"There is something, to me, very sinister about this emergence of a weird kind of conformity, or orthodoxy, particularly among the people who operate the media, so that you can tell in advance exactly what they will say and think about anything. It is true that so far they have not got an Inquisition to enforce their orthodoxy, but they do have ways of enforcing it which make the old thumbscrews and racks seem quite paltry." —Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media, 1977
Remember that was a good 44 years after Muggeridge--a socialist himself--traveled to the Soviet Union and was appalled by the state's mass famine-murder committed against Ukrainians (the Holodomor). He wrote about what he saw, but was rebuked on every front. The accepted version was the one ginned up by Communist Walter Duranty at the New York Times for his employer Adolph Ochs.
John Leake 'stacked on this topic a few years ago:
Duranty's Pulitzer Prize was never revoked for his vicious/murderous lies. For a very not good time you can look him up and learn about his "colorful" life. Including hanging with Aleister Crowley for "rituals" we dare not imagine too closely, and iirc stealing Crowley's girlfriend and wifing her up. If "wife" can be used in that context.
Muggeridge is a fool and a blowhard. Study the scriptures and you'll learn that Jesus never intended to start a cult that defied Judaism. He was a Jewish rabbi, for heaven's sake. It was the Christ-hating Roman Citizen and Pharisee Saul who invented Christianity and gave it its direction.
You may not be familiar with the story of Rosie Ruiz. She "competed" in the New York City Marathon. She started the race, then ducked into the subway, taking a train to near the finish line. She then came out of the subway and ran the final couple of blocks to claim the prize. I may have some details wrong but you can look it up.
Right. My surprise was that there was even a nugget of truth in anything he said. Seems obvious that he considered "participation" as actually running 30x26 miles. With a hairline fracture, conveniently described as a broken leg, which some will no doubt picture as a compound fracture.
Show me the x-ray. Show me the records of all the races. Then I might be impressed.
Anyone who has read THE BELL CURVE knows there is great intellectual disparity and a giant gulf between the percentage of crimes committed by blacks and by every other race.
All anyone has to do is watch a WNBA game to see violent animals attack any white woman with the courage to fact the pack.
"How much longer will we tolerate this adolescent nonsense?"
Well, we have 400mil guns in America, at least. And we have not done much about it. In fact, Trump has been good in this regard, putting breaks on DEI, gutting many of the patronage funding networks. But the feckless normie right is oblivious mostly, and the dissident right can't keep it together. DSA should be a boon for Repubs, but they seem incapable of raising much of an argument on their own behalf.
The Institutions for the most part can't be saved. They will collapse the West, or a Bukele will rise and gut them.
Some of the commentary I read was criticizing the university…not for hiring an unqualified candidate, but for putting such a vulnerable individual at risk of emotional violence, a.k.a. belittlement. And possibly suicide, which apparently is not uncommon in autistics.
That's how the game is played, lil octowobbler. It's an ever escalating game of Victimization Hyperbole. Actual problems are smokescreened and suffocated by clouds of fear porn flatulence.
Only some people are allowed to play though. Remember that very white girl who asserted she was black, or African American, or something (Rachel Dolezal) and got totally dragged for it...even as Talcum X (Shaun King) was making bank on his faux melanin? Both eventually got called out...but the Jason Ardays of the world are allowed to pose as stuff other than what they are. Coz...whatever.
You are additionally correct, above, in noting that the Squishy "Sciences" "are tailor-made for this grift."
They are, because they ARE that grift.
The point you raise is additionally funny (lack of qualifications don't matter, RiSk Of EmOtIoNaL vIoLeNce does!) because it's the one thing the "social" "sciences" truly do, at bottom, fear: being held to account for the mayhem they have committed. Could say the same for the "humanities" post-postmodernism though. And even the sciences. Academia is a Circus Maximus of clownship. The Ed Biz became the employer of last resort post-1971...and it shows.
I can't decide if I'm more appalled or offended that their abuse of the English language has been so widely accepted. It's like reading really extreme satire.
Wish I could blame these newer academic "fields" for the language thing, but I once tried to read ArtWeek in the 1980s and was similarly struck by the overabundance of pseudointellectual jargon. It's just Poser Language, and I can't see why no one exposes the naked emperor underneath.
Even more amazing is that the ultimate underwriters of this nonsense, the taxpayers, don't object more. What a waste of money.
The money trail is largely obscured. A good example is NIAID>EcoHealth>WIV.
I really did admire DOGE for making publicly accessible a database where you could look up any nonprofit and see how much money they got, and how the money went from NGO to NGO to NGO.
Reminds me of a joke from the '90s from one of my bosses, a Yale/Cornell grad rural sociologist who was pretty grounded, but not completely (sociologists can't be):
Did you hear about the deconstructionist Mafia?
They make you an offer you can't understand.
My teacher read the London Times Literary Supplement for millions of years, being a Shakespeare and Spenser scholar and expert on English historical poetry of the Elizabethan Era, and on Roman Britain. Sometime in the '80s we both observed exactly what you say. It was like a door had swung on its hinges...and suddenly language was a great big in-joke that earned notareity precisely for being unintelligible.
Later I reflected on Julian Jaynes's ideas on the early human "bicameral mind" whose breakdown created Consciousness as we know it.
The emitters of this pomo gobbledygook thus were more like the people Jaynes hypothesized to have existed in that early (pre Bronze Age collapse) era of the "bicameral mind": people hearing voices directly in their heads that lacked reflection, subtlety, questioning, meta- dimension, or executive functions. Entirely internal, but attributed to the gods. One brain hemisphere emitted it, the other heard it, that settled it, and woe betide anyone who questions it.
Jaynes believed that what we call "schizophrenics" are people whose mentational and language sense exists in that earlier form, the bicameral kind. I had read his book not long after it came out (I was still a kid and didn't understand 99% of it)...but came back to it when realizing, many years later, that the Academese you're describing and I'd observed reminded me of nothing so much as the ramblings of several schizophrenics I'd known.
The DEI and Tranny and other "left" (not really) phenomena of Performative Victimization Hyperbole seem entirely devoid of self-reflection, or ability to take in others' views or mindsets. I should probably find a used copy of his book and read it again.
I liked the Jaynes hypothesis. I wish others had pursued the idea.
I bought "The Closing of the American Mind" when it was published. I read the introduction and thought it was interesting, but somehow never got back to reading it. Decades later I decided to read it on my long, boring train commute to work. Introduction was good, but the rest of the book did nothing to support the arguments in the introduction. By the third chapter I realized that the author couldn't make a fucking point. He would write pages of words and go on side-quests that did nothing to illustrate his thesis. It was like swimming in tar. I continued, because it was claimed to be an important book. One evening on the ride home, in the middle of a chapter in the middle of the book, I closed it and silently screamed. I couldn't take any more. When I returned home I buried it in the kitchen trash can and dumped leftover cat food and coffee grounds on it so I wouldn't be tempted to retrieve it. I have to wonder if the critics who praised the book ever read it.
Deft summary of Allan Bloom's writing you got there. :^D
He was insufferable--part of that U Chicago cabal of drivelers who gave each other jobs and ten star NYT etc. reviews. It was always ethnic grift by slick-talking mediocrities.
> I wish others had pursued the idea.
On the "bicameral mind" hypothesis, I wondered whether that, or something like it, wasn't behind the whole "NPC" meme campaign some years ago. Did you make note of that?
There appeared to be concerted or organized online efforts being made by...somebody...to awaken people in certain intelligent but edgy corners of the internet to the fact that a surprising proportion of people entirely lack self-reflection, executive function, and "the ability to rotate the apple in 3D." And that it was OK to Notice where/when this was observed.
Although this topic was not discussed in these precise terms, aspects of it meshed with the earlier "HBD" discourse, which got itself forbidden for its crime of smashing the Blank Slate, and Malcolm Gladwell's happy little fantasy that anybody could do anything if they just got 10,000 hours of programming in it.
However if we accept that not all pools of humans are the same, and have different capacities based on very different histories, any differences allowed--beyond paint job--shouldn't end at the neck. We should expect that genetic flows of people (which used to be called "races," a hydrological metaphor) would retain and carry past capacities, selected for for whatever reasons, natural or cultural.
The DEI crowd always honked about "diversity," but then with presented with documented instances of it, rejected it entirely. While strenuously arguing that everybody could be made the same through reprogramming. (Remember the headlines agonizing over how come blacks don't backpack and go birdwatching? Must be white racism!)
I always wondered whether Jaynes wasn't torturing his point to make this very point, at a time when observations that would someday be called "HBD" were starting to be forbidden in the extreme in academia (mid-'70s, a decade in to the "civil" "rights" operation).
He offered a precise definition of "consciousness," and hung the whole model on a specific moment in history...as though it played out similarly for the ancestors of everyone alive today. The latter was a sticking point for me.
The "Bronze Age Collapse" arguably was an Old World thing, right? So it didn't affect the entire world...unless we regard it as a global environmental disaster of some sort (which in fact some now suspect). So this also raises the question of whether such a disaster might not have literally "rewired" some, many, or all people.
For instance, if the hypothesis is accurate that "the event" involved major solar or galactic electrical/magnetic whammo, stuff that literally melted and scorched rock, it could have affected the electrical/magnetic "hardwiring" of humans. All humans? Some? Which??? In what ways? Interesting topic.
So I value Jaynes's efforts to formulate and champion the notion that not everyone is the same, and not across all times and ages, and that these differences yield different stuff culturally. It seems like a big DUH...which maybe is why the (highly autocratic) DEI religion rejected it. The most robust religions demand tests of faith of their adherents. And maybe the DEI religion is, as I chumbled before, an outcropping of that older "schizoid" brain organization.
Thanks for the chance to onionbelt on this. Would be interested in your thoughts, if any.
It's been a long time since I read Jaynes so it isn't in the front of my mind. I didn't connect it to the NPC concept. I do get the impression that some people must feel they don't exist unless they talk out loud. I was also surprised to find out that some people don't have an inner monologue, and even more surprised when someone on YouTube said he was shocked to learn that some people *do* have an inner monologue.
I remember Jaynes as pressing this one idea he had, but I didn't sense any agenda such as countering the rise of "political correctness". The latter was in effect as early as the late 1960s when William Shockley was "canceled".
Didn't Jaynes also suggest that people's visual perception was different in the past? I recall the suggestion that Homer referring to "the wine dark sea" was strange because dark wine is red while the sea is blue or green. Maybe it was another book.
I've heard about the Bronze Age Collapse but haven't read up on it. It's one of those things we can never know with certainty, and if aliens ever arrive in gigantic space ships that's one thing I'd like to ask them. So much recent scientific research (even in the hard sciences) is turning out to be false or not reproducible that we don't really know as much as we think we do. I roll my eyes when I see some claim like "Scientists discover the largest galaxy in the universe" only to find them pointing to a single pixel on a JWST image. Too much "knowledge" is based on a chain of assumptions, the falsification of any one of which could invalidate their conclusions.
Curious about the history of this; please forgive me for resorting to Grok. Here's the link to the relatively brief answer, in case pasting AI output is poor form. The list of published commentaries looks pretty good. I was already a big fan of the “Grievance Studies” project. Will definitely be looking at the Orwell work.
I did a major purge of my "social sciences" holdings about a decade ago to make room for the burgeoning EE titles--many from the inherited library of my and my late darling's Pardner, an IT/network engineer. Who started out as a rocket scientist. Then went over to behavioral psych...with the intent of doing research in neuroscience. But then the internet happened, and you know how that soaked up many bright people. Good thing too. Academia in the late 20th c was no place for geniuses like he was. :^>
I still have mine. Daniel Dennett, who studied consciousness, said that most of Jaynes' ideas were wrong but some were right. On the other hand, neither Dennett nor anyone else has figured out consciousness.
A very good point...though I have to say...some of the ones I've known seem...hardwired that way. And if you ever run across a forum where this stuff is getting kneaded...message me immediately with an invitation. :^>
I've been reading Martin Mach's magnificent site since the very beginning. When I first found it I let out a SQUEEEEE that startled our then-parrot right off his perch with a squawk. That, you see, is what the internet is supposed to be for. Not startling parrots. For hosting sites like this:
And IIRC originally it was in German, which was my PhD language, so I was pretty darn rusty on all those darn declensions and such. But the pictures said it all.
In return, here's a Facebook guy who does a lot of micro videos, many of which are tardigrades. I don't *think* you must be a Facebook member to see it.
I loathe Facebook, and remain mostly because of the local community secret group page, where we post lost/found dogs, misdelivered USPS/UPS stuff, and bear/cougar sightings.
Spiff, you have done an excellent job with your analysis and presentation. I would die laughing if it weren't so goddamn serious. I have strong ancestral ties to England and have always been proud of the contributions Great Britain has made to Western Civilization. Like most Americans, I am of mixed ancestry from several Northwestern European nations. This stupid crap is happening in all of Europe and the United States as well.
There have been other Substack authors who have written on this subject, with comments covering a variety of opinions. I find some of these opinions on the reason or purpose of this diversity horror show to be lacking in logic or too simplistic. I look forward to your comments section and would love to see your opinion on this.
The purpose is to demonstrate the blank slate hypothesis is correct. Or, perhaps more accurately, that hereditarians are wrong. Those who wish to believe man is eminently malleable keep pushing up against reality.
The Cambridge mess is really an inevitable consequence of this. The failure rate of some demographics is a consequence of racism. If we remove the racism, and we elevate them to key positions, they will flourish. Professor Arday is an example of this kind of thinking.
It blinds them to reality. It encourages them to focus on race and other “protected characteristics” and inevitably quality must decline.
Arday is just unusual in the extent of his lying. His CV sounds like total fantasy. And it is primarily this that sunk him. If it hadn’t been for that he would still be there.
> If we remove the racism, and we elevate them to key positions, they will flourish.
Well...he has, hasn't he?
I mean...they're right....
The question is, of what does that "flourishing" consist, and what must be despoiled to buttress it.
> Arday is just unusual in the extent of his lying
And that's the soft underbelly of Performative Victimization Hyperbole. Homer Simpson wasn't entirely wrong when he told his wife, "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, one to listen."
This is all additionally coupled with the rise of Celebrity Scholars via the internet/"social" "media." Every field has been poisoned with this. The Emperor's New Clothes, the Wizard behind the curtain, many such cases.
But this involved senior people heaping praise on someone who, within the confines of academia, was known to lack a publishing record or any academic achievements. This was extreme even by their absurd standards. This guy was a nobody elevated high.
"The purpose is to demonstrate the blank slate hypothesis is correct. Or, perhaps more accurately, that hereditarians are wrong. Those who wish to believe man is eminently malleable keep pushing up against reality."
But to me, that seems too simple. I can't help but think there is a more sinister reason. Perhaps some of the less intelligent woke have that as a motivation, but what about those egalitarians such as Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen, whom I believe is rather intelligent? Why would someone like that think that such dumbassery would escape scrutiny?
Ah I see. I suspect it is Orwell's observation, some ideas are so crazy only intellectuals could believe them.
Baron-Cohen's belief requires looking far beyond the obvious, and I think that is the trap. The climate people do this. The weather isn't changing, or is accepted as pretty normal. But they see patterns we miss. It is like those people who convert radio waves from space into audio streams and are convinced they hear a pattern. There is some regularity there we dismiss as natural and they cannot.
I think that is an occupational hazard the intelligent are especially prone to. They see deep patterns where we see noise.
Don't leave out the money angle. This is a fantastic grift, with innumerable NGOs funded by taxpayer money. I think the true believers are mostly just useful idiots used to perpetuate this particular industrial complex with their passionate cult-like beliefs.
This is widespread in western countries, not just the UK.
What we need is for governments to shut off the tap. USAID was a good start.
Yes I agree. It is easy to focus on the cranks, but they are just the fall guys. The real power is behind the throne and they are cleaning up. Billions are spent on this.
Forgive me for repeating myself, but the Ed Biz became a major employer of last resort after 1971...and then got massively financialized in the 1980s and '90s thanks to Reaganomics/Greenspanismo.
There is a lot of stock bubble bling in the mix, in other words. People suddenly finding themselves with tons of money they had to put somewhere. This is how universities now have entire departments named by virtue of having been auctioned off to the highest bidder. People who had nothing whatever or very little to do with the field represented, or not distinguished in that field other than making a lot of money in it.
NGOs were a major Sham-Wow for that blingstorm as well.
For example, in the '90s, tech bubble gajillionaires were blamming around the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, looking for "bright ideas" to fund. You could go from latte at a cafe in Pacific Heights to 501(c)(3) incorporation and a staffing plan in weeks. And then the NGOs were constantly trying to poach each others' staff/ideas.
The dot com crash set this back somewhat, but it amped back up in the '00s with Greenspan's/City of London's financialization of housing and the resulting boom. The '08 crash set that back, but time after time there are winners, and they still need somewhere to put their ever larger share of the bling.
There's also the propaganda/media angle, but I won't go there at the moment. Point being that none of this is productive, and it doesn't run on sensible perspectives.
So of course the distorting effects on public policy have been huge, with no counterbalance. Counterbalance, say, in the form of those who want to fund causes or ideas that are defined as BAD by the current system's powerful players.
Do you remember how the SPLC intervened in Canada to block legacies it considered "not in the public interest"? And of course what are you going to do, locally, when the SPLC turns its guns on you/your local legal process, and basically threatens a massive PR attack if anyone dares suggest that people should be able to leave their money/property to whoever they want?
And remember how the Sikh attorney general of New Jersey did the same (apparently in NJ every charitable bequest has to meet approval of the state's AG)?
With all this distortion, and the public sector itself turned into a partner in and agent of the distortion, of course we're at where we're at, where unctuous dimwits with all the right checkboxes and zero credentials are given prominent roles at what used to be one of white civilization's most esteemed academic institutions. It's all of a piece. It's a de facto economic sector. Institutionalized grift, as you well note.
I wistfully recall my micro-animal existence until 2016, mostly focusing on the subcellular chemistry of metabolism and mitochondria. Much simpler times, incidentally instilling appreciation of complex systems. After that came an embarrassing TDS interlude and then the paradigm upheaval of Covid.
Now there's mostly a desire to borrow down in the moss, or perhaps be shot into space. Maybe Elon needs test subjects for the Mars project.
I am not convinced. No one can predict the future. Populations have always waxed and waned. Poverty seems to drive the numbers up and that is definitely coming as is the collapse of feminism.
Arday looks like Neil from The Young Ones, but as the Negro version of the character.
And less competent than Neil.
I hear Arday is being outed and ousted to make way for a moslem woman - any truth to that, do you know?
I wouldn't be surpised in the lsightest, knowing full well from more than two decades experience the feelings Arab and other moslems have towards Negros, be they African or USAmerican.
I am not sure who is replacing him. I am reading he has a female Muslim colleague opposed to Western education. A tricky one for Cambridge to explain. The blessings of multiculturalism.
As for discord among the non-whites. It is a source of concern the pro-immigration lobby seem ignorant of the animosities that exist all over the world we are now importing. Even Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus from the Indian sub-continent have very serious issues with one another.
Hah, yah - the esteemed and right honourable anti-racists look outside (Western/Northern/Central) Europe and see poor widdle brown pipil who they just have to save from the 'orrible nastee rayceeists...
Meanwhile, India alone is home to over 2 000 distinct ethnic groups, and there are well over a hundred different languages spoken on the sub-continent. "Indians" is about as meaningful as "African" or "European" - but I guess it is on us, having imported unthinkingly the USAmerican convention of how different groups are spoken about.
We British knew all this as we ruled them. And when we left they collapsed and broke into nine different countries. Even Churchill spoke of India as a geographical entity only. They had no concept of nationhood.
I believe I've said this before - we do battle with dark principalities. The object of dumbing us down, making us into submissive non thinking servants has been in the works for decades. Destroy mankind is the goal. The Fabian Society formed before WW2 set the standards for how to erase intelligence - start with education. Apparently it's working. All the way up to the halls of higher education. If I had no faith I would begin to despair that we aren't going to make it - are we.
I think we will. Arday’s nonsense coming to light is an example. He was found out. We hear chatter of thousands of others. We hear other things too. It is unravelling.
The Fabians have the same problem as everyone else. They cannot predict the future but act like they can. They ignore human nature. Some always resist. The Covid measures reflected almost total control of media and had the benefit of fear, but they fizzled out. So does everything.
Arday reflects a deep issue they cannot solve; their enemy is not us, it is reality. Arday shouldn’t even have attended a university let alone become a professor. That’s why it will unravel.
Spiff, it's not that "his nonsense is coming to light." It's that somebodies somewheres decided to speak up, and put the spotlight on those going along with the fantasies. It's that people who have been speaking up all along were finally granted a stage where they could be heard.
The enablers of this nonsense bear full responsiblity. The Ardays of the world cannot function without that enabling, and being rewarded for playing it to advantage.
"There is something, to me, very sinister about this emergence of a weird kind of conformity, or orthodoxy, particularly among the people who operate the media, so that you can tell in advance exactly what they will say and think about anything. It is true that so far they have not got an Inquisition to enforce their orthodoxy, but they do have ways of enforcing it which make the old thumbscrews and racks seem quite paltry." —Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media, 1977
They move as one.
Wow, 1977.
Remember that was a good 44 years after Muggeridge--a socialist himself--traveled to the Soviet Union and was appalled by the state's mass famine-murder committed against Ukrainians (the Holodomor). He wrote about what he saw, but was rebuked on every front. The accepted version was the one ginned up by Communist Walter Duranty at the New York Times for his employer Adolph Ochs.
John Leake 'stacked on this topic a few years ago:
https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/a-tale-of-two-reporters-in-moscow
Many more sources online elsewhere.
Duranty's Pulitzer Prize was never revoked for his vicious/murderous lies. For a very not good time you can look him up and learn about his "colorful" life. Including hanging with Aleister Crowley for "rituals" we dare not imagine too closely, and iirc stealing Crowley's girlfriend and wifing her up. If "wife" can be used in that context.
I was aware of Muggeridge. Was he not a pal of Orwell too? Also a man of the left honest about the horrors of the Soviet Union.
Leftists destroying their own to maintain a fiction is nothing new.
He's also famously not a fan of Monty Python:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XgKFWnZLgdc
Now I have to go find that whole interview, as well as the followup one with Rowan Atkinson.
Perhaps we could venture to guess that the Life of Brian has aged better than its critics.
Muggeridge is a fool and a blowhard. Study the scriptures and you'll learn that Jesus never intended to start a cult that defied Judaism. He was a Jewish rabbi, for heaven's sake. It was the Christ-hating Roman Citizen and Pharisee Saul who invented Christianity and gave it its direction.
Yes, the two of them had literary relations (bad way to put it, kek) over the years.
But they too were leftists. So it seems there's something deeper here.
I guess I've read too much about Jason Arday, because now I'm mostly wondering "Does he lacquer his face?"
🤡
Sweat from all the hard work he’s been putting in, lol.
I was quite surprised to read in one article that he actually was documented as having at least participated in a multi-marathon challenge fundraiser.
Of course, the question then becomes how many of those did he complete?
You may not be familiar with the story of Rosie Ruiz. She "competed" in the New York City Marathon. She started the race, then ducked into the subway, taking a train to near the finish line. She then came out of the subway and ran the final couple of blocks to claim the prize. I may have some details wrong but you can look it up.
Lol. Very entrepreneurial of her.
I remember that.
It was 30 marathons over 35 days. So he probably completed none at all. He claimed to have ran the last four with broken leg bones.
Right. My surprise was that there was even a nugget of truth in anything he said. Seems obvious that he considered "participation" as actually running 30x26 miles. With a hairline fracture, conveniently described as a broken leg, which some will no doubt picture as a compound fracture.
Show me the x-ray. Show me the records of all the races. Then I might be impressed.
I think he is a fantasist. A little crazy.
Gee it's almost like the squishiest sciences, like gender and race studies, are tailor-made for this grift.
One only needs to examine even a little of its output to realize there's no there there.
Ferdinand Waldo Demara was a far, far more interesting "fake" and at least had an IQ worthy of mention.
All this means is that you're a racist for writing about it.
So there.
Anyone who has read THE BELL CURVE knows there is great intellectual disparity and a giant gulf between the percentage of crimes committed by blacks and by every other race.
All anyone has to do is watch a WNBA game to see violent animals attack any white woman with the courage to fact the pack.
It is the great undiscussed thing, particularly in the USA. But reality is real, always there, and waiting. Many more now openly discuss these things.
Here is an example of German stupidity, Paul Joseph Watson. But he posts numerous YouTube videos showing dumbassery all over Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBF4Tz5pjgk
Good grief. The decline of Europe continues apace. They’ll get a Hilter if they are not careful.
You should watch Paul Joseph Watson; he posts at least once a day for a week. Or, if you want, I can send you a number of his past posts
I do catch his material from time to time. He is pretty on the ball.
He looks like an adolescent Thulsa Doom.
Halfway down, here.
https://telescopictube.com/james-earl-jones-conan-the-barbarian-images/
When you shine a dog turd up and are surprised it still smells like shit.
"How much longer will we tolerate this adolescent nonsense?"
Well, we have 400mil guns in America, at least. And we have not done much about it. In fact, Trump has been good in this regard, putting breaks on DEI, gutting many of the patronage funding networks. But the feckless normie right is oblivious mostly, and the dissident right can't keep it together. DSA should be a boon for Repubs, but they seem incapable of raising much of an argument on their own behalf.
The Institutions for the most part can't be saved. They will collapse the West, or a Bukele will rise and gut them.
Some of the commentary I read was criticizing the university…not for hiring an unqualified candidate, but for putting such a vulnerable individual at risk of emotional violence, a.k.a. belittlement. And possibly suicide, which apparently is not uncommon in autistics.
😳
Is he autistic though? I don’t believe anything he says.
He appears to be checking as many DEI boxes as possible.
And we have certainly learned from the tranny contingent that threats of suicide are a powerful lever.
That's how the game is played, lil octowobbler. It's an ever escalating game of Victimization Hyperbole. Actual problems are smokescreened and suffocated by clouds of fear porn flatulence.
Only some people are allowed to play though. Remember that very white girl who asserted she was black, or African American, or something (Rachel Dolezal) and got totally dragged for it...even as Talcum X (Shaun King) was making bank on his faux melanin? Both eventually got called out...but the Jason Ardays of the world are allowed to pose as stuff other than what they are. Coz...whatever.
You are additionally correct, above, in noting that the Squishy "Sciences" "are tailor-made for this grift."
They are, because they ARE that grift.
The point you raise is additionally funny (lack of qualifications don't matter, RiSk Of EmOtIoNaL vIoLeNce does!) because it's the one thing the "social" "sciences" truly do, at bottom, fear: being held to account for the mayhem they have committed. Could say the same for the "humanities" post-postmodernism though. And even the sciences. Academia is a Circus Maximus of clownship. The Ed Biz became the employer of last resort post-1971...and it shows.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
I can't decide if I'm more appalled or offended that their abuse of the English language has been so widely accepted. It's like reading really extreme satire.
Wish I could blame these newer academic "fields" for the language thing, but I once tried to read ArtWeek in the 1980s and was similarly struck by the overabundance of pseudointellectual jargon. It's just Poser Language, and I can't see why no one exposes the naked emperor underneath.
Even more amazing is that the ultimate underwriters of this nonsense, the taxpayers, don't object more. What a waste of money.
I think the taxpayer is unaware of most of it. That is the horror of paying taxes to a central government. You have no idea what you are funding.
The money trail is largely obscured. A good example is NIAID>EcoHealth>WIV.
I really did admire DOGE for making publicly accessible a database where you could look up any nonprofit and see how much money they got, and how the money went from NGO to NGO to NGO.
> why no one exposes the naked emperor
Reminds me of a joke from the '90s from one of my bosses, a Yale/Cornell grad rural sociologist who was pretty grounded, but not completely (sociologists can't be):
Did you hear about the deconstructionist Mafia?
They make you an offer you can't understand.
My teacher read the London Times Literary Supplement for millions of years, being a Shakespeare and Spenser scholar and expert on English historical poetry of the Elizabethan Era, and on Roman Britain. Sometime in the '80s we both observed exactly what you say. It was like a door had swung on its hinges...and suddenly language was a great big in-joke that earned notareity precisely for being unintelligible.
Later I reflected on Julian Jaynes's ideas on the early human "bicameral mind" whose breakdown created Consciousness as we know it.
The emitters of this pomo gobbledygook thus were more like the people Jaynes hypothesized to have existed in that early (pre Bronze Age collapse) era of the "bicameral mind": people hearing voices directly in their heads that lacked reflection, subtlety, questioning, meta- dimension, or executive functions. Entirely internal, but attributed to the gods. One brain hemisphere emitted it, the other heard it, that settled it, and woe betide anyone who questions it.
Jaynes believed that what we call "schizophrenics" are people whose mentational and language sense exists in that earlier form, the bicameral kind. I had read his book not long after it came out (I was still a kid and didn't understand 99% of it)...but came back to it when realizing, many years later, that the Academese you're describing and I'd observed reminded me of nothing so much as the ramblings of several schizophrenics I'd known.
The DEI and Tranny and other "left" (not really) phenomena of Performative Victimization Hyperbole seem entirely devoid of self-reflection, or ability to take in others' views or mindsets. I should probably find a used copy of his book and read it again.
I liked the Jaynes hypothesis. I wish others had pursued the idea.
I bought "The Closing of the American Mind" when it was published. I read the introduction and thought it was interesting, but somehow never got back to reading it. Decades later I decided to read it on my long, boring train commute to work. Introduction was good, but the rest of the book did nothing to support the arguments in the introduction. By the third chapter I realized that the author couldn't make a fucking point. He would write pages of words and go on side-quests that did nothing to illustrate his thesis. It was like swimming in tar. I continued, because it was claimed to be an important book. One evening on the ride home, in the middle of a chapter in the middle of the book, I closed it and silently screamed. I couldn't take any more. When I returned home I buried it in the kitchen trash can and dumped leftover cat food and coffee grounds on it so I wouldn't be tempted to retrieve it. I have to wonder if the critics who praised the book ever read it.
Deft summary of Allan Bloom's writing you got there. :^D
He was insufferable--part of that U Chicago cabal of drivelers who gave each other jobs and ten star NYT etc. reviews. It was always ethnic grift by slick-talking mediocrities.
> I wish others had pursued the idea.
On the "bicameral mind" hypothesis, I wondered whether that, or something like it, wasn't behind the whole "NPC" meme campaign some years ago. Did you make note of that?
There appeared to be concerted or organized online efforts being made by...somebody...to awaken people in certain intelligent but edgy corners of the internet to the fact that a surprising proportion of people entirely lack self-reflection, executive function, and "the ability to rotate the apple in 3D." And that it was OK to Notice where/when this was observed.
Although this topic was not discussed in these precise terms, aspects of it meshed with the earlier "HBD" discourse, which got itself forbidden for its crime of smashing the Blank Slate, and Malcolm Gladwell's happy little fantasy that anybody could do anything if they just got 10,000 hours of programming in it.
However if we accept that not all pools of humans are the same, and have different capacities based on very different histories, any differences allowed--beyond paint job--shouldn't end at the neck. We should expect that genetic flows of people (which used to be called "races," a hydrological metaphor) would retain and carry past capacities, selected for for whatever reasons, natural or cultural.
The DEI crowd always honked about "diversity," but then with presented with documented instances of it, rejected it entirely. While strenuously arguing that everybody could be made the same through reprogramming. (Remember the headlines agonizing over how come blacks don't backpack and go birdwatching? Must be white racism!)
I always wondered whether Jaynes wasn't torturing his point to make this very point, at a time when observations that would someday be called "HBD" were starting to be forbidden in the extreme in academia (mid-'70s, a decade in to the "civil" "rights" operation).
He offered a precise definition of "consciousness," and hung the whole model on a specific moment in history...as though it played out similarly for the ancestors of everyone alive today. The latter was a sticking point for me.
The "Bronze Age Collapse" arguably was an Old World thing, right? So it didn't affect the entire world...unless we regard it as a global environmental disaster of some sort (which in fact some now suspect). So this also raises the question of whether such a disaster might not have literally "rewired" some, many, or all people.
For instance, if the hypothesis is accurate that "the event" involved major solar or galactic electrical/magnetic whammo, stuff that literally melted and scorched rock, it could have affected the electrical/magnetic "hardwiring" of humans. All humans? Some? Which??? In what ways? Interesting topic.
So I value Jaynes's efforts to formulate and champion the notion that not everyone is the same, and not across all times and ages, and that these differences yield different stuff culturally. It seems like a big DUH...which maybe is why the (highly autocratic) DEI religion rejected it. The most robust religions demand tests of faith of their adherents. And maybe the DEI religion is, as I chumbled before, an outcropping of that older "schizoid" brain organization.
Thanks for the chance to onionbelt on this. Would be interested in your thoughts, if any.
It's been a long time since I read Jaynes so it isn't in the front of my mind. I didn't connect it to the NPC concept. I do get the impression that some people must feel they don't exist unless they talk out loud. I was also surprised to find out that some people don't have an inner monologue, and even more surprised when someone on YouTube said he was shocked to learn that some people *do* have an inner monologue.
I remember Jaynes as pressing this one idea he had, but I didn't sense any agenda such as countering the rise of "political correctness". The latter was in effect as early as the late 1960s when William Shockley was "canceled".
Didn't Jaynes also suggest that people's visual perception was different in the past? I recall the suggestion that Homer referring to "the wine dark sea" was strange because dark wine is red while the sea is blue or green. Maybe it was another book.
I've heard about the Bronze Age Collapse but haven't read up on it. It's one of those things we can never know with certainty, and if aliens ever arrive in gigantic space ships that's one thing I'd like to ask them. So much recent scientific research (even in the hard sciences) is turning out to be false or not reproducible that we don't really know as much as we think we do. I roll my eyes when I see some claim like "Scientists discover the largest galaxy in the universe" only to find them pointing to a single pixel on a JWST image. Too much "knowledge" is based on a chain of assumptions, the falsification of any one of which could invalidate their conclusions.
But I ramble.
Curious about the history of this; please forgive me for resorting to Grok. Here's the link to the relatively brief answer, in case pasting AI output is poor form. The list of published commentaries looks pretty good. I was already a big fan of the “Grievance Studies” project. Will definitely be looking at the Orwell work.
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg_30087b15-24de-4ece-98c2-1c7ede190dab
I had to consult Grok, because I was fairly sure HBD did not mean "happy birthday" in this context.
So it's just the old nature/nurture argument under a different name?
Sounds like I might want to revisit bicamerality.
🤣
I still have my copy of Jaynes ;)
It came out in 1976. I read it at the time and, also being just a kid (22), also did not understand 99% of it.
I did a major purge of my "social sciences" holdings about a decade ago to make room for the burgeoning EE titles--many from the inherited library of my and my late darling's Pardner, an IT/network engineer. Who started out as a rocket scientist. Then went over to behavioral psych...with the intent of doing research in neuroscience. But then the internet happened, and you know how that soaked up many bright people. Good thing too. Academia in the late 20th c was no place for geniuses like he was. :^>
I still have mine. Daniel Dennett, who studied consciousness, said that most of Jaynes' ideas were wrong but some were right. On the other hand, neither Dennett nor anyone else has figured out consciousness.
A good observation. All credit to schizophrenics—they can't help it.
I think the PoMo Gobbledygook, as you so accurately name it, is an entirely intentional affectation.
A very good point...though I have to say...some of the ones I've known seem...hardwired that way. And if you ever run across a forum where this stuff is getting kneaded...message me immediately with an invitation. :^>
Your terms of endearment are charming :)
I am extremely charmed by tardigrades. :^>
I've been reading Martin Mach's magnificent site since the very beginning. When I first found it I let out a SQUEEEEE that startled our then-parrot right off his perch with a squawk. That, you see, is what the internet is supposed to be for. Not startling parrots. For hosting sites like this:
https://baertierchen.de/main_engl.html
And IIRC originally it was in German, which was my PhD language, so I was pretty darn rusty on all those darn declensions and such. But the pictures said it all.
Wow, thanks.
In return, here's a Facebook guy who does a lot of micro videos, many of which are tardigrades. I don't *think* you must be a Facebook member to see it.
https://www.facebook.com/jamsgerms
Like a drug pusher, FB gives you a sample then cuts you off if you don't buy the whole thing. But I do appreciate the pointer.
I loathe Facebook, and remain mostly because of the local community secret group page, where we post lost/found dogs, misdelivered USPS/UPS stuff, and bear/cougar sightings.
Spiff, you have done an excellent job with your analysis and presentation. I would die laughing if it weren't so goddamn serious. I have strong ancestral ties to England and have always been proud of the contributions Great Britain has made to Western Civilization. Like most Americans, I am of mixed ancestry from several Northwestern European nations. This stupid crap is happening in all of Europe and the United States as well.
There have been other Substack authors who have written on this subject, with comments covering a variety of opinions. I find some of these opinions on the reason or purpose of this diversity horror show to be lacking in logic or too simplistic. I look forward to your comments section and would love to see your opinion on this.
The purpose is to demonstrate the blank slate hypothesis is correct. Or, perhaps more accurately, that hereditarians are wrong. Those who wish to believe man is eminently malleable keep pushing up against reality.
The Cambridge mess is really an inevitable consequence of this. The failure rate of some demographics is a consequence of racism. If we remove the racism, and we elevate them to key positions, they will flourish. Professor Arday is an example of this kind of thinking.
It blinds them to reality. It encourages them to focus on race and other “protected characteristics” and inevitably quality must decline.
Arday is just unusual in the extent of his lying. His CV sounds like total fantasy. And it is primarily this that sunk him. If it hadn’t been for that he would still be there.
> If we remove the racism, and we elevate them to key positions, they will flourish.
Well...he has, hasn't he?
I mean...they're right....
The question is, of what does that "flourishing" consist, and what must be despoiled to buttress it.
> Arday is just unusual in the extent of his lying
And that's the soft underbelly of Performative Victimization Hyperbole. Homer Simpson wasn't entirely wrong when he told his wife, "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, one to listen."
This is all additionally coupled with the rise of Celebrity Scholars via the internet/"social" "media." Every field has been poisoned with this. The Emperor's New Clothes, the Wizard behind the curtain, many such cases.
But this involved senior people heaping praise on someone who, within the confines of academia, was known to lack a publishing record or any academic achievements. This was extreme even by their absurd standards. This guy was a nobody elevated high.
"The purpose is to demonstrate the blank slate hypothesis is correct. Or, perhaps more accurately, that hereditarians are wrong. Those who wish to believe man is eminently malleable keep pushing up against reality."
But to me, that seems too simple. I can't help but think there is a more sinister reason. Perhaps some of the less intelligent woke have that as a motivation, but what about those egalitarians such as Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen, whom I believe is rather intelligent? Why would someone like that think that such dumbassery would escape scrutiny?
Ah I see. I suspect it is Orwell's observation, some ideas are so crazy only intellectuals could believe them.
Baron-Cohen's belief requires looking far beyond the obvious, and I think that is the trap. The climate people do this. The weather isn't changing, or is accepted as pretty normal. But they see patterns we miss. It is like those people who convert radio waves from space into audio streams and are convinced they hear a pattern. There is some regularity there we dismiss as natural and they cannot.
I think that is an occupational hazard the intelligent are especially prone to. They see deep patterns where we see noise.
Don't leave out the money angle. This is a fantastic grift, with innumerable NGOs funded by taxpayer money. I think the true believers are mostly just useful idiots used to perpetuate this particular industrial complex with their passionate cult-like beliefs.
This is widespread in western countries, not just the UK.
What we need is for governments to shut off the tap. USAID was a good start.
Yes I agree. It is easy to focus on the cranks, but they are just the fall guys. The real power is behind the throne and they are cleaning up. Billions are spent on this.
15/10 take.
Forgive me for repeating myself, but the Ed Biz became a major employer of last resort after 1971...and then got massively financialized in the 1980s and '90s thanks to Reaganomics/Greenspanismo.
There is a lot of stock bubble bling in the mix, in other words. People suddenly finding themselves with tons of money they had to put somewhere. This is how universities now have entire departments named by virtue of having been auctioned off to the highest bidder. People who had nothing whatever or very little to do with the field represented, or not distinguished in that field other than making a lot of money in it.
NGOs were a major Sham-Wow for that blingstorm as well.
For example, in the '90s, tech bubble gajillionaires were blamming around the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, looking for "bright ideas" to fund. You could go from latte at a cafe in Pacific Heights to 501(c)(3) incorporation and a staffing plan in weeks. And then the NGOs were constantly trying to poach each others' staff/ideas.
The dot com crash set this back somewhat, but it amped back up in the '00s with Greenspan's/City of London's financialization of housing and the resulting boom. The '08 crash set that back, but time after time there are winners, and they still need somewhere to put their ever larger share of the bling.
There's also the propaganda/media angle, but I won't go there at the moment. Point being that none of this is productive, and it doesn't run on sensible perspectives.
So of course the distorting effects on public policy have been huge, with no counterbalance. Counterbalance, say, in the form of those who want to fund causes or ideas that are defined as BAD by the current system's powerful players.
Do you remember how the SPLC intervened in Canada to block legacies it considered "not in the public interest"? And of course what are you going to do, locally, when the SPLC turns its guns on you/your local legal process, and basically threatens a massive PR attack if anyone dares suggest that people should be able to leave their money/property to whoever they want?
And remember how the Sikh attorney general of New Jersey did the same (apparently in NJ every charitable bequest has to meet approval of the state's AG)?
With all this distortion, and the public sector itself turned into a partner in and agent of the distortion, of course we're at where we're at, where unctuous dimwits with all the right checkboxes and zero credentials are given prominent roles at what used to be one of white civilization's most esteemed academic institutions. It's all of a piece. It's a de facto economic sector. Institutionalized grift, as you well note.
A complex system of grifts, which overlap or share cogs sometimes. See also https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/anthony-fauci-and-the-collapse-of
I wistfully recall my micro-animal existence until 2016, mostly focusing on the subcellular chemistry of metabolism and mitochondria. Much simpler times, incidentally instilling appreciation of complex systems. After that came an embarrassing TDS interlude and then the paradigm upheaval of Covid.
Now there's mostly a desire to borrow down in the moss, or perhaps be shot into space. Maybe Elon needs test subjects for the Mars project.
Whites seem to be worse than lemmings.
No, just slow to anger. Plus they have faith in voting systems. So perhaps naive. But reality is a brutal teacher.
Indeed. This Substack data analysis shows whites basically disappearing by 2130 due to insufficient replacement birthrate.
https://georgeoflydda.substack.com/p/traditional-catholics-are-the-only?r=o1yr3&utm_medium=ios
I am not convinced. No one can predict the future. Populations have always waxed and waned. Poverty seems to drive the numbers up and that is definitely coming as is the collapse of feminism.
No one can be certain of the future but there are at least 7 billion people actively predicting it. Lol.
Arday looks like Neil from The Young Ones, but as the Negro version of the character.
And less competent than Neil.
I hear Arday is being outed and ousted to make way for a moslem woman - any truth to that, do you know?
I wouldn't be surpised in the lsightest, knowing full well from more than two decades experience the feelings Arab and other moslems have towards Negros, be they African or USAmerican.
I am not sure who is replacing him. I am reading he has a female Muslim colleague opposed to Western education. A tricky one for Cambridge to explain. The blessings of multiculturalism.
As for discord among the non-whites. It is a source of concern the pro-immigration lobby seem ignorant of the animosities that exist all over the world we are now importing. Even Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus from the Indian sub-continent have very serious issues with one another.
Hah, yah - the esteemed and right honourable anti-racists look outside (Western/Northern/Central) Europe and see poor widdle brown pipil who they just have to save from the 'orrible nastee rayceeists...
Meanwhile, India alone is home to over 2 000 distinct ethnic groups, and there are well over a hundred different languages spoken on the sub-continent. "Indians" is about as meaningful as "African" or "European" - but I guess it is on us, having imported unthinkingly the USAmerican convention of how different groups are spoken about.
We British knew all this as we ruled them. And when we left they collapsed and broke into nine different countries. Even Churchill spoke of India as a geographical entity only. They had no concept of nationhood.
A clown 🤡 in university robes is still a clown 🤡.
I believe I've said this before - we do battle with dark principalities. The object of dumbing us down, making us into submissive non thinking servants has been in the works for decades. Destroy mankind is the goal. The Fabian Society formed before WW2 set the standards for how to erase intelligence - start with education. Apparently it's working. All the way up to the halls of higher education. If I had no faith I would begin to despair that we aren't going to make it - are we.
I think we will. Arday’s nonsense coming to light is an example. He was found out. We hear chatter of thousands of others. We hear other things too. It is unravelling.
The Fabians have the same problem as everyone else. They cannot predict the future but act like they can. They ignore human nature. Some always resist. The Covid measures reflected almost total control of media and had the benefit of fear, but they fizzled out. So does everything.
Arday reflects a deep issue they cannot solve; their enemy is not us, it is reality. Arday shouldn’t even have attended a university let alone become a professor. That’s why it will unravel.
Remnds me of the old adage - I know there is balance to life, I can see it as I swing by. 😂
That reminds me of Douglas Adams' quote: I love deadlines, I like the sound they make as they swoosh past me.
My favorite Douglas Adams quote.
Mine is what the potted geranium said mid-air.
Not again!
omg - I can so relate 🙄
Spiff, it's not that "his nonsense is coming to light." It's that somebodies somewheres decided to speak up, and put the spotlight on those going along with the fantasies. It's that people who have been speaking up all along were finally granted a stage where they could be heard.
The enablers of this nonsense bear full responsiblity. The Ardays of the world cannot function without that enabling, and being rewarded for playing it to advantage.
Look at how Ma Beeb reports the situation:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78gmp7zylvo
It's a "plagiarism row," etc.
I get it. The traditional media are spinning it hard. But it is failing this time. I hope we see others come forward and expose the whole grift.