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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
>Conservatism, which is an intellectually serious movement with plenty of serious thinkers.
Do you have any recommendations for good news sources or blogs that can act as a counterbalance to the more mainstream media houses like NYT or WaPo ? The issue I face is that it's very difficult to find good quality conservative content. Even something like National Review is only marginally palatable, and only when it is inward looking (e.g., as was the case with recent midterms).
Reason, the Washington Examiner, the WSJ, and, yeah, the National Review and Bulwark. I'm not a conservative, so my own reading is on the "lite" side of the movement.
"The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world" - Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum.
Yep. I am constantatly baffled by people who make fun of people taking about the WEF's "great reset". The consensus on the internet seems to be that its a completely fabricated conservative conspiracy theory.
Its absolutely not. You can go to the WEFs website and read the great reset white paper. The main thrust is "stakeholder" capitalism. Which at first sounds good, then by the time you get to the end you realize what they are talking about is essentially making all existing large corporations into monopolies, seizing assets from the general populace by means of economic manipulation, and then once power is consolidated within these corporations they will turn around and rent you everything you need and the corporations will determine how goods are distributed amongst the populace. Its really fucking dark.
They actually produced commercials featuring the line "you will own nothing and you will be happy"
Sound fringe? Like it coyld never happen? Well do you happen to work for a fortune 500 company? Your CEO probably went to Davos last year to get shmoozed by the WEF. Its an enormously popular event with buy in from so of the largest companies in key industries like banking, health care, tech, etc.
Its seriously concerning but people are being gaslit into thinking its some sort of nonsense conspiracy.
How can you possibly think that, when it's right there on their website?
Klaus Schwab wrote a book about it. These people were not elected, they don't represent the people, they are power hungry oligarchs, and don't appear accountable to anyone.
Nobody is reading this thread anymore, but you should start by reading more about what the World Economic Forum is. To be an oligarch you need more than the oli; you also need the arch. People try to hook various arch-isms up to these olis, but it's all six degrees of Kevin Bacon logic. "John Kerry, the nation's envoy for climate, agreed with Klaus Schwab that equity is important! The Great Reset is happening!"
Here's a fun fact: companies that attend WEF events or participate in the WEF on average underperform the S&P 500 by double digits percentages.
I dont get your point. Quote 1 line of my comment that is "fabricated". Everything I said is true and objectively so. So why are you hell bent on acting like this shit doesnt exist. Maybe you think its nit a serious organization that could effectively implement its goals? You could make that argument. But no, youre saying that what I'm saying is fabricated: and that is undeniably, objectively, complete bullshit. More of the same bizarre gaslighting
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's one thing to try and figure out the world. It's another to start with an ideological outlook and try to make the world fit that. To the extent people in academia and social science do that, it's a problem, because then it gets presented as scientific. Whatever the political slant might happen to be. Science isn't about how we want the world to be. Same with history. And yes, both right and left can be guilty of this.
Exactly. Some scientists are also activists, and that’s okay as long as they approach science as a scientist, with empirical mindset. In social scienses too often the activist mindset is all they have.
> Nobody reads academic leftists because they are eye-wateringly dull and they redefine many words.
FWIW Das Kapital is one of the most cited books in all of economics (and probably all of academia), so I can only assume it is also one of the most read of all academic works. There are also leftist authors such as Howard Zinn with People’s History of the United States and Stephen Jay Gould with Mismeasure of Man. Both best-sellers and the former probably the best selling history book of all time. Even in field of feminism bell hooks has a couple of best sellers that are widely read by the general public.
Seems to me that left-wing academics appeal plenty to the general public and their works get read and understood in record numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.