nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Again the media’s horns call the dogs to the hunt, again the crusaders for Justice take up arms and keyboards to fight the menace of the legal system. “The botnet knows better than you!”, they cry, brains thoroughly owned, actions directed by kernels inherited from Satan knows where; and the botnet spews forth torrents of articles hysterically shrieking of the death of dignity, shitting ever onward to the war-chants of “-phobia!” and “-ism!”. The same tedious scene, repeated since Salem; always the same, enough so that one could easily write an article to run every time. A death of a member of a demographic favored by contemporary progressivism, a media outcry, candlelight vigils, Orwellian bills, a drawn-out trial from hell, a verdict considered harmful by the bloodthirsty bots, beating their two or three talking points like as many dead horses. The bigot Ravi, the Klan-white Zimmerman, and an endless procession of those before them, lined up from New Jersey all the way to the horizon. How tedious. 

What do Dharun Ravi and Lindsay Lohan have in common?

They’ve both been sentenced to 30 days in jail. Lohan received her sentence for a string of probation violations capped off with a DUI charge, while Ravi is credited with cyberbullying his college roommate Tyler Clementi to death.

So you know, same thing.

…

I can’t help but wonder what sort of lesson anyone paying attention to this case has learned. Besides of course that it’s OK to bully gay kids to death.

Thus spewed the ‘new-media’ abomination Unicorn Booty, proving once and for all that the new is the same as the old, only more so. Cyberbullied to death, indeed. Topping even that is the LGBTQ Nation, spoken for by a self-proclaimed “human rights advocate”:

This is an outrage and a slap in the face, not only to the judicial system by
the Judge, but to all who have experienced homophobia under the cloak of mere and apparently what the Judge now considers an acceptable bias. This goes a step further by actually endorsing bias. The Judge has said, in effect, “commit a crime with bias, do not say sorry, defy judicial authority, and we will apologize for having to sentence you!”

…

While I do not doubt that Ravi was put through a measure of hell, knowing that he could be sentenced to a maximum of ten years and be the subject of deportation, I ask why this Judge even bothered to sentence him, at all – he may have well tickled him under his armpit and sent him home laughing, legitimating an attack on the next victim, whomever and however!

He did it! He killed him! And he didn’t say sorry! Never mind that ten seconds on Wikipedia reveals that Clementi’s suicide notes were not entered into evidence, because his suicide was not considered related to the crimes at hand; if you want to blame Ravi, that is what you have to attack, but good luck convincing anyone that someone would be driven to suicide by Ravi’s actions alone. But alone is what they were not.

Tedious. Utterly tedious. Who needs to read the evidence? The affiliations of the players are enough to write the whole script! Compared to reality, the Three Stooges were a class act; they at least varied their weapons. Even disregarding the evidence, as the pundits have: knowing people who knew Ravi, and having gone to the same summer camp as him, albeit obviously during different years (you laugh now, but I’ve seen it convert hardened Glenn Beck fans), the frothing homophobe narrative can appear nothing but laughable to me. He was caught up in his ego, definitely, but one does not plunge into the depths of Brahmindom and emerge as Fred Phelps.

And as a side note, anyone who can see a $10,000 fine as a tickle under the armpit is far too bourgeois to be talking politics. But I suppose that is to be expected from a “human rights advocate”.

Everyone’s favorite smug sack of fecal matter is at it again. As if cheap Googlebombing campaigns weren’t enough, Dan Savage decided to put on his New Atheist hat and do what they—and 13-year-olds on Livejournal—do best: rattle on about the Bible in the same tone of self-righteous willful ignorance as they imagine conservatives adopting on evolution. “If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys, huh?” If Leviticus talks about shellfish, why do Christians still eat shellfish, huh?

Now, I’m not concerned here with his embarrassingly simplistic New Atheist view of theology, wherein all religion that was, is, and ever will be is fundamentally isomorphic to overliteral bookstore-Protestantism; having been raised into a thoroughly secularized version of said Protestantism (albeit one with some strange bits mixed in—I’ve put pepper on food maybe twice in my life), I’m most likely the least qualified person to talk theology out of those who are aware that there’s more to it than reading what’s in the monosyllables-only translation picked up for $5 at Walmart. (Now, now, Julius, put down that Talmud. You aren’t a rabbi; stop playing at it. You’ll poke someone’s eye out.) I’m also not going to bother with the lines he recycled from that hack Sam Harris; a ten-year-old could do that, unless the demon-virus Whiggery has already implanted itself in their knowledge of history. Even his shifty-eyed insistence that Universalism is somehow on the decline, when one would have to be delusional to think gay marriage will not be widely accepted in thirty years, will be left aside for now. My question here is a simple one:

“Pansy-ass”? Really? What are these high school students doing applauding a kindergarten line?

The answer, of course, should be obvious to anyone who has read Moldbug. One quick find-and-replace, and…

[Savage] really goes beyond smugness. Searing arrogance is more like it. I am reminded of the tone of the famous Soviet humor magazine, Krokodil, which loved to parody the buffoonish, corrupt doings of the hooligan dissidents. Alas, Krokodil is no more. But perhaps we can remember the entire trope in which the smug and powerful mock the hooligans, peasants and barbarians as crocodile humor.

Crocodile humor, from a crocodile. Notice his tone throughout the speech: raining curses with one finger raised, reveling in the worthlessness of his constructed enemy, he smirks and shakes his head at the filthy, fuck-dumb proles. I’ve seen it before: it’s the tone, the exact same tone, my professor takes when he goes colonial, starts rattling on about the backwardsness of the idiots in town, how silly they are for caring about little things like the college bringing in a crane to pluck the cross from its chapel, built on the highest point in town, or for almost electing a newcomer over an “all-around great guy” who just happens to be a colonizer Democrat. Dan Savage wishing that the Republicans would go away sounds exactly like the professor wishing… well, that the Republicans would go away. Odd coincidence, that.

“These savages don’t have a leg to stand on!”, the crocodile cries. “Why won’t they get out of our way? After all, we know better. We are better. With actual power, just think what we could do!”

The mere existence of active opposition, no matter how powerless, is enough to set the crocodile off. The enemy must be crushed: converted if possible, raped and slaughtered if not. (This, I suspect, is why crocodiles are so drawn to the left: a movement that advocates the mass rewriting of society will naturally draw those who want to rewrite society in their image.) Fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war; but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for the International Community is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that the rhetoric of war fits so naturally here; the main difference between caste-war and the normal kind is that the latter has an end. And once the Kernels are situated, that is when the game is afoot. The true war begins, light versus dark, good versus evil. This is a war that the forces of light are always destined to lose…

I’ve been working my way through The True and Only Heaven, a history of progress by Christopher Lasch, an ex-Frankfurt School Marxist who followed the trend of breaking with the left after the 1960s, but, instead of following many of his contemporaries into neoconservatism, jumped the divide altogether and landed in a worldview that can only be described with the overused cliche “beyond left and right”. Although technically a history of the idea of progress, the book, after aligning itself against the secularization explanation of Mencius Moldbug and Alain de Benoist, jumps tracks and ends up summarizing the republicans, Orestes Brownson, and Carlyle (characterized as an Emerson-like secularized crypto-Calvinist and advocate of hero-worship as a means to something bearing at least some resemblance to palingenesis). (I’m about halfway through now, and that’s the Carlyle bit. Also, I’m only going to cover a few points in the introduction; there’s much more there. I might scan it later.) Anyway, Lasch throws out enough interesting points that I decided to collect a few. (My comments are in italics.)

1. “The history of the twentieth century suggests that totalitarian regimes are highly unstable, evolving toward some type of bureaucracy that fits neither the classic fascist nor the socialist model.” (p. 24) This certainly seems true of China, the most successful of those regimes; I am (admittedly to my detriment) neither a historian nor an international relations specialist, but the only counterexample that comes to mind is North Korea, which can be safely written off in any pattern to which it is an exception.
2. “The tradition of English Marxism, as articulated by Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson … repudiated economic determinism and the mechanistic distinction between economic ‘base’ and cultural ‘superstructure’. It showed that class consciousness is the product of historical experience, not a simple reflection of economic interest. The work of Williams and Thomas also showed how Marxism could absorb the insights of cultural conservatives and provide a sympathetic account, not just of the economic hardships imposed by capitalism, but of the way in which capitalism thwarted the need for joy in work, stable connections, family life, a sense of place, and a sense of historical continuity.” (p. 29) I know nothing about either of them, but they’re going on my reading list.
3. The theories of inevitable historical progression through a particular set of stages came not from Christian eschatology, but, as per Hans Blumenberg, from the mistaken assumption of the necessity of competition with Christianity on its own ground. The characteristic feature of progressivism is the “moral rehabilitation of desire”: the belief that the “private vices” of “envy, pride, and ambition” become “‘public virtues’ by stimulating industry and invention”, whereas “thrift and self-denial” lead to stagnation; in other words, the finding of value in, the moral rehabilitation of, man’s “insatiable appetites”, as a driver of never-ending expansion. “The modern conception of history is utopian only in its assumption that modern history has no foreseeable conclusion,” and its denial of the belief in the life cycle of civilizations, or at least the possibility that said life cycle may apply to ours, that it may go the way of Rome and die a natural death.
4. “[I]f humanity thrives on peace and prosperity, it also needs an occasional taste of battle. Men and women need to believe that ‘life is a critical affair,’ in Richard Niebuhr’s words. They cannot be satisfied merely with the opportunity to choose their goals and ‘life-styles,’ in the current jargon; they need to believe that their choices carry serious consequences.” This drive for cosmic significance is present in Christianity and communism, and, as per Lewis Mumford, was at least partially responsible for the success of Hitler. Compare Orwell, who Lasch quotes; or Alain de Benoist’s statement that it is “better to wear the helmet of a Red Army soldier than to live on a diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn”. This is also, according to a professor who I mentioned this to, a key point in Frankfurt School analysis (a school which Lasch once followed), which can be explained along the following lines: When traveling a long distance by car, it used to be the case that one could only take back roads; but now, we have highways, which largely prevent us from getting lost, point out the attractions we might want to see along the way, and are far more convenient. To take the highway, then, is more convenient, but at the same time less human. (I can’t vouch for any of this myself, though, since I haven’t read any proper Frankfurt School yet.)
5. According to Jon Elster, the “most valuable and persuasive element in Marxism … is the way it makes ‘self-realization’ the ‘central value in society.’ But this is another way of saying that Marxism owes much of its appeal, at least in the West, to its identification with the central values of capitalism itself—which can allegedly be achieved, in their fully developed form, only after the socialist revolution.” It may be interesting for someone with more knowledge of the Marxist and liberal traditions to catalogue their similarities, or at least those existing before their cross-pollination (or, alternatively, the coöptation (yes, with the diaeresis… there really is no less wrong way to write that word!) of what remained of leftism) in the American academy.

Also, some administrivia: I have a Tumblr now, so follow if you’re into that sort of thing.

The New York Times, that modern-day Pravda of left-liberalism, recently ran a review of a book purporting to explain the demise of the American left. The explanation given—that leftists failed, for unknown reasons, to maintain an “animating vision” of socialist utopianism—is, as one would expect given the Pravdan nature of the NYT, absurd, but the reviewer inadvertently mentioned a real explanation for said demise.

The left generally failed, according to Kazin, when it emphasized atheism, collectivism and ideological purity. It has been more successful when taking the form of broad, heterogeneous movements struggling for individual rights. Witness the rise of gay marriage, arguably today’s most effective left-leaning social campaign. Viewed as a utopian dream, it promises to transform the institution of marriage. But viewed as a civil rights matter, it simply aims to include more people in an existing institution.

By this statement, one can easily predict, given any leftist policy goal, whether it will succeed or fail: it will succeed if it involves expanding individual freedom, commonly known euphemistically as “civil rights”, and it will fail otherwise. On its face, this may seem like an odd statement; leftism, after all, is fundamentally collectivist, so why are its successes limited to a domain in which it does not lie? But it fits the reality of the situation well enough that, despite its initial counterintuitiveness, there must be a way to make sense of it.

And, in fact, there is: leftists succeed in implementing any policy goal that moves American society further toward the liberal ideal of maximized individual liberty. (Americans may be confused by this statement, since that ideal is much more commonly associated with libertarianism than liberalism in America, but libertarianism is simply a subspecies of liberalism that believes nongovernmental forces cannot restrict liberty.)

A clear example of this is American feminism, which, according to Christina Sommers, can be divided into two camps: ‘egalitarian’ (that is, liberal) feminism, currently the dominant philosophy in feminism, and ‘conservative’ feminism, the illiberalism of which has gotten it written out of the historical record, despite having been historically far more effective than egalitarianism:

Willard, a suffragist and leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, is another once esteemed figure in women’s history who is today unmentioned and unmentionable. Willard brought mainstream women into the suffrage movement, and some historians credit her with doing far more to win the vote for women than any other suffragist. But her fondness for saying things like “Womanliness first—afterwards what you will” was her ticket to historical obliquy.

Approved feminist founders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony promoted women’s suffrage through Wollstonecraft-like appeals to universal rights. Their inspirations were John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Wollstonecraft herself. Stanton wrote affectingly on “the individuality of each human soul,” and on a woman’s need to be the “arbiter of her own destiny.”

What then, in practice, is leftism in America? It cannot be proper leftism, because proper leftism, as per Kazin, has not been successful; what has been successful is liberalism, which commonly disguises itself as leftism. This may be confusing to Americans, who have most likely never encountered a proper leftist and, if they have, were most likely too distracted by the rhetorical similarities between the two to tell the difference. (Liberalism and leftism are both progressivist ideologies, but they have one easily noticeable difference: the eschaton that liberalism would immanentize is one of atomistic individuals with maximum license and no connections to anything or anyone, with the possible exception of the benevolent State, whereas leftist utopian projects demonstrate at least a faint grasp of human nature. More on that later.)

American ‘leftism’, considering its in actu effects and its rhetoric of “civil rights” and “individual liberty”, can only be described as liberalism, or, more insightfully, as ultra-Americanism:

But when we look at the actual political motifs in the two kinds of anti-Americanism, we see very little in common – besides of course hatred of America.

Clearly it’s this word anti-American that’s confusing us. If we split it in half we can see the trend clearly. To be counter-American is to resist American political theory. To be ultra-American is to accept American political theory so completely that you become more American than America itself, and you feel America is not living up to her own principles.

But what is American political theory? It is, quite trivially, the dominant political ideology in America. Considering the history of American politics, it is clear the American political theory is fundamentally liberal, and that said history can be summarized as the bringing in line of American society to a distinctly un-nuanced reading of that oft-quoted clause in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness

Liberty is license, happiness is hedonism, and our political discourse has been shaped in such a way that liberal hegemony currently goes unchallenged. The left, then, did not die due to lack of an “animating vision”; it was co-opted by liberalism. But how did this happen and what can be done? That will have to wait until next time.

Remember Tom Ball? The man who said that this country is run by a shadowy dictatorship of unelected bureaucrats, and then set himself on fire in front of a New Hampshire courthouse?

Well, he got the dictatorship part right.

From his last statement:

Any one swept up into legal mess is usually astonished at what they see. They cannot believe what the police, prosecutors and judges are doing. It is so blatantly wrong. Well, I can assure you that everything they do is logical and by the book. The confusion you have with them is you both are using different sets of books. You are using the old First Set of Books- the Constitution, the general laws or statutes and the court ruling sometime[s] call[ed] Common Law. They are using the newer Second Set of Books. That is the collection of the policy, procedures and protocols. Once you know what set of books everyone is using, then everything they do looks logical and upright.

Translated into grammatically correct English with proper terminology, this essentially says that such concepts as separation of powers and rule of law are now irrelevant; instead of laws being written entirely by legislative bodies, many are now written by the other two branches. In the current political climate, of course, this makes sense to a degree; the laws are so complicated and so far-reaching that to consistently enforce them would require far more resources than are realistically available.

But what this means is that separation of powers is a myth. What we have instead is a dictatorship of the bureaucrats, the shadowy, unelected masses who have amassed pervasive power through their role in writing policies, procedures, and protocols. Tom Ball’s case promarily involved lower-level government, but it is trivial to see that the same principle applies at the federal level.

For example:

Now, DHS and the Department of Justice will convene a working group to evaluate, on a case by case basis, the files of everyone facing deportation, and those whose cases are dropped will be eligible to apply for work permits. The move will not grant any of those people legal status, nor will work authorization be guaranteed. But they will not have to leave the country.

For years, immigrant rights advocates have pushed Obama to exercise his executive authority, which allows him prosecutorial discretion over who the country prosecutes and deports. The numbers within Obama’s record-breaking deportation effort showed that a majority of those being deported, contrary to what the Morton memo called for, had no criminal background whatsoever. Outrage over this fact escalated after the failure of the DREAM Act last December, which would have allowed a select portion of undocumented youth the opportunity to gain citizenship if they cleared a host of hurdles. In April, 22 senators sent a letter to Obama urging him to issue deferred action to DREAM Act-eligible young people, and reminded him of the menu of options he had to ease the lives of undocumented youth.

President Obama was a vocal supporter of the DREAM Act, yet his immigration authorities were still sending deportation orders to DREAM Act-eligible youth. Obama ought to bring his policies in line with his rhetoric, immigrant rights advocates argued. Thursday’s policy change was his administration’s response to those demands.

The Obama administration has instituted a policy that amounts to a laxer version of a law that has been defeated in Congress multiple times. And those in favor of this move openly admit it. Separation of powers is dead, and it died a slow, silent death.

So, you ask, how does this tie into the title? How can this teach you, a budding revolutionary, how to overthrow the Evil Regime™ of your choice in a bloodless coup with a very high probability of success?

Unfortunately for you, it probably can’t. This method only works for those in favor of instituting a bureaucracy, and I doubt this blog would attract anyone but reactionaries, libertarians, and stone-cold paranoiacs, who are generally not the sort to support such absurdities. But if you happen to be a progressive, a globalist, or some other flavor of Vogon, here’s how you’d do it:

1. March through the institutions. Manipulate public opinion, especially the opinion of the bureaucratic classes, in the direction of supporting moral judgments favorable to your agenda.
2. Institute overly broad laws, or laws that would dramatically increase the workload of those enforcing them, to flood the system. If you can’t get that done yourself, rustle up some idealists or opportunistic capitalists to muscle some through for you.
3. Point out that the system has been flooded and claim that heuristics (policies, procedures, and protocols) must be installed to deal with the caseload.
4. Guide the codification of those heuristics to ensure that they support your agenda. This should not be hard, since if you carried out step 2 properly, the bureaucrats should already think your agenda is sensible policy.

Then sit back and watch as your perverse vision of heaven on earth becomes reality. If opposition arises, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt.

Good luck pulling this off in America, though; it’s clearly already been done.

Oh great. Psychology Today is making the same mistake.

Last week, a blog post about race and appearance by Satoshi Kanazawa was published–and promptly removed–from this site. We deeply apologize for the pain and offense that this post caused. Psychology Today‘s mission is to inform the public, not to provide a platform for inflammatory and offensive material. Psychology Today does not tolerate racism or prejudice of any sort. The post was not approved by Psychology Today, but we take full responsibility for its publication on our site. We have taken measures to ensure that such an incident does not occur again. Again, we are deeply sorry for the hurt that this post caused.

Notice how they claim that the reason the post was pulled, along with the rest of Kanazawa’s blog, is the “pain and offense” caused by Kanazawa’s “racism”. I’d expect radical feminists and other people on that end of the political spectrum to come out against science, but now a science site is doing that? 

I agree with Dennis Mangan here: “One can agree with the editor that Kanazawa’s post was “inflammatory and offensive”, but as for the “racism” charge, the post was either true or false, right or wrong, or some combination.”

Science does not care about how “inflammatory and offensive” it is. All that science can legitimately concern itself with is its scientific accuracy; that is, whether things are “true or false, right or wrong, or some combination”. Throw in anything else, and it becomes not science, but propaganda.

In fact, contrary to Psychology Today’s apparent belief that informing the public and “provid[ing] a platform for inflammatory and offensive material” can be mutually exclusive, real science will inevitably offend; it is well established that people believe things that are not true, and become offended when evidence is presented that runs counter to their beliefs. It should not be surprising to anyone outside the left that the left is as guilty of this as the religious right. But the left (in its opposition to the religious right) claims to support science, despite the fact that that science offends many on the religious right. They can’t have it both ways.

Satoshi Kanazawa is the latest casualty in the war against science.

His now-infamous post on race and attractiveness stirred the modern-day Tommaso Caccinis of the leftist blogosphere to condemn him as a blasphemous racist, and even attempt to get him fired from his position at the London School of Economics. His science was admittedly questionable at best, since the data that he used (which, keep in mind, was generated by a widely respected study with significant government backing) turned out to be subjective enough to open the door for legitimate criticism, and there is definitely room for legitimate criticism here; I am not convinced that his study says what he thinks it says, or even that it says anything at all. But that criticism was hardly brought up, and it was eventually lost in the flood of blasphemy charges from pitchfork-waving culturists.

The authors of the article pointing out the problems with the Add Health data, not satisfied by merely criticizing the data like actual scientists, went on in the same article to blast Kanazawa for coming to conclusions that did not still hold true once half the data got thrown out the window, because obviously it is impossible for people to be reasonably considered sexually attractive before the age of 18 (never mind that many countries, and even many states in the US, set the age of consent lower than that), and therefore it is “inappropriate” to point out that existing data is compatible with Kanazawa’s conclusion and incompatible with the absurd culturist response that everyone in America, even in black-dominated areas such as the one that I currently live in (where, interestingly, even the worst of the black supremacists tend to limit their sexual activity to white women), has been brainwashed into supporting a standard of beauty more useful to the evil, culture-controlling Je… um, whites. Of course, thinly veiled accusations of pedophilia are not a valid argument for throwing out half of the data, and statistics is enough of an art that analyses from authors who throw out such absurd ad hominems are questionable. (I’d run the numbers myself, but my statistics class was taught by a miserable alcoholic who spent most of the semester talking about his drinking habits, so I am decidedly unqualified for such analysis.)

What do we have here? A scientist used data from a seemingly credible source to come to a certain conclusion, and it turned out that that source might not deserve the reputation it enjoys. One could even legitimately go so far as to call the study pseudoscience, and given the overreaching claims and use of obfuscatory buzzwords in the article, it is clear, at least to me, that it is at best another example of the absurdity of science journalism. This would be the limit of the controversy over that article in a world that had any sort of respect for science, but, since the dominant ideology of the Western world relies on the belief, different only in degree than that of the creationists that adherents of that ideology so love to mock, that the processes of evolution ceased to operate on the human brain as soon as Homo sapiens first set foot on Earth, we do not live in such a world.

So, of course, the controversy broke completely free of the constraints of rationality, and culturist bloggers took up arms against not Kanazawa’s methods, but his results. Jezebel, a crypto-feminist spinoff of an online tabloid, spewed forth a Two Minutes Hate that simply called Kanazawa an “awful”, “crappy” racist who hid his racism behind meaningless bar graphs. Crooks and Liars dismissed “Zantoshi” Kanazawa’s conclusion out of hand with the unsupported culturist non-argument that beauty is entirely subjective. Pam’s House Blend, a self-proclaimed “Online Magazine in the Reality-Based Community” (shades of “Fair and Balanced”?), claimed, in an ironic yet predictable denial of reality, that races are too diverse for statements about racial trends to be valid. The Guardian, in what may be the first use of Reductio ad Hitlerum in the mainstream media (if that anti-science Pravda of radical New Left trash can even be considered mainstream), compared Kanazawa to peddlers of Aryan pseudoscience, and then claimed that Kanazawa’s article was morally objectionable because it “insulted and denigrated women of African descent all over the world, insinuating that some inevitable genetic development forces them to the lowest rung of his imaginary rigid scale of ‘attractiveness’”, as if science should be suppressed if it has the possibility of hurting anyone’s self-esteem. (One can imagine a similar objection to Darwin; does it not hurt the self-esteem of humans everywhere to learn that they are not God’s special snowflakes, but instead the descendants of apes?) And so on.

If this were an isolated incident, or if the criticism focused on his scientific failings and not his un-PC results, it would be effectively irrelevant; Kanazawa is a sensationalist, and I doubt many people would care if his bombast cost him his career. But this is not isolated; considering the particular objections that were raised to his article (note the title of the post announcing the petition to get him fired: “Fire Racist, Sexist Satoshi Kanazawa”), he is the latest victim of a pattern of culturist opposition to science that has claimed the careers of many other scientists of far more merit, including Lawrence Summers, who lost his position as president of Harvard after drawing fire for a conjecture that there might possibly be a biologically caused nonzero difference in scientific aptitude between the sexes, and Nobel laureate James Watson, who lost his job for pointing out the established fact that the average IQ of Africa is lower than the average IQ of the US. And in cases such as these, the ends do not justify the means; attacking even the worst hack for ideologically motivated reasons may bring about a desirable immediate result, but that result comes at the cost of strengthening the ideology behind it.

History has seen this pattern many times before. The culturist insistence that science be subordinated to its essentially faith-based beliefs differentiates itself only in rhetoric and ideology from the Soviet attacks on geneticists as “fly-lovers and people-haters” and puppets of the bourgeoisie and the Catholic charges of heresy against heliocentrism. Instead of defending their beliefs in the arena of rational debate, they attempt to shut down all opposition, regardless of its accuracy. And, judging by the fact that Kanazawa’s career is currently threatened not by his possibly unscientific methods, but by his politically incorrect results, it looks like they’re getting away with it.

Is there any doubt that culturism is currently the dominant ideology of the Western world?

Cuba is the only country in Latin America that chose a different path to try to achieve national independence, sovereignty, and political and economic development. Cuba did so through a popular nationalist revolution that swept away a bureaucratic authoritarian, dictatorial, praetorian, repressive, and corrupt regime. How has Cuba’s different approach to national, political, and economic development shaped the current Cuban reality. How has neo-imperialism hindered Cuba’s development?

This is from the study guide. I already had doubts about the amount of trust I could put in this class; the professor claims that import substitution industrialization was fundamentally flawed and a complete and utter failure, whereas other sources say that it had some success in larger, more populous countries, that it may have reached a larger degree of success with international trade agreements among Latin American countries, and that its failure compared with the Asian export-driven model was due in part to the USA’s Cold War policy of heavily promoting capitalist development in Asia. But this particular bit seems… I don’t know, maybe a bit over the top? Out of all the things that have hindered Cuba’s development (possibly including its reliance on an economic model that has literally never succeeded), the one thing that gets singled out is neoimperialism?

But it gets even better. The professor for this class is the head of the political science department.

I am a product of the public school system. I have spent enough time in that particular conditioning facility that I am used to mindlessly regurgitating the expected answers. And yet, I find myself questioning my ability to do that here; the disparity between the expected answers and the answers that I find is large enough that I would have to completely shut myself off from outside information in order to ensure that no crimethink slips into my regurgitations.

Why do I subject myself to an institution that cannot even live up to its stated purpose?

I have, unfortunately, been forced by the college that I currently attend to take an intro-level course in political science. The class starts its unit on racism tomorrow, and considering the current intellectual climate of the American higher education system, that promises to be interesting, to say the least. (Note: I threw this article in the draft pile for a few days. It turned out not to be as interesting as I had thought. Considering that my definition of ‘interesting’ involves massive amounts of controversy, I am beginning to think that I might have been too pessimistic about this place.) One of the required readings for the class is an article by Howard Zinn for The Nation, the gist of which is that the Constitution has had only a minor effect on the lives of Americans compared to historical social movements.

This, of course, is patently absurd to anyone not steeped in the American political tradition to the point of being completely and utterly unable to imagine a set of circumstances outside those of that tradition.

The creation of the Constitution, along with the subsequent success of the federation it created (it only became a nation in the traditional sense after the Union crushed states’ rights), brought about not just policy shifts, but a full-blown paradigm shift. What’s the difference, you ask? A policy shift may result in a complete reversal in public opinion on an issue or set of issues, but a paradigm shift operates on such a deep level that it eliminates even the visceral knowledge that people once thought differently. Someone born after World War II would find the widespread belief that democracy (read: rational-legal authority; charismatic leadership was a large feature of post-WWI totalitarianism) had failed utterly incomprehensible, as a result of the paradigm shift set in motion by the establishment and ratification of the Constitution. Democracy and rational-legal authority are now Good Things. So much so, in fact, that Mencius Moldbug, a self-proclaimed reactionary, based his entire political ideology around the theory of formalism, which essentially states that violence is caused by absence of rational-legal authority. Hmm.

Policy shifts are easier to notice, especially when, as in the case of Howard Zinn’s article, they happened within the lifetime of the person doing the observing. It takes practically no intellectual effort to notice that de jure segregation no longer exists, or that the initiation of the Vietnam War did not go through the constitutionally proper channels for initiating a war. Paradigm shifts, on the other hand, cannot even happen within the lifetime of one person, and, when complete, cause there to be an entirely new set of fundamental assumptions that people carry about the world. The fun thing about fundamental assumptions about the world is that they go largely unnoticed; I have to wonder how many libertarians or Religious Right conservatives have noticed that their ideological  disagreements stem almost entirely from their differing views on human nature. Things that go unnoticed must go unchallenged and unquestioned, and so people assume that those fundamental assumptions are universal. How many people today would find it even conceivable that some parts of civilized Western society (this is important; wacky beliefs aren’t seen as outrageous unless they’re coming from people who are civilized and most likely white) once truly believed that faith was superior to reason? Or that the king was an agent of God? Or that “the people” should not be given a voice in the affairs of the government?

In short, a paradigm shift brings about the condition that I described earlier: that of being completely and utterly unable to imagine a set of circumstances outside those of the ideology launched into popularity by the paradigm shift. Foseti did a better job of describing this than I possibly could, although he didn’t put it in the same terms.