7 ms·

James Lindsay has a lot to say on this. The guy is probably the most intellectual commentator in conservatism. Here's the first part of his three part series

James Lindsay has a lot to say on this. The guy is probably the most intellectual commentator in conservatism. Here's the first part of his three part series on the death of the university. https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-1-red-thread/ https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-p... He says that the decline of universities was all started by Herbert Marcuse in the 60s. James reads all of Marcuse's old books and deconstructs them and shows how all the crazy stuff going on today in universities and soft sciences makes perfect sense from the perspective of these leftist theoreticians and their goals. Their goals are not to improve scientific understanding, but to turn absolutely everything in higher education into a political weapon to transform society.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
The first page of the referenced UNESCO document refers to the 'red thread', with the link you provided linking that to Communism. Now, whoever at UNESCO actually wrote that may well have been a communist and may well be pushing communist ideology, but googling the phrase brings up a traditional Chinese myth which would give a different sense to the phrase - that of an inevitable and inherently compatible match. I'm a bit unclear on whether or not this is the right interpretation, but it seems a bit more likely than obliquely referencing Communism when it comes to sustainability, and the link you provided seems to simply be implying the link to Communism rather than stating why this phrase is unambiguously linked to it (other than the colour red). To me this might be like seeing the phrase 'red letter day' and implying a link to Communism. Any clarity possible?
apocalypstyx 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
- narrator 4y ago
  The thing about James is he reads all these old books cover to cover line by line and explains the context and ideas around it. Nobody reads academic leftists because they are eye-wateringly dull and they redefine many words. The people who wrote this Wikipedia article are trying to do a gigantic gaslight about 60+ years of academic left literature not really being serious or not existing or nobody actually taking it seriously. That and thousands and thousands of academics have been trained in this stuff and written doctoral thesis on it and the guy who wrote this article thinks it's all just a conspiracy theory that it had any effect on anyone. Yeah right. James takes apart all their old works and cross-references to earlier works and explains how all their stuff ties together. The guy is an academic mathematician so he's precise and his reasoning is refreshingly clear. He even jokes about how most leftists today haven't even read any leftists to even know where their ideas even came from. In these old works they describe how the dumbed down activist techniques work and how to teach them, but people are ignorant of all this stuff or gaslight that it doesn't exist as if it's some organic will of the people rising up all by itself.
  - apocalypstyx 4y ago
    Are you really sure about where you're ideas come from? I remember the Christian anti-Harry-Potter craze when I was a kid. Preachers would have hour-long television programs about how this, this, and this were in those books. But none of it was. I knew. I had read them. I have never trusted what others wanted to convinced me a book was 'about' since then. Education (so far as I see it) should leave one, as best is possible, with an understanding of a body of work. To agree or disagree with that body of work is a separate affair. What those preachers and what people like James Lindsay want, so far as I am concerned, is a so-called understanding that leads to an end other than understanding in and of itself. Quite simply, if someone were to read Lindsey's work and come away thinking that X, Y, or Z in fact had a point, I doubt he would be happy with that outcome.
    - narrator 4y ago
      I could see how some fundamentalist Christians could draw a line from the practices of the mystery cults and some Harry Potter stuff like secret knowledge, a secret society and an elite of magical lineage, but it's fiction after all, so why make a big fuss? If Harry Potter had an afterword that called on children everywhere to make secret societies with blood oath, initiation rituals, and all the stuff the people who wrote the bible more than 2000 years ago were talking about when they referenced Satan, then the fundamentalists Christians could validly criticize the books. However, the academic leftist stuff is not fiction. It's totally completely serious endeavor, and that's why it's important to take it seriously and criticize its goals because they intend to foment a revolution and they are deadly serious.
      - apocalypstyx 4y ago
        There is no single "they". Half of leftist theorists argue with the other half more than three quarters of the time, the other quarter they argue with themselves. And as for revolution, context is king. To the Southern slave holders, emancipationists were radicals intent on overthrowing the very foundations of civilization itself. The birth myth of the United States is revolution (though I admit we may have been better off eventually going the route that Canada took). Of course it's serious stuff, people who try to figure out the world generally do take themselves seriously. A bunch of people sit around and try to figure out what the structures that we create are, how they actually operate, and if that is helpful or harmful to the human beings within those structures, serious stuff indeed. Their conclusions may be right or wrong or a mixture of both. Criticism, however, does not properly take the form of 'this idea is produced by an academic leftist, therefore it is bad and wrong'. Where's the marketplace of ideas in that? Self-avowed conservative intellectuals have been wrong in the past as well. They have no less wanted to produce 'revolutions'. They have no less produced disastrous and failed revolutions. And if we want to say that things shouldn't change from what they are now, at all, then that might be the most radical proposition of all, because it has never before happened in history, though many have tried it because they too thought their place in history perfect.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Maybe Cultural Marxism is just a conspiracy theory but the criminal Gang of Four was a very real conspiracy, and their "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" killed millions of people, led to destruction of cultural heritage on a scale unprecedented in modern times and plausibly set their country back quite significantly. The fact that these clearly problematic ideas are once again being taken seriously in the West (after a well-documented first flare-up of Western Maoism in the 1970s) should give us pause.
  - apocalypstyx 4y ago
    I'm not a communist, so I have little trouble in denouncing or disliking Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, etc. I also, however, find these sorts of discussions completely disingenuous, however, in that it is conveniently left unmentioned how many millions might or might not be calculated to have died because of capitalism, cultures that have been destroyed, etc. No one is actually willing to lay everything on the table for examination.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I think it's because capitalism is decentralised as much as possible, and decisions are made - and rewards given - as close to the people taking the risks/doing the work as possible, and so it's hard to make the case that "letting people get on with it" is to blame. Although there will be some emergent negative effects, there will also be vast emergent positive effects. Whereas deaths due to Marxist ideology or socialist top-down policies are actually undeniably due to them, and they seem to happen pretty much everywhere it's tried.
- PathOfEclipse 4y ago
  If you take anything from Wikipedia seriously that is politically charged, then you clearly aren't paying attention. That, or you're part of the problem.
  - collyw 4y ago
    Always check the talk tab.
tptacek 4y ago
James Lindsay is a clown who confidently predicted that the Democrats were going to put people into reeducation camps, that LGBT people are part of a vast pedophilia conspiracy, that the World Economic Forum used COVID to engineer a "great reset" to eliminate American sovereignty, that Jewish people are responsible for anti-Semitism because it's a reactionary backlash against liberalism, and that Critical Race Theory is in actuality a conspiracy of heresy launched by the Black Southern Baptists. He is a limitless fount of the stupidest quips on the Internet, and given the Internet I'm referring to, that's a remarkable achievement. Apparently, Lindsay suffered a serious head injury within the last few years (it came up in a Rogan interview). It would explain a lot. We're talking about someone who managed to get himself into a Twitter fight with the Auschwitz Memorial. Your claim here is a grave insult to conservatism, which is an intellectually serious movement with plenty of serious thinkers. Thomas Sowell is a serious conservative. Arthur Brooks is a serious conservative. Patrick Deneen (gah). You can rattle off dozens more. Nobody is ever going to put Rufo and Lindsay in that lineup. "I'm not kidding. The entire program is based on Hegelian alchemy. They actually think they're wizards. In this case, twerking, based on "black girl" identity, breaks open the rules of decorum and expectation to free the Divine shard of liberated nature from the confine of society."
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
  [dead]
- narrator 4y ago
  The guy actually reads leftist literature and analyzes it and yes it says crazy stuff. For example, Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum, wrote a book entitled "COVID-19:The Great Reset" and then you say this guy is crazy because he thinks the World Economic Forum are advocating using COVID-19 to do some Great Reset because he read it in some book. Except it's the book that the president of the world economic forum wrote and published. I read it. It's a pretty radical book. I even did a close highlight of all the kooky stuff, but I'm not going to argue with you about it because you obviously didn't read it or have never heard of it. If you read famous new left literature, its totally in outer space and he just says here's what it says. Then you say he's crazy for saying leftist are serious about what they wrote in their books. That's the irony of your comment. All the stuff that you say is crazy is stuff he reads and repeats straight out of new left books. He sounds crazy because his method is to instead of just repeat traditional conservative principals in different ways like the conservatives you mention he actually engages with the lunatic left and tells people what they say and what they say is crazy so he sounds crazy just for repeating it and then critiquing it.

bigDinosaur 4y ago

The first page of the referenced UNESCO document refers to the 'red thread', with the link you provided linking that to Communism. Now, whoever at UNESCO actually wrote that may well have been a communist and may well be pushing communist ideology, but googling the phrase brings up a traditional Chinese myth which would give a different sense to the phrase - that of an inevitable and inherently compatible match. I'm a bit unclear on whether or not this is the right interpretation, but it seems a bit more likely than obliquely referencing Communism when it comes to sustainability, and the link you provided seems to simply be implying the link to Communism rather than stating why this phrase is unambiguously linked to it (other than the colour red). To me this might be like seeing the phrase 'red letter day' and implying a link to Communism. Any clarity possible?

apocalypstyx 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

narrator 4y ago
The thing about James is he reads all these old books cover to cover line by line and explains the context and ideas around it. Nobody reads academic leftists because they are eye-wateringly dull and they redefine many words. The people who wrote this Wikipedia article are trying to do a gigantic gaslight about 60+ years of academic left literature not really being serious or not existing or nobody actually taking it seriously. That and thousands and thousands of academics have been trained in this stuff and written doctoral thesis on it and the guy who wrote this article thinks it's all just a conspiracy theory that it had any effect on anyone. Yeah right. James takes apart all their old works and cross-references to earlier works and explains how all their stuff ties together. The guy is an academic mathematician so he's precise and his reasoning is refreshingly clear. He even jokes about how most leftists today haven't even read any leftists to even know where their ideas even came from. In these old works they describe how the dumbed down activist techniques work and how to teach them, but people are ignorant of all this stuff or gaslight that it doesn't exist as if it's some organic will of the people rising up all by itself.
- apocalypstyx 4y ago
  Are you really sure about where you're ideas come from? I remember the Christian anti-Harry-Potter craze when I was a kid. Preachers would have hour-long television programs about how this, this, and this were in those books. But none of it was. I knew. I had read them. I have never trusted what others wanted to convinced me a book was 'about' since then. Education (so far as I see it) should leave one, as best is possible, with an understanding of a body of work. To agree or disagree with that body of work is a separate affair. What those preachers and what people like James Lindsay want, so far as I am concerned, is a so-called understanding that leads to an end other than understanding in and of itself. Quite simply, if someone were to read Lindsey's work and come away thinking that X, Y, or Z in fact had a point, I doubt he would be happy with that outcome.
  - narrator 4y ago
    I could see how some fundamentalist Christians could draw a line from the practices of the mystery cults and some Harry Potter stuff like secret knowledge, a secret society and an elite of magical lineage, but it's fiction after all, so why make a big fuss? If Harry Potter had an afterword that called on children everywhere to make secret societies with blood oath, initiation rituals, and all the stuff the people who wrote the bible more than 2000 years ago were talking about when they referenced Satan, then the fundamentalists Christians could validly criticize the books. However, the academic leftist stuff is not fiction. It's totally completely serious endeavor, and that's why it's important to take it seriously and criticize its goals because they intend to foment a revolution and they are deadly serious.
    - apocalypstyx 4y ago
      There is no single "they". Half of leftist theorists argue with the other half more than three quarters of the time, the other quarter they argue with themselves. And as for revolution, context is king. To the Southern slave holders, emancipationists were radicals intent on overthrowing the very foundations of civilization itself. The birth myth of the United States is revolution (though I admit we may have been better off eventually going the route that Canada took). Of course it's serious stuff, people who try to figure out the world generally do take themselves seriously. A bunch of people sit around and try to figure out what the structures that we create are, how they actually operate, and if that is helpful or harmful to the human beings within those structures, serious stuff indeed. Their conclusions may be right or wrong or a mixture of both. Criticism, however, does not properly take the form of 'this idea is produced by an academic leftist, therefore it is bad and wrong'. Where's the marketplace of ideas in that? Self-avowed conservative intellectuals have been wrong in the past as well. They have no less wanted to produce 'revolutions'. They have no less produced disastrous and failed revolutions. And if we want to say that things shouldn't change from what they are now, at all, then that might be the most radical proposition of all, because it has never before happened in history, though many have tried it because they too thought their place in history perfect.
zozbot234 4y ago
Maybe Cultural Marxism is just a conspiracy theory but the criminal Gang of Four was a very real conspiracy, and their "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" killed millions of people, led to destruction of cultural heritage on a scale unprecedented in modern times and plausibly set their country back quite significantly. The fact that these clearly problematic ideas are once again being taken seriously in the West (after a well-documented first flare-up of Western Maoism in the 1970s) should give us pause.
- apocalypstyx 4y ago
  I'm not a communist, so I have little trouble in denouncing or disliking Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, etc. I also, however, find these sorts of discussions completely disingenuous, however, in that it is conveniently left unmentioned how many millions might or might not be calculated to have died because of capitalism, cultures that have been destroyed, etc. No one is actually willing to lay everything on the table for examination.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I think it's because capitalism is decentralised as much as possible, and decisions are made - and rewards given - as close to the people taking the risks/doing the work as possible, and so it's hard to make the case that "letting people get on with it" is to blame. Although there will be some emergent negative effects, there will also be vast emergent positive effects. Whereas deaths due to Marxist ideology or socialist top-down policies are actually undeniably due to them, and they seem to happen pretty much everywhere it's tried.
PathOfEclipse 4y ago
If you take anything from Wikipedia seriously that is politically charged, then you clearly aren't paying attention. That, or you're part of the problem.
- collyw 4y ago
  Always check the talk tab.

tptacek 4y ago

James Lindsay is a clown who confidently predicted that the Democrats were going to put people into reeducation camps, that LGBT people are part of a vast pedophilia conspiracy, that the World Economic Forum used COVID to engineer a "great reset" to eliminate American sovereignty, that Jewish people are responsible for anti-Semitism because it's a reactionary backlash against liberalism, and that Critical Race Theory is in actuality a conspiracy of heresy launched by the Black Southern Baptists. He is a limitless fount of the stupidest quips on the Internet, and given the Internet I'm referring to, that's a remarkable achievement. Apparently, Lindsay suffered a serious head injury within the last few years (it came up in a Rogan interview). It would explain a lot. We're talking about someone who managed to get himself into a Twitter fight with the Auschwitz Memorial. Your claim here is a grave insult to conservatism, which is an intellectually serious movement with plenty of serious thinkers. Thomas Sowell is a serious conservative. Arthur Brooks is a serious conservative. Patrick Deneen (gah). You can rattle off dozens more. Nobody is ever going to put Rufo and Lindsay in that lineup. "I'm not kidding. The entire program is based on Hegelian alchemy. They actually think they're wizards. In this case, twerking, based on "black girl" identity, breaks open the rules of decorum and expectation to free the Divine shard of liberated nature from the confine of society."

sieabahlpark 4y ago
[dead]
narrator 4y ago
The guy actually reads leftist literature and analyzes it and yes it says crazy stuff. For example, Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum, wrote a book entitled "COVID-19:The Great Reset" and then you say this guy is crazy because he thinks the World Economic Forum are advocating using COVID-19 to do some Great Reset because he read it in some book. Except it's the book that the president of the world economic forum wrote and published. I read it. It's a pretty radical book. I even did a close highlight of all the kooky stuff, but I'm not going to argue with you about it because you obviously didn't read it or have never heard of it. If you read famous new left literature, its totally in outer space and he just says here's what it says. Then you say he's crazy for saying leftist are serious about what they wrote in their books. That's the irony of your comment. All the stuff that you say is crazy is stuff he reads and repeats straight out of new left books. He sounds crazy because his method is to instead of just repeat traditional conservative principals in different ways like the conservatives you mention he actually engages with the lunatic left and tells people what they say and what they say is crazy so he sounds crazy just for repeating it and then critiquing it.