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The professional activist class seems to consist largely of destructive people of bad character--some of them moral defectives from the start and most others weaklings easily swayed to do the worst. In the late 1980s I had the misfortune to be in graduate school getting a foretaste of this banquet of bullshit and saw something in our backyard that captured the essence of what was coming: a bird lay breathing rapidly in the grass but as I approached I realized it was a mass of maggots giving the corpse a ghoulish appearance of life.

We can speculate on what killed that bird, but the nature of what infested its remains was clear.

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I was reading this morning about the average cost per case for male students who have been subjected to these kangaroo courts:

"Cases of male students and others challenging sexual misconduct and harassment charges cost colleges an average of $187,000 each to defend, said Ed Bartlett, president of Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE), a group that advocates due process for those accused under Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination. In cases where the schools lose, he said, the average settlement imposed is $750,000, bringing the annual cost to $41 million for universities."

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/10/07/colleges_learning_costly_woke_math_in_the_courtroom_school_of_hard_knocks_797604.html

And I will repeat what I said in the comments of your last post: activists were able to do this as they appealed to the liberals in authority, who in turn did not want to seem like they were illiberal. And this has only accelerated during the Trump admin and beyond. But, at the same time, more and more people are becoming aware of the damage that is being done in the name of Liberalism, and it is trashing the left, Democrats, and said liberalism. Parents reacting to CRT is a good example of this.

Altogether, this shows how our decentralized political system is so important.

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Today I saw my great niece and her best friend coming out of a bedroom in which they had just dressed for a high school prom dance. I greeted them with "Wow, look at these gorgeous babes!" And they beamed back at me. I was glad to be free to say something that was spontaneous and pleased them. But I was also aware that this was one of few remaining places where I felt such freedom. It's a large family, and none of them would have thought anything of my statement, but would have nodded in agreement or added to it. Because they are, in fact, gorgeous babes. At the same time, I know that in modern university settings my statement would have been viewed as a vicious attack, tantamount to rape, especially once the girls had internalized their women's studies (or is it now gender studies?) indoctrinations. Henceforth, the only form of joy or pleasure permitted them would be derision against people like me. And they would know that it is their duty to denounce their own sexuality and enter into the nunnery of political activism.

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The rewriting of sexual mores and disciplinary proceedings you describe is indeed shocking. I think, though, that you are missing one key point.

You correctly note that the rules were shockingly unfair, and imposed by extortion without proper procedures required by the Administrative Procedures Act. You emphasize that universities could not afford to resist these rules, but in truth I don't think they would have wanted to resist. They were already thoroughly committed to the victim-victimizer mindset, which would require procedures that would focus on protecting victims (women) by persecuting victimizers (men). If anything, the Department of Education's "Dear Colleague" letters announcing rules-that-were-only-guidance gave cover to allow university administrators to pursue procedures they were only too happy to embrace. As witnessed by Harvard's resistance to rolling back any aspect of these procedures outside of their law school, when given the opportunity.

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I remember in my freshman year of college, 2001, a friend was sexually assaulted (raped?) by a young man in our dorm when she was stone cold drunk. She brought it to our campus court, asking for him to be relocated to another dorm. It was he said, she said- and she lost. Seeing him in the dorm every day wore on her all year until he moved off campus. At the time, I was so angry. I thought, why wouldn’t they believe her? What motive did she have to lie?? There was nothing in it for her. But times have really changed… I see now, with 20 years of cultural shifts, that a blanket “believe all women” policy is horribly unjust. Litigating these cases is hard and always will be. But you owe both parties as fair of a resolution as possible. Both parties deserve a fresh start. (All of that is to say nothing of the good advice for young adults to generally be wary of the combination of sex and alcohol outside of a solidly committed relationship.)

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Wes! Fantastic.

I see the wellspring of this foolishness being the rejection of causation or attribution. To say something happen for a reason had become socially impolite, rude and gauche - it made you a reactionary and banished you from the right circles.

At the core of this was a strict dogma in which a right thinking person dare not attribute an outcome to a cause, outcomes could only be attributed to management or mismanagement. You were forbidden from saying there is an inherent difference in people and or behaviours and that those differences drive outcomes. You couldn’t say somebody’s life screwed up because they screwed up; it was always circumstances beyond their control that lead to bad outcomes. You can’t attribute outcomes to a source or cause or attribute bad behaviour as begetting a bad outcome.

I repeat myself ad infinitum, sorry. But I think it’s important because at the core of post war liberalism is a weird rejection of common sense, a silly argument and a profound arrogance that rejects simple evidence - end of history - the old rules no longer applied. (The entire right wing media stick is pointing out the silliness of liberalism, the lack of common sense). This is not Wes’ successor ideology I’m describing, this is traditional liberalism and it too was based on lying - that’s my point. Liberalism failed because it was basically stupid and abjured much that is common sense and now those erstwhile liberals have become authoritarian utopian fascists. Title IX is star chamber justice.

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Top-tier journalism, informed, investigatory, thoughtful. Quite amazing section of activists you've identified. The focus on their technique for re-purposing institutions is brilliant. As you describe them, the SIs are a virus: latching on to the DNA of existing institutions and causing it to reproduce themselves.

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"the work of people trained in the Foucaultian critique of institutional power who have found ways to leverage those insights to become its bearers imposing new forms of normativity onto the world.". Quite. Foucault in the postmodern age succeeds Orwell in the modern, in the phrase, "it wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual".

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"[A] coalition of professional activists and activist professionals driven by a self-generated sense of crisis". Perfect. Applies here and in a 1001 other places.

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There seem to be too many among us who are disgusted by the senselessness overtaking modern America for me to write this, but have we already lost? Is the toothpaste "already out of the tube" as they say? I can't imagine a world in which we can feasibly "go back" to a previously agreed upon reasonableness.

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Modern feminism is abusive, divisive and totally marketable.

https://youtu.be/srgARAkaZzM

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At the California Law Review website, the authors of "The Sex Bureaucracy" are listed as Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen.

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