This message from the Eagles goes out to all those social justice warriors on campus.

Jordan Peterson: “So the first thing that you might want to know about Postmodernism is that it doesn’t have a shred of gratitude — and there’s something pathologically wrong with a person that doesn’t have any gratitude, especially when they live in what so far is the best of all possible worlds. So if you’re not grateful, you’re driven by resentment, and resentment is the worst emotion that you can possibly experience, apart from arrogance. Arrogance, resentment, and deceit. There is an evil triad for you.”

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/perverse-postmodern-climate-retreat-from-reason/

Alternative song for sending off graduates comes from Bob Dylan:

 

This remarkable arrow was designed by a scientist specializing in optical illusions.  In this case, no matter what you do, you can not make your brain see anything other than an arrow pointing right.  The reason is your brain processes the patterns on the object with only that perception possible.

It is the creation of Professor Kokichi Sugihara at Meiji University in Tokyo.  Professor Sugihara has a long history of designing mind-bending objects.  The mathematician provides some complex equations in his paper explaining how such an illusion is possible, but all you really need to know is that the always-right arrow uses forced perspective to exploit your brain’s penchant for finding right angles where there aren’t any.  It may seem like magic, but it’s really just your brain being too efficient in its quest to make order out of chaos.

This is a fun example, but it reminds us of the climate wars where perception bias is also hardwired. And it reminds us that any observer adds a frame of reference on top of objective reality.

 

Art credit: Chris Gall

This post is based on one of the best things written lately on the toxic mentality dominating today’s college campus. It is a rich, in-depth exploration of the issue, and rewarding to those reading the whole article. Some excerpts in italics here with my bolds to show the train of thought and some of the pearls.

Peter Berkowitz writes in The Standard on Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Colleges foster smugness on the left and resentment on the right.

According to John Stuart Mill, liberal education furnishes and refines the mind. It furnishes the mind with general knowledge of history and literature, science, economics and politics, morality, religion, and philosophy. It refines the mind by teaching students to grasp the complexities of critical issues and to appreciate the several sides of moral and political questions. In furnishing and refining the mind, liberal education tends to temper judgment, elevate character, and form richer and fuller human beings.

Though different from professional education, liberal education improves the ability of professionals to practice their professions wisely. As Mill observed, “Men may be competent lawyers without general education, but it depends on general education to make them philosophic lawyers who demand, and are capable of apprehending, principles, instead of merely cramming their memory with details.”

Chris Gall recalls some examples where Justice Scalia demonstrates Mill’s point, and then digs into the heart of the matter.

Unfortunately, liberal education in America is in bad shape. Our colleges have exposed it to three major threats. They have attacked and curtailed free speech. They have denigrated and diluted due process. And they have hollowed and politicized the curriculum. These threats are not isolated and independent. They are intertwined. All are rooted in the conceit of infallibility. To remedy one requires progress in remedying all.

Free Speech Curtailed

From speech codes, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and safe spaces to disinviting speakers and shouting down lecturers, free speech is under assault on college campuses. One reason is that, as polls by Gallup and others show, many students do not understand the First Amendment. And when they learn that it protects offensive and even hateful speech, they dislike it.

Why has free speech fallen out of favor? Many university students, faculty, and administrators suppose there is a fundamental conflict between free speech on one side and diversity and inclusion on the other. The freer the speech, the argument goes, the more pain and suffering for marginalized students. This way of thinking springs from a faulty understanding of free speech and of diversity and inclusion in education.

Yes, words wound. Children learn that from experience. History teaches, however, that beyond certain narrow exceptions—such as true threats, direct and immediate incitement to violence, defamation, and sexual harassment—the costs of regulating speech greatly exceed the benefits. One cost is that regulating speech disposes majorities to ban opinions that differ from their own.

Well-meaning people will say, “I hear you, I’m with you, I support free speech, too. But what does free speech offer to historically discriminated-against minorities and women?” The short answer is the same precious goods that it offers to everyone else: knowledge and truth. The long answer begins with three observations.

First, for many years women have formed the majority on campuses around the country. Approximately 56 percent of university students are female. On any given campus, women and historically discriminated-against minorities are together likely to represent a large majority. Thus, the curtailing of campus speech on behalf of these minorities and women reflects the will of a new campus majority. This new majority exhibits the same old antipathy to free speech. It plays the same old trick of repressing speech it labels offensive. And it succumbs to the same old tyrannical impulse to silence dissenting views that has always been a bane of democracy.

Second, as Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman argued last year in their book Free Speech on Campus, far from serving as an instrument of oppression and a tool of white male privilege, free speech has always been a weapon of those challenging the authorities—on the side of persecuted minorities, dissenters, iconoclasts, and reformers. In the United States, free speech has been essential to abolition, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay rights. All took advantage of the room that free speech creates to criticize and correct the established order. Restricting speech—that is, censorship—has been from time immemorial a favorite weapon of authoritarians.

Third, a campus that upholds free speech and promotes its practice is by its very nature diverse and inclusive. Such a campus offers marvelous benefits to everyone regardless of race, class, or gender. These benefits include the opportunity to express one’s thoughts with the best evidence and arguments at one’s disposal; the opportunity to listen to and learn from a variety of voices, some bound to complement and some sure to conflict with one’s own convictions; and, not least, the opportunity to live in a special sort of community, one dedicated to intellectual exploration and the pursuit of truth.

Instead of touting free speech’s benefits, however, schools are encouraging students—especially but not only historically discriminated-against minorities and women—to see themselves as unfit for free speech, as weak and wounded, as fragile and vulnerable, as subjugated by invisible but pervasive social and political forces. Standing liberal education on its head, colleges and universities enlist students in cracking down on the lively exchange of opinion.

Liberal education ought to champion the virtues of freedom. It ought to cultivate curiosity and skepticism in inquiry, conscientiousness and boldness in argument, civility in speaking, attentiveness in listening, and coolness and clarity in responding to provocation. These virtues enable students—regardless of race, class, or gender—to take full advantage of free speech.

Since free speech is essential to liberal education, we must devise reforms that will enable colleges and universities to reinvigorate it on their campuses. Last year, the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute developed “model state-level legislation designed to safeguard freedom of speech at America’s public university systems.” Consistent with its recommendations, universities could take several salutary steps:

Abolish speech codes and all other forms of censorship.
Publish a formal statement setting forth the purposes of free speech.
Create freshman orientation programs on free speech.
Punish those who attempt to disrupt free speech.
Host an annual lecture on the theory and practice of free speech.
Issue an annual report on the state of free speech on campus.
Strive where possible for institutional neutrality on partisan controversies, the better to serve as an arena for vigorous debate of the enduring controversies.
Many colleges and universities won’t act on such principles. Public universities, however, are subject to the First Amendment, and state representatives can enact legislation to assist state schools in complying with their constitutional obligations.

Due Process Denigrated

The curtailing of free speech on campus has not occurred in a vacuum. It is closely connected to the denial of due process in disciplinary proceedings dealing with allegations of sexual misconduct. Both suppose that little is to be gained from listening to the other side. Both rest on the conceit of infallibility.

Campus practices, for example, can presume guilt by designating accusers as “victims” and those accused as “perpetrators.” Universities sometimes deprive the accused of full knowledge of the charges and evidence and of access to counsel. It is typical for them to use the lowest standard of proof—a preponderance of the evidence—despite the gravity of allegations. In many instances, universities withhold exculpatory evidence and prevent the accused from presenting what exculpatory evidence is available; they deny the accused the right to cross-examine witnesses, even indirectly; and they allow unsuccessful complainants to appeal, effectively exposing the accused to double jeopardy. To achieve their preferred outcomes in disciplinary hearings and grievance procedures, universities have even been known to flout their own published rules and regulations.

There is, of course, no room for sexual harassment on campus or anywhere else. Predators must be stopped. Sexual assault is a heinous crime. Allegations should be fully investigated. Universities should provide complainants immediate medical care and where appropriate psychological counseling and educational accommodations. Students found guilty should be punished to the full extent of the law.

At the same time, schools must honor due process, which rightly embodies the recognition that accusations and defenses are put forward by fallible human beings and implementing justice is always the work of fallible human beings. Some would nevertheless truncate due process on the grounds that a rape epidemic plagues higher education, but, fortunately, there is no such thing. The common claim that women who attend four-year colleges face a one in five chance of being sexually assaulted has been debunked. According to the most recent Department of Justice data, 6.1 in every 1,000 female students will be raped or sexually assaulted; the rate for non-student females in the same age group is 7.6 per 1,000. Yes, even one incident of sexual assault is too many. Yes, women’s safety must be a priority. And yes, we can do more. But contrary to conventional campus wisdom, university women confront a lower incidence of sexual assault than do women outside of higher education.

Others would curb due process because all women should just be believed. Certainly they should be heard. But no one should just be believed, especially when another’s rights are at stake. And for a simple reason: Human beings are fallible. As Harvard professor of psychology Daniel Schacter amply demonstrated in The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (2001), we humans routinely forget, routinely remember things that never were, and routinely reconstruct the past in ways that serve our passions and interests.

Then there’s the question of why universities are involved at all in adjudicating allegations of nonconsensual sex. Nonconsensual sex is a common statutory definition of rape. Generally, universities leave violent crimes to the police and courts. If a student were accused of murdering a fellow student, who would dream of convening a committee of administrators, professors, and students to investigate, prosecute, judge, and punish? For that matter, if a student were accused of stealing or vandalizing a fellow student’s car, would we turn to a university committee for justice? If both murder, the gravest crime, and crimes much less grave than sexual assault—theft and vandalism—are matters for the criminal justice system, why isn’t the violent crime of sexual assault?

The denial of female agency, which follows from the claim that women are incapable of truly consenting to sex, implies that a man who acknowledges having had sex with a woman has prima facie committed assault. This approach—common on campuses—may be illegal. Insofar as it presumes male guilt and denies men due process, it appears to violate Title IX by discriminating against men on the basis of sex. It is also profoundly illiberal and anti-woman. It turns out that the denial of due process for men rests on the rejection of the belief—central to liberal democracy—that women, as human beings, are free and equal, able to decide for themselves, and responsible for their actions.

The willingness of university officials to deny female agency, presume male guilt, and dispense with due process is on display in the more than 150 lawsuits filed since 2011 in state and federal courts challenging universities’ handlings of sexual-assault accusations. Lawsuits arising from allegations of deprivation of due process at Amherst, Berkeley, Colgate, Oberlin, Swarthmore, USC, Yale, and many more make chilling reading. Numerous plaintiff victories have already been recorded.

To take advantage of their newfound freedom to provide due process for all their students, universities might consult the October 2014 statement published by 28 Harvard Law School professors in the Boston Globe. The statement offers guidance in reconciling the struggle against sexual misconduct with the imperatives of due process. It counsels universities to adopt several measures:

Inform accused students in a timely fashion of the precise charges against them and of the facts alleged.
Ensure that accused students have adequate representation. Adopt a standard of proof and other procedural protections commensurate with the gravity of the charge, which should include the right to cross-examine witnesses, even if indirectly, and the opportunity to present a full defense at an adversarial hearing.
Adopt a standard of proof and other procedural protections commensurate with the gravity of the charge, which should include the right to cross-examine witnesses, even if indirectly, and the opportunity to present a full defense at an adversarial hearing.
Avoid assigning any one office—particularly the Title IX office, which is an interested party because maximizing convictions justifies its presence—responsibility for fact-finding, prosecuting, adjudicating, and appeals.
In, addition, universities ought to make sessions on due process an essential part of freshman orientation.

It is unreasonable, however, to expect the restoration of due process on campuses anytime soon. For starters, it depends on reinvigoration of free speech. A culture of free speech presupposes and promotes a healthy sense of fallibility. That opens one to the justice of due process. For what is due process but formalization of the effort by fallible human beings to fairly evaluate other fallible human beings’ conflicting claims?

Free speech, however, is not enough on its own to rehabilitate due process. Commitment to both is rooted in an understanding of their indispensable role in vindicating liberal democracy’s promise of freedom and equality. To recover that understanding, it is necessary to renovate the curriculum so that liberal education prepares students for freedom.

The Curriculum Politicized

The college curriculum has been hollowed out and politicized. The conceit of infallibility is again at work—in the conviction that the past is either a well-known and reprehensible repository of cruel ideas and oppressive practices or not worth knowing because progress has refuted or otherwise rendered irrelevant the foolish old ways of comprehending the world and organizing human affairs.

The disdain for the serious study of the history of literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and war that our colleges and universities implicitly teach by neglecting them, denigrating them, or omitting them entirely from the curriculum, has devastating consequences for liberal education. Without a solid foundation of historical knowledge, students cannot understand the ideas and events that have shaped our culture, the practices and institutions that undergird liberal democracy in America, the advantages and weaknesses of constitutional self-government, and the social and political alternatives to regimes based on freedom and equality. Absent such an understanding, students’ reasoning lacks suppleness, perspective, and depth. Consequently, graduates of America’s colleges and universities, many of whom will go on to occupy positions of leadership in their communities and in the nation, are poorly equipped to form reasoned judgments about the complex challenges America faces and the purposes to which they might wish to devote their lives.

To say that the curriculum has been hollowed is not to say that it fails to deliver a message but that it lacks a core. Much of college education is a mishmash of unconnected courses. Most undergraduates are required to fulfill some form of distribution requirements. Typically, this involves a few classes in the humanities, a few in the social sciences, and a few in the natural sciences. Within those broad parameters, students generally pick and choose as they like. For fulfilling requirements in the humanities, schools tend to treat courses on the sociology of sports, American film and race, and queer literary theory as just as good as classical history, Shakespeare, or American political thought.

The most common objection to a coherent and substantive core curriculum is that it would impair students’ freedom. Each undergraduate is different, the argument goes, and each knows best the topics and courses that will advance his or her educational goals. What right do professors and administrators have to tell students what they must study?

The better question is why we put up with professors and administrators who lack the confidence and competence to fashion and implement a core curriculum that provides a solid foundation for a lifetime of learning. Every discipline recognizes that one must learn to walk before one learns to run.

In every discipline, excellence depends on the acquisition of primary knowledge and necessary skills. Even the ability to improvise effectively—with a game-winning shot, a searing riff, or a devastating cross-examination—is acquired initially through submission to widely shared standards and training in established practices. It is peculiar, to put it mildly, that the authorities on college campuses are in the habit of insisting on their lack of qualifications to specify for novices the proper path to excellence.

For many professors, ideological opposition to a core curriculum on the grounds that it interferes with students’ freedom merges with self-interested opposition to it on the grounds that having to teach a common and required course of study would interfere with faculty members’ freedom. University hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions usually turn on scholarly achievement in rarefied areas of research. Powerful professional interests impel faculty to avoid teaching the sort of courses that provide students with general introductions, solid foundations, and broad overviews because those take time away from the specialized scholarly labors that confer prestige and status. Much better for professors, given the incentives for professional advancement entrenched by university administrations, to offer courses that focus on small aspects of arcane issues.

The hollowed-out curriculum, moreover, is politicized as much by routine exclusion of conservative perspectives as by aggressive promulgation of progressive doctrines. Students who express conservative opinions—about romance, sex, and the family; abortion and affirmative action; and individual liberty, limited government, and capitalism—often encounter mockery, incredulity, or hostile silence. Few professors who teach moral and political philosophy recognize the obligation to ensure in their classroom the full and energetic representation of the conservative sides of questions. Courses featuring Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and John Rawls abound; those featuring Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Friedrich Hayek are scant.

Worse still, higher education fails to teach the truly liberal principles that explain why study of both conservative and progressive ideas nourishes the virtues of toleration and civility so vital to liberal democracy. Many faculty in the humanities and social sciences suppose they are champions of pluralism even as they inculcate progressive ideas. The cause of their delusion is that the rightward extreme of their intellectual universe extends no further than the center-left. Many were themselves so thoroughly cheated of a liberal education that, unaware of their loss, they blithely perpetuate the crime against education by cheating their students.

Small wonder that our politics is polarized. Both through their content and their omissions, college curricula teach students on the left that their outlook is self-evidently correct and that the purpose of intellectual inquiry is to determine how best to implement progressive ideas. At the same time, students on the right hear loud and clear that their opinions are ugly expressions of ignorance and bigotry and do not deserve serious consideration in pressing public-policy debates. By fostering smugness on the left and resentment on the right, our colleges and universities make a major contribution to polarizing young voters and future public officials.

What should be done?

First, freshman orientation must be restructured. Schools should not dwell on diversity, equality, and inclusion while excluding diversity of thought. In addition to providing sessions on the fundamentals of free speech and the essentials of due process, they ought to give pride of place in orientation to explaining the proper purposes of liberal education. This means, among other things, reining in the routine exhortations to students to change the world—as if there were no controversial issues wrapped up in determining which changes would be for the better and which for the worse. Instead, orientation programming should concentrate on helping students understand the distinctive role higher education plays in preserving civilization’s precious inheritance and the distinctive role such preservation plays in enriching students’ capacity for living free and worthy lives.

Second, curricula must be restructured to make room for a core. In our day and age, undergraduate specialization in the form of a major is inevitable. And students accustomed to a wealth of choice and to personalizing their music lists and news sources cannot be expected to abide a curriculum that does not provide a generous offering of electives. But even if a third of college were devoted to a major and a third to pure electives, that would leave a third—more than a year’s worth of study—to core knowledge.

A proper curriculum should not only introduce students to the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. It should also make mandatory a course on the tradition of freedom that underlies the American constitutional order and clarifies the benefits of a liberal education. In addition, the curriculum should require study of the great moral, political, and religious questions, and the seminal and conflicting answers, that define Western civilization. And it should require study of the seminal and conflicting answers to those great questions about our humanity and our place in the world given by non-Western civilizations.

Third, professors must bring the spirit of liberal education to their classrooms. The most carefully crafted and farsighted revisions of the curriculum will not succeed in revivifying liberal education unless professors teach in the spirit of Mill’s dictum from On Liberty, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” Indeed, unless professors recognize the wisdom of Mill’s dictum, they will fail to grasp the defects of the contemporary curriculum that make its revision urgent.

The Professor’s Vocation

To provide a properly liberal education, then, our colleges and universities must undertake three substantial reforms. They must institutionalize the unfettered exchange of ideas. They must govern campus life on the premise that students are endowed with equal rights and therefore equally deserving of due process without regard to race, class, or gender. And they must renovate the curriculum by introducing all students to the principles of freedom; to the continuities, cleavages, and controversies that constitute America and the West; and to the continuities, cleavages, and controversies that constitute at least one other civilization.

To accomplish these reforms, the conceit of infallibility must be tamed. Progress in one area of reform depends on progress in all. But to recall a matter Marx touched on and, long before him, Plato pursued: Who will educate the educators?

Times have changed. The academy has undergone a kind of religious awakening. These days many professors resemble priests who believe their job is to impose their faith. But the zealous priest is no more suited to the vocation of liberal education than is the cynical priest. Professors would do better to take the midwife—in the Socratic spirit that Mill embraced—as their model.

Liberal education’s task is to liberate students from ignorance and emancipate them from dogma so that they can live examined lives. It does this by furnishing and refining minds—transmitting knowledge and equipping students to think for themselves.

What about political responsibility? What about justice? What about saving the country and the world?

Through the discipline of liberal education, professors do what is in their limited power to cultivate citizens capable of self-government. And law professors do what is in their limited power to cultivate thoughtful lawyers. Those are lofty contributions since self-government and the rule of law are essential features of liberal democracy—the regime most compatible with our freedom, our equality, and our natural desire to understand the world and live rightly and well in it.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. This is a revised and expanded version of the 2018 Justice Antonin Scalia Lecture delivered on February 5 at Harvard Law School. It draws on previously published essays.

First a thoughtful reflection by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail The brave new age of gender-neutral kids, followed later by the Brave New World of New York City. Excerpts with my bolds.

When Storm was born seven years ago in Toronto, he or she became the most famous baby in the city. That’s because Storm’s parents announced that they were going to raise the baby as gender neutral. “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” Storm’s father, David Stocker, told The Toronto Star. In an e-mail, Storm’s parents told their friends, “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now – a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation.”

Storm’s parents, it turns out, weren’t oddballs. They were pioneers. More and more progressive parents have decided to liberate their children from the chains of gender. They give their children gender-neutral names such as Zoomer or Scout. They refer to them using gender-neutral pronouns. They buy them gender-neutral toys and scrupulously avoid pink and blue. They tell people that it’s up to the child theirself to decide what gender they identify with.

These parents don’t like the term gender-neutral, explains New York magazine. They prefer gender-open, gender-creative or gender-affirming. For them, the gender binary is a trap constructed by society to imprison their children and restrict their human potential. Gender is a spectrum, not a binary, they argue. They hope that freeing our children from the shackles of arbitrarily imposed gender norms will be the first steps in a sweeping cultural change to create a better, fairer, more egalitarian society.

Progressive parents are not alone in this Utopian project. Sweden is also engaged in a deliberate experiment in social engineering. Instead of “boys” and “girls,” teachers are urged to call the children “friends.” Many Swedish preschools have dropped gendered pronouns in favour of the newly invented gender-neutral term “hen.”

As The New York Times reports, Swedish teachers encourage boys to play in the kitchen and girls to shout “no.” Some boys show up in dresses; no one cares. Sweden’s national curriculum requires preschools to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns” and encourage children to explore “outside the limitations of stereotyped gender roles.” In one pilot project, boys and girls were split up and coached to behave in gender-non-conforming ways. Boys were instructed to massage each other’s feet. Girls were taken on on barefoot walks in the snow.

More and more progressive parents have decided to liberate their children from the chains of gender. They give their children gender-neutral names such as Zoomer or Scout. They refer to them using gender-neutral pronouns.

Will all these efforts create a more egalitarian, less gendered world? I’m skeptical. Gender-neutral parenting is the latest example of blank-slatism run amok. The blank-slate theory is the romantic belief that environment and culture are wholly responsible for human behaviour. If only we stopped stereotyping little people as girls or boys, they’d stop behaving in stereotypical ways.

This is not to say that it’s useless to try to socialize kids. But we also need to admit that human beings are also profoundly shaped by their genes. Gender is far more influential than many people are willing to acknowledge. Men and women exhibit significant behavioural differences not (or not only) because they’re socialized differently, but because they’re wired differently. Give a girl a pot and she’ll play house. Give a boy a pot and he’ll beat it like a drum. And forget about the gender “spectrum.” Although there are lots of tender boys and lots of aggressive girls, more than 99 per cent of people identify with their birth sex.

Large-scale studies show that men and women differ not only in size and strength but also in personality traits. Across dozens of diverse cultures, women consistently rate themselves as warmer, friendlier, more anxious, and more sensitive to feelings than men. Men rate themselves as more assertive and more open to new ideas.

For most of human evolution – when the differentiation in gender roles was extreme – these differences made sense. (They also help explain the dominance of men in the corridors of power, although you’re not supposed to say that.)

I do feel a bit uneasy for children such as Storm (who, for the record, is now identifying as a girl). Most kids like a bit of structure in their lives, especially, I imagine, on the existential question of whether they’re a boy or a girl. It seems like a lot to ask them to sort it out for themselves. Is it really fair to make your kid the subject of a social experiment, no matter how righteous you think it is? And do you really think they’ll thank you for it? I have my doubts.

The Brave New World of New York City Where Anything Goes

According to NYC Commission on Human Rights, Gender Identity is one’s internal, deeply-held sense of one’s gender as male, female,or something else entirely.

A primer for business owners and employees on how to respectfully treat all the gender expressions includes prescribed behavior and punishments.  They may encounter a list of 31 identities and expressions that the city officially recognizes.

1. Bi-Gendered
2. Cross-Dresser
3. Drag-King
4. Drag-Queen
5. Femme Queen
6. Female-to-Male
7. FTM
8. Gender Bender
9. Genderqueer
10. Male-To-Female
11. MTF
12. Non-Op
13. Hijra
14. Pangender
15. Transexual/Transsexual
16. Trans Person
17. Woman
18. Man
19. Butch
20. Two-Spirit
21. Trans
22. Agender
23. Third Sex
24. Gender Fluid
25. Non-Binary Transgender
26. Androgyne
27. Gender-Gifted
28. Gender Bender
29. Femme
30. Person of Transgender Experience
31. Androgynous

Summary

So it goes with the intense modern preoccupation to achieve distinction (recognition and maximum friends) by acquiring a set of diversity options, then claiming to belong to various categories. Adding value to society is not a consideration.

 

As recent posts have shown, the climate movement is mounting a cynical legal maneuver modeled after the tobacco lawsuit strategy decades ago.  This post on April 1 provides some quotations for insight into the linkage between foolishness, idealism and the endpoint of cynicism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Footnote:

This post was inspired by Pointman’s blog post THE SECOND GREAT EXTINCTION OF THE LIBERAL DREAM.

Some tidbits that resonated:

There was something which happened in the 1980s which was variously labeled the death of the liberal dream or the great extinction of the liberal dream. It was much discussed at the time, but you’ll rarely hear of it in any political discussion nowadays. In essence, it was a seismic and global shift away from the statist, left-wing ideas that had held sway in government circles through most of the 70s. The entire world seemed to be moving towards the right and any surviving liberal ideals became the exclusive province of raggedy assed hippies moving into middle-age or embittered politicians who were also products of the 60s, but were now severely out of touch with the modern Zeitgeist.

By the dawn of the 80s, the world was ready, if not desperate, for practical, effective politicians like Reagan and Thatcher, both of whom never sat well with their own political establishment, but would go on to do a job of societal re-engineering that brought back prosperity and culminated in the political grand slam of the Berlin wall coming down in 89, which marked the effective demise of the Soviet Union and a half century long ideological battle.

If any of that lot sounds familiar, then welcome to 2016 and the supposedly massive surprise of Trump being elected.

It’s a return to respecting traditional values which actually never went away, because without them, any civilisation would implode. Country, family, responsibility and common decency. There’s an old saying – comes the day, comes the man, and America in it’s relatively short history, has been inordinately fortunate in that respect. In its hour of need, it seems to cough up just the right man. Trump is smart, tough and always up for a scrap. I’ve no doubt he has his flaws, but his visceral support for those values and his intention to move them back into the centre of American life is the basis of his appeal to his electorate.

A previous post (Feel Good Climatism) pointed to the controlling power of progressive PC institutions in today’s societies.

Short version: The right attempts political persuasion. The left, on the other hand, attempts social persuasion — basically seizing the commanding heights of culture-making institutions and then deciding that espousing some political claims (being pro-gay-marriage) increase social status and that espousing other political claims (being against gay marriage) decrease social status and, indeed, make one a social pariah, fit for ostracism, mass mockery, and internal exile.

The left’s method works much better than the right’s. It always has and it always will. Because most people don’t care about politics all that much — but nearly everyone (except for the crankiest of contrarians, including some of the current assembled company) cares about their social status.

Contemporary socio-political orientations no longer fit traditional liberal/conservative definitions. The left is now committed to “post-modern” philosophy and “progressive” political action, deriving from identity politics and cultural warfare. Traditionalists are now on the far right sideline and “conservatives” are tarred with that same brush. People in the middle are a mix of classical liberals and conservatives who still embrace the western rational, free enterprising democracy frame. Progressives want to overturn that heritage with tactics from social class conflict, supercharged in the age of Internet, social media and 24/7 buzz. The middle alternative on the right is more properly termed “libertarian” since the focus is on individual liberty, free enterprise and limited government. The same concerns motivated those drafting the US Constitution.

The Masses Push Back

Recent events suggest a rise of libertarian views among the masses, portending a growing backlash against the progressive, post-modern views of ruling elites around the world. From Brexit to Trump to Germany, and now Italian voters are trashing the establishment.

Italy’s voters choose populists, deliver stinging rebuke to Europe (CNN)

Italy was plunged into political uncertainty Monday after parliamentary elections delivered victories for populist, euroskeptic parties but left no clear path forward for a new government.

No party or coalition received enough votes to rule alone, and Italy now faces a hung parliament, in what European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker described last month as the “worst-case scenario” for Europe.

Cultural Exploitation Unmasked

Apart from electoral results, there are more voices ready, willing and able to speak out against the PC narrative and the bullying behavior that goes with it. For weeks, Parkland school survivors were adored as celebrities, but now some realism and analysis shows the political and social exploitation that has occurred.

Dear Annoying Parkland Kids: We Gave You A Pretty Awesome World, Try Not To Mess It Up By Robert Tracinski in the Federalist MARCH 6, 2018.  Excerpts below with my bolds

All the reasons for refusing to allow ourselves to be led by children were summed up in the latest coronation of the Parkland kids, this time by ancient leftist Bill Maher. He invited David Hogg and Cameron Kasky on his show so Hogg could boast about hanging up on the President of the United States, and so Kasky could give us this sanctimonious little lecture: “I mean this sincerely, I really do, to all the generations before us, we sincerely accept your apology. We appreciate that you are willing to let us rebuild the world that you f—ed up.”

This sums up everything that’s wrong with these kids’ astroturfed ride to fame. They get flown around the country, they get invited on TV, they get puffball interviewers like Bill Maher, all because they are willing to repeat in a cloyingly self-righteous manner the message favored by their adult handlers. But not because they actually know what they’re talking about.

Let’s look at their arrogant presumption that previous generations messed up the world, so that today’s kids, in their superior wisdom, have to “rebuild” it.

Start with the issues most directly at hand here. School shootings are actually down over the last 20 years. Northeastern University Professor James Alan Fox analyzed the data and concluded that mass school shootings are “extremely rare events” and that “there is not an epidemic of school shootings.”

Moreover, Fox adds that “over the past 35 years, there have been only five cases in which someone ages 18 to 20 used an assault rifle in a mass shooting,” meaning that the most common proposed new gun control measure would have little effect.

Speaking of guns, you might think that without gun control, we’re living in a lawless post-apocalyptic hellscape. In fact, crime is down. Murders are down. Violent crimes committed with guns are way down.

But cite these statistics and you will be told that you cannot contradict the Parkland kids because being present at the scene of a mass shooting makes them unquestionable experts on the topic. No, really. Kasky tells us, “We’ve seen our friends text their parents goodbye. We are the experts.” I can hear Tom Nichols grinding his teeth from here. Obviously, being an expert on guns, crime, and mass shootings requires actual knowledge and research, including the ability to read and understand crime statistics.

This presumption that we adults have ruined the world has wider roots. Today’s young people are bombarded with a lot of doom and gloom that tells them everything is getting worse, pushed onto them by people who have an interest in recruiting them as activists.

They may be surprised to learn, for example, that in addition to crime being down, war has decreased across the globe. The number of wars and the number of deaths in wars decreased dramatically after World War II, of course, but it decreased dramatically again when the Soviet Union collapsed, almost as if Communism was an engine of global conflict.

And so on. The world we older generations have given today’s kids is actually pretty awesome. We can’t protect them from every danger and every risk, and we can’t stop every tragedy like the Parkland shooting. But by historical standards, our kids will be safer, healthier, and wealthier, and they can expect to live longer and more untroubled lives than we did, or than our parents did, or than our grandparents did.

I can see, though, why they wouldn’t realize any of this, because there are some who have a political interest in making things look worse. If you want young people to think capitalism is the cause of war — a view they hear often — you don’t want them to find out that the triumph of the capitalist countries in the Cold War led to a decrease in war. If you want them to rail against “global capitalism” — I can’t decide if this is a cause of the left or of the right these days — you can’t have them realizing that capitalism and trade are wiping out global poverty. If you want them to think free markets are inferior to socialism, you don’t want them to understand the massive increases in prosperity in free market societies, or to question the latest environmentalist panic. And if you want them to become televised activists for gun control, you have to create the impression that there is an epidemic of gun crimes and mass shootings.

The Parkland kids have swallowed all of this, and hence their ignorant ranting to us about how the older generations have messed everything up.

To be sure, the kids we’re seeing on TV are not representative of their peers. We don’t hear much about the Parkland students who don’t fit the left’s narrative. Instead, we’re mostly getting a couple of the high-school debate club types. Once I found out that detail, it all fell into place, because we all remember the guys from high-school debate club. They weren’t the smartest kids, just the most preening and self-important.

The important point is that too many of today’s young people are not being taught to see and appreciate what has made the world as good a place as it really is for them. They have no idea who designed the large and complex systems that produce the peace and prosperity they enjoy, no idea how those systems work, and no idea how much they can foul them up by knocking out pins and levers and constitutional amendments just because they’re angry.

So the lesson from this is to show a little humility, kids. You’re still learning, and you would be well served not to be content to repeat what you learn at school, but to go do your own reading and research and listen to people who disagree with you. It’s not as traumatic an experience as you have been led to believe. When you can show that you understand what’s good about the world we are giving you, and you have some idea of how it got to be that way — then we’ll listen to your ideas for changing it.

Waking Up to Social Thought Control

At a deeper and more personal level, people are waking up to the oppressive cultural regime attempting to control individual thoughts and behavior.

The Backlash Is Building By Rod Dreher • March 5, 2018.

This post by Dreher contains thoughtful emails from people realizing how mobbing done by PC twitter gangs threatens the roots of liberal social democracies. Just a few paragraphs to show why you should read the whole thing (my bolds).

A reader writes:

I read what you said about having spoken with four people recently who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but are considering it now because of the left’s recent behavior. I’m not quite in that camp, but am close to it; I suspect my progress on the issue largely resembles those of your friends and (I suspect) a substantial minority of other Americans as well.

The firing of James Damore back in August was what really made me start hesitating about my previous view that “political correctness” was, as Vox, the New Yorker, and all the other right-thinking people say, a Fox News attempt to discredit politeness. Here was a guy who was making a calm, carefully reasoned argument that some of Google’s diversity initiatives might not be the best way to achieve diversity, and that Googlers should be free to criticize such policies. In response, not only was he fired (and with a publicity that basically guarantees he’ll never work for a Silicon Valley firm again), but he was subjected to a regularly scheduled bout of Two Minutes’ Hate every day for weeks.

That got me paying more attention to the way the Left handles speech, and it made me realize that “political correctness” was most definitely alive and well, and hardly restricted to trivialities like whether the Washington Redskins should be named something else. In Europe, as Douglas Murray has documented, people who raised concerns prior to 2015 about the influx of immigration were silenced with accusations of racism, until things finally reached a boiling point and spilled out with the growth in populist fascist movements. 20 years ago, Theodore Dalrymple was already writing about how the police in the UK were already growing hesitant to investigate Muslim immigrants’ tendency to keep their daughters out of school for fear of being called racist, and more recent data indicate that such social problems (and the continued fear of being labeled racist for trying to address them) are hardly going away. Things that ought to be the subject of legitimate debate in the United States are being categorically ruled out in the same way: could innate biological differences affect, even if only in a small way, the pay gap between men and women? Sexist. Is it really a good idea to let in a large influx of Muslim immigrants in light of the problems Europe has had in that regard? Islamaphobe. Does IQ vary, on average, by race, and does this create the risk of widening the inequality gap because society increasingly rewards high IQ? Racist. Is Obamacare actually as successful as is claimed? You want poor people to die. Is letting in lots of low-skilled immigrants good for the economy? Racist, nationalist, white supremacist.

The fact is, I don’t want to live in a country where the only views permitted in public debates (if they can be termed “debates” at all) are the ones deemed acceptable by enraged Twitter mobs, and where expressing a perfectly reasonable, measured claim (“America should prioritize its own working class over that of illegal immigrants, while still doing what we can to help the Dreamers”) publicly can put you at quite reasonable fear of getting doxxed and subsequently losing your job and health insurance. It’s bad enough that people like Zack Ford are on social media. The last thing I want is for candidates people like him favor to get political power on top of the formidable socio-cultural power the Left already possesses.

Summary

What a strange twist. Marx gave us the notion of ideology, which he understood to be the system of beliefs and values that the ruling class used to control the working class and ensure continued power and privileges. Today’s Marxist wannabes who are mostly in the entitled class are employing the ideology of environmentalism to mount an anti-capitalist crusade under the banner of Climate Change, advocating policies which will further the misery of the downtrodden.

For more on how we got here

Warmists and Rococo Marxists.

Disturbing: Legal Social Justice Warriors

Coercive PC Discourse Redux

News comes of law schools endorsing social justice warfare for their students and graduates.  Bruce Pardy writes in the National Post The social justice revolution has taken the law schools. This won’t end well  Excerpts below with my bolds.

What is a law school for? According to the University of Windsor, revolution. Earlier this month, Windsor’s law school released a statement on the jury verdict that acquitted Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley of the second-degree murder of Coulton Boushie. According to the statement, the Canadian legal system is oppressive. “Canada has used law to perpetuate violence against Indigenous Peoples,” it states, “a reinvention of our legal system is necessary.”

The statement reveals how legal education has lost its way. One could be forgiven for thinking that the purpose of law schools was to train lawyers to understand legal principles and to think logically and critically. Instead, some law schools portray themselves as political actors working for a cause. At Windsor’s law school, “we strive toward social justice. We take that commitment seriously.” Indeed they do. So do other law schools in Canada, some more explicitly than others. Social justice means defeating oppression and righting historical wrongs — by favouring or blaming people as members of groups, and by undermining Western legal principles such as the rule of law, equal application of the law, presumption of innocence, and freedom of expression, thought, conscience and religion.

There is an old saying that at any trial there are four versions of the truth: what the prosecution says, what the accused says, what the jury finds, and what actually happened. I have no idea what transpired at that farm in Saskatchewan. But Windsor’s law professors seem to know — an impressive feat, since they were neither at the scene nor in the courtroom to hear the evidence. Due process exists, in part, to protect us all from the self-righteousness of mobs.

One might expect Justin Trudeau and his ministers to jump on ideological bandwagons, but it is telling when law schools want to ride along too. Windsor’s says that “the law’s response to Coulton Boushie’s death is tragic, unnecessary and unacceptable.” Boushie’s death was indeed tragic and unnecessary, but the law’s response was not. Even the lawyer for Boushie’s family, Chris Murphy, said that “based on the evidence, the submissions made and the charges that the judge gave to the jury, a route of acquittal was a possibility.”

Human history is rife with oppression. Women were oppressed when only men could own property, slaves when they had no right to liberty, Indigenous people when they were forced to attend residential schools. Oppression results when some people do not have the same legal rights as others. But today’s law schools resist the idea of equal application of the law and openly advocate progressive policies. For instance, when Trinity Western University, an independent religious institution that receives no government funding beyond its charitable status, proposed to open a law school, the established schools urged provincial law societies to ban TWU’s graduates on the grounds that its community covenant did not reflect progressive values. The law societies in Ontario and B.C. obliged. The Supreme Court’s decision on TWU’s challenge of those decisions is pending.

Law schools may not need to preach revolution much longer. If you haven’t noticed, the tipping point is near. Courts and academics are transforming the Charter of Rights and Freedoms from a roster of fundamental liberties into a social-justice charter that justifies curbing individual freedoms instead of protecting them. The words of section 15(1) of the Charter, which guarantee that “every individual is equal before and under the law,” suggest that the same rules should apply to everyone. However, the Supreme Court has held that the law can nevertheless treat people differently if doing so produces equal outcomes, and that treating people the same — for instance, requiring the same qualifications from a minority job applicant as from others — might even violate section 15(1) if it produces unequal results.

The Law Society of Ontario has begun to compel its members to expressly acknowledge an obligation to promote progressive values. Individual liberties are no longer fundamental. Everyone is not subject to the same rules. The legal ground is shifting.

Not all law professors endorse the path that we are on, and fortunately they can still choose what to teach in their own courses. Not all lawyers or judges agree either. Many have kept their heads. Give them credit for thinking for themselves. After all, they probably went to a Canadian law school.

Bruce Pardy is professor of law at Queen’s University and a member of the Law Society of Ontario.