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What to do about education?

I’ve complained about “expertise” as an institution. But what kind of education should we have?

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Why lockstep transgenderism?

The idea behind fanatical transgenderism is that reality is socially constructed, so denying Bruce Jenner is a woman is the same as annihilating the woman Caitlyn Jenner. It’s equivalent to murder, and implicitly to genocide.

But why do respectable people repeat this stuff, which you’d think they know is insane?

For some it has a bit of a potlatch quality. Reckless extravagance proves invulnerable status.

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Progressives more crazed than evil

Progressives can simply look evil, because they’re so crazed. But there’s a whole theory of the world behind their views. Otherwise they wouldn’t be developing so uniformly or be so strong among formally educated people.

They believe in truth and righteousness. But it’s the “larger truth” that reflects necessary context: how bad and utterly disqualifying it is to stand in the way of obvious justice. It follows that whatever they do to you is justified.

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Fat cats as progressives

“Left” means social justice, which means that social attitudes and connections are supervised and controlled by the guys at the top. The CEO of Goldman Sachs is a guy at the top.

I suppose someone could say “social justice” also means equality, but the left says all concepts are social constructions, so why wouldn’t the Goldman Sachs guy use his social power to construct “equality” as “I get everything”?

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Speech is violence

The thought behind the progressive claim that speech is violence is that reality is socially constructed, so denying Bruce Jenner is a woman is the same as annihilating the woman Caitlyn Jenner. It’s equivalent to murder, in principle to genocide. The claim is word magic, possibly primitive, certainly insane.

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Christianity in the NWO

What happens to ethnic distinctions in an age of global capitalism and bureaucracy, and of electronic and physical means of communication that destroy distance? What happens to Christianity under such circumstances?

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Whiteness conundrums

It’s not clear what exactly “whiteness” means but it’s a broad term. Documents used in official settings have declared merit and objectivity aspects of whiteness. And it’s not clear there’s a distinction between “whiteness” and “Western civilization.” Or between either and “white supremacy.”

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Thoughts on Ukraine

The battle on the Right over Ukraine is part of a grand battle over civilization and humanity. Is it Eastern barbarism and the Hitler-of-the-week that are the great threats, or is the imperialistically woke and multicultural West the real problem?

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More on cancel culture, from Rome

Nihil sub sole novum:

The busts of twenty most illustrious families were borne in the procession, with the names of Manlius, Quinctius, and others of equal rank. But Cassius and Brutus outshone them all, from the very fact that their likenesses were not to be seen.

Tacitus

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A view from the Great Proletarian Cultural

The Cowshed, a memoir of the Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin, a Chinese academic, suggests 1966 precedents for present-day situations:

The role of “privilege” (from the Introduction):

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From 1984

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

“Four.”

“And if the Party says that it is not four but five – then how many?”

“Four.”

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Investment management and politics

Someone sent me a story about the Pennsylvania senate race, and a Republican candidate whose firm handled — not very successfully — some of the investments for the state teachers’ pension fund. An opponent, the famous Dr. Oz, is raising it as an issue.

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Why is everyone crazy?

People who lived through communism tell me that a big difference between the political lunacy then and now is that people today actually believe what they’re told. That seems true. There doesn’t seem to be an inner circle running things that recognizes the difference between prolefeed and what’s actually going on. For all I know George Soros does, but who else?

It’s shocking and horrifying, but so far as I can tell it’s so. I’m constantly puzzling over this. Why has everyone gone bananas?

Some brief thoughts:

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Why all the Nazis and Hitlers?

John Derbyshire notes that today Nazis are everywhere. Everybody our rulers find objectionable, including both sides in the Ukraine war, are Nazis. He says it’s “because they are mentally lazy and view the world in terms of simplified narratives.”

To my mind it’s less laziness than an extremely limited understanding of what’s real. As they say, ideas have consequences.

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Experts, the world, and the Church

If we live in an age of expertise, how come everything’s so stupid? I discuss.

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How to deal with universal madness?

What do you do about it when everything we’re told seems generated by a Martian AI program? I discuss at Catholic World Report.

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Narratives going wild

Where is the real deal in an age of propaganda? I discuss.

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The question of the sexes

The sexual binary through classical eyes. At Catholic World Report.

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Tradition and traditionalism

Is traditionalism “dead ashes”? I discuss at Catholic World Report.

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What is freedom?

Freedom is another word for — what? I discuss at Catholic World Report.

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