I really thought this essay was building up to a stronger point than "how can they be too powerful if I can write a dissent on Substack without being harmed."
Just for starters, they did everything they could to shut down Substack and it is only the bravery of the owners that thwarted that plan. You have whole teams at elite institutions like NYT and Wapo dedicated to deplatforming dissent.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard is both part of, and representative of, the elite that dominates K-12 education, the rest of academia, Hollywood, the media, government, the FBI/CIA/military, NGOs, Tech, SV, Wall Street, corporations, etc.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard and the rest of the elite have become bastions of intolerant, religious, anti-truth thinking these days. Consider two propositions, “sex is a spectrum” and “race has no biological basis”. Neither statement is evenly remotely true. However, 99% of Harvard students and faculty would affirm the “truth” of these statements, at least publicly. Like it or not, universities and the rest of the elite have become deeply irrational. It is somewhat unclear if the race nonsense or the sex nonsense is more deeply held. This academic insanity is somewhat new (perhaps not, see below). From “Sex is a Spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/) a comment by Spencer
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
The converse point is that Harvard and other universities were deeply religious and intolerant even years ago. The famous book “The Blank Slate” was written in 2003. The Summers affair (at Harvard) is from 2006. The Pinker/Spleke debate is from 2005. It was clear then (and still is) that Spelke was/is a liar. Was she ever punished for lying? Of course, not.
Of course, these problems are by no means limited to Harvard. Over at Yale, a talk was given on 'The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind'. The speaker (Dr. Aruna Khilanani) explicitly fantasized about killing innocent white people and then was offended because Yale would not give her the recording. The following is from her speech.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)”
These issues are by no means limited to elite universities. At University of Southern Maine, an instructor (Christy Hammer) dared to say that there are two sexes All but one student (21 of 22) walked out in protest. The one student later caved to the fanatics. Of course, Hammer was entirely correct.
Have you noticed that the same people who insist one minute that they're the tough guys and "liberal elitists" are a bunch of wimps will day the next minute that those liberal elitists are all-powerful tyrants subjecting them to Nazi-style persecution? How is that possible?
For people who claim to believe in competition, they don't seem to be open to the possibility that the ideas of liberal democracy could have outcompeted theirs. No, the other side *must* be cheating. That's who they need conspiracy theories.
The allure of being a rebel remains strong in America. Who wants to be a sheep in the flock? Being in a rebel minority feels cool and dangerous. America started in rebellion to monarchy. Now, trendy intellectuals want to rebel for monarchy or some other authoritarian form of government. Maybe they are right that the majority of people who favor liberal democracy are brainwashed by the cultural elites, or maybe they are astoundingly narcissistic to believe that they know better than the majority. I am no fan of the authoritarian wing of the far left, and am disgusted by the excesses of cancel culture. But, the solution is not throwing out the baby with the bath water. A flawed and frustrating democracy is better than any dictatorship. While I might be in favor of a theoretical benign, incorruptible, trustworthy, and public interested philosopher king whose political views align with mine, unicorns are a fantasy. Messy democracies trying to hash out incompatibilities between diverse populations works best for everyone in the long run. It seems the best our democracy can hope for at the moment is banding together occasionally in the face of existential crises (Covid apparently wasn’t big enough, maybe the next pandemic will be). Trying to undermine democracy because you have taken the red pill - well look who claims to be woke now? America’s various great awakening’s have shown us to be littered with true believers claiming moral superiority over the uninitiated. Beware of true believers and zealots from the left or the right.
The fundamental anti-enlightenment distrust of the individual persists. It seems wrong but the idea that there is an alternative, worthy counterpoint to the enlightenment cannot be dismissed easily. Yarvin and that ilk obviously don't make the case but it does seem like there should be one.
The "Red Pill" hypothesis has taken what anthropologists know about societies and amplified it 100 fold. Why can't we accept the fact that - as a species - we humans cannot make conscious or unconscious conspiracies work for more than a few years or decades? The conspirators only get as much as decades if the conspiracy is backed by the force of arms after which everything falls apart.
I really thought this essay was building up to a stronger point than "how can they be too powerful if I can write a dissent on Substack without being harmed."
Just for starters, they did everything they could to shut down Substack and it is only the bravery of the owners that thwarted that plan. You have whole teams at elite institutions like NYT and Wapo dedicated to deplatforming dissent.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard is both part of, and representative of, the elite that dominates K-12 education, the rest of academia, Hollywood, the media, government, the FBI/CIA/military, NGOs, Tech, SV, Wall Street, corporations, etc.
For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard and the rest of the elite have become bastions of intolerant, religious, anti-truth thinking these days. Consider two propositions, “sex is a spectrum” and “race has no biological basis”. Neither statement is evenly remotely true. However, 99% of Harvard students and faculty would affirm the “truth” of these statements, at least publicly. Like it or not, universities and the rest of the elite have become deeply irrational. It is somewhat unclear if the race nonsense or the sex nonsense is more deeply held. This academic insanity is somewhat new (perhaps not, see below). From “Sex is a Spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/) a comment by Spencer
“Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.”
The converse point is that Harvard and other universities were deeply religious and intolerant even years ago. The famous book “The Blank Slate” was written in 2003. The Summers affair (at Harvard) is from 2006. The Pinker/Spleke debate is from 2005. It was clear then (and still is) that Spelke was/is a liar. Was she ever punished for lying? Of course, not.
Of course, these problems are by no means limited to Harvard. Over at Yale, a talk was given on 'The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind'. The speaker (Dr. Aruna Khilanani) explicitly fantasized about killing innocent white people and then was offended because Yale would not give her the recording. The following is from her speech.
“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)”
These issues are by no means limited to elite universities. At University of Southern Maine, an instructor (Christy Hammer) dared to say that there are two sexes All but one student (21 of 22) walked out in protest. The one student later caved to the fanatics. Of course, Hammer was entirely correct.
Have you noticed that the same people who insist one minute that they're the tough guys and "liberal elitists" are a bunch of wimps will day the next minute that those liberal elitists are all-powerful tyrants subjecting them to Nazi-style persecution? How is that possible?
For people who claim to believe in competition, they don't seem to be open to the possibility that the ideas of liberal democracy could have outcompeted theirs. No, the other side *must* be cheating. That's who they need conspiracy theories.
The allure of being a rebel remains strong in America. Who wants to be a sheep in the flock? Being in a rebel minority feels cool and dangerous. America started in rebellion to monarchy. Now, trendy intellectuals want to rebel for monarchy or some other authoritarian form of government. Maybe they are right that the majority of people who favor liberal democracy are brainwashed by the cultural elites, or maybe they are astoundingly narcissistic to believe that they know better than the majority. I am no fan of the authoritarian wing of the far left, and am disgusted by the excesses of cancel culture. But, the solution is not throwing out the baby with the bath water. A flawed and frustrating democracy is better than any dictatorship. While I might be in favor of a theoretical benign, incorruptible, trustworthy, and public interested philosopher king whose political views align with mine, unicorns are a fantasy. Messy democracies trying to hash out incompatibilities between diverse populations works best for everyone in the long run. It seems the best our democracy can hope for at the moment is banding together occasionally in the face of existential crises (Covid apparently wasn’t big enough, maybe the next pandemic will be). Trying to undermine democracy because you have taken the red pill - well look who claims to be woke now? America’s various great awakening’s have shown us to be littered with true believers claiming moral superiority over the uninitiated. Beware of true believers and zealots from the left or the right.
The fundamental anti-enlightenment distrust of the individual persists. It seems wrong but the idea that there is an alternative, worthy counterpoint to the enlightenment cannot be dismissed easily. Yarvin and that ilk obviously don't make the case but it does seem like there should be one.
The "Red Pill" hypothesis has taken what anthropologists know about societies and amplified it 100 fold. Why can't we accept the fact that - as a species - we humans cannot make conscious or unconscious conspiracies work for more than a few years or decades? The conspirators only get as much as decades if the conspiracy is backed by the force of arms after which everything falls apart.