Climate Change Spurred De-Urbanisation

The Indus Valley Civilisation has been pushed back at least 2500 years, with evidence of a pre-Harappan civilisation going back a thousand years more--enough time to develop bustling cities with basic amenities, trade, and a written language, and then lose them.

94% of Professors Think Their Work is Above Average

Researchers have determined that overconfidence leads to higher social status.  This is already generally understood at some level, as people who wish to attain higher social status have been shown to be more overconfident.  This is not perceived as narcissism, but as evidence of how beloved is the person.

When this insight gets paired with the Dunning-Kruger effect, which indicates that incompetent people are too incompetent to perceive their own incompetence, and are therefore perhaps overconfident, we find cause for concern in the organisation of human affairs.

Multipolarity is Orthodox

While the Catholic Pope Francis calls walls unchristian and washes the feet of migrants, the Russian Orthodox Church makes the ethical argument for sovereignty in the face of the financial and cultural pressures of transnational elites.

"Emotional Fever" of "Loser Fish" Demonstrates Consciousness

The stress and depression experienced by confined and farmed fish has prompted the first glimmer of awareness in their farmers that our dinner has feelings too.  We can only hope that humanity's farmers will reach the same conclusion.

Minority Silenced

DePaul College Republicans invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at their school on the subject of feminism.  At the last minute, the DePaul University administration demanded that the club pay for an expensive security team.  When protestors took to the stage, stole a microphone, and threatened to punch the speaker, administrators ordered the officers to stand down.  The event was eventually cancelled.

Unaccountability and innocence.

"9/11 Was An Inside Job!" Say Saudis

Almost fifteen years after the event, the terrorist attack on the WTC in New York is still being used by all parties as a political weapon in a dangerous war of words.

Confessions of a Straight White Male Cultural Studies Major

~~~

An empty decade ago, I got my degree in Cultural Studies from Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario.  That was the most progressive program at the most progressive school I could find in Canada. 

It was ten years ago that I fled in shame--unable to write what I had to in order to receive my Honours.  Only today am I prepared to say that I couldn't get my Honours then because there was no honour to be found in what I was doing.

~~~

We must back up, to whatever point little Joey first learned the word, “society.”  What a revelation that concept was!  I was sure that things could be so much better, saner, safer, and more peaceful if this amorphous, capricious creature called “society” would only get its act together.  The utterance was always at the ready, deployed by wee Joey as a mild curse.  “Society.”

Clearly individuals were generally decent, but in association I could only see their accumulated error.  Somehow good people added up to a needlessly shit social environment, and in my hazy innocence I imagined that understanding and considering the social and psychological exigencies of our conduct could help cleanse us of this need to waste energy on condemnation and habitual idiocy.  We suffer not because we deserve it, not because we must, but for want of understanding just how much the inertia of past ages still directs us.

Yes, people weren't the problem, it was society.  The terrible disappointment that is humanity was but a mass of waves and murmurations echoing old impulses.  It wasn't something inherent in each faulty person, it was old mistakes handed down and uncorrected.  Our common heritage was our misperception of things.

~~~

I remember the feeling I had in junior high social studies class, when Mr. Houle explained why Canada was better than the United States.  America strove for a melting pot with one standard—he invoked “hotdogs and baseball” and got big laughs, so I know the message stuck—while we enlightened Canucks, in our more refined and elevated moral sense, presented a mosaic of cultures.  We were a place where every colour and creed could belong.  Our identity was all identities.

It should have made me feel full.  It should perhaps have made me feel privileged and proud and overwhelmed with the depth and breadth of the Canadian soul.  Instead it made me feel oddly hollow.

Of course other people from other cultures could bring their assorted foods, dances, and hats, and thereby give me a richer palette with which to colour my life, but what could I bring to another country of my own home, my own culture, my own identity?  We were everything and nothing, yet I knew there was something more in me than snow and maple syrup.

~~~

The school counselor called me down one day to tell me about a special program at the University of New Brunswick.  I got the impression mine was the name from our school she was giving them.

The program was a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Leadership Studies.  They operated out of an old Victorian home, where I would be living and working alongside my classmates.  I took the tour, was shown a project they were working on, something about different perspectives on oil drilling, and then we sat down with the dean. 

Eventually he came to that awful, awful question: “Do you have any questions?”  I fished around for a moment, and then stumbled into asking him point-blank what the goals and objectives and principles and philosophy of the program were.  What were they trying to accomplish in the world?

In response, he reached for the brochure and read me the fucking blurb on the back.  It was then that I knew I would not be lead into whatever kind of leadership they were offering.

~~~

My childhood fixation with “society” gradually became more finely tuned and nuanced into a preoccupation with “bullshit.”  Yes, bullshit was the problem now.  If only society would get over its bullshit.

It seemed to me that English, Sociology, Psychology, History, Philosophy and Fine Arts were all too narrowly circumscribed by their own particular brands of bullshit.  What I needed was a degree in Bullshit Studies, but I couldn't find that.

I thought I got close enough when I found the only department of Cultural Studies then existing in the country at Trent.  So I went.

~~~

At first it was great.  For the first time in my life I felt intellectually stimulated and challenged.  It was exciting to have my field of view expanded so rapidly. 

It was good to be away from home.  I had a board plan for meals and a thousand mandatory flex dollars for personal pan pizzas, I had thirty hits of pretty good acid I brought from Nova Scotia, and it was now possible for me to get old Doctor Who on my computer.  Genesis of the Daleks.  The Caves of Androzani.  Those were good days.

I made one critical mistake, and that was critical thinking.  I took a course in practical reasoning in the philosophy department, learned logic, and did quite well at it—my highest mark, with a final of 96, if I remember right.

When my second year began, and I was now taking four cultural studies courses instead of one, a terrible sinking feeling appeared in my gut.  I suppressed it as best I could, but I couldn't convince myself I didn't detect a problem. 

I thought I had signed on for the study of culture, but it was increasingly apparent that we were studying it in order to impose our predetermined narrative upon it.  I couldn't help but notice that this narrative was built on assertions more than data.

I got very good at making those assertions.  I realised that I could throw my practical reasoning out the window, as it was irrelevant.  Writing in the proper mode was more performance than reason.  Eloquence, conviction, and slavish devotion to identity politics were all that was needed.

They had lots of good points and perspectives, but my intellectual conscience wouldn't permit me to ignore that the justification for the sanctification of Marx and Freud was never given.  With other names too, we read them to find the ways in which they were right.  Everything was interpretation, but there was only one acceptable interpretation.

We disagreed at our own peril.  With a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, the professor I most respected once castigated us for not speaking up and participating more often, apparently blissfully unaware that she would routinely make fun of anyone who stepped outside her dogma.  I'm almost certain that everyone else in that seminar had the same thought in that moment.

~~~

It wasn't until my third year that I learned about the Sokal hoax.  I think I made the mistake of Googling my education.  Within moments of wondering how the outside world viewed post-modernism, I discovered that a journal of cultural studies had accepted a paper made mostly of meaningless gibberish because the author had included enough buzz words that they liked. 

It was a big scandal and I hadn't heard a peep about it, much less sober discussion about the limitations of our methods.  This was pretty fucking damning, but I was so far into my degree that it seemed there was no turning back--and it still seemed inconceivable that a nascent discipline could be quite so fragmented, incoherent, and misanthropic as cultural studies appeared, so I was sure I was missing something, I just wasn't smart enough.  This was university, after all.  It was grown-up business.  There was no way it could be as fucked as it appeared.

~~~

In my final year, I took two 400-level courses with the intention of getting my Honours.  The only identity Mr. Houle had left me with was being a good student, so that was what I would do.

One of those classes was taught by a young gay man, the other by an old gay man.  Both courses drew heavily from Jacques Lacan, and both professors readily admitted that they didn't understand most of his mystical psychobabble.  This was supposed to be the summit of my learning, but my teachers seemed almost as confused as I was.

When it came time to compose my final papers, I could see all the hoops I was to jump through arrayed before me.  It didn't matter if I understood what I was saying, I just had to repeat some stuff with my own clever spin to make it sound like an elaboration of a proven idea.  I had to adopt a pose and sustain it for however many thousand words, building self-referential loops of nonsense until the mounting absurdity reaches such levels that the mind relents and agrees.

I still believed that we're driven by the unconscious.  I still believed that every cultural artifact encodes layers of meaning.  I still believed that there exist institutionalised injustices, and I still wanted peace and understanding for all people. 

Somehow all this brought me to was a listless self-loathing.  I still didn't know what my culture could possibly stand for, beyond slavery, exploitation, colonialism, patriarchy.  I still didn't know what I could stand for, other than to be an ally for aggrieved classes.

Indeed, when my nervous breakdown came and I e-mailed my teachers that I wouldn't finish the year, I don't think I imagined that the older gay professor appeared most upset to be losing an intelligent, straight, gentile ally who he had invested in.  I hope that's only a vicious projection on my part.  The young gay Jewish professor just seemed confused, while my three straight professors, all of them in the philosophy department, expressed various levels of support and concern. 

My metaphysics teacher shuffled things around to give me a pass with the work I'd done, so I could still get a degree.  Another phoned me in Nova Scotia, when he read my e-mail too late to make a difference, and earnestly tried to confirm I was sure about dropping the course, as I had written a paper he liked.  Between the philosophy and cultural studies departments, the difference in reaction when I faltered was striking.

~~~

At that time the problem was academic.  It was my own failure, or it was the excesses of my teachers, but it was behind me.  I tried for a few years to catch up on the readings I'd missed in the hopes that something would come together, but I only became more convinced that most of my higher education was best ignored.  I could retain some psychology and semiotics, film theory and the history of ideas, but as an animating ideology cultural studies was impossible.  It told stories of oppression in which I could only play a stock villain or a prostrate ally.  But at least it was only professors who believed that shit.

Now I'm actually worried.  What I thought ten years ago was a radical academic fringe confined to a hippie school and mentally stuck in '68 is now a swarming horde of shrieking cultural Marxists, determined to remake society in accordance with the dictates of their puny feelings.  I just want to convey to the rational men and women, gay and straight, Jew and gentile alike, that from my own lived experience, the ideological underpinnings of the militant social justice movement are every bit as mental as they may appear, and I barely got out alive to tell you so.

By the waterfall.

The Canadian Lückenpresse

If you live in the CBC matrix, you are living in a bubble that will soon be pricked by reality. A reality that even the CBC cannot hold at bay. Your trusted information gatekeepers will not be able to stop the truth from busting through and overwhelming you. The shock will render you bewildered and paralytic. You will not be able to make sense of what has befallen you, much in the way that the establishment media pundits are dumbfounded by Trump's success. How could this happen?

Justice that rewards.

Sweden Invests In Imams

Kista Folk High School in Sweden will be training imams with a government grant in the autumn, in the hopes of counteracting fundamentalist groups.  The program will be open to Shi'ites, but is intended to cater to Sunnis.  There is some debate over whether it will be able to satisfy the needs of all Islamic backgrounds, or if there will even be employment opportunities for the Sunni theology.  Nevertheless, Kista Folkhögskola's rector, Abdulkader Habib, thinks religious authorities being educated in Sweden is a "positive development."

Monoliths and Lighthouses

'Man's actions are always good.'

Judge not.

Elijah Wood and Hollywood

Elijah Wood, himself having avoided being preyed upon by Hollywood moguls, has seen enough, heard enough, and read enough to break ranks and attest to the presence of organised child abuse in the global centre of culture creation.

The innocent element in so-called evil acts.

Pleasure and social instinct.

Pleasure in custom.

Unethical Amnesia

Because of the brain's preference for virtuous memories, unethical actions have a tendency to be poorly remembered, and therefore repeated.  The ego's defense mechanisms encourage dishonesty to discourage psychological distress.  The petty blind spots of individuals thus accumulate, weaving a lying web of dissimulation and deception we like to call society.

Custom and what is in accordance with it.

PM Bumps MP

Justin Trudeau, the proud feminist prime minister who touted his historic gender-balanced cabinet, is now in hot water for elbowing a woman in the House of Commons.

"I am ashamed to be a witness to the person who holds the highest position in our country do such an act," said NDP MP Nikki Ashton. "I want to say that for all of us who witnessed this, this was deeply traumatic, what I will say, if we apply a gendered lens, it is very important that young women in this space feel safe to come here and work here."

The prime minister has repeatedly apologised for accidentally bumping a lady while "manhandling" a man.

"I want to take the opportunity... to be able to express directly to [Brosseau] my apologies for my behaviour and my actions, unreservedly. The fact is in this situation, where I saw... I noticed that the whip opposite was being impeded in his progress, I took it upon myself to go and assist him forward, which I can now see was unadvisable as a course of actions that resulted in physical contact in this House that we can all accept was unacceptable," because it's 2016.

Morality of the mature individual.

Soft and Hard Targets of Scepticism

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.

Belgian Police Warn Against Liking Things

Facebook's helpful new feature allowing users to react with greater nuance has the coincidental effect of providing deeper data on user mental states, allowing algorithms to tailor the selection and placement of advertisements to take advantage of their moods.

The three phases of morality hitherto.

Origin of justice.

On The Unreliability of Witnesses and Scientists

Once the reality of meteorite falls became established, the historian Eusebius Salverte pointed out that scientists' failure to recognise the truth of the matter for so long was borne out of "a predetermination to see nothing, or to deny what we had seen."

Vanity.

Disappearing Migrants Necessitate Better Surveillance

Germany has lost track of 130,000 migrants, so the European Commission must spend £24million on computers to track everyone's faces.  The technology will be ready in four years' time--at which point it will help to bring migration under control, and definitely not be used for any other purpose.

Ebony Dickens Did Not Do Anything

A woman who posted on Facebook that she condoned black people killing white cops, and declared that she herself was plotting to shoot and kill as many as she could the next day (while invoking free speech) intended the statement, "Death to all white cops nationwide" as satire.  Charges of terroristic threats and inciting a riot have been dropped, because she said she's sorry.  She was only a black woman trying to make a point about white privilege, after all.

The Bending of Trending

"Imposing human editorial values" is the job of a team of "news curators" who decide what stories Facebook will display as currently important to users.

Criminals Paid to Move to the Suburbs

The plan is to make the bad part of town move to the good part of town to make it good.  It didn't work in the test case, but that's still the plan.

Luke 18, 14 improved.

The index of scales.

Wickedness is rare.

Refinement of shame.

Sleep of virtue.

Skin of the soul.

Errors of the sufferer and the doer.

Someone Resists Nordic Resistance

Tess Asplund is a brave activist hero, being hailed for the iconic moment when she stood up to hundreds of militant extremist right-wing fascist Nazis, as a single woman with a single defiant gesture: a fist raised in peace.  Unfortunately the Daily Mail was unable to reach any of the hundreds of militant extremist right-wing fascist Nazis for comment.

Russian Firefighting Offer Called "Snide"

In a startlingly vivid expression of slave morality, allegations are being made that Russia's offer to help put out Canada's fires are an attempt to belittle Canada.  While the government deliberates over whether to accept the help, the fire rages on.

Big Solution For Big Problem

Faced with the prospect of having to conserve water, the United Arab Emirates is considering building a mountain to command the rain instead.  Millennia hence, no one will believe the stories.

Political Action Committees Against Caucasians

Two white millennials have been raising money to pressure white men not to run for office, while another PAC dedicated to stopping Donald Trump has unironically tweeted and deleted that they hate white children.

Negative Partisanship Escalates

47% of Trump supporters mostly only back him because they don't want Clinton to win, a worrying 1% more than the percentage of Clinton supporters who mainly support her because they don't want Trump to win.  Everyone may be choosing the lesser of two evils, but Reuters is more bothered by Trump.

Public Given Small Yellow Submarine in Consolation

Some assholes at the U.K.'s National Environment Research Council--who asked for people's suggestions for a publicly-funded ship's name--apparently think the Sir David Attenborough is a better name for a research vessel than Boaty McBoatface, and they'll subvert the will of the people to wage their poncy class war against fun!

Vanity enriches.

Ambition a surrogate for moral feeling.

Honour transferred from the person to the thing.

The ascetic.

Misunderstanding of virtue.

Everyday standard.

Recipients of Aid Offer Aid

As thousands of residents of Fort McMurray fear for the loss of their homes and lives to raging wildfires, people of all sorts work to help however they can.  Where some see a human tragedy, others a terrible example of nature's power, some see an opportunity for the advancement of their political agenda, and others praise this effort as much as the charity being reported.

Wolf Cried

When redefining terms and seeking out offenses isn't enough to validate your bigoted expectations of bigotry, consider faking a hate crime.

Earthling Exceptionalism Improbable

The application of new exoplanet data to the Drake equation has added several exclamation marks to the Fermi paradox, the suggestion that we observe a problematic dearth of aliens around.  Either there are other intelligent civilisations already visiting, or we can expect our own civilisation to inevitably collapse very soon.  Possibly both.

Degree of moral inflammability unknown.

Hope.

Execution.

Love and justice.

Morality and success.

Sancta simplicitas of virtue.

Punishable, never punished.

Whither honesty can lead.

The rager.

Value of diminution.

Revelling in revenge.

Revenge and the desire to revenge.

Intellect and morality.

What one can promise.