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.
Related!
A little more about one of those sailors…
A link from the link.
While Kiwi ANZAC dead whirl in their graves like runaway gyroscopes, the ghost of Churchill is rethinking his take on Naval tradition.
Is it a bad acid trip, or is it Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Sammich Cookie?
Videos here.
@aelfheld, who said:
You think so? I disagree; the Arab mindset vis-a-vis women is highly hypocritical. And, as well, flavored heavily by the matriarchy. Most of those rules about clothing don’t come from the men, they come from the old women, the senior wives threatened by the young hotties. You’ll note that the rules only apply to Muslim women, while the sex slaves get put on display…
You have to step back and analyze why these rules exist in the first place; it’s all about control. And, access: Young attractive women are a commodity that has to be controlled by the elder members who’re already established, because if it were left up to the men, those older women would be out on their ears and replaced by younger, more attractive women. In an endless cycle of consumption… The rules about clothing and all the rest are there to cut the older men off from those younger women and control them in order to keep the older women in the place they fought to get into. The sex slaves don’t figure into it all that much; only the wives that can contribute legitimate children.
In the end, the enforcers and the people who came up with the rules are all the older women in the society, and they’ve got damn good reasons for doing what they did.
There’s a lot of truth in that, but there is also the purely religious impulse: Muslim culture has it that Allah created Adam as an upright, righteous man, and Shaitan colluded with Eve to take him down, using her wicked sexuality.
Female sexuality therefore interferes with male righteousness (as established by Abrahamic rules), which involves self-mastery. Women need to be covered up so they don’t ruin men’s righteousness. Their very existence is problematic, being as they colluded with the devil to destroy men’s morality.
@ Farnsworth M Muldoon;
I do not know what the details are on this NZ Navy ship. I doubt that the reality will ever be put forth anywhere that the likes of us will be able to know what actually happened, that night.
I do know, from personal experience, that every single time I’ve been around one of these creatures that exist mostly as adjectives, they’ve all been promoted and put in charge of things not due to any real competence or skill, but because they were a member of the right demographic. In this case, lesbians.
You can either promote for competence or for some other adjective you choose. If it’s not competence, you’ll wish you had when that “person of adjective” screws things up by the numbers, because they’re rarely competent. It’s a sad thing, but true: The fact that they trumpeted that woman’s lesbianism to the stars likely means that they wanted to promote a lesbian more than they wanted to promote a skilled captain, so… Do the math.
It’s about like the bad old days when you had to be a member of the aristocracy to be entrusted with any responsibility, because “blood”. Today, it’s all about the identity politics.
Behold! The new LGBTWTFBBQ aristocracy… Just as incompetent and unaccountable as the old version. All that’s really changed is what grants that patent of nobility… Used to be, breeding. Today? Deviation and perversion.
@dicentra, who said:
Ooohkay… You may picture me facepalming, and then raising a finger in finest Nathan Fillion fashion:
Here’s the thing: The way you’re framing it, here, the causal factors for this are religion, religion, religion.
The way I see it, it’s culture, culture, culture… The religion in question serves to provide justification and rationale for what they’re doing, not the other way around.
I am pretty sure that the impulse to do what they’re doing came in long before the idea of Islam was ever conceived; the religion came out of the culture and the environment, not the culture out of the religion. Remember, man is not the “rational creature”, he’s the “rationalizing creature”.
If you read the Quran, what you find is a mish-mash of weirdly interpreted earlier religious texts, carefully selected by the authors to support the things they wanted to do… Just like with the way the Jews picked up stuff while they were in Babylon, copying wholesale the stories about great floods and so forth.
In the endless debate about which came first, the chicken or the egg, I’m going to have to plump down for the cultural chicken that laid the religious egg.
I mean, you could blame Islam for all this, but… I think it’s rather further back up the tree, and due to the people that came up with the religion in the first place.
Chicken or egg?
Looks like chicken.
The official rationale for the law is to better track diseases like bird flu, but it seems reasonable to assume that other, more nefarious reasons exist–power for the sake of power, endless expansion of government bureaucracy, and ever increasing restrictions on the raising of meat animals in the name of vegetarianism and “saving the planet”.
Given McWhorter’s misrepresentation of Amy Wax (“blithe”) he should remove the beam from his own eye before denouncing the mote in her eye. (If such a mote even exists–I didn’t notice any “sloppiness” in those interviews.)
If you like your overcoat, grab it now.
It’s as if they have no clue as to what a military force is for.
Oh, good show.
Well, I’m generally a fan of civility. Assuming that both parties are debating in good faith, it tends to make things run more smoothly.
But that word, assuming.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen appeals to civility – or rather, demands that one indulges the other party’s vanities – used as way to shut down rebuttals or any untoward lines of enquiry. That it’s so easy to prompt gasps of indignation, or feigned indignation, and claims of emotional injury – even at a prestigious, very expensive law school – is itself a problem.
Again, mouthing warm noises about “affirmative action” – i.e., racial favouritism in admissions – is widely regarded as a default piety; but noticing the predicate – the shortcomings that are implied – is regarded as a default sin, a sign of wickedness, at the very least some gaspworthy rudeness.
Likewise, it’s somehow not rude for a recent immigrant, someone belonging to a racial minority, to exult, triumphally, at the prospect of America becoming a white-minority nation; but if a white person demurs, and isn’t thrilled by the prospect of demographic replacement, then this is denounced and openly mocked as “white supremacy,” racism, fragility, rudeness, etc. And thus, a basis for further scorn.
A gay patriarchy, perhaps. Perhaps. I have seen sociology studies about Afghanistan and similar hard-Islamic societies where full burqa requirements are in effect. Also reports from western men, non-military, who have lived in those societies who observed the creepy virtual absence of women. The suppression of overt sexual norms resulted in a down-low culture of homosexuality and the “boys for play”. Or so they said.
Mahound codified as holy writ much that was in nomadic Arab culture. Still, it seems a stretch to think women in a patriarchy would have no influence on the rules under which they live.
It also seems a stretch to think religion, spreading beyond its roots, won’t effect an alteration on those other cultures among which it takes root, causing them to resemble in some aspects the culture from which the religion sprang.
Note the occasional reports from American troops in Afghanistan, angry that they were ordered to never interfere in the boy-rape culture.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
But instead of a kindly old geezer, you’ve got ambitious mediocrities with the manners and morals of a sea lamprey.
I did read elsewhere that the ship lost power before running aground, which immediately makes conclusions about the captain’s competency more uncertain: Running aground while under power generally ends a captain’s career. But if the ship first loses power one must study what the captain did (and did not do) when power was lost as well as what led to the loss of power.
Also: Why the seeming high frequency of recent incidents involving loss of power?
DEI engineers?
Well, being lectured on the importance of respecting feelings by people for whom “too white,” “so white,” and “whiteness” are pejoratives of choice, their go-to put-downs, is a bit much.
Ah, but it’s only their feelings that are of any import.
The non-reciprocal dynamic is practically a signature of wokeness. See… well, pretty much anything in the archives.
I don’t know that you’re wrong, but strongly suspect the reasons lie elsewhere–such as the growing tendency of various Western governments to neglect their militaries. Note the shrinking combat fleets, the gutting of the logistics branches, the sight of ships covered with rust, etc.
The dismal parade of prancing academics like Ruger wailing about their trauma and irreparable harms is nothing new; it may have predated Larry Summers’ personal downfall at Harvard in 2006(?) but as I recall that was the first time I saw a grown woman — theoretically a liberated one and a Harvard faculty member at that, whimpering that she thought she would faint when Summers described what he thought were contributing factors to the then-dearth of females at the high end in STEM. At the time I thought the reports of her whining were a gross calumny, but was immediately proved wrong by the orchestrated chorus of support for her in her woe. Summers, of course, was immediately struggle-sessioned and ousted in what I believe was the radical left’s first major public power flex against one of their own who just wasn’t woke enough.