Pages

Sunday, September 25, 2022

2022-09-25

*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)

Economic and Market Fare:


..... summarizes the current landscape as follows: "aggressive fiscal activism reigns supreme, most visible currently in the UK. This will bring higher growth, higher inflation, and higher interest rates across the curve."

What does this mean for investors? Well, according to Edwards, for them "the party is over" as is the Ice Age that defined markets according to the SocGen strategist. And as the coming "Great Melt" melts the ‘Ice’ in ‘Ice Age’, it will also "melt investor returns away too."

......... according to the SocGen bear, the UK Government extremes of fiscal largesse will undoubtedly be countered by even more aggressive monetary tightening and QT, because of runaway inflation, rather than the monetary facilitation we saw in the pandemic.

.... world is "likely set for a decade or more of poor financial returns exacerbated by the current ongoing economic ideological shift, which effectively means that interest rates and inflation will rise on a secular basis – i.e. The Great Melt."


UK Markets Implode After Truss Unveils Historic Tax Cuts As Economy Slides Into Recession Amid Soaring Prices

..... The head of the Institute of Fiscal Studies described Kwarteng's fiscal plan as the "biggest tax-cutting event since 1972." Truss hopes tax cuts and increased government borrowing will stimulate the faltering economy as growth slows, households plunged into energy poverty and inflation at the highest in forty years




Before getting distracted by the spin put on Friday’s budget, it is important to be clear what the motivation for it is. It’s not a budget for growth, it’s a budget for the rich and those who fund the Conservative party. Abolishing the 45% tax band obviously benefits only the very well off, dropping the increase in corporation tax will mainly benefit shareholders who are mostly at the top of the income distribution, not extending the windfall tax on energy producers will exclusively benefit shareholders, not increasing NI rates benefit the better off far more than anyone else, ending the cap on bankers bonuses benefits the already very rich, and so on. Conservative MPs are much more right wing on economics than Conservative voters or even party members, and this is a budget for them, as long as it doesn’t mean they lose their jobs.

The Resolution Foundation calculatesthat almost two thirds of the tax gains go to the richest fifth of the population, with almost half going to the top 5%. They also point out that the stamp duty changes mainly benefit richer households in the South East. Of course poorer households will get a small amount of this giveaway, but less than is needed to cover the increased costs of essentials according to NEF. ...

It is also a budget that is highly likely to mean cuts in public spending after the next election. ...

... Worse still, as I outlined here, the evidence clearly suggests that increasing inequality at the top reduces growth. Either the government is blind to the evidence, or they have to pretend it’s all about growth as a cover for the true reason for tax breaks for the rich: their ideology and party donors. .....


The Budget for the Very Rich

Budgets often reflect nothing more than the dreams and aspirations of a finance minister. Today Britain’s finance minister presented a budget which revealed something more sinister. The overthrow of the Johnson government was indeed a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to dislodge the electoral mandate (for “levelling up”) of a government and replace it with an undemocratic mandate to serve the interests of the very rich, while bearing (or “levelling”) down on the poor. 

This IS the right wing Revolt of the Rich. .....



The morning after Kwasi Kwarteng’s non-budget it is hard to write an objective appraisal because there was nothing objective about it.

The fact that it was not called a budget when very obviously it was just that was contemptuous of parliament, and everyone else in the country.

The fact that Kwarteng set out to spend more money than any other Chancellor in history and yet do nothing to help the public services, or anyone working for them, or anyone in need in the UK was staggering. Money was reserved for the very wealthiest, companies, and the households who consume the most energy. Banks and energy companies get a bonanza from Kwarteng. No one else will......



A recession so contrived and man-made that every economist, politician, business owner, college student, CEO, rapper and professional athlete has been able to see it coming in real-time for months and months…

Take a picture, you may never see anything so obviously about to happen ever again. A child could have foreseen it.

At a certain point, a person who is charge of price stability should probably look in the mirror and say “For whatever reason, I am not good at this. Or whatever method I am using to make decisions is not going well or producing positive outcomes.”

I don’t think this is so much to ask of the people we put in charge of our institutions.

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee for example. ....


Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’. But instead of building up a messier and messier picture of human behavior, we need a new model.



Charts: 
1:



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


... Yes, we should make fossil-fuel companies pay for the damage they have wrought. But since doing so will involve a messy power struggle, we need to be pragmatic. On that front, here’s a clever option: look for under-enforced legislation that if fully enforced, would make the fossil-fuel business go bankrupt.

True, this type of law sounds far-fetched. But it’s actually quite common. Here’s why.

When fossil-fuel companies extract resources, they are usually required to cleanup their (local) mess. For example, when an oil company drains a well, it’s supposed to plug the hole and return the well site to its original condition. Since this cleanup is a legal obligation, you’d think that oil companies — being law-abiding corporate citizens — would have been diligently cleaning up their defunct wells. But for the most part, they let these obligations slide.1 And so their cleanup liabilities have slowly accumulated.

For years, researcher and activist Regan Boychuk has been watching this crisis unfold. A resident of the oil-rich province of Alberta (Canada), Boychuk is one of the few people paying attention to the oil industry’s growing cleanup liabilities. He thinks the procrastination strategy is nearing its end game. If current cleanup liabilities were called in, Boychuk suspects that the oil industry couldn’t cover them — not even if it drained every existing well. In other words, Alberta’s conventional2 oil business is bankrupt.



Other Fare:

The stolen masterpieces have never turned up—and nobody’s really looking for them




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Regular Fare:

Tracey: A Fairy Tale Version of World War II is Being Used to Sell the Next World War



Endemic Fare:

I've continued to come across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Joey Smalley (aka Metatron) and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut (on twitter); new additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk and Aaron Kheriarty; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts



As I mentioned a few days ago, the genetic signatures in primate populations are clear: We’re survivors of those who survived repeated episodes of mass culling by corona viruses. With that knowledge in the back of your head, any attempt at mass vaccination risks exacerbating what is inherently already an existential threat. But people are stupid, so they went ahead and injected everyone with this stuff.

The Japanese authors of this paper don’t dance around the issue: The Omicron waves are being enhanced by vaccination. .....

They conclude their study by writing: “These results suggest that the rapid spread of Omicron around the world may in part result from the lack of cross-neutralization against Omicron and some ADE activity of sera after vaccination.” This isn’t exactly subtle anymore, is it? 

None of this will come as a shock to those of you who have been reading my posts on Omicron since we first heard of it. There was a lot of delusional optimism that this would now mean the end of the pandemic, but as I warned at the time, this was the point where we would witness the successive birth of new iterations of SARS-COV-2 with growing enhancement of disease by mass vaccination.

I’ve also warned a few times now that as you approach complete antibody evasion the speed of mutation would increase, as it would rapidly begin to pile on more spike mutations. And guess what’s happening: ........

.... So far, 2022 has been the deadliest year of the pandemic here in Europe. They’re not telling you this, they’re calling the excess mortality “unexplained”, because acknowledging this means acknowledging the vaccines have exacerbated this pandemic, as I warned you was going to happen. If the pandemic was over, you would see negative excess mortality, as so many of the dead are above 85. You don’t see negative excess mortality, so it’s not over.

Now you have the situation where everyone is constantly being reinfected, because the shrinking subset of antibodies recalled by reinfections are progressively easier to avoid again through mutations. No matter which way you cut it, that’s not a good thing. If through some miracle, we manage to overcome the homogenization of the population’s immune response, perhaps through exposure to other pathogens, that still means that during this window of homogenization and unprecedented mass infection we massively increased the genetic diversity of this virus, allowing it to arrive at all sorts of highly fit new variants that won’t just disappear once our immune response improves. In other words, your engine broke down, you fixed it, but you already lost the race.

There is no easy way out of this. It’s stupid to pretend the population will be fine after repeated episodes of infection from this virus.

.... If I were wrong, if the lockdowns were a great idea, if the masks were going to help bring this pathogen under control, if we would be better off if we had arrows that tell us where to walk in the department store, I would tell you. But you can look at the excess mortality statistics here and notice that Sweden is doing decidedly better than all its Scandinavian neighbors and even better than places like Hong Kong and South Korea.

The earlier variants deliver the body the experience it needs to survive the later variants. Just as it’s safer to donate half a liter of blood once every three months than to donate two liters once a year, it’s better to suffer a bit of damage from the occasional infection, than to spend two years not getting infected, only to get unlucky and get hit unprepared, by a virus that has learned to reproduce and avoid innate immunity in the bodies of people who have experience with this pathogen.

.... If you want to hear a solution, which I know you do, then the obvious answer is to look towards the place that’s mysteriously avoiding the global carnage and misery: Sub-Saharan Africa. What are they doing differently? A few things.

To start with, they don’t engage in unprecedented experiment against the human holobiont. The non-human organisms that live around the human body are not being decimated in sub-Saharan Africa. There are no strange genetic experiments to force the human body to develop an immune response against SARS-COV-2 it would never develop on its own from natural infection. In addition, people constantly get infected with a wide variety of other pathogens, so that SARS-COV-2 encounters bodies that are well experienced with a range of different tactics to avoid alerting our immune systems.

......... And as I have said a few times, you really need to airline industry to shut down. You need to deglobalize the world. Omicron emerged in South Africa, if it had died out there the pandemic would have been over by now. Now we’re dealing with the descendants of BA.2.75, which is doing nothing out of the ordinary in India, but causing the next waves here in the Western world. This is not what people like to hear, but it is the reality we’re dealing with: Any new version that emerges anywhere now takes over the whole world. This is not compatible with human health.

This pandemic is going to continue, until the survivors learn to live in harmony with non-human organisms. The longer that takes, the fewer such survivors there will be.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

el gato malo: i’ve musing of late about just how it came to pass that the entirety of western governance seems to have become bereft of reality and competence and generally run by people who appear to be about as smart as a soup sandwich and yet have managed to accrue not only such intense confidence in their own planning ability and vision but in addition gained access to the levers of power to impose their addled ideas upon the rest of us while aided and abetted by a cheer-leader class that eggs them ever onward. it’s really quite a thing.

Yakk: What you have to appreciate is that when he [Trudeau] says that you need to make sure you are up-to-date with your vaccines so you can continue to do the things you enjoy with the people you love…what do you think he really saying?



Anecdotal Fare:

Chudov: Canadian Woman Died 7 Minutes After Bivalent Booster. Death Ruled "Natural Cause"
The coverup puts similar people at risk of death!





COVID Conspiracy Fare:

My blue pilled friends can't figure out why, if the vaccines are so dangerous, aren't more doctors speaking out. Here's why.

My blue pilled friends who believe the vaccines are safe have told me they would reconsider their position if just a single one of their own doctors came out against the vaccine. One of them said even if a “TV doctor” (such as Sanjay Gupta) said it was unsafe, they would reconsider their position.

I told them that doctors are afraid to speak out because they will lose their ability to practice medicine if they challenge the mainstream narrative.

My friends find that too hard to believe. They asked me incredulously, “Why would the medical community silence doctors who are trying to save lives?”

They didn’t believe my answer.

So I wanted to interview a doctor who is very highly respected and who is not an “anti-vaxxer” to explain it to them.

Here is my interview with Dr. Marik on the subject where he describes how he was personally retaliated by the medical community after he discovered early treatment work and the vaccines are unsafe. It’s really stunning. They actually had to fabricate patients who don’t exist.

Note also that Dr. Marik was a believer in the COVID vaccine; he took it just like he was told. It took him months looking at the evidence before he changed his mind.

I asked him in the interview, “Now that you realize the vaccines are not safe, could you have gotten it wrong this time?” He said, “No, the evidence is very clear.”

He regrets not having done his homework and trusting others when he took the shot. It was only after he looked at the data directly himself, he said the data was crystal clear.

When he started speaking out, he was retaliated against by the medical community.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:




Voting for membership in the Russian Federation has started in four oblast of Ukraine: “Russian proxy officials in four regions — Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Kherson and Zaporizka in the south — earlier this week announced plans to hold referendums over four days beginning on Friday. Russia controls nearly all of two of the four regions, Luhansk and Kherson, but only a fraction of the other two, Zaporizka and Donetsk. Ukrainian officials have dismissed the voting as grotesque theater — staging polls in cities laid to waste by Russian forces and abandoned by most residents.” President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Ukraine’s allies for their steadfast support and said “the farce” of “sham referenda” would do nothing to change his nation’s fight to drive Russia from Ukraine.

The Ukrainian regime has resorted to pure terrorism to prevent the votes from happening....



Putin’s decision to order a partial mobilization of the Russian military, when combined with the decision to conduct the referendums in the Donbass and occupied Ukraine, radically transforms the SMO from a limited-scope operation to one linked to the existential survival of Russia. Once the referenda are conducted, and the results forwarded to the Russian parliament, what is now the territory of Ukraine will, in one fell swoop, become part of the Russian Federation — the Russian homeland. All Ukrainian forces that are on the territory of the regions to be incorporated into Russia will be viewed as occupiers; and Ukrainian shelling of this territory will be treated as an attack on Russia, triggering a Russian response.

Whereas the SMO had, by design, been implemented to preserve Ukrainian civil infrastructure and reduce civilian casualties, a post-SMO military operation will be one configured to destroy an active threat to Mother Russia itself. The gloves will come off.


Kunstler: “Joe Biden’s” Last Stand

Historians of the future, grilling spatchcocked plovers over their campfires, will need not ponder for even a New York minute who started World War Three in the rockin’ 2020s. They will point straight to the waxy, furtive, larval figure known as “Joe Biden,” by then judged a moral weevil of such epic low degree that he became an embarrassment to all the other sewer-dwelling denizens of the dank DC underworld, including the roaches, the rats, the humble shipworms eating through sunk oaken foundations of buildings long forgotten, the writhing maggots rinsed from a thousand restaurant dumpsters, the slithering hellgrammites, millipedes, silverfish, pillbugs, termites, dung-beetles, woodlice, and, not least, the scaly lawyers spawned out of the infestation beneath K Street called Perkins Coie LLP. Even these would loathe and disdain the thing that came into this world as “Joe Biden.”

Let us agree that the place called Ukraine was never any of America’s business. For centuries we ignored it, through all the colorful cavalry charges to-and-fro of Turks and Tatars, the reign of the dashing Zaporozhian Cossacks, the cruel abuses of Stalin, then Hitler, and the dull, gray Khrushchev-to-Yeltsin years. But then, having destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and sundry other places all on a great hegemonic lark, the professional warmongers of our land and their catamites in Washington made Ukraine their next special project.  They engineered the 2014 coup in Kiev that ousted the elected president, Mr. Yanyukovich, to set up a giant grifting parlor and international money-laundromat. The other strategic aim was to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership, which would have made it, in effect, a forward missile base right up against Russia’s border. Because, well, Russia, Russia, Russia!

An early beneficiary of these arrangements, you might recall, was one Hunter Biden, the drug-addicted, sex-obsessed, no-account son of Barack Obama’s no-account vice-president then known simply as Joe Biden sans quote-marks — because in 2014, he was a closer approximation of a real person than is sadly now the case. In fact, he was known as “The Big Guy” among Hunter’s business coterie (though listed as “Pedo Peter” on Hunter’s speed-dial). After the 2014 coup, and for years beyond, Hunter pulled a steady revenue stream out of Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings, a natgas distributor (among other things), serving as a know-nothing, no-show board member. When this monkey business came to the attention of President Trump, and he made a telephone inquiry about it, he was instantly beset by swarms of DC swamp vermin hoisting writs of impeachment.

Fast forward through the past eight years and you have Kiev’s persecution of the Russian-speaking Donbas provinces, the constant shelling and harassment by Banderite Nazis. Between that and the ever more strident urgings for Ukraine to join NATO, President Putin of Russia, Russia, Russia apparently had enough. In February of this year, he started the Special Military Operation to put an end to these hostilities. By April, when whole battalions of Ukrainian Nazis had been exterminated, a call to peace talks was issued by Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. This was shot-down without ceremony by “Joe Biden” (that is, by the junta behind him). The genius strategists in Foggy Bottom aimed to “weaken” Russia. To what end? (you might ask). Okay: Reasons….

Hence, many hard-fought battles on-the-ground later, Ukraine has lost roughly 70,000 troops killed to Russia’s roughly 6,000 KIA. The USA pours $10-billion-a-month into this venture, including missiles aplenty and other ordnance, in a stupid effort to prolong the conflict and bankrupt our own land. Thus, Mr. Putin has decided to stop pussyfooting around Ukraine, and declared an upgrade in Russia’s effort to put a conclusive end to these shenanigans. He set this forth clearly in a sober speech Wednesday, which included a reminder to the geniuses in the White House basement game room that Russia is a nuclear power.

“Joe Biden” (looking like the ghost of Konstantin Chernenko) answered in a speech to the UN General Assembly the next day, a maundering recitation of sanctimonious bluster, larded with climate hysteria to alarm and bamboozle the UN’s scores of Third World delegates, with not a word about any possible peace talks — because peaceful resolution of the conflict is the last thing that our government wants. It wants war, meaning we citizens of this land will get it, good and hard, if the puppeteers working “Joe Biden’s” mouth get their way. Prepare to live in an ashtray. ......

..... Not to put too fine a point on it: the shit has already hit the fan. We are where we were going. If you truly believe those 2020 national election results, then this is what you voted for, America. Feeling any buyer’s remorse yet? Got the feeling that something must be done? Okay then, what?



....... The Russian foreign minister presented a long list of human rights violations by Kiev that went ignored by various European and global human rights groups, from “burning books, just like in Nazi Germany” to using banned ‘petal’ land mines against civilians this summer. “Such outrages became possible and remain unpunished due to the fact that the US and its allies, with the connivance of international human rights institutions, have been systematically covering up the crimes of the Kiev regime for eight years, basing their policy towards [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky based on the well-known American principle: he may be a son of a b*tch, but he is our son of a b*tch,” said Lavrov.




The Western media is a collection of liars in a propaganda ministry, and its so-called “Russian experts” are for the most part Russophobes operating on grants from the US military/security complex.  Consequently, Westerners have no valid understanding of the conflict in Ukraine, how it arose, and how the West’s involvement together with extraordinary provocations, has  created in the Russian leadership the conviction that the goal of the West is to destroy Russia.  As this conviction hardens, the Russian leadership is abandoning hope of peaceful coexistence with the Western world and is preparing for war.

In his speech Putin begins the preparation of the Russian people for the hard reality.  Putin doesn’t like the hard reality and did his best to avoid it by ignoring provocations and insults until it became impossible because, as Putin says,  “the West has crossed every line.”

The West, of course, is Washington.  The rest of the Western world reports to Washington as I learned from a US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. “How,” I asked him, “do we get the other countries to do what we want?”  “Money,” he replied. “You mean foreign aid?”  “No, we give the leaders bagfuls of money.  They report to us.  We own them.” 

This means that there are no independent Western voices in Britain, Germany, France or elsewhere to moderate Washington’s drive for world hegemony.  There is no one to say, “do you know what you are doing?” There is no one to warn Washington that the US is pushing Russia too hard.  There is no one to warn us against believing our own propaganda. Consequently, Washington has pushed the Russian leadership out of the accommodation mode into the prepare for conflict mode.

This clearly demonstrates how dangerous is the neoconservatives’ unilateralism.  There is no one to talk back to Washington but Washington’s chosen enemies, whose words, if reported at all, are always reported out of context following the propaganda line that it is Russia and China, never Washington, who is the threat and cause of conflict. ........
The topic of my speech is the situation in Donbas and the course of a special military operation to liberate it from the neo-Nazi regime that seized power in Ukraine in 2014 as a result of an armed coup. ................


***** CaitOz Fare ***** :


.... One who is sincere and courageous about having an authentic relationship with reality will take seriously the very real possibility that this could all be ending fairly soon. They will face this possibility directly and let it inform the way their humanity expresses itself in the world, rather than compartmentalizing away from it and avoiding it.

It’s just a fact that based on what we know about what nuclear war would mean for life on this planet and how we’re hearing more and more often that we’re now already closer to armageddon than we were during the last cold war, humanity as we know it may not be around for much longer. Our end could very well come not in millennia or even centuries, but in months or years.

..... For those who are willing and able to face our situation where it stands, it’s a useful object of contemplation which brings up a lot of highly relevant questions about how to better live life to its fullest. Questions that kind of demand answers.

Questions like, would I be happy with the way I’ve been spending my time lately if it turned out that tomorrow is the day the ICBMs start flying?

Would I be content with the things that my interest and attention have been focusing on, not just in my outward expression but silently in my mind?

What would I wish I had done? What would I wish I had done more of? What would I wish I had stopped doing? ....

... Have I been living a life of truth and integrity? Have my behavior, speech and thinking aligned with what I know to be true? With what I believe to be valuable? With what I think of as an authentic human being?

Only you can answer these questions for yourself, but they do deserve answers. ...



Future generations, if there are future generations,
will scarce believe that our species once stockpiled armageddon weapons on purpose,
once built our entire civilization around economic models that could only result in the destruction of our biosphere,
once permitted corporations who profit from war to successfully lobby policymakers to start more wars,
once warehoused living beings in factory farms where they were tortured and brutalized,
once starved children to death with sanctions because their rulers disobeyed our rulers,
once made policies which kept people poor so they’d be financially coerced into facilitating military mass murder,
once let people go hungry and homeless if they didn’t have enough imaginary numbers in their bank accounts,
once stripped this planet of biodiversity and old growth forests to turn the gears of an imaginary economy instead of collaborating with our ecosystem.

Future generations, if there are future generations,
will look back in perplexity at our omnicidal madness,
at our blind subservience to the very worst among us, ....



Other Quotes of the Week:

Peterson: “I know what I’d do in his shoes,” he said on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show on Thursday. “I’d wait till the first cold snap and shut off the taps.”

Piepenburg: I am once again reminded of the 2014 statement made by then U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, that Russia would run out of money long before the West ran out of energy.

Byju: Only after learning the definition of what the late anthropologist David Graeber called bullshit jobs did I realize that—despite the unparalleled clout I received from society as a consultant—I was, in fact, working a bullshit job. This simple detail would reveal not only why I was so miserably employed, but also an alarming truth about how we’ve arranged our society.




Rigger-ous Reads (on Culture Wars, Identity Politics, etc.):


I’m a bit further into the book Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. As I read more about the “social justice” view of the world, what we might term the “woke” perspective, the more my sense of unreality and disbelief increases. How can seemingly intelligent people believe this utter pile of shite?

That assessment may be a little harsh, because there ARE some good points made along the way by some of these woke theorists described in the book, but it’s like they take a few salient observations and construct some absurd fantasy; it’s akin to conspiracy theorizing par excellence.

What is uncovered in the book is a “woke” depiction of ‘reality’ that’s not tethered to anything, least of all reality. I’ve repurposed an old Gary Larson cartoon that neatly sums up my current view....

...... The overriding impression one gains is that it’s not supposed to make sense, in any ‘traditional’ meaning of the word sense. They’re not at all interested in ‘truth’ in any objective sense, but they are passionately, obsessively, wedded to subjective ‘truth’.

.... Instead of a universal view of humanity, a view that is pretty much rejected by the woke theorists, we now have a ridiculous and obsessive focus on differences rather than commonalities. Race, gender, sexuality, disability, weight - you name it, we’re explicitly being pressured into focussing on our differences, rather than the things that draw us together as human beings.

They think this is the right thing to do.

They are Grade A morons. ....



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


Although social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is considered “heterodox” (these days that means “anti-progressive”), I’ve found that nearly everything he’s written is worth reading. That especially includes his two books The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, the latter co-written with Greg Lukianoff. Haidt is neither a polemicist nor a firebrand, but he says what he thinks and calls out nonsense in a no-nonsense way. And now he’s taking a hike from an important academic group because it violates his principles.

Haidt was in fact one of the cofounders of the Heterodox Academy, an organization of academics promoting viewpoint diversity, which of course is the wrong kind of diversity. The group grew out of a talk promoting viewpoint diversity given by Haidt in 2011 at the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—the biggest and best-known society of its kind.

And that leads to the double irony that’s the subject of today’s post.  In an article on the Heterodox Academy‘s website (click below to read), Haidt announces that he’s resigning from the SPSP, and for exactly the reason that helped birth the academy ten years ago—the quashing of viewpoint diversity by academia.

.... Haidt notes that there are two “fiduciary duties” of professors, and by that he means duties that are directed towards a beneficiary (in this case, academics and students), must be adhered to with absolute loyalty, and in which there is no taint of self-interest. All other duties are subsidiary and must go away when in conflict with these two. Here are those duties as quoted by Haidt:

1). As teachers I believe we have a fiduciary duty to our students’ education.

2.) As scholars I believe we have a fiduciary duty to the truth.

Together these serve to fulfill the telos of a university (its end or purpose), and that telos is truth—finding and promulgating truth.

Haidt actually calls these duties “quasi-fiduciary duties” since we aren’t obligated to promote students’ overall welfare, nor is there an agent for whose benefit we seek the truth. He gives four examples of how a professor can violate each of these duties, and argues that universities are now declining in public esteem because they’re making the second duty subsidiary to other goals, goals that fall under the aegis of “advancing social justice”



Pics of the Week:





Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)