would have us believe that Wax’s mere presence on campus is “physically and emotionally harming all of us.” And whose list of grievances included one student who resented the expectation that in order to win a debate, she “had to prove herself” – i.e., make a compelling argument – and another who was crushed by the suggestion that affirmative action policies can leave their supposed beneficiaries academically unprepared.
At which point, the word irony springs to mind.
This, then, is the standard at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. Where tuition is a mere $76,000 a year.
So far as I can see, Professor Wax’s heretical comments – whether on the statistical benefits of bourgeois values, or on cultures of dysfunction, or on “equity” versus competence, or on her own students’ performance disparities and drop-out rates – have yet to be refuted by those trembling with indignation. They have, however, been denounced as “hate speech,” “racist,” “segregationist,” “white supremacy,” etc.
Apparently, among our betters, it is now scandalous to suggest that a way to minimise the risk of poverty and imprisonment is to be diligent and hardworking, charitable and civic minded, and to “eschew substance abuse and crime.”
Again, $76,000 a year.
At which point, it’s perhaps worth repeating this, from an earlier post on those supposedly traumatised by Professor Wax and the fact that she exists:
Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.
Update 2:
In the comments, ccscientist adds,
And the result is very often disaffection and resentment, which is eagerly redirected, not least by many of Wax’s critics, towards “whiteness,” or “white supremacy,” or “structural racism,” or some other self-flattering conspiracy theory. The resentment may be misdirected, or entirely unearned, but it is exploitable.
It’s also worth remembering that Wax’s comments about performance disparities and drop-out rates among her own students were prompted by Glenn Loury, who had noted, correctly, that such disparities must necessarily result from racial favouritism and wildly varying standards in admissions. A point he explains more fully in the short, and very much recommended, video embedded here.
Wax was essentially confirming Loury’s own reasoning, and stating clearly what Loury had cautiously tip-toed towards. And yet she, unlike he, is demonised and punished for articulating a statistical necessity, an observable fact. As Wax puts it, common knowledge, albeit of a kind studiously ignored by those doing the punishing and puffing out their chests.
As Wax says in the video linked above,
And noticing the knot, the mental contortion, is very much forbidden.
That needs to be a meme.
Well, as a broad directional yardstick, a snapshot of ideological and moral difference, the excusing and enabling of habitual, emboldened criminality is not a trivial point, or unrelated to broader concerns.
And examples of the prevailing twistedness, the most modish ‘progressive’ attitudes, aren’t exactly hard to find.
Legalizing shoplifting (which is the effect of what they’ve done) sounds like extremism to me.
I repeatedly encounter that attitude among liberals I know: We must say (or not say) various things because of how they may make Certain People feel. And thus pronouns become mandatory. Racial differences in achievement and crime become verboten. And so on.
That reminds me: There was supposedly an episode of the Glenn Show podcast sometime in the last year which I’d meant to listen to but lost track of, in which Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss racial differences in crime rates and while they agree that blacks do offend at a significantly higher rate nonetheless the police and courts should treat blacks more leniently for the sake of racial reconciliation because black paranoia is real and can only be assuaged if blacks stop going to prison so often.
Has anyone here listened to that podcast?
Charles Murray weighs in on Amy Wax vs. the thought police. (All but the first four paragraphs are behind a paywall.)
It is a common ploy for liberal and left-wing fascists to excuse censorship and punishment of dissenting views on the basis of “civility”: The left is allowed to use vicious, demonizing, and even inciteful rhetoric, but conservatives are required to pussyfoot around controversial issues.
And open borders, everything is racism, 52 genders…
And recreational thuggery.
The complaints against Professor Wax were compiled, with some enthusiasm, by the law school’s Dean, Theodore Ruger, who claimed to have experienced “lasting trauma” after hearing Wax speak. This, remember, is a supposedly grown man. An intellectual.
Ruger’s improbable assertion echoed those of several activist students, who would have us believe that Wax’s mere presence on campus was “physically and emotionally harming all of us.” And whose grievances included a student who resented the expectation that in order to win a debate, she “had to prove herself,” and another student who was supposedly crushed by the suggestion that affirmative action policies can leave their supposed beneficiaries academically unprepared.
At which point, the word irony springs to mind.
This, then, is the standard at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. Where tuition is a mere $76,000 a year.
As I said in the post linked above,
Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the endless unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.
And from the thread following the post linked above:
Apparently, among our betters, it is now scandalous to suggest that a way to minimise the risk of poverty and imprisonment is to be diligent and hardworking, charitable and civic minded, and to “eschew substance abuse and crime.”
Again, $76,000 a year.
OK…Yet another thing that has been bloody obvious to me most of my life yet for the most part goes unspoken. Not that it isn’t acknowledged with something of a wink and a nod, and spoken by some people, but to say this out loud, clearly and without apology, in “polite” company, brings…mmm…opprobrium* upon one…don’t ask me how I know…this: The more intellectual a given population is, the softer, weaker (both physically and emotionally) and more averse to objectivity that conflicts with their expectations they become. One can point to “warrior philosophers” and such as an exception, but even amongst many of them, in the context of the warrior class, they lean to the softer side. Not making a judgement about them, just an observation.
*opprobrium…did I use that right? ISTFG, that’s the first time I’ve ever used that word. Swearsies. Honest. I feel kinda weird now…maybe I did it wrong.
[ Post updated. ]
Here I am, toiling at the weekend again. Heroically.
[ Consoles self with prospect of apple crumble and custard. ]
Here I am, toiling at the weekend again. Heroically.
Ooh, good crumble. Nice and tart.
She’s a sane woman in a mad house.
Another forbidden reality: male/female differences in athletic performance.
Noticing that the lies are systemic, pervasive, malicious:
The interviewer, who seemed to have done his research by reading her Wikipedia bio, expressed his concern at a statement by Wax that the US would be better off with more white people. I was vexatiously misquoted, says Wax, I said that we should be more selective about CCC (cultural compatibility and closeness), even if it has the unintended side-effect of importing or begetting more flesh and blood white people, and because of that I was maliciously accused of actually liking white people and wanting them to flourish.
The permitted speech norms for conservatives, which the interviewer is enforcing and Wax is going along with, is that you’re allowed to nurture sentimental (and completely ineffectual) hopes for aspects of white culture but not for white people. The morality of non-discrimination demands indifference (but doesn’t forbid glee) about the possibility that there’ll be no blue-eyed children in Sweden by 2100, with conservatives being allowed to express the hope that the replacement Swedes continue to drive Volvos and eat pickled herring.
Wax attempted to go back to the cultural compatibility and closeness theme with her story about her Korean correspondent who, not having troubled to learn about the Anglo protestant concept of loyal opposition, wanted Wax to be ritually disemboweled. “I hate to say this but their culture is not our culture” – Wax hates to make a banal observation about cultural diversity because white people aren’t allowed to make such statements unless it’s to thank newcomers for their ethnic food. She was trying to point out that just because the “model minorities” don’t cause trouble in school doesn’t mean that they’re truly assimilating, that their contempt and resentment towards their host nation often runs very deep, that they might have little interest in being the preservers of its culture. The interviewer cut off that line of thinking as being an anecdote. But it does raise questions about how “low and slow” immigration should be – zero, for example, is both low and slow.
Not that different from the white leftists I’ve known who never met a punishment of dissent which they didn’t like.
The what-ization of institutions now? Hmmmm?
Sooner or later, everyone comes around to patriarchy.
Melodramatic claims of trauma or harm are classic Cluster B tactics to emotionally blackmail people into silence and conformity.
Our society improves only as it learns to recognize such behavior and reject it out of hand as beyond the pale. You know, like our forebears did.
The endless, convoluted dishonesties – to be mouthed loudly and often – would get a little wearing, I think.
There’s an exchange in an earlier video, discussed here, in which Wax mentions the evasions and double standards used by devotees of “equity.” The practised, neurotic avoidance of the obvious. She recounts their bewilderment, or feigned bewilderment, at why, despite the slyly lowered standards, the favouritism, and the claims of “latent ability,” the supposed beneficiaries rarely flourish:
It’s almost funny.
If further, more dramatic illustrations of this particular madness should be needed, this may fit the bill:
If you think I’m joking, do guess again.
And here’s the thing. The pretence is now so perverse, so unmoored from reality, that it’s tempting for those outside of it to assume they must be missing something that would make it make sense. Because otherwise it would just be… well, unhinged. A ludicrous ideological corruption.
As I said before, regarding the apparently scandalous notion that all cultures and subcultures are not in fact equal in their likely consequences:
It’s all so transparently untrue. And yet you’re not supposed to notice.
Or God forbid, to mention it.
More on Amy Wax, from the inestimable New Criterion.
Some reference to the Twelve Labors of Hercules seems apposite. Particularly the Augean Stables.
On the upside, I am, I’ve just discovered, being taken out for lunch.
Theodore Ruger, who claimed to have experienced “lasting trauma” after hearing Wax speak.
Ruger, being a major maker of firearms, I get PTSD just reading his name.
This is a fun game.
[ I must use coasters. I must use coasters. ]
I finally managed to read McWhorter’s op-ed. If anything, it’s worse than she says.
Arguably the most egregious passage is this:
The aspects of 1950’s America that Amy Wax praises have nothing to do with what McWhorter refers to here. And it is absolutely certain that McWhorter knows this. And so we have a tenured professor at Columbia University lying through his teeth to defame someone whose truthful and well-motivated views hurt his feelings. “Thou shalt not bear false witness”.
Here’s a semi-rhetorical question: How should good people treat those who see them as enemies and seek to do them harm?
[ Returns from tavern, gorged on turkey roast and all the trimmings. ]
Yes, it’s a curiously glib construal, or misconstrual, of Wax’s point. A clumsy smear. But then, McWhorter’s academic environment is one in which pretentious victimhood, and bad faith more generally, are rewarded. And all but mandatory. At some point, presumably, the dishonesty becomes a habit, a kind of muscle memory.
Also from McWhorter’s New York Times editorial:
And yet there is nothing blithe about how she says this in that hour-long conversation with Glenn Loury (“Amy Wax on Penn suspension & the feminisation of institutions”). Quite the contrary–she shows serious concern for the welfare of students who, due to “affirmative action” programs, are accepted at universities for which they are not prepared or not qualified and who would do better at lower-tier universities.
Lie after lie after lie.
A very brief conversation between Glenn Loury and Amy Wax: The Institutional Contradictions of Affirmative Action | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax | The Glenn Show
This. A thousand times this.
Would that make such an academic a meathead? 😉
Absolutely. His description is perverse, a lie. At best, a weird distortion.
But again, if your academic environment is steeped in such dishonesty – as McWhorter’s is – and if your social status depends on pretending not to know certain things and mouthing obvious lies, and perhaps internalising those lies – as McWhorter’s does – then the habit can be hard to break. Even if one were inclined to break it. And I’ve seen little evidence that McWhorter has much interest in any such effort.
Arguably, of course, there’s no material reward for doing so. And obvious penalties.
Thank you, David, for doing what I neglected to do: Provide a link to the exact spot in the interview where Amy Wax talks about this.
If you had told me in 1975 that I would someday root for Archie Bunker while laughing at Meathead I would have said you were crazy.
It’s perhaps worth considering the importance of such pretensions, and what may hinge on their perpetuation.
The most statusful universities now seem to rank “diversity” and “equity” as being of at least equal importance to intellectual ability. It’s certainly a higher priority than probity or truthfulness or honest discussion. The contrivances are routinely referred to as a mission, the highest possible goal. And if much of that supposedly sacred mission becomes suspect or superfluous, there’s a great deal of status at risk, and a cash value attached.
Without the pretence, the endless, shameless victimhood we see would be much harder to justify and sustain, and vast amounts of unearned but exploitable grievance could be lost. That’s social and political leverage. The vanities of an entire social class could be called into question. Even the outcomes of presidential elections could conceivably be altered.
T’aint a trivial thing.
Steve Sailer noted this tendency to overlook failures to meet academic prerequisites because the candidate had “overcome hardships”, and pointed out something obvious: namely that a candidate who fails an entrance requirement hasn’t been able to overcome whatever hardship they might have had. It’s misplaced charity, and a bet (cost of admitting a sub-par candidate, opportunity cost of rejecting better candidates) without sufficient evidence that Mr or Ms Sub-par With Sad Story has the talent and mindset required for more advanced work.
The modern academic perversity is a surreal thing to witness.
A few years ago, I attended a graduation ceremony at UC Berkeley, for the first cohort of a brand-new STEM program in Data Science.
The keynote speaker was a very senior UC official, possibly even the Chancellor, I can’t quite recall. She focused almost entirely on the ongoing effort that would be required to achieve the essential goal of improved equity and diversity.
I couldn’t help notice the ethnic makeup of the graduates, as they paraded across the stage to be greeted by her. A very diverse population indeed. Approximately 15% White, so UC is pretty close to achieving their goal there, at least.
They may have partially overcome those hardships, but the rhetoric is crafted to obscure the fact that they are still not qualified for that institution.
Remember the term “social promotion”?
That was a big thing in the 1960’s, with liberals arguing for the vital importance of promoting kids to the next grade no matter how badly they had failed to learn the material: If the kids were “kept back” this would be humiliating, while if they were “promoted” they would make up in the next year what they’d failed to learn in the last year. No evidence was presented, as best I recall, only assertions based on, well, “niceness”.
CAVEAT: I was 10 years old in 1965, so my memory of what was happening is bound to be fuzzy, but I do distinctly remember hearing about this while I was still in the classrooms which were on the side of the elementary school for grades 1-4.
I plan to burn bridges with a few more libtards by suggesting to them that they obtain all their vital services from affirmative action hires.
And in a few cases of extreme libtardery, suggest that they live in those “hoods” that they insist have no more crime than nice upper class suburbs.
Men and women and trans: being a little older I have male friends with very low T (almost zero in one case). Did it make them less of a man? No. It robbed them of endurance and sex drive. After menopause, almost all women have low hormones and low sex drive (and other adverse side effects such as sagging skin, dry hair). Do they still act like women? Of course they do. How you act and react to the world are not just due to hormone levels. I know, that poor dead horse that I am beating.
Men and women and sports: to take a simple case, almost 100% of men of all ages (up to 70+ yrs) have greater grip strength than 100% of women of any age. Guys, have you ever shaken hands with a woman with a crushing grip? hahaha no, of course not. Never. This has nothing to do with inherent worth but everything to do with sports. It also bears on women thinking they can fight a man because they watched Black Widow fight some guys. Men have twice the punching power (more I actually think) and much more ability to take a punch. It is not smart to act like, as a woman, you have any weight to throw around. In my younger years I remember us guys punching each other in the shoulder just for fun or to say hello with force that would be called assault if we did it to a woman. Part of chivalry was that guys understood never to hit a woman and women understood that their man would protect them (being stronger). A quaint idea I guess.
Affirmative action: Thomas Sowell has clearly shown that blacks admitted to top schools for which they are not prepared often fail to graduate (from anywhere). Those offered a top spot who chose to go to a lower ranked school had a much higher graduation rate and good later success. In other words, AA students are being sacrificed for the sake of appearances (a point Wax makes of course). But libtards don’t mind breaking a few eggs to make their DEI omelettes.
Hormone levels in childhood and youth affect brain development, and I would expect those effects to persist thereafter.
And then there are habits of cognition on top of that….
Please alert David’s kitchen staff when the horse is sufficiently tenderized.
Professor Wax is a BALLER!
WOW, it is so CLEAR that she ran out of fucks to give A LONG TIME AGO.
What a hero.
[ Resorts to online slang dictionary. ]
David, I think you have a reader who is not an old geezer.
Das, you need not get off my lawn.
A verboten thought: If only the clerk had been armed with a semi-auto shotgun.
She’s right (and funny). The Democrats are the extremists.
And the result is very often disaffection and resentment, which is eagerly redirected, not least by many of Wax’s critics, towards “whiteness,” or “white supremacy,” or “structural racism,” or some other self-flattering conspiracy theory. The resentment may be misdirected, or entirely unearned, but it is exploitable.
It’s also worth remembering that Wax’s comments about the performance disparities and drop-out rates among her own students were prompted by Glenn Loury, who had noted, correctly, that such disparities must necessarily result from racial favouritism and wildly varying standards in admissions. A point he explains more fully in the short video embedded here.
Wax was essentially confirming Loury’s own reasoning, and stating clearly what Loury had cautiously tip-toed towards.
And yet she, unlike he, is demonised and punished for articulating a statistical necessity, an observable fact. As Wax puts it, common knowledge, albeit of a kind studiously ignored by those doing the punishing and puffing out their chests.
As Wax says in the video linked above,
And noticing the knot, the mental contortion, is very much forbidden.
[ Post updated again. ]
An unwise favouritism which academia has been indulging in for 60 years.
You’d think that such smart people would have learned better by now.
That academia has not learned better can, I think, be attributed to the stupidity of cloistered academics, the group-think fostered and demanded by academic culture, and the steady degeneration of academia as the sixties radicals infiltrated and took over. Nowadays even actual islamo-fascist terrorists are welcome.
In fact, the earliest black riots on university campuses were perpetrated by “affirmative action” students who were utterly unprepared for the rigors of university life and lashed out at “whitey”. But instead of recognizing that they were mis-matched to the institutions and could have done better at less demanding schools, the blacks raged at “racist” standards and a lack of “black history” classes.
Thomas Sowell has written about the 1969 violence at Cornell University.
Walter Berns is another professor who wrote about what he saw at those riots/campus takeover.
Wax’s story is a pretty good shorthand for the ongoing, quite rapid corruption and rot of academia. As she says in this video, which I strongly recommend:
These mighty keepers of our culture. Our betters.
Academic tenure was supposed to protect professors, and yet professors are among the least courageous in our society.
Some friends.
Heh. Well, quite.
Perhaps by friends they mean social status.
Indeed.
Now, there is a psychological and professional cost to being a social outcast, no matter how just the cause that one adheres to. But tenure is supposed to be the professional protection that makes it possible to dissent. And yet here we are. I believe it was Victor Davis Hanson (and I am sure many others) who remarked that life in academia trains people to be conformists and non-risk-takers.
Professor Wax is being sanctioned despite her accusers offering no evidence to refute her statements, and despite presenting no evidence of her ever discriminating against students. Indeed, her accusers are themselves accused of indulging in, shall we say, procedural irregularities, and of avoiding clear, reciprocal and objective standards.
As remarked, for instance, here:
And when your list of supposedly damning sins include the whining of a student who resents being expected to be coherent in her arguments, at a law school, as if that were an outrage and clearly racist, then some self-reflection seems in order.
Suddenly recalled this song from many decades ago:
“Their Way,” written by Bob Blue, recorded by Bright Morning Star:
I came, I bought the books, lived in the dorms, followed directions.
I worked, I studied hard, made lots of friends who had connections.
I crammed, they gave me grades — and may I say not in a fair way.
But more, much more than this, I did it Their Way.
I learned so many things even though I’ll never use them.
The courses that I took were all required — I didn’t choose them.
You’ll find that to survive it’s best to play the doctrinaire way
And so I knuckled down and did it Their Way.
Yes, there were times I wondered why I had to cringe when I could fly.
I had my doubts, but after all I clipped my wings and learned to crawl.
I learned to bend, and in the end I did it Their Way.
And now, my fine young friends, now that I am a full professor,
Where once I was oppressed, now I become the cruel oppressor.
With me you’ll learn to cope, you’ll learn to climb life’s golden stairway.
But like me, you’ll see the light and do it Their Way.
For what is a man? What can I do? Open your books — read chapter two!
And if it seems a bit routine, don’t talk to me — go see the Dean.
They get their way, I get my pay… We do it Their Way!
If the clerk had hit that first guy that went through the door with whatever he had in his hand it might well have stopped the thugs. The hesitancy was . . . ill-advised.
Penn should be ashamed.
Minor quibble perhaps but ‘ongoing’ seems to contradict the suddenness implied by ‘quite rapid’. To borrow a phrase, the intellectual bankruptcy seems to have come about gradually, then suddenly.
Such exalted beings are untrammeled by
plebeianbourgeois notions of morality.Heh. Wax actually used that line, or a minor variation of it, during this interview, which I was listening to, exactly when I spotted your comment.
The interview linked above is worth a listen, by the way. As Wax puts it, her basic point is, “People have to be allowed to fail, on their own level, and according to a single standard.” In other words, you shouldn’t cheat or degrade standards and credibility, irreparably, in order to achieve some politically congenial colour palette.
This is said following an anecdote about a would-be doctor who flunked his exams not once but four times, resulting in the mobilising of an entire department of handwringers determined to fudge and make unwarranted accommodations, solely on grounds of the student’s skin colour. Because they wanted a black trophy.
To which, Wax adds, “But think about the patients who are going to have him as a doctor.” And one might also think about the competent black medical students whose credentials may be tarnished or rendered suspect by such supposedly high-minded efforts.
See also firefighting, policing, maths teaching, and any number of other things.
“Gradually, then suddenly” is how I subconsciously interpreted David’s comment.
One of the other elephants in the room is that if these young people truly do have the raw talent necessary to succeed, the (almost always public) schools that they attended utterly failed in their duty to help them acquire the ability to pass those tests. Note the lack of inquiry into why that might be. Perhaps look at places where school choice is an option, specifically vouchers, and see if there is some sort of difference there.
I think I failed to convey my impression that the deliquescence of the academy has been going on for quite some time, starting well before the spoiled brats of the 1960’s were allowed to go . . . unspanked.
And likely a school closer to home. I suspect that the going-away-to-college thing might have done more damage to people from lower crime, more rural black communities than others. Though getting out of the more…urban…mentality probably helped.
Oh, I quite agree with you: The catastrophes of the 60’s could not have happened if academia had not already become seriously decadent and corrupt.
The ongoing moral rot:
Columbia University has updated its anti-discrimination policy to say that race-neutral policies that have a “disproportionate impact” constitute discrimination.
For those who missed it, not entirely unrelated to the topic at hand:
For instance, in the RAF, where brownness and womb-having have now been deemed of more importance than, say, passing a basic fitness test.
One big problem with not allowing people to fail is that failure quite often leads to later success. I know a good number of people who were the kind teachers and administrators shook their heads about. Oh what a pity so-and-so just will not buckle down and conform to being a good student. He’ll never get into college with that attitude. I now see many of those same students on FB driving their 35 foot fishing boats with three 450 HP engines on the back, running successful multi-million dollar businesses that they started themselves, etc. I thank God good people like that didn’t waste years of their lives reading Bronte or being force-fed Keynesian economics.
Related!
@pst314
I also do sometimes catch the Glenn Loury & John McWhorter podcast. Two powerful and usually very careful minds. Not infallible, of course.
In connection with Amy Wax’s point, John McWhorter can be somewhat fussy and prim when it comes to the manner in which the racial orthodoxy is challenged. He did go through the great effort, and risk, of writing his book “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America”. Of which I own a copy. The book is precise and effective. I expect he found Amy Wax’s approach sloppy, and so he didn’t want to stick up for her in full.
That’s one that I haven’t read yet.
What’s the deal with the magic sticks they are holding? Does it give them special indigenous-people powers? Maybe the sticks are cursed? Which idea is stupider, that or DEI?
Related to related and DEI!
@pst314
I had a high school friend who became a freshman there after we graduated in 1968. I visited him there in 1972. I don’t remember anything about that violence or talking with him about it, which shocks me.
Until the Internet came along, I paid little attention to the news aside from headlines. Obviously. I wasn’t that much different from today’s students.
Heck, it was only a few years ago that I first learned about the 1970 kidnapping and murder of Quebec’s Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. I was shocked that it had happened, and I was shocked that, again, I had zero memory of it.
Which is utter bullshit. The supposed “patriarchy” they whinge on about incessantly? It’s as much or more a product of the older women in all those societies. Why?
Maintenance of position. You can’t have those young hotties out there taking advantage of the older women by soaking up all the old successful male juices. Those are the exclusive purview of the successful older females, who picked right when they were young hotties and sacrificed their young hottiness on those males. As such, it’s key and essential that they control their competition, the younger hotties.
The sexual politics of this crap are utter bullshit. Any patriarchy, any real one? Would not be set up the way our society is. It’d be all about access to young hot p*ssy, all the time, and the older worn out versions would mostly be living alone on ice floes, not least due to their loss of decent personality you could live with.
What’s amazing to me is how the average Western woman is unable to work out that things are set up for her benefit, and that it took thousands of generations of effort by her foremothers to get it that way. They pissed away all that advantage over the course of a century, thinking that the men had it so great. Reality? Most males in any society are basically meat-getting appliances for the women, and the rest of the “privilege” they are given are the smelly leftovers women with any real sense don’t want in the first place. Sure, great… Go wear yourself out and shorten your lifespan drudging away at the coalface, while we stay home and raise the kids. At least for the upper classes, this was a truth: Women had it better. Lower-class types got equally screwed, just in different sex-role based ways. Not much to chose between life as a household drudge and being the guy running behind the carriages or standing in the front line of mid-18th Century combat.
You would almost want to laugh at them, until you look around and recognize the damage that sheer envy and failure to think through consequence has delivered upon our entire society.
Women say that they want to be treated the same as men… Right up until they’re facing the consequences of that in real life. Observe what happens to that vaunted “Lesbian survey ship captain” in New Zealand: I guarantee you that the end of that “inquiry” will result in her not being held at all accountable for her failure in command the way a male would be. They’ll excuse her for whatever gross negligence was responsible for putting that 100-million dollar ship onto a reef, and her life will go on. A male in that job? Dude’s done for, period. Only someone whose first adjective was “Lesbian” can escape consequence, because… Woman.
That line of Jack Nicholson’s in As Good as it Gets still resonates, years later… “How do you write women so well, Mr. Udell?” “I think of a man, and then I take away reason and accountability…”
Ladies and gentlemen, I offer up to you the epitaph for our current society, with regards to the way all too many women in it conceive of their positions. They would burn you at the stake for pointing it out, but that’s a reality for far too many. Zero reason, zero accountability or responsibility. It’s always the fault of the patriarchy; never the women who actually set those rules in place and enforced them on their daughters with a viciousness that’s incomprehensible to a man.
Note who’s often the driving force behind honor killings; who really did Hester Prynne dirty. The average male loves him some slut, because sluts are more fun. The reality is that the slut isn’t loathed or hated by men, but by other women who rightly see her as a threat to their ongoing criminal enterprise, running men’s lives into the ground through overwork and bitching about everything.
La nouvelle trahison des clercs.
I was not prepared for college in spite of a pretty good high school. Terrible study habits and too much partying. However, being white, I had no ready excuses so I had to figure it out. Did smashingly after I did figure it out. If you are black, you can blame someone else.
You spoke French!
[ Gomez Addams falls in love. David Thompson glares. I dither. ]
@Nate Whilk: Are you stochastic Socratic?
My memory is extremely dim. I know I heard about these events when they happened, but I was only 15 in 1970.
Ever get the feeling the ‘patriarchy’ is the mid-wit version of Bigfoot?
Three out of four screwed the pooch, and they did it without penises.
All the time. And, when you call them on it, the usual suspects almost always cite something that actually comes out of the very real “matriarchy”.
Believe me, if it were truly up to men? Every woman would have to wear “revealing” clothes, and she’d have to keep herself fit enough to do so… Hell, were it truly the “male patriarchy”, clothes would likely be completely illegal in the first place, especially the sort of thing that makes you want to cite for false advertising… In a real patriarchy? No push-up bras, no hiding behind corsets or other things. It’d all be there, out in the open and available for the patriarchs to evaluate for fertility.
The fact all this crap is actually mandated and “controlled”? That false modesty enforced on the young hotties? That’s how you know the real source: Threatened older women with influence/control over the older patriarchs. They’re not worried about younger women being sex objects so much as they’re worried about losing the places they themselves earned by being sex objects when they were younger… And, more attractive. Probably better personalities, too…
A real “patriarchy” would look nothing like the BS these idiot women imagine; it wouldn’t be Margaret Atwood-esque fantasy (which is a female projection, pure and simple…), it would probably be more like a permanent frat-boy paradise of put-off adulthood and refusal to grow up. Valhalla, in other words.
Male goals and desires look nothing like what the girls imagine, or what they’ve actually enforced when they were able. Men would like to f*ck everything and anything without repercussion or responsibility; they’d prefer a rotating cast of dozens of different women, all willing to play “catch me, f*ck me” games, but not too hard… Just enough to make it a game. The only damn reason most men put up with the BS necessary to run civilizations is because that’s been more-or-less what the women in their lives wanted, up until lately when they suddenly got the bright idea that they’d like to be doing what the boys looked like they were doing, without ever having to pay the price that the boys were…
You get down to it, and the failure of our civilization is mostly down to the women deciding they’d like some strange, and that their heretofore successful domestication of their own men just wasn’t enough for them.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2024/10/verboten-realities.html#comment-180016
pst314 – Heh. Much appreciated. I promise not to kill the grass.
What attracts me to Prof Wax’s comments is that graduated from law school in California in the early 90’s and the academic disparity of what she’s talking about now was starkly obvious among my 1L classmates back then – a full 20 years before Prof Wax started speaking up on these issues.
Mine was not a top-tier school, so the affirmative action students in my particular school were even further left to the bell curve of academic qualifications than Prof Wax encounters. This is even after these students had been pushed into “Gifted and Talented” programs from K-12 in CA public schools. After they had been admitted to Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford and given scholarships despite the fact that they were academically unqualified for those institutions. This is after they were pushed into special tutoring sessions in college. So, not only were they admitted to elite institutions, they were given thousands of hours of remedial tutoring and they STILL couldn’t meet academic admissions standards for law school.
At my particular law school, the professors even put together racially segregated tutoring sessions where the tutors were the top performing law students from the prior year. They were instructed to call security if non-minority students tried to attend.
And, even with all of that malfeasance, the amount of pure corruption was staggering. Several of these charity-admission students showed up to class in brand new BMWs or Porsches. They were CLEARLY not lacking in “privilege.” They just weren’t smart enough to score well on the LSAT and not diligent enough to earn good GPAs in college, despite their family money and loads of special attention from the schools.
Nevermind the number of students who faked being minorities, so they could access these racially segregated benefits. One student comes to mind: This person took the trouble to adopt a hyphenated last name to make a French last name appear to be French-Spanish (which the admissions team would take as Mexican.)….This person drove to the first day of law school in a brand new Jaguar sedan – having graduated from 5 years at Stanford with no debt.
Oh, and this person was dumber than a box of rocks and had precisely zero interest in studying. So, yeah, for Prof Wax to be saying what she says in the way she says it makes her a BALLER. She’s rising out the academic ghetto of Penn Law and crushing the enemies of our culture.
I love it.
I got my STEM field bachelors degree in 1977. I don’t recall clearly, but I think there were a few (but not many!) blacks in our freshman weed-out-the-goats intro physics and chemistry classes. After that first year, I recall only one black physics or chemistry major and he was from personal observation rather mediocre. As best I recall nearly all the black students were in humanities departments.
I recall hearing about special remedial classes being set up at UWM even while I was in grade school. Year after year, failing students were socially promoted for “equity”, until they applied to college and were found to be unqualified even for local non-selective state schools. So the liberals and black activists demanded remedial programs in college to allow those kids to “catch up”. And then those remedial progams mysteriously counted the same as real college classes. And then all the other classes were dumbed down. Utter insanity:
Also recalled: The shibboleth “everyone should go to college”.
Which quickly became “regardless of ability”.
Ya think those professors were grifters and cloistered fools? Maybe?
[ Begins collecting links for Friday Ephemera. ]
The dress code for women in most of the Arab countries seems a more likely example of what the ‘patriarchy’ would mandate.