Articles 3.
3.1
My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit. - Peter Boghossian
“ I noticed signs of the illiberalism that has now fully swallowed the academy quite early during my time at Portland State. I witnessed students refusing to engage with different points of view. Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions. And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male.
At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural appropriation” is immoral?
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For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation.
I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.
This isn’t about me. This is about the kind of institutions we want and the values we choose. Every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, been initially condemned. As individuals, we often seem incapable of remembering this lesson, but that is exactly what our institutions are for: to remind us that the freedom to question is our fundamental right. Educational institutions should remind us that that right is also our duty. “
3.2
How We Chose Violence - John Wood Jr.
“In modern American political life, we do not intentionally choose violence. We are not yet at the point of having paramilitary forces under the command of politicians roaming freely in American streets, whatever one’s concerns may be about Antifa or the Proud Boys. We choose violence through deceit, both explicit and implicit. More specifically, we choose violence by misleading each other about the sorts of issues that cause us to think of one another as enemies—perhaps even mortal enemies.
How can we blame people for turning to violence when they believe that the peaceful mechanisms of democracy are being stolen from them by the very politicians who represent them? How can we blame people for turning to violence when they believe that innocents are being gunned down in vast numbers by the very police officers whose duty it is to protect them?
Those who recognize that each of these narratives is a deception may nevertheless resist this juxtaposition. One might offend you more than the other. One might seem more excusable than the other. Yes, you might say, police killings of unarmed black men were exaggerated; but there is still a problem with systemic racism in the criminal justice system that can’t be ignored. Yes, maybe Trump lost the election, you might say; but with all of the electoral changes that took place in response to COVID-19, and after all of the lies of the mainstream media, it makes sense to call for greater scrutiny of the outcome. “
3.3
The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics - Glenn Greenwald
“The op-ed sounds like it was written by an NSA official justifying the need for mass surveillance (yes, fine, your privacy is important but it is not absolute; your privacy rights are outweighed by public safety; we are spying on you for your own good). And the op-ed appropriately ends with this perfect Orwellian flourish: “We care deeply about civil liberties and civil rights for all — which is precisely why we support vaccine mandates.”
What makes the ACLU's position so remarkable — besides the inherent shock of a civil liberties organization championing state mandates overriding individual choice — is that, very recently, the same group warned of the grave dangers of the very mindset it is now pushing. In 2008, the ACLU published a comprehensive report on pandemics which had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics.
The title of the ACLU report, resurfaced by David Shane, reveals its primary point: "Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health – Not a Law Enforcement/National Security – Approach.” To read this report is to feel that one is reading the anti-ACLU — or at least the actual ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation. From start to finish, it reads as a warning of the perils of precisely the mindset which today's ACLU is now advocating for COVID.”
3.4
How Biden Could Bring Back Trump - Andrew Sullivan
“In his usual tempered language, former president Barack Obama took note of the vast crowds of Haitian migrants who had largely overwhelmed the small border town of Del Rio last week. He viewed it as a cumulative failure of immigration policy:
Immigration is tough. It always has been because, on the one hand, I think we are naturally a people that wants to help others. At the same time, we’re a nation-state. We have borders. The idea that we can just have open borders is something that ... as a practical matter, is unsustainable.
That’s an apposite word: “unsustainable.” And yet what is unsustainable seems currently unstoppable.
We are in a new era of mass migration, and the US government is demonstrating in real time that it has no idea how to control it. From January through July, well over a million undocumented migrants were intercepted at the border — Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, Romanians, among others — and the pace is accelerating. If those intercepted in the first half of this year formed a city, it would be the tenth largest in the US.
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Worse: the immigration debate reflects an elite that simply cannot imagine why most normal citizens think that enforcing a country’s borders is not an exercise in white supremacist violence, but a core function of any basic government. “
3.5*
1491 - Charles C. Mann
“Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.
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The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto's army left, notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto's and La Salle's visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000—not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters," says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.
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Indigenous biochemistry may also have played a role. The immune system constantly scans the body for molecules that it can recognize as foreign—molecules belonging to an invading virus, for instance. No one's immune system can identify all foreign presences. Roughly speaking, an individual's set of defensive tools is known as his MHC type. Because many bacteria and viruses mutate easily, they usually attack in the form of several slightly different strains. Pathogens win when MHC types miss some of the strains and the immune system is not stimulated to act. Most human groups contain many MHC types; a strain that slips by one person's defenses will be nailed by the defenses of the next. But, according to Francis L. Black, an epidemiologist at Yale University, Indians are characterized by unusually homogenous MHC types. One out of three South American Indians have similar MHC types; among Africans the corresponding figure is one in 200. The cause is a matter for Darwinian speculation, the effects less so.
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When Columbus appeared in the Caribbean, the descendants of the world's two Neolithic civilizations collided, with overwhelming consequences for both. American Neolithic development occurred later than that of the Middle East, possibly because the Indians needed more time to build up the requisite population density. Without beasts of burden they could not capitalize on the wheel (for individual workers on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective as carts for hauling), and they never developed steel. But in agriculture they handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas.
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The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? "The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so" after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, "and for some regions right up to the present time.“
3.6
The Coming Collapse of The Cyrpto Grifters - Concoda
“Upon opening any Bitcoin-related forum post, Twitter thread, or YouTube video comment section, you’ll notice this has grown into somewhat of an epidemic. With all the toxicity involved, you’ll probably assume that these individuals are nothing more than trolls or bot accounts, but no. These are real freedom fighters who’ve succumbed to the get-rich-quick mentality which the crypto grifter class promotes, a mindset that if we strip it down to the most objective level, involves trying to get rich, for free, doing absolutely nothing, and blindsiding anyone who questions the doctrine that will enable this thesis to play out.
This is the kind of poisonous venom the cheap money era has injected into modern economic thinking, where we never create anything of substance, just rampant speculation that ends up transferring wealth from “fools” to “insiders”. It’s what economics writer Charles Hugh Smith defines as “the illusion of getting rich while producing nothing of value
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Right now, we’re witnessing the same theatrical performance, but this time, the collapse of the crypto underbelly will complement it as a sideshow. What’s left of the space will be the real fans, the silent minority, who also want to rid the world of financially repressive regimes and promote economic freedom, only not via crypto prices going #ToTheFrickinMoon.
Hopefully, once the great cryptocurrency purge comes to pass, we’ll see the industry mature, with the silent minority becoming the loud, passionate majority that new-age finance so desperately needs.”