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Today, Jesse Singal wrote an opinion for the New York Times where he argued that Trump defunding youth gender research was a bad thing, despite the terrible research coming out of that part of science. He thinks that reform is in order, not slash-and-burn practices. In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new. Certainly, funding bad actors makes no sense, but to me, reform is little gain, and even a good new study must follow around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.
It reminds me of an (unpopular) opinion Trace shared the other day on Twitter regarding the axing of funds for museums and libraries. Even if anthropology is 99% leftist, well, the institutions belong to those who show up, so right wingers just need to get in there and fix it themselves. While I appreciated that stance as it related to conservative law organizations, and as it related to Twitter when left-wingers were leaving the site en masse, I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
Deus Ex took a look at this perspective. Spoilers for Deus Ex:General Carter, after the UNATCO plot is exposed, decides to stay within the organization, because institutions are only as good as the people that comprise them. Later in the game, you see him in the Vandenburg compound. He has given up on his idea of reform and joined the resistance.
I'm going to guess most of this forum disagrees with Trace and Jesse on this matter in pretty much the same way that I do. Can you name any areas in government or other organizations where you do agree with them?
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.
Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.
I have spent my entire adult life, and even before that, with the knowledge that if I ever spoke my true political/social views I would instantly torpedo my entire career and social standing forever. I have been living under a censorious regime in a country that supposedly enshrines freedom of speech as one of its highest virtues for My. Entire. Life. The only place where I can even come close to honestly speaking about how I view the world is in anonymous and pseudoanonymous forums like this one, and even then I take pains not to get too real with y'all because it's really not that difficult to dox someone with a long post history and it just takes one obsessive.
Why are there no rightists in the academy? Could it be because they were systematically deplatformed and depersoned and dethroned on a generational, decades long project to completely seize control of elite production forever? No, it's because righties are dumdums, we're all dumdums.
And now you have the audacity to complain when the institutions you hollowed out are being kicked over, all the support columns contributed from the right having been forcibly removed? Boo hoo.
If you may allow me a moment of cathartic ranting emerging from decades of repression; razing these institutions is a moral imperative. I want them to do it more. I voted for it. I hope it gets worse for you. I hope your degrees not only become worthless, but millstones to drown you. I hope you have to hide your former affiliations on your social media and resumes, like I have had to do with my views for my entire life. I hope you know every ounce of the fear and anxiety your regime has smothered on me like an inescapable burial shroud, for, again, my entire fucking life. I hope they are so thorough with their dismantling of your institutions that in 50 years your cathedrals that are on the tips of every tongue now are only vaguely recalled in retrospect. A quaint historical artifact, like Standard Oil. Only then can something somewhat resembling what was lost be built from the ashes.
You stomped on us for 20+ fucking years, did you never think what would happen when we became the shoe? You deserve everything bad that is happening to you; you will deserve the much worse things that are still to come.
Sorry for the heat, but it's probably more honest than what you usually get. If you read between the lines, you should have seen this seething rage boiling over years ago. I am quite certain that many, many people feel the same - they just don't say it, yet; the habit of censoring one's own emotions, thoughts, and opinions for safety being deeply ingrained. The tighter you seal it, the more dangerous the pressure cooker becomes.
A rant about how much you hate your enemies and can't wait to see them get the rope is always going to be hard keep within the rules of discourse here, but all your "you" statements put this well over the line. The first part of your post was okay, but when you tell another poster that you want to see them, personally, suffer, that is too much heat.
My apologies, the you is rhetorical and broad. "You (the left)." I'm not wishing personal, specific harm on Skibboleth.
One of the divergences of right and left, however, is their belief in retribution, punishment, and suffering as morally justified and necessary in and of themselves. It has been my general observation that the left has completely abandoned the idea that retribution and punishment can be just and morally necessary for their own sake, not merely as incentives or correctives.
If there was a magic pill that would ensure a criminal never again committed crime - indeed, became an upstanding moral citizen - but induced no particular suffering, I get the feeling that many on the left would feel this was a sufficient "punishment" to, say, child murderers, and that any further retribution upon them would be barbaric and primitive. I do not believe this, nor do most on the right.
Suffering punishment when you do wrong is correct, morally. You SHOULD feel guilt when you do bad things. The push towards a shameless society is very, very bad. Shame is good, actually. Being punished when you do wrong is good for you and just good, full stop. A father disciplining his child does so out of love, and for their own good. So understand that even when if I say things like, "I think X should be punished" - this too is not necessarily a statement born out of hate. I can and do think that being punished can be good for someone. I think this is frequently the case, in fact.
And again, not merely for its utility to modify behavior. I think this a view that many postmodern leftists simply can't square - "I want you to be hurt because it will be good for you on a spiritual and moral level to be punished for your sins. I want you to suffer because I love you and suffering can, in fact, be good." The purely utilitarian view where all suffering is bad simply can't deal with this. Their instinct is to try and invert it somehow, "Oh, the suffering actually is good because it brings positive utility later-" NO. The suffering is good because it is suffering. If it is just it is just completely independent of the future. If the universe were to blip out of existence the next nanoinstant, it would still be just.
I want to also comment briefly on hate. Hate, in almost all modern popular media, is simply bad in and of itself. Epitomized by Star Wars philosophy schlock about the dark side. "Hate is the worst. Humans would be better off without hate. If only we could learn not to hate?" - These things sum up a LOT of the left's worldview. I think it's dead wrong. Hate is the most human and divine of emotions. God is merciful, yes, but he is also wrathful - when it is justified. A rat can feel fear, or even joy - can it feel hate?
And what of the utility of hate? The left seems to have completely forgotten why hate exists. Whether you think it a quirk of evopsych or a divine part of the grand design, hate has a strong, real, and practical purpose. It motivates you to completely destroy long-term threats permanently, even at considerable short term cost. A herd of gazelles might stomp out a lion that eats their young if they can catch it in the act. A tribe of humans tracks the lioness 30 miles to their den, kills her, kills her mate, kills all her cubs - and repeats the process every time they even see a lion in their territory from now until eternity until their distant descendants can't even imagine what it is like to fear being prey, to fear their child being snatched up in the red jaws. That is the value of hatred.
The events in Rotherham could never have happened to a society that hadn't had its ability to hate stripped from it. Hate is an essential part of society's immune system, and while it must be controlled, it should never be discarded.
This is untrue. There was plenty of hate for Pakistani muslims in the 80s and 90s when this started. So that cannot be the whole story. The first reason it wasn't stopped and why white prostitution gangs still operate in the same way is that no-one really cares about the victims. Underclass girls who drink and do drugs and are from broken homes or in care are seen as a problem, as scum. I've heard the cops say it, in towns just down the road from Rotherham. Their own families barely care for them let alone anyone else.
That is the true and ongoing failure here. Condemned by conservatives for loose morals and sin and condemned by liberals for being chavvy and ill educated and low class.
They will continue to be victimised by one group or another for these reasons. Its Russian gangs in London, Sectarian ones in Northern Ireland, but the victims remain the same.
A lack of hate is not the issue by far. There is more than enough of that. It's not enough compassion. Not enough love.
Child prostitution is popular because there are always men who will pay for it. Always. Lock up the offenders of course, but just like with drug dealers, a new one will be along in a minute. You have to want to protect the victims not just punish the guilty. You have to want to see them not as a problem but as broken girls from broken homes who need help and treatment. But they aren't easy to work with or help so even the most compassionate of social workers or police officers becomes a jaded burned out cynic soon enough. I've seen it happen in my days working in social care. So then the cops treat the girls as prostitutes and drug addicts not as vulnerable children. No humans involved as the saying goes.
That is the almost insumountable problem. Anyone who wants to help is set against an almost unending torrent of misery and exposed to the sordid underbelly of human desire. Not many come out of it with their compassion intact. But that is what is needed, not more hate.
Have you commented anywhere around here on the refugee and resistance goings-on in Ireland? Seeing ladies getting run roughshod by the police is a bit strange to this American.
Not meant to be a gotcha of any sort, just asking since your commentary on the UK tends to be thoughtful and much more charitable than I'll see anywhere else. Not around as much as I used to be and figured I'd missed it if it's come up.
Not really, I'm from Northern Ireland, and I lived in England for a long while, so those are the places I know best. My insight into the South of Ireland is likely to be slightly superficial. I was raised Protestant so I don't have a lot of close links south of the border.
Dublin, I know is expensive and its likely immigration is contributing to that, and I think the Irish government much like the English has been reasonably pro-immigration for some time, so I'd imagine its the same pressures driving resentment as elsewhere. The Gardai don't to my knowledge have much of a reputation for unnecessary brutality, but they are part of the establishment and its very easy for an us vs them mentality to result in overreaction. To see the mass of people not the individuals.
@FtttG may have more local knowledge.
I appreciate your kind words by the way.
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