OK reading that art gallery thing I'm still perplexed as to why metropolitan leftoids in the UK are so enthusiastic about importing ridiculous political fads from the USA -- that thing about a missing space for black women's work is a weird UK-incompatible copy of a kneejerk-veneration of black women trend in the USA among elites and wannabe-elites that itself is epiphenomenal to DEI extortion here. Is this like ambitious Dacians eagerly learning Latin or something? And I've pointed it out before, but these are the exact same people who moan smugly about how gauche Americans are with Trump/guns/etc.
"why metropolitan leftoids in the UK are so enthusiastic about importing ridiculous political fads from the USA"
Critical Social Justice (or whatever you want to call it) is the official belief system of the young and educated "culture workers" (LOL) throughout the Anglosphere and even in most of the capitals of Western Europe. (The fact that there's even a term like "culture worker" shows how deeply rooted in Marxism so much of this is.)
The foundation of this belief, which was hammered out in 1980s American Humanities depts, is that the first purpose of all thought and criticism is to "interrogate" the work for "hegemonic power", to locate whether the work or author is either supporting the Oppressed or the Oppressor, and then launch a political strategy of either attacking the "oppressive discourse" or supporting the "transgressive" discourse. Sounds like fun, I know...
It essentially turned anyone with a Humanities degree into an agent of the secret police, who comb through texts to discover acts of bigotry and other ideological crimes. In the 80s this was just an academic style or strategy but all these years later it has cohered into a rigid uncompromising morality, the proper etiquette for all good liberals, and a totalizing worldview that you only question or violate at great risk.
These "culture workers" are also completely postnational, they have much more loyalty to their own guild of right thinkers than to any country or region, and in a world of global technology where you meet more people online than in IRL, they can be in LA or Frankfurt or Sydney, it doesn't matter. They all have the same beliefs and tastes, they are all the same person, identical and interchangeable.
The Gurwinder article is similar to a paper published by Bruce Charlton in 2009 on "clever sillies." Charlton's explanation for intelligent people often lacking common sense is that they apply abstract reasoning and a preference for new and counter-intuitive ideas to the realm of human behaviour. Abstract reasoning and novel solutions are great tools when solving a complicated scientific problem, but for social questions, rules of thumb and instinct are far more appropriate because they are a product of the unforgiving process of natural selection.
A "strong tendency to social conformity" is a perfect description. I've been guilty of it myself, especially when I was young and wanted to endear myself to high-status people. I found myself saying things because I (correctly) thought it was what certain people wanted to hear. Basically playing to an audience to earn social capital.
Yes that is true. It makes far more sense, if a government wants to raise TFR, to forget about the people not having kids and trying to get families with 2 to have 3 or 4. I think that percentage was lower in mid century US but that increasingly resembles a middle class anomaly in human history.
Why I found the 2 child tax credit limit so wrong headed. It was a response to a cultural aversion to large families, which have become associated with the underclass or recent immigrants and reinforced the assumption that normal people would not have more than 2 kids.
yeah that's a good point. Cultural norms matter and the authorities, through law and taxation incentives, can influence a lot.
Big families are like a lot of things in that they become a high-status signal above a certain level in society, and a low status signal below a certain point. Among posh and upper bobo families 3 is pretty common still.
I actually think this makes sense. There have been some US surveys that indicate that a number of families with 2 children would actually prefer 3 or 4.
The reasons cited are often financial, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a cultural bias toward 2 children as well. So, a major subsidy increase for child 3 or 4 may possibly produce a significant increase in fertility rates.
This is an example of Kenneth Clark’s extremely dangerous and problematic ideology:
“I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. “
—Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, (1969) I agree that it’s the greatest documentary series of all time.
That Prevent research is similar to that recently released internal FBI memo that identified attending Latin Mass as a extremism marker. As if the clowns who raided the Capitol on January 6th attend any mass, much less Latin Mass!
"As with so many things, post-Christian society is reverting to pre-Christian norms, in this case the norm where a large proportion of men were thrown onto the romantic scrapheap."
I always find refences to pre and post Christianity interesting, as if the rest of the planet, and the multiple civilizations that occupy it, don’t exist. Most of the modern world is facing fertility issues. There’s a New York Times article this morning on declining fertility rates in China, Korea and Japan. The reasons for a world wide decline in fertility is long, but technology and, with it, women’s increasing ability to choose when and whether to get pregnant are at the top of the list. Christianity is, at best, peripherally important.
Yeah but ethnonarcissm is universal. Peruvians going on about their food or the Irish going on about how they are welcoming and went everywhere. It is ethnic supremacism being aided and abetted.
It is like the modern habit of drinking water constantly. Kids act up sometimes because they are thirsty. Kids sometimes get sick because they are thirsty. So you can control this by making sure there is water everywhere. But Kids will act up anyway kids will get sick anyway. So a lot of women have made water bottles ubiquitous but not changed human nature - because easier to believe kids are thirsty and not bad
Intelligence without usefulness is surely Asperger's syndrome The people who are so smart but not rich. Most of the world would not have Mastermind...or pub quizzes.
I subscribe to the feminisation view of Wokism. Because Ethno narcissm is not enough If ethinc narcissism . Sarah Raio might have upper caste arrogance but she needs agreeable upper class white women to pay her bills.
It is the same with Tinder./ Poly no fathers or brothers to chase away the players . In the old days a new secretary might be shielded by the office romeo.
There is an absence of male authority in the West.
I wonder how soon a man on a white horse will appear
Great selection of posts. I'm particularly interested in the subject of self-deception, so I clicked through to the full Gurwinder post, and subscribed.
I’m trying to read both Tom Holland and Ferdinand Mount. Mount has written about classical things that came back not in the Renaissance but in our time. (I know of no great Renaissance or Baroque sports stadiums.) Holland has pointed out the post- Christian institutions that no historic pagan society ever came up with; broad based charity, same sec marriage, and now that a person, even a child, may decide whether they are a boy or a girl regardless of their equipment.
A real sign of the return of paleopaganism would be, to me, if we got a society where successful and “hot” males collected harems, but the rest were either incels or resorted to prostitutes.
I have watched scores of debates between atheists and believers and the two positions can't get any further apart than they already are. Both understand each other's position so it's not a problem of an ever-widening gap in comprehension. It's just that one, usually for terrible reasons, posits the existence of God while to the other this looks like wishful thinking and intellectual dishonesty. What Paisley and Callaghan found to talk to each other about is a mystery to me, unless they talked about the societal benefits of belief rather than its truth/falsity.
I like the distinction between 'atheists' and 'the merely godless'. To me the former is a thought-through position whereas the latter is not. Probably the godless would indeed benefit from living in a religious society, one that kept nihilism at bay and introduced some moral guideleines. On the other hand, I don't think either Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris would be better people for believing in God.
'I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization'.
'Transformative-justice workshops' i.e. a time-tabled moan-fest by black people who don't see why they should abide by the law. 'Prison abolition': try it out in your area of Philadelphia and let us know how it goes.
I wouldn't read anything by someone with that CV. He may be starting to realise that things are going too far but I'm pretty sure my idea of too far would, for him, be not nearly far enough.
I read Douglas Murray's article on Prevent's research unit, and found myself intrigued; trying to work out the internal thought processes and external procedures that leads an organ of State in a liberal country to conclude that interest in the works of Edmund Burke and the TV series 'Civilisation' represent markers of extremism. I imagined a state of affairs not unlike that in 'The Office' (UK version).
Perhaps the inner workings of Stasi were similarly banal. I wouldn't want to go full Hannah Arendt on this matter, but given the purpose of the Prevent, such revelations ought to induce a little more than mere mockery. On the other hand (forgive me), the fact that such absurdities can be brought into the public light should give us heart.
OK reading that art gallery thing I'm still perplexed as to why metropolitan leftoids in the UK are so enthusiastic about importing ridiculous political fads from the USA -- that thing about a missing space for black women's work is a weird UK-incompatible copy of a kneejerk-veneration of black women trend in the USA among elites and wannabe-elites that itself is epiphenomenal to DEI extortion here. Is this like ambitious Dacians eagerly learning Latin or something? And I've pointed it out before, but these are the exact same people who moan smugly about how gauche Americans are with Trump/guns/etc.
"why metropolitan leftoids in the UK are so enthusiastic about importing ridiculous political fads from the USA"
Critical Social Justice (or whatever you want to call it) is the official belief system of the young and educated "culture workers" (LOL) throughout the Anglosphere and even in most of the capitals of Western Europe. (The fact that there's even a term like "culture worker" shows how deeply rooted in Marxism so much of this is.)
The foundation of this belief, which was hammered out in 1980s American Humanities depts, is that the first purpose of all thought and criticism is to "interrogate" the work for "hegemonic power", to locate whether the work or author is either supporting the Oppressed or the Oppressor, and then launch a political strategy of either attacking the "oppressive discourse" or supporting the "transgressive" discourse. Sounds like fun, I know...
It essentially turned anyone with a Humanities degree into an agent of the secret police, who comb through texts to discover acts of bigotry and other ideological crimes. In the 80s this was just an academic style or strategy but all these years later it has cohered into a rigid uncompromising morality, the proper etiquette for all good liberals, and a totalizing worldview that you only question or violate at great risk.
These "culture workers" are also completely postnational, they have much more loyalty to their own guild of right thinkers than to any country or region, and in a world of global technology where you meet more people online than in IRL, they can be in LA or Frankfurt or Sydney, it doesn't matter. They all have the same beliefs and tastes, they are all the same person, identical and interchangeable.
The Gurwinder article is similar to a paper published by Bruce Charlton in 2009 on "clever sillies." Charlton's explanation for intelligent people often lacking common sense is that they apply abstract reasoning and a preference for new and counter-intuitive ideas to the realm of human behaviour. Abstract reasoning and novel solutions are great tools when solving a complicated scientific problem, but for social questions, rules of thumb and instinct are far more appropriate because they are a product of the unforgiving process of natural selection.
A "strong tendency to social conformity" is a perfect description. I've been guilty of it myself, especially when I was young and wanted to endear myself to high-status people. I found myself saying things because I (correctly) thought it was what certain people wanted to hear. Basically playing to an audience to earn social capital.
Regarding the collapse in fetility, sometimes think commentators focus too much on people with no children and not enough on small family sizes.
The percentage of women in Western countries who never have kids has remained around 15-20%, at least since the 19th Century.
What's changed is that women generally have 1 or 2 children now and families of 5 or 6 kids are considered odd.
Yes that is true. It makes far more sense, if a government wants to raise TFR, to forget about the people not having kids and trying to get families with 2 to have 3 or 4. I think that percentage was lower in mid century US but that increasingly resembles a middle class anomaly in human history.
Why I found the 2 child tax credit limit so wrong headed. It was a response to a cultural aversion to large families, which have become associated with the underclass or recent immigrants and reinforced the assumption that normal people would not have more than 2 kids.
yeah that's a good point. Cultural norms matter and the authorities, through law and taxation incentives, can influence a lot.
Big families are like a lot of things in that they become a high-status signal above a certain level in society, and a low status signal below a certain point. Among posh and upper bobo families 3 is pretty common still.
I actually think this makes sense. There have been some US surveys that indicate that a number of families with 2 children would actually prefer 3 or 4.
The reasons cited are often financial, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a cultural bias toward 2 children as well. So, a major subsidy increase for child 3 or 4 may possibly produce a significant increase in fertility rates.
Yes, think it's hard to untangle why people have fewer kids than they'd like, as none of us are great judges of our own reasoning.
Even "financial" reasons are likely partly cultural e.g. expectation that even young children don't share bedrooms.
This is an example of Kenneth Clark’s extremely dangerous and problematic ideology:
“I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. “
—Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, (1969) I agree that it’s the greatest documentary series of all time.
That Prevent research is similar to that recently released internal FBI memo that identified attending Latin Mass as a extremism marker. As if the clowns who raided the Capitol on January 6th attend any mass, much less Latin Mass!
"As with so many things, post-Christian society is reverting to pre-Christian norms, in this case the norm where a large proportion of men were thrown onto the romantic scrapheap."
Hey, what could go wrong?
I always find refences to pre and post Christianity interesting, as if the rest of the planet, and the multiple civilizations that occupy it, don’t exist. Most of the modern world is facing fertility issues. There’s a New York Times article this morning on declining fertility rates in China, Korea and Japan. The reasons for a world wide decline in fertility is long, but technology and, with it, women’s increasing ability to choose when and whether to get pregnant are at the top of the list. Christianity is, at best, peripherally important.
The power who goes by 2nd city bureaucrat on twitter coined (I think) the term “ethnonarcissism”, which is helpful
Yeah but ethnonarcissm is universal. Peruvians going on about their food or the Irish going on about how they are welcoming and went everywhere. It is ethnic supremacism being aided and abetted.
It is like the modern habit of drinking water constantly. Kids act up sometimes because they are thirsty. Kids sometimes get sick because they are thirsty. So you can control this by making sure there is water everywhere. But Kids will act up anyway kids will get sick anyway. So a lot of women have made water bottles ubiquitous but not changed human nature - because easier to believe kids are thirsty and not bad
That's a great word to describe a lot of what we are seeing in the American political Left, namely The Squad.
AOC is an ethnonarcissist if I've ever seen one. Once you understand that ethnonarcissism defines her, everything else falls into place.
Intelligence without usefulness is surely Asperger's syndrome The people who are so smart but not rich. Most of the world would not have Mastermind...or pub quizzes.
I subscribe to the feminisation view of Wokism. Because Ethno narcissm is not enough If ethinc narcissism . Sarah Raio might have upper caste arrogance but she needs agreeable upper class white women to pay her bills.
It is the same with Tinder./ Poly no fathers or brothers to chase away the players . In the old days a new secretary might be shielded by the office romeo.
There is an absence of male authority in the West.
I wonder how soon a man on a white horse will appear
Great selection of posts. I'm particularly interested in the subject of self-deception, so I clicked through to the full Gurwinder post, and subscribed.
I’m trying to read both Tom Holland and Ferdinand Mount. Mount has written about classical things that came back not in the Renaissance but in our time. (I know of no great Renaissance or Baroque sports stadiums.) Holland has pointed out the post- Christian institutions that no historic pagan society ever came up with; broad based charity, same sec marriage, and now that a person, even a child, may decide whether they are a boy or a girl regardless of their equipment.
A real sign of the return of paleopaganism would be, to me, if we got a society where successful and “hot” males collected harems, but the rest were either incels or resorted to prostitutes.
Which Mount book is it?
How the Classical World Came Back to Us.
Thanks! I like Mount's writing, shall look it up at the library/
I have watched scores of debates between atheists and believers and the two positions can't get any further apart than they already are. Both understand each other's position so it's not a problem of an ever-widening gap in comprehension. It's just that one, usually for terrible reasons, posits the existence of God while to the other this looks like wishful thinking and intellectual dishonesty. What Paisley and Callaghan found to talk to each other about is a mystery to me, unless they talked about the societal benefits of belief rather than its truth/falsity.
I like the distinction between 'atheists' and 'the merely godless'. To me the former is a thought-through position whereas the latter is not. Probably the godless would indeed benefit from living in a religious society, one that kept nihilism at bay and introduced some moral guideleines. On the other hand, I don't think either Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris would be better people for believing in God.
'I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization'.
'Transformative-justice workshops' i.e. a time-tabled moan-fest by black people who don't see why they should abide by the law. 'Prison abolition': try it out in your area of Philadelphia and let us know how it goes.
I wouldn't read anything by someone with that CV. He may be starting to realise that things are going too far but I'm pretty sure my idea of too far would, for him, be not nearly far enough.
I read Douglas Murray's article on Prevent's research unit, and found myself intrigued; trying to work out the internal thought processes and external procedures that leads an organ of State in a liberal country to conclude that interest in the works of Edmund Burke and the TV series 'Civilisation' represent markers of extremism. I imagined a state of affairs not unlike that in 'The Office' (UK version).
Perhaps the inner workings of Stasi were similarly banal. I wouldn't want to go full Hannah Arendt on this matter, but given the purpose of the Prevent, such revelations ought to induce a little more than mere mockery. On the other hand (forgive me), the fact that such absurdities can be brought into the public light should give us heart.
Mr Shawcross' report and the government's response to it may be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-prevents-report-and-government-response
I think the Euro idea of a strong united continent (well, Neo-Frankish empire) as a balance to US dominance is a great idea... in theory.
I'm becoming more pessimistic about the Ukraine war, the risk of escalation seem to be higher. Wonder when I should relocate to Montevideo.