Academic Freedom For Students

When Jared Taylor Came To Town

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

Counter-Terrorism Officials Mystified

With four attacks in southern Germany coming shortly after the mass murder of 84 people in Nice, counter-terrorism officials are struggling to detect a common thread. Is there a single, defining feature to these attacks that could offer clues on how to prevent more of them from happening?

The Lone Gunman of Dallas

Randomly killing cops in the street serves no strategic purpose for any genuine civil rights, activist or political group, which implies that the people who actually committed these killings are agents provocateur who killed a few cops in service to their agenda to further erode the few freedoms and liberties left in the US, incite a race war, and usher in an increasingly oppressive police state. Hillary Clinton is also undoubtedly very grateful that the events in Dallas 'coincidentally' sidelined the news that she committed a federal offense and should therefore be ineligible to run for president.

Blacks Not Systematically Murdered By Police

This does not mean that the police never unjustly kill Black people or that any particular anecdote is false. But it does mean that we can not infer from any anecdote the sort of generalized narratives which BLM types are prone to pushing.

Oedipus and Icarus Keep Falling

Computer analysis has suggested that there are six basic emotional arcs used in Western storytelling.  One such simple arc was once described by Kurt Vonnegut as “man falls into hole, man gets out of hole.”  Stories that end in a fall of emotional valence are found to be especially well-received, as well as those that present the various arcs in sequence.  "In particular, the team says the most popular are stories involving two sequential man-in-hole arcs," suggesting pornography has better storytelling than we thought.

The Gynocratic Nobility

Men, fearful of female disapproval, hid from the discussion or overcompensated, accepting these irrational arguments. All the major movements of the era: civil rights, feminism and immigration, all had the strange consequence of increasing the number of both workers and consumers. Wages began to stagnate and then, in real terms, fall. When interest, debt service and taxes are considered, wages plummeted. That’s not a coincidence. Feminism is a mystification.

Lessons From Sacramento

The leadership and ideologues of contemporary industrialized leftist (including anarchist and communist) movements are Jews with a Machiavellian racial motive, as well as rootless cosmopolitan fad-chasing white bourgeoisie, and they feel those whites who do not share their affinity for kale and “Polyamory” are hopelessly inferior, or even a potential threat to their status and privilege.

“This is the way it is.”

Another assault of another young person in another rural town has prompted another round of accusations of unfounded hate, phobia, and "white supremacy."

Virtual Reality and the Holocaust

A "virtual Holocaust survivor" who lived through an extermination camp and a death march will now be educating children by "upsetting the viewer’s sense of comfort." 

The interactive hologram and associated artificial intelligence answers questions with selections from 25 hours of footage of Pinchas Gutter, creating a vivid and convincing testimony intended to "jolt another world into your own." 

Historical investigation of the event remains verboten.

"The precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear"

Here’s who the New York Times blames, in order: Republican politicians, Republican-led state legislatures, Republican governors, Republican federal lawmakers, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, anyone who believes in traditional marriage, anyone who’s ever voted to preserve traditional marriage, and anyone who has ever voted for anyone who believes in or has voted to preserve traditional marriage.

Murder by Madman Enthusiastically Politicised

The lone witness to allege that the killer of British MP Jo Cox shouted "Britain First!" before and after the murder is himself a member of the rival British National Party.  Another witness, a Muslim, denies the statement was uttered.  Journalists, politicians, and the pundits of social media proceed with their confidently bigoted denunciation of anyone with any ideas in common with the crazy person.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.