CHUDE JIDEONWO
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Why No One Trusts Data Centers and Flock Cameras

Why No One Trusts Data Centers and Flock Cameras

When small business owners begged to reopen so they could make a mortgage payment, the press, the political class, and many of our medical experts called them selfish, and worse. Some reporters said those people should not get respirators if they got Covid during those protests. Then, in the summer, cities started burning in riots, and the press, the political class, and many of our medical experts decided that mass gatherings were now a moral necessity and the virus would understand. That was the moment several million Americans concluded that none of it had ever been about the science and the press. The political class, and many of our medical experts, wanted control, not solutions.
A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution

A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution

Coleman Hughes defends the ideal of colorblindness, which he defines as “treat[ing] people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.” He calls for “policies aimed at reducing the gap between the haves and the have-nots [that] should be executed on the basis of class, not race.” First, class-based affirmative action, which punishes children for the success of their parents, is worse than the current system of explicitly anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-male discrimination. A class-based affirmative action regime would not only discriminate against higher-performing racial groups. Within the white and Asian populations it would disproportionately target the most talented individuals, who are more likely to have high-SES parents. We need to end the war on nature, accept that talent is not distributed equally within or across groups, and allow people to succeed based on their merit. Second, the ideal of colorblindness is probably not tenable. Race provides important information about expected outcomes. That’s why AI ethicists find it so difficult to stop pattern-recognizing algorithms from becoming “racist.” People spontaneously organize themselves to some extent along racial lines, and groups can have conflicting interests. Racial realities will inform interpersonal behavior and public policy.
From Isaac Newton to Jason Arday

From Isaac Newton to Jason Arday

I wonder if over time the private sector may take on the intellectual role once played by the university. There are companies you can employ to answer almost any question you like— most commonly: “Where should I invest my money?”—as well as plenty of companies that employ scientists to carry out research that might once have been done by academics. “Objective, rational linear thinking” will reliably have market value, even if its social status is diminished. Isaac Newton might not have found a place at today’s Cambridge, which would be a great loss to the institution. But I have faith that someone, somewhere will always be willing to pay brilliant people to be weird.
A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution

A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution

Coleman Hughes defends the ideal of colorblindness, which he defines as “treat[ing] people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.” He calls for “policies aimed at reducing the gap between the haves and the have-nots [that] should be executed on the basis of class, not race.” First, class-based affirmative action, which punishes children for the success of their parents, is worse than the current system of explicitly anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-male discrimination. A class-based affirmative action regime would not only discriminate against higher-performing racial groups. Within the white and Asian populations it would disproportionately target the most talented individuals, who are more likely to have high-SES parents. We need to end the war on nature, accept that talent is not distributed equally within or across groups, and allow people to succeed based on their merit. Second, the ideal of colorblindness is probably not tenable. Race provides important information about expected outcomes. That’s why AI ethicists find it so difficult to stop pattern-recognizing algorithms from becoming “racist.” People spontaneously organize themselves to some extent along racial lines, and groups can have conflicting interests. Racial realities will inform interpersonal behavior and public policy
LOSING THE GENETIC LOTTERY

LOSING THE GENETIC LOTTERY

It may be the case that Harden wants to destigmatize the idea that people may be born with inherent limitations, that people’s circumstances are not their “fault” but just that—circumstance. But it’s hard to see how it would help marginalized groups like the unhoused to put their circumstances down to inherent genetic differences between them and those who are housed. And given the disproportionate representation of Black people in the unhoused population—13% of the U.S. population, but 40% of the unhoused—it’s easy to see how race as biology could be reconstructed.
No, Woke 1 Was Not Crazy

No, Woke 1 Was Not Crazy

Beyond the disappointment of seeing Ossé and AOC dismiss such an important time and the real grievances that gave birth to that movement—a movement that benefited their careers as well as larger Democratic victories around the country—I’ve also been disappointed in their framing their current lack of imagination as maturity. It seems like the natural cycle for inspiring young politicians on the left to get elected and slowly be transformed into the liberals that they used to criticize, even to the point of lending political cover to people carrying out a genocide, but it’s no less dispiriting to watch them accept this current iteration of the world as the less absurd one.
Why “Woke 1” Failed Feels So Obvious Now

Why “Woke 1” Failed Feels So Obvious Now

Like a lot of people in circa-2020 left-wing activism, Hong was correct on the merits. The genocide of Native Americans does, indeed, heinously clash with the new-world facade imagined by the Thanksgiving tradition. But if we’re being honest, that wasn’t the argument she was making in her tweet. Instead, she was asking Americans to embrace the ascetic, self-flagellating, and eternally anxious lifestyle of Woke 1. Did ordinary people really want to interrogate Thanksgiving like this? Especially knowing full well that all that interrogation could ever reveal was a bottomless shame that nobody—and certainly not they themselves—could atone for? The answer to that question was no, which seems obvious now. But there was, indeed, a brief aperture of time in the pressure cooker of 2020 when it all seemed possible.
What AOC gets right – and wrong – about ‘Woke 1.0’

What AOC gets right – and wrong – about ‘Woke 1.0’

Even though I wish she’d used different language for it, I understand her suggestion that Woke 1.0 was crazy. The strict policing of language, the “cancellation” of anyone who had, at any point in their life, made a mistake that was perceived as injurious to women or people of color, the inflexible and frequently impractical notions of what can be said, taught and legislated raised the specter of a dictatorial left that devalued individual liberties and threatened our freedom of speech almost (though not quite) as much as the extreme right.
By disparaging 2020 protests as ‘Woke 1’, liberals are following the rightwing’s lead

By disparaging 2020 protests as ‘Woke 1’, liberals are following the rightwing’s lead

The phrase “Woke 1” is also off-putting because it’s dismissive of the work that abolition advocates and social justice organizations have been doing before and after 2020. What happened at the start of the decade wasn’t momentary advocacy; it’s in lockstep with what freedom fighters have been seeking since the inception of this country. It behooves some Democrats to realize the vitality of grassroots movement work isn’t dependent on photo ops and national headlines. The truest advocates are still on the frontlines, even if the masses have decided it’s no longer trendy.
From Poverty to Progress

From Poverty to Progress

What we are living in today with the Woke Revolution over the last 10 years is just the latest instance of a new generation of supporters of Left-of-Center ideologies being unwilling to come to terms with the Central Moral Dilemma of the Left. Each new generation of supporters of Left-of-Center ideology choose preserving their morality identity over creating positive Results in the material world.
Quibbling with Cofnas: I

Quibbling with Cofnas: I

Why do we end up using race ? Because it is easy and lazy. Relatedly, the American Republic was structured such that folk of different continental origin had different roles, with European origin (“white”) being an encompassing identity across a wide range of national origins. This means race has a specific American history that is often untrue in other countries.
Race in America and the Dork Right

Race in America and the Dork Right

when all that would be necessary is an appeal to traditional American and widely accepted principles of freedom, of free association, living and letting be, and law and order.
After a Scholar’s Awful Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship

After a Scholar’s Awful Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship

For people on the left, it’s sure easier to talk about the feral excesses of the right-wing press than the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives. But both contributed to the Arday disaster. Denying that won’t protect the left. It will just leave leftists out on a limb that grows ever more shaky.
Why the Media is Honest and Good

Why the Media is Honest and Good

My advice is to read the mainstream media, and trust the facts they present, while questioning the narratives. Understand where the biases are and correct for them. Read some of their critics too, but understand that those critics are almost more biased and less intelligent and honest than those that they attack. The few media critics who are better than the press are rare and deserve your support. The exception here is anything having to do with race, gender, or sexual orientation, where you should understand that establishment journalists are trying their best but can’t be trusted because they’ve lost their minds, or are scared of those that have, and you’d be better off listening to people with cancelable views. Continue to criticize the press for where it falls short, without devolving into nihilistic hate.
The Intellectual Poverty of Hanania, Karlin, Cofnas, and the Alt-Centre

The Intellectual Poverty of Hanania, Karlin, Cofnas, and the Alt-Centre

Liberals are competent and innovative, especially in a cultural environment that selects for them, but only moderately so. They iterate on the innovations produced by others; they are fantastic managers, excellent at following procedure, and hopelessly tame and conventional in their thinking. Of course they are—liberalism is what is conventional today. The immoderately, foundationally, paradigm-shatteringly innovative man is often to the right of the Overton Window… Mainstream conservatism is simply too stupid to defeat wokeness, and classical liberalism doesn’t ultimately oppose it—it amounts to demanding that we go back to when the cancer was third stage rather than terminal. While this is an improvement, it is not a solution.
The Year of Fukuyama

The Year of Fukuyama

Journalism is another area in which conservatives display less intelligence and competence than liberals. In a moment of lucidity at the 2009 CPAC convention, Tucker Carlson lamented the fact that conservatives have been unable to create institutions like the New York Times . Over boos from the audience, he noted that “yes they are liberal, yes they twist it. But they are still out there finding the facts and bringing them to people.” He said that “conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations.” They should “not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media but gather the news themselves.” And yet, 14 years later, after Carlson was fired from Fox News and the fetters were off, he started trumpeting fake news about UFOs and Barack Obama’s gay affair. He was ultimately pulled down to the level of his conservative audience. I anticipate that in many ways American society will be all but unrecognizable after a few decades. But the major pillars of our economic and political system won’t change. We’ll still have elections, the peaceful transfer of power, the House and Senate, a 9-member Supreme Court that acts as the final interpreter of the laws, a global empire with bases in over a hundred countries abroad, millionaires and billionaires who carry a disproportionate share of the tax burden, social security and Medicare, growing racial diversity, increasing class stratification based on IQ differences and assortative mating, no major secession movements, and virtually zero political violence. People without the capabilities to succeed in a modern society will continue to have problems, and they will find demagogues claiming to speak for them on either the left or right depending on the color of their skin, although technology and culture will ultimately matter more for them than politics. The higher classes will embrace embryo selection and perhaps genetic engineering, leaving the bottom of society further behind than before, even if in absolute terms things get better for almost everyone. Policy decisions made in Washington will matter to a certain extent, but the most important among them won’t have much to do with what we consider hot-button political issues.
Actually, Color-Blindness Isn’t Racist

Actually, Color-Blindness Isn’t Racist

Color-blindness is the best principle with which to govern a multiracial democracy. It is the best way to lower the temperature of racial conflict in the long run. It is the best way to fight the kind of racism that really matters. And it is the best way to orient your own attitude toward this nefarious concept we call race. We abandon color-blindness at our own peril.
Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do

Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do

The more I looked at the data, the more I became convinced that liberalism simply worked. Steve Pinker’s books of the last decade are irrefutable on this point. Nonetheless, many pundits and intellectuals continue to argue that what we need is not sensible reform — for example, what I argue should be done with civil rights law — but an overthrowing of the entire system and a move to a new “postliberal” order. I’m convinced that most of them are just projecting their personal unhappiness onto the rest of the world, just as I once did. I can understand seeing flaws in the modern West, but I can no longer comprehend looking at any other alternative and thinking it’s likely to be better.
How Academia Created Jason Arday

How Academia Created Jason Arday

Even worse than Arday’s work displaying no actual excellence is the consequence that characters like him wind up passing the torch to the next generation of black scholars. In a career spent in and around academia, I’ve seen this happen too many times. I refer to nothing like all black academics. But this is a vortex that young black scholars are sadly vulnerable to being pulled into, aided and abetted by white fellow travelers. Especially if they have a certain stage presence, people like Arday attract mentees, who often value sitting at the feet of someone of their own race, who may understand their experiences more readily than other professors. But what happens when the Arday types don’t have anything actually to teach?
Jason Arday and progressive Britain’s ideal black citizen

Jason Arday and progressive Britain’s ideal black citizen

A black Briton could wear traditional Nigerian clothing within an institution without much difficulty, but drawing upon a Nigerian Pentecostal understanding of sexuality, family formation or human nature provides a more demanding test of what institutions mean when they speak of diversity. That is where difference becomes considerably more complicated.
I thought you’d just believe me

I thought you’d just believe me

EDI was the reform intended to sweep that system away, and its aims were not unreasonable: social mobility is a societal good. Establishments need to be challenged to keep them alive. But what has happened is the perversion of those aims into a new establishment, where mediocrity is something to be embraced unchallenged, as a form of social justice. Excellence is threatening to established hierarchies in a way that mediocrity is not.
The Joyless Return of ‘Ted Lasso’

The Joyless Return of ‘Ted Lasso’

In short, Ted Lasso turned out to be exactly the sort of dude TV excels at delivering these days: just another broken man, a lovable loser kept afloat by the tender love and care of a few strong, wise, and resilient women.
I strongly believe that knowledge is fundamental to running a society. We need economists who understand monetary policy in central banks. We need researchers who have studied history, strategy, and military affairs to help steer national defense. We need doctors and public health experts to design effective responses to epidemics.

I strongly believe that knowledge is fundamental to running a society. We need economists who understand monetary policy in central banks. We need researchers who have studied history, strategy, and military affairs to help steer national defense. We need doctors and public health experts to design effective responses to epidemics.

The universities, the media, the publishing industry, Amazon, and many of our other core knowledge institutions have a serious problem. Their response is to close ranks and avoid a serious discussion. No, sorry, this will not do. The Jason Arday scandal should be a moment of reckoning. Unfortunately, I am afraid it will not be.
Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

To put it succinctly: Opposing D.E.I., in part or in whole, does not make one racist. We can agree that the legacy of racism requires addressing and yet disagree about how best to do it. Of course, in the pure sense, to be opposed to diversity, opposed to equity and opposed to inclusion would fairly be called racism. But it is coy to pretend these dictionary meanings are what D.E.I. refers to in modern practice, which is a more specific philosophy.
Against Human Resources

Against Human Resources

The idea behind unions is that workers and bosses are fundamentally in conflict. They don’t have to hate each other, by any means, but their interests diverge, and the best way for them to reach agreement is to have a fair fight by clearly defined rules. This is the opposite of H.R.’s ethos, which is all about denying that conflict exists and finding win–win solutions—or at least solutions that everyone will pretend are win–win after they have been badgered into accepting the consensus.
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally

The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally

Offensive Summary: In this subculture, Trump isn’t necessarily admired as a coherent conservative philosopher. He functions more like a mythic character : unruly, shameless, funny, physically and rhetorically excessive, and apparently immune to the moral policing of respectable institutions. His appeal is therefore partly aesthetic. He embodies transgression against a culture that these people regard as suffocating.
The Problem with White Male Liberalism

The Problem with White Male Liberalism

Whether he realizes it or not, Rauch’s commitments to science and viewpoint diversity are in tension. He talks of his admiration for the “epistemic breakthroughs” of Enlightenment thinkers, despite their works being “flawed with the inequities and blind spots of their eras (one of which is reflected in the fact that all of them were men).” Yet isn’t it perhaps remarkable that the systems and thinkers Rauch admires so much came from one sex, in one broadly defined culture, making up a small minority of the world’s people? If the institutions such men created are so incredible, perhaps diversity of perspective and opinion aren’t as important as Rauch would like to think. I note that while the author criticizes what social media have done to our brains and our public discourse, the one website he really admires for upholding epistemological standards is Wikipedia — which is often criticized, as he points out only in passing, for being too male.
Women’s Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas

Women’s Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas

At the same time, the argument against giving in to more emotional women is that truth is actually pretty important and if feelings get hurt on the way there, too bad. But of course I’d think that. I’m a man, and one at the extreme tail ends of both disagreeableness (high) and neuroticism (low). If I was the type who responded to difficult ideas by “literally shaking,” I could well have a different opinion. But it would be the job of the rest of society to steer me away from thinking too hard about political or philosophical issues, and towards private pursuits where my hypersensitivity would do less harm.
Wokism Is Just Beginning

Wokism Is Just Beginning

Our institutions are largely controlled by boomers and gen Xers who lean toward classical liberalism. This is the demographic that stands in the way of the total wokification of America and other Western countries. But, to repeat Solomon’s observation, “one generation goes, and another generation comes.” In this case, generational turnover will mean the end of free speech, free thought, free association, due process, and everything else that millennials and (especially) zoomers think is less important than diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Nathan Cofnas shouldn’t be silenced

Nathan Cofnas shouldn’t be silenced

Mr. Cofnas is a crackpot biologist and a racist; his ideas are lofty, and certainly revolutionary, so, protecting his freedom of expression is essential. In fact, his right as an academic to propagate his opinions is imperative under the law – the Free Speech Act which our government has to-ed and fro-ed over – and under any sound vision for academic advancement
Institutional Failures in the Garden of Great Intellects

Institutional Failures in the Garden of Great Intellects

Second, it is cavalier to neglect the impact of register and tone when writing and speaking about ethnicity and ancestry—especially in conjunction with intellectual capacity—because we tend to mistakenly elide cognitive capacity with moral worth. This is a sensitive topic; I am wholly in sympathy with those who find coarse expressions of “group differences” offensive. But does an “offensive” opinion provide legitimate grounds for what was effectively a sacking by Emmanuel College? It does not, and my interest here is in institutional failings, not in psychoanalysing either Cofnas or Arday.
‘I would be ashamed to have written any part of this’: Odyssey translator Emily Wilson attacks Nolan blockbuster

‘I would be ashamed to have written any part of this’: Odyssey translator Emily Wilson attacks Nolan blockbuster

“But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality … the film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas – although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants… The characters don’t have the kind of depth the Homeric characters have. I felt, ‘Do I really care if this guy gets back to his wife?’ You haven’t given me any reason to.”
The Cambridge fantasist is proof that stupid intellectuals are poisoning Britain

The Cambridge fantasist is proof that stupid intellectuals are poisoning Britain

There is no one quite as stupid as an intellectual. A friend who taught at Cambridge before fleeing for the relative sanity of a Swiss professorship blames the Arday scandal on “a weak, woke administrative class” who have bought into the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) cult . “The disease began,” he says, “when the colleges started to hire so-called senior tutors, many of whom are failed academics on an ideological mission to change the ethnic make-up of the Cambridge faculty. Their loyalty is with Left-wing politicians. Most academics are naïve, cowardly, sentimental, indifferent or gullible, so they just go along with it. It’s a disaster.”
Universal Principles of Liberalism and the Politics of Race

Universal Principles of Liberalism and the Politics of Race

For those who use historical grievances to seek preferential treatment and special favors for their group, the last thing they want is to acknowledge that other human beings face the same challenges they do. It is paramount to them that their grievances should be seen as unique. Nothing infuriates them more than seeing their group compared with others. Sowell recounts meeting a Maori social justice activist in New Zealand who insisted that the experience of her people was unique.
The dumbest take on Louis CK yet

The dumbest take on Louis CK yet

He exposed himself to women who looked up to him because he wanted to see the fear in their eyes. He wanted to watch their confusion and distress when they realised this opportunity to talk to their comedy hero was, in fact, an ambush. That they weren’t safe with him.
1915 Declaration of Principles on

1915 Declaration of Principles on

Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure If this profession should prove itself unwilling to … prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter … for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others —by others who lack certain essential qualifications for performing it, and whose action is sure to breed suspicions and recurrent controversies deeply injurious to the internal order and the public standing of universities.
Life Lessons From Lenin

Life Lessons From Lenin

You must never let the unlistening crowd decide what you can say. Freedom of speech is the freedom to be yourself, and there are no mistakes when it comes to that, my love.
The Slumflower Needs Guidance (From Black Feminists)

The Slumflower Needs Guidance (From Black Feminists)

This simplistic feminism works to grant access for people unfamiliar with the politics but buckles under the greater weight of critical thinking. “The only solution to ensure the safety of women, is for men to not exist,” Eggerue tweeted and later deleted on Father’s Day in June 2018. The tweet attempted to create a discourse around violence against women and challenge the patriarchy on a day created to celebrate fathers. It was a deliberately provocative move designed to garner attention, but the simplicity of the message failed to address wider implications. What would this new world order do with women who uphold the patriarchy and perpetuate its ills? Where would disabled and/or trans people exist in this binary, arbitrary view of the fight against gender violence? Eggerue’s tweet left too much room for ambiguity, conflated men with the patriarchy,
The Slumflower is a small part of a much bigger problem

The Slumflower is a small part of a much bigger problem

I mostly question how a brand of feminism that claims not to care about men, seems so intensely obsessed with them. Whilst Eggerue is ‘guilty’ of all of the above, she isn’t alone. Followers have said that she admits coming into her ideas on self-worth and feminism after spending over a year getting over a man she had dated for three months. I think deep, unresolved pain is most people’s route and anchor to Popular Feminism. Whilst the movement can be a powerfully cathartic force for its participants, it isn’t healthy or sustainable for that pain to remain unresolved, unstudied. All it truly is, is profitable.
Feminism without human warmth leaves me cold

Feminism without human warmth leaves me cold

Zoe Williams Above all, my feminism doesn’t even exist without the presumption that all human beings are infinitely precious, infinitely vulnerable, that none of us could withstand the harshness of this worldview, in which we all use each other furiously until everybody’s spent.
The tic and the taboo

The tic and the taboo

I truly feel for Davidson. This latest chapter in the culture war is so frustratingly stupid it’s like a really bad episode of The Jerry Springer Show. And yet this is a painful but needed reminder for our nation that the absurd hypersensitivity Americans have around the word “nigger” is actually really unhealthy and will inevitably lead to situations in which innocent people are trampled over pretend harms, which is precisely what happened here. We should be ashamed of ourselves for becoming so profoundly unkind in the name of kindness. In the end, that’s the real takeaway.
The Radicalization of J.D. Vance

The Radicalization of J.D. Vance

An open border,” for instance, “is a bonanza to the kind of managerial class people in my milieu, who like, say, cheap nannies and so forth. Not so good for workers on the low end.”
The Corruption of Medicine

The Corruption of Medicine

That demolition of standards rests on an a priori truth: that there is no academic skills gap between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics, on the other. No proof is needed for this proposition; it is the starting point for any discussion of racial disparities in medical personnel. Therefore, any test or evaluation on which blacks and Hispanics score worse than whites and Asians is biased and should be eliminated.
Don’t Judge Me

Don’t Judge Me

He talks of Americans yearning to live not the great life and not only the good life, but something far humbler: “a normal life.” I asked him if this choice was deliberate. It was.
In Defense Of J.D. Vance

In Defense Of J.D. Vance

This is how it works. Southerners have an advanced capacity to put up with a lot for the sake of keeping social harmony. It can and does lead to all kinds of dysfunction — oh yes indeed it does! — but it also works magic in keeping messy people together. The bonds of family and community cannot be stretched infinitely, of course, but they can be stretched a lot farther than people think. In my own extended family, we don’t have any people who inhabit ideological and social extremes, but if we did, we would find a way to work through it. That’s just what we do. When I was in the latter years of high school and the first years of college, my father and I were very much at odds politically (actual dialogue: “Daddy, I’m a socialist.” “Got damn, how did I get a son like you?!”), but we held it together.
America Detransitions

America Detransitions

Most Americans were willing to go along with the lie that a man is a woman as a matter of kindness. But then trans women went from saying they identify as women to saying they are women. Pronouns went from being preferred to mandatory . Their plight went from marginalization to genocide . Activists went from talking about liberation and revolution to raping and murdering TERFs.
Changes in Need for Uniqueness From 2000 Until 2020

Changes in Need for Uniqueness From 2000 Until 2020

people are worried about expressing too controversial opinions, particularly in online spaces and on politically charged topics, while also wanting to feel included in experiences and groups (Ekins, 2017; Liu et al., 2017) . Trends in other psychological characteristics suggest that social anxieties and ways of relating to others have also been changing (Twenge, 2000; Twenge et al., 2019) .
The Slow Death of American Individualism

The Slow Death of American Individualism

Our national archetypes are the lone cowboy, the pioneer, the rebel without a cause, our captains of industry and titans of fortune. To be a self-made man or the captain of one’s ship is one of the our highest aspirations — to be a sovereign soul with built-in equity and fuck-off money.
Why blue-collar culture matters

Why blue-collar culture matters

For more than a century, Hollywood and advertising have been the twin engines of American identity. Generations of boys found their blueprints for manhood on the silver screen, as girls looked to magazine models. Sitcoms enshrined the family’s form, right down to the color of the picket fence; and even love came packaged with a script, from meet-cute to the grand gesture and happily-ever-after.
What I Love When I Love America

What I Love When I Love America

That’s what I love when I love America — its ability to arouse ambition, energy and activity. But here’s the catch. When you love America for its raw energy, you are loving it for a force that also produces crassness, materialism and, from time to time, immaturity.
Camille Cosby’s words show she’s trapped in an outdated space

Camille Cosby’s words show she’s trapped in an outdated space

Very often, what we do is indict folks that came before us for their silence, not understanding what the costs of speaking were, and not understanding that what they are doing in that silence is building the infrastructure, the visibility, the universal representation that makes it possible for a new generation to speak
Why I Am Not a Liberal

Why I Am Not a Liberal

Since the dawn of the Progressive movement over a century ago, the left has been more technocratic. Those early Progressives tried to make a science of society and govern according to scientific principles. Today the social sciences are the narrow doorway all of human knowledge has to pass through if it’s going to influence policymaking. We want studies! The social sciences are great. I use them all the time. But when overly quantitative, they can misrepresent reality. They see only what can be quantified. They see only masses of people whose data can be tabulated, not unique individuals.
Cass Sunstein on What Lefty College Kids Get Wrong, the Dangers of Trump and His Own Regrets

Cass Sunstein on What Lefty College Kids Get Wrong, the Dangers of Trump and His Own Regrets

The other story is about a student who came into my office one day and said she wanted to write a paper on how the law constructs the body. I thought, “Oh, OK.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And she looked at me with incredulity and said, “The law doesn’t construct the body?” A lot of things have changed since I was in law school, evidently. I said to her, “I don’t have a position on that yet. What would it mean to say that the law constructs the body?” It’s clear that in some class, the idea that the law constructs the body was taken as self-evident and thrilling, and the student hadn’t asked what the sentence actually meant.
People telling crass jokes in private chats has a different moral valence than doing so publicly, or voicing earnest, violent intentions in confidence, or having a single heated moment, or making repeated and calculated offenses of various kinds for the purposes of cruelty or offense for its own sake, the subject, manner, timing, and audience for which all matter. Our failure to distinguish these contexts—treating every utterance as equally revealing of a person’s character and equally prosecutable—is dumb and mostly insincere political posturing but also the sign of a culture that has lost any feel for the moral texture of human life, and on account of this blind stupidity attempts to collapse everything into a formless blob of equivalence. Different things are different, and yes, it’s possible, I promise, for you to evaluate them differently.

People telling crass jokes in private chats has a different moral valence than doing so publicly, or voicing earnest, violent intentions in confidence, or having a single heated moment, or making repeated and calculated offenses of various kinds for the purposes of cruelty or offense for its own sake, the subject, manner, timing, and audience for which all matter. Our failure to distinguish these contexts—treating every utterance as equally revealing of a person’s character and equally prosecutable—is dumb and mostly insincere political posturing but also the sign of a culture that has lost any feel for the moral texture of human life, and on account of this blind stupidity attempts to collapse everything into a formless blob of equivalence. Different things are different, and yes, it’s possible, I promise, for you to evaluate them differently.

What annoys me is when people claim that I must denounce so and so or say such and such because it’s the “principled” thing to do. They haven’t even considered the possibility that perhaps I have different principles than they do. Those might be YOUR principles but they aren’t mine. One of my most cherished principles is loyalty to family and friends. It might not be yours but it is mine. So when you accuse me of not having principles, please make sure to stipulate that I don’t have YOUR principles. And that is true. But I’m not you and you aren’t me. You might want to consider that on occasion.

What annoys me is when people claim that I must denounce so and so or say such and such because it’s the “principled” thing to do. They haven’t even considered the possibility that perhaps I have different principles than they do. Those might be YOUR principles but they aren’t mine. One of my most cherished principles is loyalty to family and friends. It might not be yours but it is mine. So when you accuse me of not having principles, please make sure to stipulate that I don’t have YOUR principles. And that is true. But I’m not you and you aren’t me. You might want to consider that on occasion.

Safetyism doesn’t belong on campus Conservatives have adopted social-justice tactics

Safetyism doesn’t belong on campus Conservatives have adopted social-justice tactics

There has also been relatively little pushback against the sort of hyperbole purporting to justify aggressive managerial and police interventions on campuses; even where its format and tone vividly reminds one of the activist guilt-tripping of which the modern Left is so fond, and the Right normally so critical. Many cultish identitarian tics familiar from social justice activism turn up in pro-Israel discourse about the protests, and yet remain uncriticised from the Right. These include: a total failure of charity when it comes to construing the various motives of pro-Palestinian and anti-war activists, collapsing all of them into a single simple narrative of “hate” towards Jewish people, despite evidence to the contrary; exhortations to move from subjective perceptions of antisemitism by particular Jewish students or groups of students to immediate protective or punitive action (or both); the glossing over of reasonable disagreement between Jewish students on, precisely, whether the protests are antisemitic or not; and accusations of confusion and self-hatred towards those who dissent.
Gaza and the End of the Culture War as We Know It

Gaza and the End of the Culture War as We Know It

For starters, we now know that culture wars were never about free speech or academic freedom. Reactions to Oct. 7 and Israel’s massive military response, which has claimed over 35,000 lives so far (of which 15,000 are children), have exposed the hypocrisy on all sides of the political spectrum. It’s clear, without any shadow of a doubt, that not all lives matter, at least not to the same extent, depending on which side you’re on; that “safe spaces,” “microaggressions” and even “women’s rights” apply only to certain groups; and free speech is seen as antisemitic hate speech if it’s directed against Israel’s wanton disregard for human rights and international law in Gaza and the West Bank.
How Trans Activism Defeated Itself

How Trans Activism Defeated Itself

Not to make the same mistake himself, Thoreau argued that if you struggle for peace and justice then you must be peaceful and just in your struggle.
Bury the ‘words are violence’ cliché

Bury the ‘words are violence’ cliché

Teach students that objectionable speech is violence and you invite them to see their own aggression as self-defense. This is the bloody fallacy we just witnessed: Accept the premise that rhetoric is a physical attack and you hand extremists a moral permission slip to answer speech with force. We need to bury this trope. Retire it—from classrooms, HR trainings, and editorials—for good.
Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights

I think that resulted in a lot of us — a lot of our movement — stopping the conversation and ceasing doing the hard work of opening hearts and changing minds and telling stories that over 20 years had shifted and deepened understanding on gay midentities that allowed for marriage equality to be built on solid ground.
Freedom of Sex The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.

Freedom of Sex The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.

By asserting the freedom of sex, we may stop relying on the increasingly metaphysical concept of gender identity to justify sex-changing care, as if such care were only permissible when one’s biological sex does not match the serial number engraved on one’s soul. The same goes for “sex assigned at birth,” which unhelpfully obscures the very biological processes that many people have a right to change.
The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers

The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers

It isn’t that all the heterodox types have gone full MAGA. It’s just that they seem to loathe racial and social justice activists much more than they oppose Trump, or favor reform. So any time a counter-narrative emerges, they tend to ditch their avowed skepticism and latch onto it.
The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Why did Japan and South Korea have similar “growth miracles” in the twentieth century even though Japan was the historic colonizer and Korea its colony? Because they both adopted the key institutions. Why is Ethiopia poor even though it was never a colony? Because, like its African neighbors, it has not yet adopted them.
The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Fantasy World of Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Coates is not a journalist so much as a composer—one who uses words not to convey the truth, much less to point a constructive path forward, but to create a mood, the same way that a film scorer uses notes. And the specter haunting this book, and indeed all of his work, is the crudest version of identity politics in which everything—wealth disparity, American history, our education system, and the long-standing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors—are reduced to a childlike story in which the “victims” can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the “villains” can do no right (and are all-powerful).”
The problem with Coates is that he never turns his critical eye inward. Ezra should have said, “So you think Charlie Kirk promoted hate. Have you considered that some people might feel exactly the same way about you?” One punch I pulled in my review of his last book—which, let’s be honest, got me in enough trouble as it was—was a section I cut trying to get him to stop thinking about white people’s complicity in violence for a minute and start thinking about his own. He spends a lot of time in the book persuading ordinary Israelis to grasp their complicity in violent dispossession. You personally may never have hurt a Palestinian, he says, but the house you live in is yours only because of evil deeds your countrymen did and are doing today. The book ends with Hassan Jaber, a 91-year-old Palestinian in Chicago, who longs for the land he grew up on. This was in living memory. His family wants to return. Coates implies that any solution is hollow if it doesn’t involve this guy getting his house back. He analogizes their plight to every historical crime he can think of from Jim Crow to imperialism—but never anything that implicates himself. Coates is from Baltimore. The city was 80% white in 1940, and it’s about 25% white today. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who fled. By the time Coates was growing up, Baltimore was majority black and that majority was consolidating political power, which it holds today.

The problem with Coates is that he never turns his critical eye inward. Ezra should have said, “So you think Charlie Kirk promoted hate. Have you considered that some people might feel exactly the same way about you?” One punch I pulled in my review of his last book—which, let’s be honest, got me in enough trouble as it was—was a section I cut trying to get him to stop thinking about white people’s complicity in violence for a minute and start thinking about his own. He spends a lot of time in the book persuading ordinary Israelis to grasp their complicity in violent dispossession. You personally may never have hurt a Palestinian, he says, but the house you live in is yours only because of evil deeds your countrymen did and are doing today. The book ends with Hassan Jaber, a 91-year-old Palestinian in Chicago, who longs for the land he grew up on. This was in living memory. His family wants to return. Coates implies that any solution is hollow if it doesn’t involve this guy getting his house back. He analogizes their plight to every historical crime he can think of from Jim Crow to imperialism—but never anything that implicates himself. Coates is from Baltimore. The city was 80% white in 1940, and it’s about 25% white today. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who fled. By the time Coates was growing up, Baltimore was majority black and that majority was consolidating political power, which it holds today.

I want to ask him: Did that happen peacefully? Or is there a violent dispossession in the recent past from which you benefited? Is there a 91-year-old Baltimore native who longs for the beautiful row house he grew up in, who can’t return to his old neighborhood because he’s afraid for his physical safety? What would it take for that guy to get his house back? The analogy isn’t exact. Coates’s analogies aren’t exact, either. The point is to get you to think about the systems of dispossession that you benefit from beyond your individual actions. That’s Coates’s whole theme, getting people to reflect on their complicity in violence. It would really help his argument if once, just once, he applied that to himself.
I’m seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points. I’m not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days. Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn’t want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them. However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right – nay, obligation – to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created. When you’ve known people since they were ten years old it’s hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn’t managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I’ve repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn’t want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.

I’m seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points. I’m not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days. Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn’t want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them. However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right – nay, obligation – to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created. When you’ve known people since they were ten years old it’s hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn’t managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I’ve repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn’t want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said.

The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma’s ‘all witches’ speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through’ (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family’s safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness. Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is. She’ll never need a homeless shelter. She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I’d be astounded if she’s been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her ‘public bathroom’ is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who’s identified into the women’s prison? I wasn’t a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women’s rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges. The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me – a change of tack I suspect she’s adopted because she’s noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was – I might never have been this honest. Adults can’t expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public – but I have the same right, and I’ve finally decided to exercise it.
Is Woke a Mental Disorder?

Is Woke a Mental Disorder?

But she is not wrong, exactly. She is hurting . And she has found a theology of pain. A secular martyrdom , in which her suffering is reframed as moral clairvoyance. This is not just coping. It’s conversion. She has been saved — by systems, structures, discourses, and trauma. To question her belief is to question her dignity. And so, she clings to it with the fervor of a drowning priest.
We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another

We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another

I was thinking about this before Kirk’s murder. We are going to have to live here with one another. There will be no fever that breaks, no permanent victory that routs or quiets those who disagree with us. I have watched many on both sides entertain the illusion that there would be, either through the power of social shame and cultural pressure or the force the state could bring to bear on those it seeks to silence. It won’t work. It can’t work. It would not be better if it did. That would not be a free country.
Why I cancelled my book deal

Why I cancelled my book deal

I soon realised that while discovering online communities that stray from the approved script can feel like a breath of fresh air, if you breathe it in too long, it turns out to be just another toxic gas disguised as oxygen. Many of those who had once voiced reasonable disagreements with progressive identity politics, found their resentment pushing them towards the same irrationality, extremism, and hysteria they’d spent the last five years criticising. Though many of these people subscribed to different ideologies, clearer than ever was that the mentality was the same.
The Trouble with Elon

The Trouble with Elon

Of all the remarkable people I’ve met, Elon is probably the most likely to remain a world-historical figure—despite his best efforts to become a clown. He is also the most likely to squander his ample opportunities to live a happy life, ruin his reputation and most important relationships, and produce lasting harm across the globe.
The normalization of non-monogamy

The normalization of non-monogamy

The key point here is that monogamy is not just about relationships. It’s about discipline. It’s about curbing base instincts for a greater good. It’s about accepting the fact that freedom without limits isn’t freedom at all—it’s all-out hedonism.
HBO Head Dismisses Trans Activist Critics Of J.K. Rowling, New ‘Harry Potter’ Series

HBO Head Dismisses Trans Activist Critics Of J.K. Rowling, New ‘Harry Potter’ Series

The decision to be in business with J.K. Rowling is not new for us. We’ve been in business for 25 years,” Bloys said on “The Town” podcast. “We already have a show on HBO from her called ‘C.B. Strike’ that we do with the BBC. It’s pretty clear that those are her personal, political views. She’s entitled to them. ‘Harry Potter’ is not secretly being infused with anything. And if you want to debate her, you can go on Twitter.”
Rowan Williams and Our Sentimental Age

Rowan Williams and Our Sentimental Age

After all, the claim “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” is rationally empty. But its emptiness belies its power, a power drawn from the fact that it gives expression to the Western notion of individual freedom and self-determination. And that power seems to have co-opted Williams for the trans cause. This is a serious development. When the intellectual elites of our culture allow sentiment to supplant reason, then the discourse of public life is in grave trouble. We should know this from seeing what happens when sentiment comes to dominate other branches of our culture. Art becomes kitsch. And ethics becomes a matter of responding to the latest sob story and the immediate appetites of the moment without reflection on broader social needs, goods, or consequences. That is why it is useful to have elites that keep themselves aloof from this, who understand the present moment in the larger context of history.
The fight for Europe is on

The fight for Europe is on

His speech also underlined how MAGA’s chief ideologues don’t view it as just a national project but a civilizational one, a politico-cultural crusade that’s to be carried out well beyond the U.S. It is a project to save Western civilization — from itself, if necessary
A Democratic Reckoning on “Gender Identity”?

A Democratic Reckoning on “Gender Identity”?

Another challenge Democrats face is the rise of interest-group liberalism—specifically, the “public interest” nonprofits that now make up the backbone of the Democratic coalition. These groups have no incentive to moderate their stances on controversial issues; they report to foundation and deep-pocket donors, and they increasingly recruit staff based on ideological commitments.
Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again. The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us.
Why We Got It So Wrong

Why We Got It So Wrong

But I’m also seeing many people who are still victims of conceptual blindness. They are so imprisoned by their mental models, they can interpret these results only in identity politics terms: Harris lost because America is racist (even though she did virtually the same as Biden did among white voters). Harris lost because America is sexist (even though she underperformed among women). Some people blamed white women for abandoning their Black sisters, as if lack of gender solidarity were the main thing going on here.
A Canadian man was arrested for refusing to affirm his son’s gender, and Lobsters think this validates Peterson’s claims. However, the man was charged with the crime of “family violence” – no connection to Bill C-16.

A Canadian man was arrested for refusing to affirm his son’s gender, and Lobsters think this validates Peterson’s claims. However, the man was charged with the crime of “family violence” – no connection to Bill C-16.

The amount of people who gaslight on bills like this are staggering. Saying you “cannot be jailed” for pronouns while immediately turning around and saying repeatedly not abiding by someone’s pronouns is “hate speech” and you can be jailed for it. The semantics are blaring and obvious, but the people who support this idiocy are blind to its problems. As with everything in American politics nowadays (blm, women’s rights, immigration, etc).
Israel Killed 31 of My Family Members in Gaza. The Pro-Palestine Movement Isn’t Helping.

Israel Killed 31 of My Family Members in Gaza. The Pro-Palestine Movement Isn’t Helping.

I remain very pro-Palestine. I’m also in favor of peace and pragmatism. I’m vehemently opposed to everything Hamas represents and all of their vile acts against the Israeli people. I also think Prime Minister Netanyahu is a war criminal, responsible for killing my family members along with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. He has blood on his hands and will not be easily forgiven. Balancing these multiple truths is not something many activists seem capable of doing. They’re genuinely unwilling to acknowledge that the goal should be coexistence. To achieve true peace and anything approaching a realistic solution, we need to talk to each other as equals.
They’re Voting for Trump to ‘Save Democracy’

They’re Voting for Trump to ‘Save Democracy’

Like during the eclipse a few years ago, the experts said, ‘Don’t look at the sun and if you look at the sun, you’ll go blind.’ And he just looked at it anyway. And they showed pictures, and of course, he’s not blind. That’s what we need. We need an idiot that looks at the sun when the experts say not to. Not forever. Right now. For the next four years. That’s what we need.”
Your Laughter Is My Trauma: Hannah Gadsby and the Comedic Art of Emotional Manipulation

Your Laughter Is My Trauma: Hannah Gadsby and the Comedic Art of Emotional Manipulation

But trauma is increasingly becoming the mark of honor in today’s vomitous culture of constant revelation. Hannah Gadsby and other high-profile confessors will be fine, with access to the kind of counselling and other services that exist to ease victims of trauma back into everyday life. But texts like Nanette create dramas of revelation and exposure that serve as templates for everyone else, and reinforce an already widespread cultural prerequisite that women in particular continually define themselves by their traumatized selves. Attend any social justice event on matters like prison abolition and you will find panels of mostly women, mostly women of color, often LGBTQ-identified, beginning their presentations with their tales of trauma. People who do this have spoken (usually privately, and only in trusted circles) that they are often explicitly told, by funders and “allies,” that they must present their tales of woe if they want to be taken seriously.
The Great Awokening What happens to culture in an era of identity politics?

The Great Awokening What happens to culture in an era of identity politics?

An artist can be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she makes machines precision engineered to flatter contemporary taste. An artist can also be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she sees what’s unsaid and so says something new. The first category is disposable; the second is not. The work of a critic — alert to ideals, alert to ambition — is to tell the difference.
Tems’ ‘Born in the Wild’ is a Searing Spiritual for a Tortured Generation

Tems’ ‘Born in the Wild’ is a Searing Spiritual for a Tortured Generation

The album’s greatest success, though, is in the way its metaphysical themes eclipse any particular religion. This is especially resonant with the way recent generations have come to engage with spirituality. So many of us are amateur astrologers, yogis and meditators, we channel our moral compases into activism and music. We’re the generations that social media tried to destroy, living in an era where mental health crises proliferate and long-lauded institutions crumble along with their facades of integrity. All this has pushed many of us into often untraditional psychological and spiritual practices – some of us are the first in our families to go to therapy, some of us do tarot. Tems has her God and skillfully manages to make that unique relationship ubiquitous.
Afrobeats To The World: Nigerian History Is Repeating Itself

Afrobeats To The World: Nigerian History Is Repeating Itself

Afrobeats to the world is hanging by a thread. Without the local numbers to back our claim, we are at risk of being exposed and abandoned when pop music inevitably shifts its focus to another emerging sound. It’s another shiny thing. Look towards global music interaction with dancehall and the Caribbean creative class of the early 2000s for a lesson on capital flight, and how that can crush an entire industry.
Afrobeats To The World Gets Its Biggest Challenge

Afrobeats To The World Gets Its Biggest Challenge

2023 gave Afrobeats to the world its most stark realization. We don’t mint enough stars for the capital we attract. We either solve for that or plateau. And you know what happens when a culture hits the stationary phase. To stand still is to fall behind.
Camille Paglia: Elite Trolling

Camille Paglia: Elite Trolling

Yet beyond the gross simplifications that have transformed certain philosophers into bogeymen for rightwing agitators, criticisms of poststructuralism’s legacy cannot so easily be dismissed. We have become extremely adept at describing what must be dismantled, unlearned and problematised, yet almost completely useless when it comes to creating compelling visions of a better society.
Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World

Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World

The New Criticism desperately needed supplementation, but that opaque hash (so divorced from genuine art appreciation) was certainly not it. I was disgusted at the rapid spread of deconstruction and post-structuralism throughout elite U.S. universities in the 1970s, when I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College. The reason it happened is really quite prosaic: a recession hit in the 1970s, and the job market in academe collapsed. Fancy-pants post-structuralism was the ticket to ride for ambitious, beady-eyed young careerists on the make. Its coy, showy gestures and clotted lingo were insiders’ badges of claimed intellectual superiority. But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start. It is doubtful that much if any of their work will have long-term traction.
The Brooklyn Museum’s Much-Criticized ‘It’s Pablo-matic’ Show Is Actually Weirdly at War With Itself Over Hannah Gadsby’s Art History

The Brooklyn Museum’s Much-Criticized ‘It’s Pablo-matic’ Show Is Actually Weirdly at War With Itself Over Hannah Gadsby’s Art History

It’s Pablo-matic” is clearly filling the same function for the more recent era of superficial hyper-moralism in art— “a time when nuance and all the confused intentions, desires, and beliefs that go along with it are considered less a way of understanding human frailty than a failure of ‘accountability,’” as Hilton Als already put it in a sharply critical essay about Douglas , Gadsby’s follow-up to Nanette.
The Polanski Problem

The Polanski Problem

The solution is not to smash your idols but to recognize that they are not idols at all. For Dederer, this insight came with the confessional rituals of the 12-step movement. The humility required to stand before the group and describe “what is worst about me, what is most monstrous,” and the realization that most human beings have a monstrous aspect, allowed her to see “the humanity of monsters.” This amounts to a more dramatic enactment of a pretty common experience: As children, we adore our parents, and growing up is a process of realizing how flawed they are—often with a period of extravagant adolescent rejection—before we come to understand that we love them despite those flaws, as we hope to be loved despite our own. The obdurate truth remains that some of the most beautiful and profound things humanity has created are the work of terrible people. We can decide, in a fury of righteousness, to cast those works aside. Or we can choose to view them as a kind of grace, the miraculous salvage from the inevitable wreck of our lives.
Hannah Gadsby’s Song of the Self

Hannah Gadsby’s Song of the Self

Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.
Coleman Hughes on the Separation of Race and State.

Coleman Hughes on the Separation of Race and State.

The same kinds of people who say that speech is violence, who say that they were actually hurt or felt unsafe because of my TED talk, are the same kinds of people right now that see Hamas slaughtering children in front of their mothers and say, “That’s not violence. That’s resistance.”
Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra. – The New York Times

Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra. – The New York Times

For all its diversity, Egyptian society often prizes light skin and looks down on darker-skinned Egyptians. But many Egyptians and historians say the racist slurs hurled online at Ms. James, while abhorrent, distract from the real issue. The show is dragging an ancient queen into the middle of contemporary Western debates in which she has no real place, they argue.
Fela: The Beatification of an Embattled Saint: Taking a Glance at “Fela: This Bitch of a Life”

Fela: The Beatification of an Embattled Saint: Taking a Glance at “Fela: This Bitch of a Life”

His charismatic charm drew in many, but charisma would never be enough to promote solid ideologies except it is backed by intelligent, well-researched, objective ideas. In Nigeria, this is however not the case. Since there are, and have been, very few people who stand up to defend our rights, many Nigerians love the outspoken, and more so, those who speak for them. However warped their ideologies, these speakers usually gain cult followings. In Nigeria, when a man’s name is said too often, he becomes a god. Odumegwu Ojukwu, Nnamdi Kanu, Naira Marley, Sunday Adeyemo, Omoyele Sowore, Hush Puppi, etc, all rose to prominence because they had the loudest voices or raised the most dust. Fela falls somewhat into this category, too. His ideology was humane and even strangely prophetic but stifled by the very miseducation he sought to correct.
Mo’Nique Reveals Why She Still Wants a Public Apology From Oprah Winfrey.

Mo’Nique Reveals Why She Still Wants a Public Apology From Oprah Winfrey.

When you are good on the inside, I believe it shows up on the outside. It’s a new chapter, but not because of Hollywood,” she says. “It’s a new chapter because my babies are graduating high school. It’s a new chapter because my grandson will be going to kindergarten next year, and my granddaughter to the fifth grade. Those things, for me, are the priority.” When you are good on the inside, I believe it shows up on the outside. It’s a new chapter, but not because of Hollywood,” she says. “It’s a new chapter because my babies are graduating high school. It’s a new chapter because my grandson will be going to kindergarten next year, and my granddaughter to the fifth grade. Those things, for me, are the priority.”
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Trial Is Her Best Role in Years.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Trial Is Her Best Role in Years.

But, at a time when so many mainstream figures seem obsessed with appearing of-the-people despite being anything but, there is something admittedly refreshing about Paltrow’s cards-on-the-table approach. (As the hosts of the culture podcast “How Long Gone” have noted, she’s taking us back to “a different era of celebrity,” when stars didn’t bother acting as if they were just like us.)
You can see why Harry dislikes the tabloid press – but they didn’t cause Diana’s death | Prince Harry

You can see why Harry dislikes the tabloid press – but they didn’t cause Diana’s death | Prince Harry

Onyeama, who was banned from returning to the school after writing the book Nigger at Eton in 1972, which detailed the abuse he suffered, said he was surprised by the attention his story had received, and by Eton’s apology. “My attitude is that it is not necessary. It was neither solicited nor expected, it was not fought for. There’s no obligation on the part of Eton college to apologise for anything. So really, to me, it is a non-issue.
Eton College: Nigerian author recalls racist abuse

Eton College: Nigerian author recalls racist abuse

“My grandfather had no rudiments of any form of education at all and he knew nothing beyond the ‘kill or be killed’ way of life in those days,” Onyeama said. “It wasn’t done as a means of oppression. It was a means of livelihood and a demonstration of power and might. It was the way of life in the old Africa before the white man brought civilisation, so to speak,”
SARAH VINE: Why I feel deeply uneasy at William’s treatment of Lady Susan – and the way she’s being sent for ‘re-education’

SARAH VINE: Why I feel deeply uneasy at William’s treatment of Lady Susan – and the way she’s being sent for ‘re-education’

If in doubt, be a victim, that’s the mantra of the modern world. Your parents, your employer, your siblings, some poor old biddy who got the wrong end of the stick… Resilience, fortitude, loyalty and common sense: they belong to another era. The revolution is here, and you had better get with the programme – or face a long and harrowing march to your newfound ‘freedom’.
Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue was clever, but insidious

Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue was clever, but insidious

Dave Chappelle is, undoubtedly, a comic genius. But he’s not the only comic genius, and he’s one who, unlike many of his colleagues, hasn’t recognized that a different generation expects comedians to abide by certain rules. The first is: Don’t punch down. Chappelle can’t obey this dictum, because he embraces what scholars sometimes call a “standpoint epistemology.” Not without warrant, he regards his identity as an African American male as the most disparaged and degraded of identities. Hence, by definition, he is always punching up.
Four Uncomfortable Truths About Dave Chappelle and The Jews – U.S. News

Four Uncomfortable Truths About Dave Chappelle and The Jews – U.S. News

There is a tacit dogma today that if something is funny it must also be morally good, while if something is morally bad it cannot therefore be funny. A whole lay taxonomy of comedy has arisen that insists jokes are good and funny only when they “punch up” — i.e., aim their barbs at the powerful — but bad and unfunny when they “punch down,” mocking the powerless. But this just isn’t true. What makes something funny has nothing to do with what makes something good. In fact, it’s often the contrary. Humor is anarchic and impious. It draws its power from ridiculing whatever a society holds sacred, by saying whatever a society insists must not be said.
Uju Anya and the dangers of deliberate half-education, By ‘Tope Fasua.

Uju Anya and the dangers of deliberate half-education, By ‘Tope Fasua.

The history of the world could as well be written as the history of plunders, from one society to another. Every nation on earth was formed by a group of oppressors, plunderers, enslavers, conquerors, whether from within or without. The history of Europe could be considered to be particularly bloody – perhaps simply because it was documented and made available for all to see and read.
Is it time to gatekeep Afrobeats?

Is it time to gatekeep Afrobeats?

“I feel gatekeeping is ridiculous, and it’s people outside the game that usually make statements like that because, at the end of the day, music is a business”, says Ini Baderinwa, an entertainment consultant and co-founder of TXT Mag.
JK Rowling sees through her enemies.

JK Rowling sees through her enemies.

The critics rail away about her narcissism, her ignorance, her refusal to listen. But this book makes it clear that they’re badly mistaken: she has always been listening. Not with the empty-headed deference of the obsequious ally, but in the way that all good storytellers do, as a fly on the wall of the discourse, a keen observer of human affairs. And it is this — not her fame, not her money, but her ability to imagine an internet troll in all his sharp-edged human complexity — that ultimately makes Rowling uncancellable.
How Toxic Is Masculinity?

How Toxic Is Masculinity?

She believes that exaggerated complaints about the toxicity of men—their mansplaining and manspreading and so forth—have become a kind of tribal habit among women. In addition to eliminating much of the pleasure and charm of everyday male-female interactions, the constant demonizing of men has led us to lose sight of what is valuable and generative in male and female difference.
As a celebrity on the internet, Merchant admits that he’s “quite dull”, a result of being skittish about causing offence. He remembers once being about to tweet about New Zealand, but then being unsure if the term “Kiwi” is problematic. “When you’re policing yourself in that way, because you don’t want the headache of it [if it goes wrong], it’s absurd to me.” Writing television, he adds, you have numerous people figuring things out behind closed doors and having the space to be thoughtful. The speed and brevity of Twitter, meanwhile, leaves no such room.

As a celebrity on the internet, Merchant admits that he’s “quite dull”, a result of being skittish about causing offence. He remembers once being about to tweet about New Zealand, but then being unsure if the term “Kiwi” is problematic. “When you’re policing yourself in that way, because you don’t want the headache of it [if it goes wrong], it’s absurd to me.” Writing television, he adds, you have numerous people figuring things out behind closed doors and having the space to be thoughtful. The speed and brevity of Twitter, meanwhile, leaves no such room.

“I’ve become more and more cautious because I don’t want to get into a debate,” he says. “I don’t want to have to defend a tweet from 10 years ago. It’s not interesting to me to spend time defending a point of view or a glib joke that I made at 2am.”
n the course of their fight for tolerance, many progressives have become intolerant of those who disagree with them or express other opinions and taken on a kind of self-righteousness and censoriousness that the right long displayed and the left long abhorred. It has made people uncertain about the contours of speech: Many know they shouldn’t utter racist things, but they don’t understand what they can say about race or can say to a person of a different race from theirs. Attacking people in the workplace, on campus, on social media and elsewhere who express unpopular views from a place of good faith is the practice of a closed society. Unanswerable Prayers

n the course of their fight for tolerance, many progressives have become intolerant of those who disagree with them or express other opinions and taken on a kind of self-righteousness and censoriousness that the right long displayed and the left long abhorred. It has made people uncertain about the contours of speech: Many know they shouldn’t utter racist things, but they don’t understand what they can say about race or can say to a person of a different race from theirs. Attacking people in the workplace, on campus, on social media and elsewhere who express unpopular views from a place of good faith is the practice of a closed society. Unanswerable Prayers

I
Apart from a bit of press-release groveling — a big mistake on the part of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who shouldn’t have indulged these babies — the activists got zilch. The special remains up, without a trigger warning. Far from ditching Chappelle, Netflix is re-upping with the standup, who has agreed to produce and host four new specials highlighting other comics whose work Chappelle likes. And the activists? They just sort of….shut up and went back to work after their meaningless little break. Maybe some of them quit the company. From Netflix’s point of view, who cares? Chappelle is a huge draw to the service. Retaining him matters a lot more than whether a handful of self-righteous fringe characters are happy. Netflix’s refusal to make any substantive policy concessions should be a model to every company that is getting bombarded with demands from the people who came of age on woke college campuses where it’s the norm to boycott, block or shout over people you disagree with.

Apart from a bit of press-release groveling — a big mistake on the part of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who shouldn’t have indulged these babies — the activists got zilch. The special remains up, without a trigger warning. Far from ditching Chappelle, Netflix is re-upping with the standup, who has agreed to produce and host four new specials highlighting other comics whose work Chappelle likes. And the activists? They just sort of….shut up and went back to work after their meaningless little break. Maybe some of them quit the company. From Netflix’s point of view, who cares? Chappelle is a huge draw to the service. Retaining him matters a lot more than whether a handful of self-righteous fringe characters are happy. Netflix’s refusal to make any substantive policy concessions should be a model to every company that is getting bombarded with demands from the people who came of age on woke college campuses where it’s the norm to boycott, block or shout over people you disagree with.

Will Gen X please stand up? I have something I want to say to you — to us. We grew up in a country that didn’t ban books. We all agreed that witch hunts and blacklists were bad. Censorship was an outrage. The 1980s were not that long ago. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. So obviously we’ve got a problem here. Everybody can see it. Everybody knows where it’s heading. What we don’t have — yet — is a group of people who are willing to do something about it.

Will Gen X please stand up? I have something I want to say to you — to us. We grew up in a country that didn’t ban books. We all agreed that witch hunts and blacklists were bad. Censorship was an outrage. The 1980s were not that long ago. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. So obviously we’ve got a problem here. Everybody can see it. Everybody knows where it’s heading. What we don’t have — yet — is a group of people who are willing to do something about it.

My Unsettling Interview With Steve Bannon

My Unsettling Interview With Steve Bannon

He says this mass thing called media, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of the noosphere , is going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything. And Trump understands that. That’s why he watches TV. He understands that to get anything done, you have to make the people understand. And so therefore, constantly, we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare. Everything is narrative. And in that regard, you have to make sure you forget about the noise and focus on the signal.
Feeling The Churn: Why Netflix Cancels Shows After A Couple Of Seasons & Why They Can’t Move To New Homes

Feeling The Churn: Why Netflix Cancels Shows After A Couple Of Seasons & Why They Can’t Move To New Homes

“At the core of their business is churn,” one industry insider said, noting that there are always subscribers who drop Netflix after a free trial period or a month or two later, and the goal is to get more people to sign up, which comes mostly thanks to hot new series everyone is talking about. As an asset, having 30 episodes of a series (three seasons) is considered enough to satisfy viewers discovering the show. Tacking on more episodes does not add significant value, I hear. “A show doesn’t serve a purpose [anymore],” an observer said. “There is no reason for the network to continue to invest in it.”
Dramas seem to be fading or just missing this season, but limited series are going strong

Dramas seem to be fading or just missing this season, but limited series are going strong

“Television is a complex, difficult, challenging process. There is something inherently easier in terms of executing a one-season show and all that it takes on thematically, and having a beginning, middle and end to it, versus challenging an audience with a thematic center of a show that needs to exist, say, three, five, seven seasons, where it runs the risk of becoming sort of repetitive or redundant,” Orsi says. “In some ways, [limited] is an easier path than the rigor of an ongoing series, having to explore the essence of a show in different ways but always still being the thing that was bought right out of the gate.”
A past/present rundown on Wolf’s interactions with NBC/Universal

A past/present rundown on Wolf’s interactions with NBC/Universal

NBC believes Mr. Wolf is being greedy. Provided his shows survive a few more seasons, he will make around $750 million for his work on five shows in the “Law and Order” franchise. His contract gives him more power than perhaps any other producer in the industry. It includes a provision that Mr. Wolf believes entitles him to a multi-million dollar “kill-fee” if the network cancels any of his shows. NBC disagrees. NBC also says its rerun strategy is good for business because it is one more way to promote the franchise.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Trial Is Her Best Role in Years

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Trial Is Her Best Role in Years

But, at a time when so many mainstream figures seem obsessed with appearing of-the-people despite being anything but, there is something admittedly refreshing about Paltrow’s cards-on-the-table approach. (As the hosts of the culture podcast “How Long Gone” have noted, she’s taking us back to “a different era of celebrity,” when stars didn’t bother acting as if they were just like us.)
Was Everybody Always Out to Get Chris Licht? Zuckerites might be rejoicing, but Zaslav is still the boss.

Was Everybody Always Out to Get Chris Licht? Zuckerites might be rejoicing, but Zaslav is still the boss.

Tucked into the very end of the Atlantic profile is a brief acknowledgment of what a train wreck Zucker’s first couple of years felt like. But unlike Licht, with his well-meaning higher-purpose-of-journalism bromides, Zucker was always going to chase the biggest audience. Which is why all the sanctimony from CNN staff over Licht’s Trump town hall seems a bit rich. Many of the people criticizing Licht for “platforming” Trump for one evening are the same ones who worship Zucker, the ultimate Trump-platformer who green-lit The Apprentice and offered Trump debate advice. CNN used to broadcast Trump’s empty podium.
CNN’s Chris Licht showed the problem with anti-woke centrism

CNN’s Chris Licht showed the problem with anti-woke centrism

In reality, there has never been a right to voice your opinion without the possibility of being shamed or shunned (terms without precise meanings) — and there shouldn’t be. Shaming and shunning people are free expression, too. What I suspect this editorial was actually calling for is for self-described Democrats and liberals to be able to express more conservative views (such as skepticism about transgender rights) but without being attacked in the way that conservatives often are for such views (being called bigots).
Why Are Some Journalists Afraid of “Moral Clarity”?

Why Are Some Journalists Afraid of “Moral Clarity”?

Essentially, Sullivan and other opinion writers decrying what they see as a new orthodoxy are arguing that everything should be subject to debate, that the sphere of legitimate controversy ought to be boundless. Part of the bedrock of this argument is the absolute belief in the value of debate unto itself. This is where the spectre of totalitarianism appears. These writers fear that what they see as an emerging new political consensus challenges the primacy of traditional liberal values that should never be debated: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other individual rights.
Inside the identity crisis at The New York Times

Inside the identity crisis at The New York Times

Bennet believes that Sulzberger, the publisher, “blew the opportunity to make clear that the New York Times doesn’t exist just to tell progressives how progressives should view reality. That was a huge mistake and a missed opportunity for him to show real strength,” he said. “He still could have fired me.”
Column: Ellen DeGeneres announced the end of her show. Then somehow, she made things worse.

Column: Ellen DeGeneres announced the end of her show. Then somehow, she made things worse.

Fame like that can be stifling, and if DeGeneres chose to insulate herself from her staff to avoid ongoing “There’s Ellen, she’s always up for a chat” interruptions, that’s perfectly valid and not necessarily unkind. Like every sought-after star, she is a finite resource and the fact that she doesn’t know the names of her employees does not make her a monster, just very busy and mindful of her own sanity.
Tech’s Harsh Censorship of Porn Is Hitting Very Close to Home.

Tech’s Harsh Censorship of Porn Is Hitting Very Close to Home.

The right for consenting adults to create and consume fetish content is worth fighting for. But it doesn’t make for a very marketable campaign. Sex—especially weird sex—isn’t considered an appropriate cause to rally behind. It doesn’t attract allies because people know they will be labeled sick, dangerous perverts. That’s why the rights of porn and sex workers are very often couched in something else. We’re pro-free speech, we’re pro-worker livelihoods, we’re anti-privacy violations. And we are all of those things, and those are reasons that people should care. But we should also care about the sex, about sexual variety and sexual freedom, even though it invites the thorny question of whether or not there is such a thing as an unethical fantasy.
Dave Chappelle Confronts Anti-Trans Backlash, Says Protesters Threw Eggs at His Fans.

Dave Chappelle Confronts Anti-Trans Backlash, Says Protesters Threw Eggs at His Fans.

“I’m not even mad that they take issue with my work. Good, fine. Who cares? What I take issue with is the idea that because they don’t like it, I’m not allowed to say it. Art is a nuanced endeavor,” he continued. “I have a belief that they are trying to take the nuance out of speech in American culture, that they’re making people speak as if they’re either on the right or the left. Everything seems absolute, and any opinion I respect is way more nuanced than these binary choices they keep putting in front of us. I don’t see the world in red or blue.”
Spare by Prince Harry review: a lifelong quest for meaning often shows royal in an unflattering light.

Spare by Prince Harry review: a lifelong quest for meaning often shows royal in an unflattering light.

Why, though, did Harry write it? To tell his side of the story, to blow the whistle on the behaviour of the press and the way his family works, to avenge (perhaps) his mother. In these, it succeeds. He is a man, though, ever in search of a purpose. By the end, one senses he has found a new one: to tell the truth and change the world. Those are noble goals. But they may not be easy to achieve. It is hard not to fear, somehow, that the likeable, sweet, rather simple prince may soon find himself in search of meaning once more.
American Gigolo is no longer sexy.

American Gigolo is no longer sexy.

It is difficult not to see the new American Gigolo as the latest absurd iteration of the media’s anxious, obsessive search for trauma, victimhood, and injury in what, until now, have been recognised as happier chapters in the American story. As Mike Hale has aptly put it in the New York Times, it “remakes an era-defining film for the current age of victimisation”.
These reporters’ use of phrases such as “online violence” and their invocation of “trauma” when discussing mean tweets capitalizes on the natural sympathy people feel for victims of real trauma and violence and turns it to the journalists’ own professional advantage. It’s a good trick, because it’s difficult to criticize these journalists without being oneself accused of compounding the claimed injury.

These reporters’ use of phrases such as “online violence” and their invocation of “trauma” when discussing mean tweets capitalizes on the natural sympathy people feel for victims of real trauma and violence and turns it to the journalists’ own professional advantage. It’s a good trick, because it’s difficult to criticize these journalists without being oneself accused of compounding the claimed injury.

The writer Michael Tracey described the deployment of what he calls “therapeutic trauma jargon” in a recent issue of his Substack newsletter: “Obviously, this harm cannot be externally adjudicated because one’s harm must never be subject to contestation or (god forbid) falsification. So the logic goes, every person has the right to say they are harmed without ever having the legitimacy of that harm questioned, because to question the harm compounds the harm.”
Cancel Culture in 1832 Sounded Pretty Fierce

Cancel Culture in 1832 Sounded Pretty Fierce

What I’d like to point out, in brief, is that while the technology is new, the phenomenon is not. The “tyranny of the majority” in public opinion — the way it enforces conformity and reprimands dissent — has been part of American life reaching back to the beginning. And there’s even a case to make that it is intrinsic to democracy and democratic life, an inescapable consequence of the leveling spirit.