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.