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.
"The professional activist class seems to consist largely of destructive people of bad character"
That's a huge mistake. First of all, I know quite a few of those people, and you're just flatly wrong about their character. Their motivation is that they see injustice, and want to right it.
So: we can't win a battle against them if we go to war with wrong information. And indeed this is a big reason why they're currently winning.
I'm not so sure, M. MarkS. I think, in large part, they're winning because they have less scruples than most people. True, Your friends could be different. Or You could be giving Your friends the benefit of the doubt.
From "The Sex Bureaucracy" Sir Wesley linked to:
"Our purpose is to guide the reader through the landscape of the sex bureaucracy so that its development and workings can be known and debated."
AFAIK, that never happened. Probably due to those who see their own fantasies of injustice and then go to right them. That's how the changes the essay talks about came into place in the first place. right?
People who "see injustice" in certain places, but not everywhere are full of shit. Looking to rectify "campus sexual assault" while 2 blocks away from campus young immigrants from Thailand are forced to give rub and tugs as a condition of their being housed in the USA is intentional myopia.
For every homeless person with an iPhone there are 20 homeless in Calcutta who don't have shoes, let alone clothing.
For every "fat-shamed" person in the USA, there are 50 children dying of starvation in East Africa.
The world is blatantly unfair. I can't skate as well as Wayne Gretzky, nor can I jump as high as Michael Jordan. I can't dance like Michael Jackson, nor can I sing like Luciano Pavarotti. It ain't their fault, nor mine.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
"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".
People who apply for social services are often rejected and that rejection serves as an instruction manual on how to properly present their plight and become eligible.
The managed state is largely stupid and always self perpetuating. Why not raise minimum wage to $20 an hour and let people spend money as they see fit rather than have a bunch of government bureaucrats creating a labyrinth that people have to navigate. Liberalism was always overreach, successor ideology is the application of force.
"[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.
Yah. Found out today there are two lights in an otherwise empty universe of non-morality. Andrew Sullivan and Dave Chappelle. Reading Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, I'm learning how these people self-justify. Simply employing delusion to an extremity not envisioned when the book was written in 2015 (I thin').
I'm slightly under-even because I bought the domain StopTheWoke.org, and thought I'd set up a "Slack" in case there was any interest. Foolish errand, but I expected that. What I totally let slip by was the FACT that anything I'd come up with would be considered "hate speech" by Slack and therefore deleted.
Still, seeing the intuitive-logic of this reminds me that there IS a Way around this garbage, unlikely tho it be: Republicans coined the phrase eons ago, but applies now more than it did then. "The Moral Majority." The difficulty is that the polarization of today makes it difficult for people of different parties to realize they actually have more in common than not.
Ah well...
Goes without saying, but if I don't I might forget: TYTY, Sir Wesley. I'd be amazed if any had the guts to contradict what You "say" here. I'd actually LIKE to seem some different views, but that's just me. (TYTY again. :)
Ah well... I've been up for fourteen hours. Recalling what You wrote, I realized how stupid I can be sometimes. Obama administration. Now, I KNEW this had been going on since mid-2000s when Critical Theory became ACTIVIST. Just forgot.
But, ACTUALLY, it STARTED in '80s when Critical Race "Theory" (as they SAID) was "avowedly political." You wouldn't know it by today's standards but, in actual FACT, science and politics produce confirmation bias, EVERY time. So the whole idea that this is some "scholarly" work is a bit of a lame joke, if it wasn't so serious.
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.
You ask a good question, which I don't claim to be qualified to answer.
I'll just come up with "a couple" points. (Which may turn out to be more than two. ;)
For the foreseeable future, I don't see how the Democratic Party can be reclaimed to an agreed upon reasonableness.
There would still be a POSSIBILITY, that reasonable Dems would come to understand they've been BETRAYED by their leaders by their buy-in with the consensus media opinions.
Whether the Repubs can come up with reasonable candidates is a pretty serious question. If they don't i, personally, won't vote.
All that is a stop-gap, AFAIK. Slow DOWN the rush to dismantle American Institutions and replace them with air.
I, personally, don't see America ADVANCING any, until a Centrist voting BLOCK, emerges as a force to be reckoned with.
Needless to say, that's IMHO and ICBW. Probably AM. Dunno anyone who has a real clear crystal ball. Be VERY welcome to other views.
THere are a couple flashpoints that MIGHT wake people up to DO some things. In my whole life (66), I don't think I've ever used the word "evil." But CRT and reparations are both, IMHO, about as pure an evil as one could find.
Both Dems and Repubs align SOMEWHAT on the issue of CRT.
Reparations? BLM DEMANDS them. (Of course. What did Ya expect.) Kendi and the 1619 PRoject wants them. Coates started the thing off in '13, I thin'. Dems are PUSHING for them. Lotta stupid people (among them caucasian Black Racists) want whites to "atone." A whole lotta OTHERS just want a free handout.
But I'm not at ALL certain how all this is gonna play out in Peoria.
Now, my paternal grandparents came over from Russia early 1900s. My maternal grandparents lived in Illinois, and had NOTHING to do with Jim Crow. That all's BESIDE the point.
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.
"The professional activist class seems to consist largely of destructive people of bad character"
That's a huge mistake. First of all, I know quite a few of those people, and you're just flatly wrong about their character. Their motivation is that they see injustice, and want to right it.
So: we can't win a battle against them if we go to war with wrong information. And indeed this is a big reason why they're currently winning.
I'm not so sure, M. MarkS. I think, in large part, they're winning because they have less scruples than most people. True, Your friends could be different. Or You could be giving Your friends the benefit of the doubt.
From "The Sex Bureaucracy" Sir Wesley linked to:
"Our purpose is to guide the reader through the landscape of the sex bureaucracy so that its development and workings can be known and debated."
AFAIK, that never happened. Probably due to those who see their own fantasies of injustice and then go to right them. That's how the changes the essay talks about came into place in the first place. right?
People who "see injustice" in certain places, but not everywhere are full of shit. Looking to rectify "campus sexual assault" while 2 blocks away from campus young immigrants from Thailand are forced to give rub and tugs as a condition of their being housed in the USA is intentional myopia.
For every homeless person with an iPhone there are 20 homeless in Calcutta who don't have shoes, let alone clothing.
For every "fat-shamed" person in the USA, there are 50 children dying of starvation in East Africa.
The world is blatantly unfair. I can't skate as well as Wayne Gretzky, nor can I jump as high as Michael Jordan. I can't dance like Michael Jackson, nor can I sing like Luciano Pavarotti. It ain't their fault, nor mine.
The Year Zeroes should watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxuUkYiaUc8
Remember when you could make fun of them?
Dude!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
"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".
I am an employer.
People who apply for social services are often rejected and that rejection serves as an instruction manual on how to properly present their plight and become eligible.
The managed state is largely stupid and always self perpetuating. Why not raise minimum wage to $20 an hour and let people spend money as they see fit rather than have a bunch of government bureaucrats creating a labyrinth that people have to navigate. Liberalism was always overreach, successor ideology is the application of force.
I think quite a few of your fellow employers would be very unhappy with a $20 minimum wage.
Anyway, that's just another form of taxation.
I'm all in favor of MUCH higher taxes on people like me, who can easily afford them, and UBI for all.
No they wouldn’t, it’s an even playing field, it’s the same disadvantage for everyone
I'm not sure where you're going to or coming from with this. What was the alternative to the inevitable liberal overreach?
Give people a living wage not programs
"[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.
Yah. Found out today there are two lights in an otherwise empty universe of non-morality. Andrew Sullivan and Dave Chappelle. Reading Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, I'm learning how these people self-justify. Simply employing delusion to an extremity not envisioned when the book was written in 2015 (I thin').
I'm slightly under-even because I bought the domain StopTheWoke.org, and thought I'd set up a "Slack" in case there was any interest. Foolish errand, but I expected that. What I totally let slip by was the FACT that anything I'd come up with would be considered "hate speech" by Slack and therefore deleted.
Still, seeing the intuitive-logic of this reminds me that there IS a Way around this garbage, unlikely tho it be: Republicans coined the phrase eons ago, but applies now more than it did then. "The Moral Majority." The difficulty is that the polarization of today makes it difficult for people of different parties to realize they actually have more in common than not.
Ah well...
Goes without saying, but if I don't I might forget: TYTY, Sir Wesley. I'd be amazed if any had the guts to contradict what You "say" here. I'd actually LIKE to seem some different views, but that's just me. (TYTY again. :)
Ah well... I've been up for fourteen hours. Recalling what You wrote, I realized how stupid I can be sometimes. Obama administration. Now, I KNEW this had been going on since mid-2000s when Critical Theory became ACTIVIST. Just forgot.
But, ACTUALLY, it STARTED in '80s when Critical Race "Theory" (as they SAID) was "avowedly political." You wouldn't know it by today's standards but, in actual FACT, science and politics produce confirmation bias, EVERY time. So the whole idea that this is some "scholarly" work is a bit of a lame joke, if it wasn't so serious.
One never knows. Oct. 19: https://www.amazon.com/Centrist-Solution-Made-Government-Again/dp/1635769043
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.
You ask a good question, which I don't claim to be qualified to answer.
I'll just come up with "a couple" points. (Which may turn out to be more than two. ;)
For the foreseeable future, I don't see how the Democratic Party can be reclaimed to an agreed upon reasonableness.
There would still be a POSSIBILITY, that reasonable Dems would come to understand they've been BETRAYED by their leaders by their buy-in with the consensus media opinions.
Whether the Repubs can come up with reasonable candidates is a pretty serious question. If they don't i, personally, won't vote.
All that is a stop-gap, AFAIK. Slow DOWN the rush to dismantle American Institutions and replace them with air.
I, personally, don't see America ADVANCING any, until a Centrist voting BLOCK, emerges as a force to be reckoned with.
Needless to say, that's IMHO and ICBW. Probably AM. Dunno anyone who has a real clear crystal ball. Be VERY welcome to other views.
Ah well... Forgot:
THere are a couple flashpoints that MIGHT wake people up to DO some things. In my whole life (66), I don't think I've ever used the word "evil." But CRT and reparations are both, IMHO, about as pure an evil as one could find.
Both Dems and Repubs align SOMEWHAT on the issue of CRT.
Reparations? BLM DEMANDS them. (Of course. What did Ya expect.) Kendi and the 1619 PRoject wants them. Coates started the thing off in '13, I thin'. Dems are PUSHING for them. Lotta stupid people (among them caucasian Black Racists) want whites to "atone." A whole lotta OTHERS just want a free handout.
But I'm not at ALL certain how all this is gonna play out in Peoria.
Now, my paternal grandparents came over from Russia early 1900s. My maternal grandparents lived in Illinois, and had NOTHING to do with Jim Crow. That all's BESIDE the point.
Reparations are just outrageous from so many angles, I dunno what to say. But this is what I DID say (DEFINITELY a WIP): https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/reparations-a-well-rounded-view/comment/3165464
Modern feminism is abusive, divisive and totally marketable.
https://youtu.be/srgARAkaZzM
Not cicking on your clickbait. Try making a substantive comment instead.
At the California Law Review website, the authors of "The Sex Bureaucracy" are listed as Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen.