Opinions, art, debate
True. Gender Studies programs are insignificant and graduate no students to speak of. The belief that there are crowds of people with degrees in Gender Studies is as realistic as the idea that people take out $200K loans to get PhDs.
There are many serious problems in higher education but they don’t include Gender Studies or expensive PhDs.
The first time I was contacted for an interview by a major newspaper was in 2010. There was an issue at my alma mater, and they wanted my perspective as somebody with specific knowledge of the situation. Since then, I’ve been contacted at different times and on a variety of issues by Newsweek, Chicago Post Tribune, St Louis Post Dispatch, and others. I’ve also been contacted by individual journalists working on freelance projects. I ended up rejecting every single request except for an interview with Rod Dreher.
The reason why I always end up rejecting interviews is because the way it works for an in-depth piece is that you receive the questions before the actual interview. Alternatively, there’s a pre-interview where parameters are set and the conversation is prepared. Every single time (except with Rod Dreher who behaved with the utmost professionalism), the journalist would come to the interview with what I can only qualify as egregious bias. No space was left within the interview for me to talk about what actually happened. We are not talking about opinion pieces, mind you. These were supposed to be articles on specific events at the institutions where I worked.
The questions were of the following variety:
“Please describe instances of racism at your college. How did it make you feel to witness them?”
“Please describe the trauma that Professor X caused you with his repeated sexual harassment. What are some of the professional costs of this trauma?”
These questions were based on absolutely no claims of mine. I never witnessed any racism on any campus. Professor X never caused me a second of unpleasantness. I’ve never in my life been sexually harassed in any academic environment. But the journalists were treating these fantasies as fact. I knew that no matter what I said at the interview, my words would be perverted to mean whatever lie the journalist wanted to advance.
One of my instructors agreed to a TV news appearance and was horrified at how her comments were edited to transmit the opposite message from what she actually said. Again, this wasn’t about opinions. The instructor was trying to describe an event in which she took part. The journalist turned her into a whiny, pathetic bastard when the message the colleague was trying to send was that of cheerful positivity. This wasn’t an issue of world politics or elections. Still, the journalist found it necessary to inject lies into the story. Events exist so that journalists can turn them into lies. The lie is the ultimate goal.
This is not only personally aggravating but scary. The information we receive about the world is vitiated. Yarvin and Zizek point to a very real problem that makes our entire pretense at democracy look pathetic.
Yesterday Trump said to a dumb, unprofessional journalist who kept interrupting in a voice of an excited toddler who urgently needs the bathroom, “Are you with Bloomberg? You are horrible. Horrible. I don’t know why they even have you.” That felt good. It felt like he was saying it to every single one of these bastards who tried to put words into my mouth and use me for dishonest purposes. We can get upset with Trump or with Zizek but the question remains. How can any of what we call democracy mean anything if everything we call the news is lies, including about pretty trivial issues?
Slavoj Zizek agrees with Curtis Yarvin:
They are both right. What we call democracy is meaningless because the press is dishonest and spreads politically biased lies. The cultural apparatuses are completely ideologically captured and aren’t performing their functions. Politicians can’t afford to have a long-term vision because they need to please the lowest common denominator voters with fantasies and unrealistic promises.
What we get as a result of all this is oligarchy dressed up as democracy. The only part of it that is democratic is the effort to coddle and please the most undisciplined, dumb and emotional among us. What Yarvin proposes is telling this part of the population to get shafted and let people who aren’t low-IQ emotional wrecks steer society.
The biggest objection to Yarvin’s proposal is that there’s no way to ensure that the oligarchy that will come to power as a result will, indeed, be responsible and will act for the common good. However, the democratic oligarchy we currently have definitely isn’t responsible and isn’t acting for the common good.
There’s a funny social media scandal about several journalists and politicians (Keith Olbermann, Ryan Lizza, RFK, some weirdo politician from South Carolina) who were all passing around some hooker and imagining that they were in a relationship with her.
Middle age hits people hard if they don’t manage to stabilize their personal life before it comes.
I highly recommend the Netflix cartoon film In Your Dreams to people with children. It’s a very nice children’s movie that promotes the following ideas:
A very wholesome, utterly unobjectionable movie. I particularly loved that the importance of reality was at the heart of the plot. If you want a children’s movie with a conservative sensibility, this one is perfect.
Did you know that at some Florida universities faculty and staff are obligated to take flu shots?
I’ve never seen anything of the kind. Flu shots seem kind of random.
I fear to ask if COVID is considered a type of flu.
DHS statement to FOX via @TriciaOhio:
“Not only was Akhror Bozorov—a wanted terrorist—RELEASED into the country by the Biden administration, but he was he was also given a commercial driver’s license by Governor Shapiro’s Pennsylvania. This should go without saying, but terrorist illegal aliens should not be operating 18-wheelers on America’s highways.”
Not only did this wanted terrorist get a driver’s license, he got Real ID:
I don’t have one because it’s very hard to get. How come criminal illegals are handed out Real IDs? The dude is an open jihadi. Is there a reason why such efforts were made to give him the only form of ID besides a passport that gets you on a commercial flight?
Yeah, because if you say that yes, you want to remarry, what if you jinx it? Or what if you don’t meet anybody and end up feeling like a loser? It’s easier to pretend that you are not interested and then position yourself as somebody who unwillingly gave in to the pleas of desperate suitors. It’s a much better look than confessing to spending years desperately trying to scare up a new husband. That’s exactly what I did between marriages.
What people say they want is an indication of absolutely nothing whatsoever except that, at this particular moment, they felt like saying it. This is why I could never understand this whole branch of sociology that conducts questionnaires and then draws conclusions based on what people said like it’s indicative of reality.
Words are not reality. Words people say about themselves are definitely not reality.
This is very mysterious. Why are they on the floor? Is it a cultural thing?
My mother grew up in a small village, six children in the family, the father disabled from the war and not earning much, no indoor plumbing, got up before dawn to feed the animals and clean out the barn. But they had extremely high hygiene standards. The bedding was always crisply white which in those conditions was a bloody miracle. Grandpa checked the cleanliness of surfaces with white handkerchief. Somebody leaving socks on the floor would have led to months of soul-searching.
In my father’s educated city family, it would be equally unlikely to encounter such a scene. Somebody would have definitely written sarcastic poetry if that happened.
Cultural differences are very interesting to me.
Would you try this?
I wouldn’t. Not for any principled reason but because it’s boring.
I agree with Matt, though, that for people without a strong sense of self and those with narcissistic injuries this will be both irresistible and damaging.
AI will mean more stratification and more people trapped in a favela of body and mind.
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