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Academic rot

Quotes:

We are producing graduates who have very little idea of the diversity of opinion in the real world.

Peanut allergies are rising because we are not exposing kids to peanuts. The same is occurring with conservative opinions.

You need to experience exclusion and intolerance in order to grow up.

Kids today are never out of sight of adult supervision.

“Bias response teams” are always available to be called in to mediate conflict. “Bubble-wrapped kids”.

What do universities do to promote interaction of different political viewpoints? Nothing. They are suffocating it.

Slurs replace argument. Kids learn to slur, not argue.

The key to the new morality is a method of looking at society as a matter of power and privilege. That is the only perspective they learn. Privilege is bad, victimhood is good. One totalizing perspective. we are actually making students less wise.

Does the Left not  know that what they are doing is causing the election of Trump? [That’s Jonathan Haidt asking, not me]

 

 

Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt discusses the university political monoculture of leftism, victimhood, and social justice warriors. You gain prestige by invoking the university’s authority to settle your sensitivity issues with professors. Haidt links this tendency to changes in the American parenting style: a parent is always present, and kids never learn to settle things by themselves. He calls it a feminized culture. Liberty and freedom are not talked about; diversity and inclusion are always talked about, and diversity never means diversity of opinion. A gigantic staff of therapists supervizes the playground. “We need to change diversity training”, he says. That is a code for changing the moral education of students.

 

 

Amy Wax

I need not dilate further on this woman’s virtues of bravery and truth telling. That she remains so free from rancor after her recent experience of the left-wing mob of law professors howling for her head is  a testament to her character. And she is right, the university is rendering itself irrelevant, and the question we tax payers must ask is: why are we paying these people?

Why are we paying for universities? What are we getting from them but ill-educated mobs of leftists? Indeed, positively badly educated people, who think they know everything and really know nothing.

 

 

 

You might also want to look at Heterodox Academy for a statement of the underlying problem.

The Problem

Law Society goes totalitarian

 

As the shit of post-modernism continues to ooze out of the universities, more and more institutions fall beneath the advancing sludge. My long-lasting distaste for the Ontario bar association (the Law Society of Upper Canada) is now more fully justified. Lawyers in Ontario are now being required to confess their sins of racism and repent.

LATEST UPDATE – September, 2017

Lawyers and Paralegals – Here’s what you need to KNOW AND DO for 2017:
1. Adopt a Statement of Principles  (mandatory)
2. Create, Implement, Review a Human Rights/Diversity Policy  (mandatory for legal workplaces of 10 or more licensees)
3. Participate in the Inclusion Survey (non-mandatory)

Lawyers are not merely being asked to implement programs they may not believe in, they are being asked to sign acts of confession that the policies they are being asked to implement are true, just, and appropriate. Jordan Peterson’s concern for being made to say imaginary pronouns invented by transsexuals was but the harbinger of a totalitarian impulse that will soon affect us all.

The Law Society writes:

Overview

All lawyers and paralegals play a vital role in Accelerating Culture Shift, one of 5 strategies adopted by the Law Society  to address the barriers faced by racialized licensees.

As part of this strategy you are required to create and abide by an individual Statement of Principles that acknowledges your obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally, and in your behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public. (Recommendation 3(1) in the Challenges Faced by Racialized Licensees Working Group’s Final Report)

The Law Society will ask licensees to report on this in their 2017 Annual Report.

This requirement applies to all Law Society licensees. A licensee is anyone who is licensed to practice law or provide legal services and includes retired licensees, licensees working outside of Ontario and licensees not currently practicing law or providing legal services.

Creating a Statement of Principles

The Law Society has developed resources to help in creating your personal Statement of Principles.

We have provided templates of two sample statements. To satisfy the requirement you may adopt and abide by either statement. Please feel free to modify the statements or create your own that meets the requirement. Statements of Principle must be in writing.

Principles:
To help achieve the objectives of valuing equality and enhancing diversity and inclusion, I have adopted this Statement of Principles.

No Discrimination or Harassment

I am aware that under the Human Rights Code every person has the right to be free from discrimination and harassment in employment.

I acknowledge my obligation not to discriminate against, nor harass, any person on the basis of the grounds under the Human Rights Code with respect to my employment of others, or in professional dealings with other licensees.

I acknowledge my obligation not to tolerate, condone, or ignore any form of Human Rights Code-based harassment or discrimination in my legal workplace, or in professional dealings with other licensees or any other person.

I acknowledge that the right to be free from discrimination and harassment applies to everyone at my legal workplace: clients, partners, associates, students, paralegals, legal assistants, or other employees.
Abide by Workplace Policies

I agree to review, understand and abide by all policies in my legal workplace that prohibit harassment and discrimination, and that encourage diversity and inclusion on the basis of the grounds set out in Human Rights Code or other grounds.

I will report any observations or allegations of harassment or discrimination.

If asked, I will cooperate in any investigation and complaints procedure at my legal workplace.

I will not reprise against, or threaten to reprise against anyone for making a formal complaint of harassment or discrimination, or for cooperating in any investigation.
Promote Diversity and Inclusion

To promote diversity and inclusion I agree to:

review, understand and abide by any and all of my legal workplace’s policies that encourage diversity and inclusion on Human Rights Code or other grounds;
encourage a culture of inclusion and diversity at my legal workplace, in order to help attract and retain the best talent and better serve my clients’ needs;
support strategies in my legal workplace (and beyond it, where appropriate) that prioritize diversity and inclusion on Human Rights Code and other grounds in hiring, promotion and retention decisions;
cooperate and engage in any efforts of the Law Society, my legal workplace and others to advance equality, diversity and inclusion in the legal profession and in the broader community;

Serve Clients/ the Public

I am aware that under the Human Rights Code, every person has the right to be free from discrimination and harassment with respect to the provision of services, including legal services.

I will provide legal services in a manner that is courteous and equitable, without discrimination or harassment.

I will ensure that no client or prospective client is denied services or receives inferior service on the basis of the grounds set out in the Human Rights Code.

I will respect both the letter and spirit of human rights legislation in professional dealings with other licensees or any other person.

 

Recall that this constitutes words being put into people’s mouths: you the Ontario lawyer are being required to sign your adherence to nebulous concepts such as diversity, inclusion, harassment and equality.

 

Let’s look at “equality” as the Law Society defines it.

Equality

The Supreme Court of Canada has held that equality is an “elusive concept” that “lacks precise definition.” * Equality does not mean treating all people the same for all purposes. In Canada, court decisions at all levels make it clear that both the Charter of Rights and Freedoms** and human rights legislation aim to achieve “substantive” rather than a “formal” equality.

Whereas “formal equality” involves “equal treatment for those in similar situations and different treatment for those in dissimilar situations” (‘treating likes alike’),” *** “substantive equality” does not always require treating all people the same.

Substantive equality, rather, is aimed at “recognizing and responding to difference and remedying discrimination and stereotyping.” **** It requires “acknowledgment of and response to differences that members of a particular group might experience” in order to be treated equally.*****
To be clear, it is substantive equality that human rights/diversity policies in legal workplace should be aiming for.

The Official Religion of our times is not Christianity. It is the religion of perpetual striving after equality, which is really equality of result, not of opportunity. It is an ideology that will provide endless opportunity for official interference in private affairs, the perpetuation of grievance, the cultivation of envy, and the violation of individual conscience. This is not accidental; it is its post-modernist purpose.

The Decadence of Academia

Two videos, one by Roger Scruton, one by Jordan Peterson. Both say the same  thing, that the invasion of Foucault and Derrida and the French Nonsense Machine has triumphed, and the only point of inquiry in academia is to ask who has power. That is the sum and substance of the agenda. It is not scholarship, it is anti-scholarship. It is anti-civilization and anti-culture.  But this is where we go when equality of outcome is the only thing that matters.

Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia, two heretics from post-modernism (warmed over Marxism), discuss their common enemies.

 

 

More Google Bias detected

 

 

Google’s search bias against conservative news sites has been quantified

This is a posting in Watts up with That by Leon Goldstein.

Google Search is found to be extremely biased in favor of climate alarmism and against climate realism.  The PGSTN ranges for climate realism and climate alarmism do not even overlap!  Some of the most important climate realist domains, including low-controversial judithcurry.com, have such a low PGSTN that they can be considered blacklisted by Google.

Google Search is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains and against conservative domains with a confidence of 95%.  Further, certain hard-Left domains have such a high PGSTN that their standing raises suspicions that they have been hand-picked for prominent placement.  Certain respected conservative domains are blacklisted.

And Google wants us to trust their results? Gosh, I get all googly at the thought, entrusting the categorization of all knowledge to a bunch of PC wankers in Silicon Valley.

Calls to end identity politics

 

 

A left wing writer called Anis Shivani has written a piece in Salon which I commend to your most serious attention. It is entitled “Time to give up on identity politics: It’s dragging the progressive agenda down”. Salon is not normally my preferred reading, but Shivani puts his fingers on some very large issues and says some quite interesting things that have helped me understand the Left’s strange behaviours.

His contention is that the Left’s obsession with identity politics occurred during a period when the owners of this planet got away with the most massive concentration of wealth in their hands, and that this identity obsession was a futile distraction from the real business of politics.

 

….identity politics, wherever it has manifested, has been absolutely devastating to the cause of liberty.

  1. It privileges culture, instead of politics. My first point is that when you fight for identity, you’re giving up politics in favor of culture. And that’s exactly where neoliberalism wants you, fighting for your culture (or what you imagine is your culture), rather than the arena of policies, where the real consequences occur. You may gain some recognition of your identity, but you may also have to pay the price of losing everything else that makes life worth living.
  2. Not only politics, but economics is taken out of the equation. It’s astonishing, even after living under the principles of neoliberalism for around 40 years, how few liberals, even activists, are able to define our economic system with any sense of accuracy. They keep acting as if the fight is still on between the old New Deal liberalism (laissez-faire economics slightly moderated by some half-hearted welfare programs) and a right that wants to shred those welfare mechanisms. In fact, both parties are committed to slightly different versions of neoliberalism, and their transformation proceeded apace with the rise of identity politics. Politics was freed to take its course, because culture became the site of contestation, and this meant an unobstructed opportunity to redefine economics to the benefit of the elites.What identity politics has done is to take the shine off the political process itself. This is more than a consequence of identity politics. It is because identity politics has garnered so much attention that political reform, which needs to be ongoing and consistent, has stalled for nearly 30 years. Instead of campaign finance reform of the McCain-Feingold brand, which sought to make a little advance toward taking money out of politics, we went, during the period of identity politics’ ascendancy, to the total capitulation of politics to money. The same process has held true in every arena of policymaking. Even issues like climate change are framed in cultural terms — i.e., as identity politics, because today culture cannot be spoken of without being defined by identity politics — and therefore overwhelmed by paralysis.
  3. Identity politics always breeds its equal and opposite reaction. Identity politics is in fact the father, or the Great Mother, of white nationalism, rather than white nationalism being an independent force that has arisen from quite different sources. At root, both share the same particularistic, extralegal, extra-constitutional, anti-democratic, metaphysical, folkish impulse. Whenever a misguided movement tries to alter people’s thoughts and intentions, rather than limiting itself to people’s performance and action in the transparent democratic arena, then totalitarianism is the necessary result. Even when we dream of an anarchist utopia, we do not try to alter people’s souls, we aim to alter economic arrangements in such a way as to allow people the maximum possible room for freedom. We cannot be readers and interpreters of people’s hearts and minds; such a venture has no business in politics. (emphasis mine)
  4. Identity politics is not winnable. The idea of the nation, in a post-Cold War world, as my generation imagined for a moment, should have led to a redefinition of the concept in rational, empirical, scientific, utopian and ultimately anarchist terms. The founding principles of the Enlightenment were available all over again, in that brief moment, to be recharged with potent liberal energy, extending across the globe. Instead we got neoliberal globalization, dedicated entirely to consumerism and shallow identity politics, working in sync to enervate democracy to the point of nonexistence.

It pleases me to read a leftist who is clearly NOT a totalitarian engineer of souls, who thinks the entire leftist project of the current time (identity politics) is fundamentally mistaken. Of course, if you reduce politics to tribes, you end up in a sort of Afrikaner state, with the dominant tribe being – guess what? – whites. This is not Enlightenment politics; this is a form of polity we thought we had escaped from centuries ago.

Another interesting read is a book by Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, which was based on an article in the New York Times  of November 2016 from which I quote here.

“But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)”

Precisely.

Oliver Traidi reviews Mark Lilla’s book in Quillette, here.

 

Shivani thinks that young people have been so indoctrinated in identity politics by thirty years of unceasing propaganda that it cannot be broken out of, except by economic or foreign policy disaster. I am not so pessimistic. I think electoral defeat at the hands of Republicans will cause the Dems to rethink a great deal.

It also explains to me why the Left has been branding Trump a racist and a fascist and so forth: since identity politics is the way they conceive what they are doing, then all political opposition to their project looks like identity politics of a different tribe. As always, the Left projects onto the Right – really, all forms of opposition – what is on the minds of the Left; it sees only itself.  It reminds me of a thought from a book written by David Horowitz, the son of two American Communists, that he did not actually find freedom of discussion until be broke with Leftism, whereupon he discovered that all sorts of conservatives exist, few of whom agree with each other about anything. Horowitz’ Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey is  a must read for all those who are curious about the strange mental prison which is Leftism.

Further prison breakouts may be expected soon.

 

Let’s blame the victims, shall we?

More realistically, and more precisely, let’s admit the limits of whites to do anything to remedy American black social pathologies. We can not take the existence of racial disparities as the evidence for white  oppression.

Professor Amy Wax presents a useful perspective on the ban on “blaming the victim”, in which the group suffering the harm is the only one that can undo the harm caused to him.

There is no way around it, the victim must help himself. But there have been injuries to human capital. These are the most enduring traits of the African American situation, and there is little white society can do about them. So says Professor Amy Wax, in the most rational way.

Why Russia is anti-communist

 

No people suffered as much from Communism as the Russians, though the Poles might come close. Hence the Russians recognize what Communism is and reject it. They are not yet freed from authoritarian government, but they know and hate Communism.

Thus they have a well-developed sense that global warming catastrophism is merely the excuse for the re-imposition of an inefficient and dictatorial form of state planning, ecological ruin and impoverishment, all of which is justified by the idea that it is “good for you”.

Read Christopher Monckton’s notes on his recent attendance at a conference in Moscow on “alternative energy”.

One has become so inured to the relentless indoctrination of young people in our own schools and universities that it was a glorious delight to discover that in former Communist countries such as Russia that dismal species of totalitarianism, even when artfully dressed up in environmentalist fig-leaves, no longer holds the slightest attraction for young people. What they want, whether the UN likes it or not (and it doesn’t), is a climate of freedom. And, if the speeches of the Academicians are anything to go by, they’re going to get it. Climate Communism? Ex-Communist Russia just isn’t buying.

 

McCarthyism was sane by comparison

Last night I bet a friend $50 that Trump will win the next US Presidential election, if there is one, in 2020. I explain why below.

A couple of weeks ago, I began composing an attack on Google’s totalitarian social cult.

Then it got worse. Charlottesville riots. Trump further demonized.  Statues of Confederate generals being  removed or vandalized. Then my own experience with American institutions.

It made an appalling coherent sense. The United States, and not just Google, is falling into a totalitarian leftist nightmare.

The firing of James D’Amore for the most mild remonstrance against Google’s hiring practices said to me, as nothing else could, that Google was in the grip of a militantly intolerant leftist belief system. Leftist, insofar as it is predicated on the view that the failure of each sex to want to be in each and every walk of life, in each profession, in exact proportion to their presence in the population, is the result of personal, cultural and systemic discrimination. Thus if the proportion of pediatric surgical nurses is 90% female, this is not the result of self-selection but is the result of unlawful or undesirable discriminations. To argue otherwise, as D’Amore did, is to engage in thought crime. I was blandly told by a senior Google representative that D’Amore had engaged in “stereotypes”, and though, in his personal opinion, Google went too far in firing him, D’Amore was guilty of a grave offence.

The second element is “belief system”, because the evidence, to the extent there is valid evidence, shows that humans do not seek to be in certain lines of work in equal measures or proportions, but according to their tastes and their conceptions of their self-interests. Further, these tastes and conceptions are statistically related to, or predictably associated with, their sex. (I emphasize that this material is found in standard treatments of the topic in Wikipedia). Thus to maintain these tastes and conceptions are mere stereotypes is un-scientific. All of which is freely available in the works of mainstream psychologists. The sexes differ, and to predicate one’s hiring policies on the belief that women want to be career obsessed workaholics in the same proportion as men do, is contrafactual. Belief in the factual is now, according to Google, a firing offence.

This brings us to the claim I make that Google shows evidence of being totalitarian.

of or being a political system in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them:

I leave it to you to judge whether “totalitarian” is applicable. For myself, “totalitarian” means that, in addition to an intolerance of opposition, there exists a corresponding theory of legitimation of this exercise of power. As Marxism and National Socialism ought to have taught us, these theories do not withstand critical scrutiny, and hence the need to suppression discussion. In the case of Google, and many others, a half-truth can become a lie when it is held to be unquestionably the whole truth. Yes, there are doubtless social and cultural factors why women do not want to be elite engineers in the same proportion as men. But when discussion of the biological factors is excluded, or when consideration of the racial factors are excluded (not the same things in my view),  then differences can only be explained by “discrimination”. In consequence corporations and society spend great energies trying to make water flow uphill. Those who point out the futility of this effort are held to be propagating “stereotypes”.

Then the riot in Charlottesville occurred, which was another part of the ongoing attack on white or historic America, as statues of all those Democratic and Confederate generals have to be hidden from public view. I do not hold with racialist agitations, any more than anti-fascist leftist hooliganism, which has gone unchecked for several years. President Trump’s condemnation of all sides in that riot has drawn the wrath of the majority of commenters, it seems.

Yet the entire episode needs to be seen as part of the continuing Democratic assault in Trump for having had the gall to win the election. The United States is unhinged. The Google incident is just a microcosm of an ongoing lunatic episode.

Rex Murphy wrote about this brilliantly in the National Post this weekend.

 

“The madness manifests itself everywhere. Such is the rush of hot news these days, that folks have forgotten last week’s excommunication ceremony, performed by the high-priests of Google’s diversity temple. One of their number issued a pallid memo merely querying whether Google had all the right policies on the holy concept of diversity. He actually favoured diversity. But he raised questions about its best pursuit. Fired in a day. A pure thought-crime, not to be tolerated in these dangerous times.

“America is in a very delirium of unhinged total politics. It is the sheerest folly to believe this is all because of Donald Trump.”

Would you like some examples?

The path of the forthcoming eclipse is passing over states that are disproportionately white.

“My lab/office door in the physics department at Berkeley uses a key card. During the day it’s a hassle so someone cleverly made up a nylon rope to wrap around the door knobs to keep the door open (see pic).

“Someone walking down the hall complained to the administration that the rope made them uncomfortable on behalf of black people. Admin asked us to figure out a way to minimize the rope’s visibility.
Berzerkely.”
  • “Confederate-looking” wall tiles to be removed from New York City subway.
  • My own experience with an American institution has indicated to me that the desire to make the place safe from Title VII anti-discrimination lawsuits was driving legal counsel to propose standards of behaviour for staff and board more stringent than the case law required. At the point where one’s legal counsel is advocating a nearly arbitrary  set of rules – a contradiction in terms actually –  to be driven by the complaints of the most sensitive snowflake, and to be investigated without recourse to standards of natural justice, that was my sign to get out, and I did.

“A very delirium of unhinged total politics”. Lefties like to complain of “McCarthyism”. That occurred when a US Senator Joseph McCarthy was going after Communist agents in the US government, in the wake of World War 2, without sufficient regard for the niceties or the facts, they said. (It turned out that what were believed to be the most extravagant claims by alarmists about Soviet Communist infiltration of government were ultimately substantiated by the publication of the KGB’s archives – see the Mitrokhin Archives). By contrast, today’s heresy sniffing is society-wide, concerns the abolition of all normal moral discourse, and seemingly will not stop until there is a revolution.

Or until Trump beats them badly in the 2020 election. Contrary to most people, I believe he will win handily in 2020, for the reason that otherwise this anti-white racism will only get worse. I just placed a $50 bet on it last night. Now you know why.