Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. It is a different take on the attack by Theodore Ruger on Professor Wax. Sunday Thoughts is a shallow dive into the cult of neoconservatism using some of their recent posts. SubscribeStar users can find it here and Substack users can find it here.
One of the great problems Enlightenment thinkers tried to solve is why it is that human beings live in ordered societies. Further, why are some people in charge of those societies and others subject to the will of those people. What explains this and more important, what is the correct system of organization? The recently rediscovered Greeks offered some insights. Scripture offered understanding of man’s nature but offered little to explain social hierarchy.
It is fair to say that Western intellectual life has been dominated by the search for the right answer as to how best to organize society. The utilitarian school gave us the claim that the goal of any social policy it to maximize total happiness. The Marxists gave us the argument that the goal of social policy is reducing exploitation. By exploitation they meant compulsion. Social contract theory gave us the general will, the idea that policy should be supported by the majority of the people.
The modern age fumbles around looking for a new answer to the great questions, having decided that the prior answers are not quite right. Restorative justice borrows a bit from all three schools. It starts with the assumption that everyone should benefit equally from society. This is an assumption that is never justified or even explained, but simply assumed as an axiom of the universe. It is the motivation to act and the authority to do just about anything to restore equal outcomes.
The main question at the center of it all is authority. No matter how sensible your new system of social order, there has to be a reason it should be preferred by or enforced upon those who disagree. Marx recognized this which is why he invented the idea of super-abundance to get around the issue. In a society in which everyone gets what they need to live, there is no need to compel anyone. According to Marx, it is scarcity that leads to exploitation.
Marx was not the first person to use sleight of hand to get around the central problem of authority in social organization. Locke and Hobbes conjured from nothing the idea of a state of nature, a mythological pre-social existence. Even Rousseau, who criticized the concept, had to fall back on it to justify his thinking. Of course, the foundation of Western democracy is the purely hypothetical concept of the social contract, which has been handed down to us by the Greeks.
This search for an answer to “by what authority?” haunts the modern ruling class, which is why they have evolved certain chants to wave away the question. Whenever they use the phrase “our democracy” they may as well be saying “by the divide right of kings” or “because the gods command it.” It is intellectual base stealing. In the name of democracy, they assume power over the rest of us and the right to use that power to achieve whatever ends they think appropriate.
The same is true of the “right side of history.” Instead of appealing to Scripture, which would create obvious problems, they appeal to a great mystery force that can be defined to meet the task at hand. The speaker is on the right side of history, so he is empowered to clear the road. Those on the wrong side of history are in the way of history so they lack all authority. Like the other abracadabra phrases popular with the ruling class, this just means “because I say so.”
This search for justification turns up in the heresy accusations leveled against Professor Amy Wax by Theodore Ruger. His bill of indictment is a blend of assumptions and vague claims about vague school policies. He holds up statements made by Professor Wax as examples of her violating school policy, but never bothers to explain how or why they violate the policy. Occasionally he asserts that something she said is in dispute, but most things are in dispute.
This line from Ruger’s letter is an example of intellectual base stealing. “[Professor Wax] public commentary espousing derogatory and hateful stereotypes has led students to reasonably conclude that she is unable to evaluate them fairly based on their individualized merit.” He then lists some examples of students who claimed to be vexed by Professor Wax. Because he can find someone who agrees with his claim, it is by force of magic a reasonable claim.
This is the sort of logic that was never tolerated by undergraduates at elite universities like the University of Pennsylvania. If Professor Wax is maintaining a hostile classroom, then some students will question her objectivity. This is true if the word “hostile” is assumed to mean heretical and “some students” is assumed to mean those who are not biological males of European ethnicity. Therefore, if a nonwhite or female gets upset, it must mean they are in a hostile environment.
It should not have to be said, but this is a classic logical fallacy that used to be taught in American middle-schools. If A always leads to B, it does not follow that the existence of B means the existence of A. There can be many causes for B. In this case, the emotionally disturbed students cited in the letter could be vexed by any number of things, including the preaching of people like Mr. Ruger. Keep telling young people that the devil is always at their elbow and they will believe it.
Strip away all of the primitive claims in that letter and you are left with an assumption that the good people, like Mr. Ruger, are here to protect the sacred people, like the nonwhite students he cites. This is the answer to the great question that has haunted the West for centuries, by what authority? The vast diverse class of people we call the managerial elite exist to shepherd the vulnerable, who they have defined as anyone who is not a biological male of European origin.
Because there is no external source of authority for these claims, anyone who challenges the claim is branded a heretic. That is what you see in that letter and in all of the hysterics that have come to dominate the age. The worship of nonwhites and the efforts to protect them have no basis in reality. Note that Ruger avoids challenging Wax on the facts. Her statements are not factually wrong, but morally wrong even though the underlying moral claims have no authority.
Like a parent tired of answering the series of why questions from their child, the managerial elite are increasingly frustrated and angry because they have no answer the question of why. Why is it wrong to point out that intelligence is not distributed equally between people or groups? What is the authority for declaring these observations of fact immoral? More important, why are these people going to such lengths to mask observable reality?
Fundamentally, the crisis of this age is one of authority. The feudal system could point to tradition and the family. The king was like the father and his people were like the family, where the father had the last word. Man’s relationship to God as described in Scripture was imperfectly recreated in politics. Just as man ultimately answers to God, subjects ultimately answered to the king. This is the answer to the question at the heart of the social order, by what authority?
This age has no answer to the great question. Why are these people in these positions and why are they imposing these novel moral codes? What justifies their claim that noticing things about people is immoral? Who decided this and by what system did they decide it? Because there are no answers to these questions, the only solution is to silence anyone who raises them. To tolerate dissent puts into question the authority of the managerial system, which has no natural authority.
If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!
Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.
The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.
Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.
I can’t say I’m puzzled by any of those things. Authority in all forms derives from human nature, inasmuch as there needs to be authority, and it derives from social sway (which derives from a hierarchy of influence and the media) down into the lower orders. The left (and not just the leftist authorities, but ordinary leftists) are not answering those questions because they deliberately want to level human society even though that means bringing the upper part of society down. That’s their goal and they know it’s their goal, but it can’t be admitted because that truth is grotesque… Read more »
I have not changed my definition of elite. You must have me confused with someone you call “Zed” but I have never bought into the puppet master thesis. I have written hundreds of posts on the systemic nature of the managerial class and phenomena like emergent behavior.
The Feds raided Trump’s house today. Further proof, if you needed it, that they know “because I said so” is no longer working on more than half the population. Dark times are here.
Fort Sumter. If the people have the stones for it.
That’s a trap.
Don’t be surprised if this is the kind of event designed to ensnare people, similar to Jan 6.
Non participation would be a better response.
If not now, when?
The FB1, 1RS, Department of Ed. need to be disbanded now, before it’s too late.
We have more to fear from our own govt than any foreign govt.
This slide towards tyranny will not end until they hear a loud, demanding STOP.
Show me the man, I’ll show you the crime. That man is us. If the FB1 doesn’t get you, the 1RS will.
Indeed. But what that retard is advocating is LARPing as the Wolverines and direct action violence, i.e. terrorism by any reasonable definition.
Indeed. But what that retard is advocating is LARPing as the Wolverines and direct action violence, i.e. terrorism by any reasonable definition.
Thats the Zman response! Just talk!
People with no experience with applied violence shouldn’t be advocating for it.
he got what he deserved. let his fate serve as a material lesson for anyone else planning to be a fake savior.
Pretty much. He didn’t even try to anything that was remotely in his powet to do. Piss off already, Trump, you had your chance.
Here is a very good post on Substack also on the topic of authority: https://roloslavskiy.substack.com/p/why-are-the-ukrainians-still-fighting I think the author makes good points about why the Ukes are still fighting, the importance of alternate authority, and the Russian lack of a Ukrainian government in exile. I’m not sure if the Russians are missing a trick by not having an alternative Ukrainian government in exile, or if they just don’t care because they expect Ukraine to cease existence as a sovereign nation. This is in contrast to the O’Biden regime, which clearly cares very much about alternate sources of authority. This is… Read more »
So much for Secret Service protection.
It also shows how screwed we are with no alternate authority. It’s all ridiculous clowns like Alex Jones or Richard Spencer, or the pet eunuchs of the Jews like Trump and DeSantis hiding cucumbers in their pants to masquerade as opposition.
Let me add that the appeal to the authority of sacred black people, holy sacred redeemers of the original sin of Whiteness, does not come out of nowhere. It comes from: A. The utter hatred and contempt of the AWFLs for the White beta male simp, and his provision (which for them is useless and annoying), that meshes nicely with the KKKrazy Glue per Sailer of non-Whites, gays, lesbians, trannies all united in hatred of White men. They can all agree, they hate White men together. B. The real superiority (now) of blacks over White men. If George Floyd had… Read more »
And this is what will drive the IQ collapse. The major thing that Idiocracy missed (or feared to portray) was that the untermensch of the future will be caramel-skinned and broccoli-haired.
Rubicon crossed, just like I predicted. Trump has been raided by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago. They took papers and opened his safe. Along with other things — computers, phones, etc. They will arrest him and perp-walk him handcuffed in DC booed by sacred redeeming blacks, AWFLs etc. Then likely extradite him along with some SEALs both active and retired to Iran so they can wash their hands. Pilate-like. They mean to rule. Heck Jennifer Rubin is calling for midterms to be cancelled. They just added 87,000 IRS agents to go after Trump supporters and White people in general. While making… Read more »
We blackest-pillers don’t get to dance much, so…today we do a little.
As I’ve said about ten times, the “installation” of a leader into a capital/capitol surrounded by outward-facing soldiers is a military coup. It doesn’t matter if we (or they) don’t acknowledge it as such. “Reality is that which…”
It’s a hundred million of us or a hundred million of them.
Hey Zman, both this and your Taki post are informative and give pause for thought. With that said, I’ve noticed on your last recent posts on the Zblog and your Taki post today that you’ve misspelled words. On the Taki post you said “decent” where you meant “descent.” Now, it’s not a big deal for me; however, for your enemies and denialists, it gives them ammunition to refute your thoughts because “he can’t even spell words properly., etc”
Just sayin’…
Why don’t you check his grammar next?
Authority is that to which the bulk of society capitulates. Authority, like many things people think of as a thing, is most accurately described as a process. A speaks, B bows to A. Ghut is an ancient root word meaning pour. To that which you pour your libation, that is your God. In practice: A small group of people used banking and media and institutions to meme themselves into authorities. The small group of people forced white schools down to accommodate blacks and Mexicans. And the culture was similarly debased. The percentage of spots allowed for whites in universities, has… Read more »
Three JIDF downvotes.
Impressive.
“The question at the heart of the social order, by what authority?” Z may have inadvertently exposed the central problem of ethics. Without a shared belief in an unquestionable lawgiver, like the Christian god, there is no such authority. Ethicists cannot deduce the “ought”s of ethics from the “is”es of the facts. Z Man is posing a question that has no answer outside of a group of people who recognize the same lawgiver. For my part, I see evidence that most people of each race share an inherited sense of morality on some important issues. Not all significant issues, but… Read more »
On a more practical level, those who control the media literally dictate the morality of most people, including most religious people. Draw your own conclusions about what must be done for us to make progress.
“White progressives and white traditionalists should not share the same territory and laws.”
From your mouth to God’s ears.
Force is the only true source of authority. In the end the reason people have to follow the orders of the elites is because they’ll be killed if they don’t. The counter argument is that they can’t kill everyone, however they can chop off the tall poppies as they rise. The rules and government is simply a network of obligations that keeps the whole thing running and prevents defection. If a group of people stop paying taxes the police have to go shoot them. If the police refuse, then they get fired. If the police try to forcibly take their… Read more »
“You see this most strongly in military families, they just spout rhetoric about honor and duty and won’t entertain the idea that their career consists of being a hired murderer for enriching corrupt politicians.” If the military’s recruiting troubles are any indicator, many of these families are wising up. What is the appeal for young white men? Even if they’re not killed or maimed, they’ll still have to bow to diversity and perverts while doing the heavy lifting. And we all know who will get promoted. It won’t be the white dude. At this point, any white man who joins… Read more »
“If the military’s recruiting troubles are any indicator, many of these families are wising up.”
And so the high-trust fabric of Inner Hajnalia unravels, to be replaced by what, precisely?
That’s the great question of our times.
Are any of us young enough to live to see the Inner Hajnalian Renaissance?
Authority boils down to a monopoly on state violence although the illusion of consent persists (Howard Zinn is a fool and a fraud but not wrong there). As the Regime feels its authority imperiled, as we see now, all pretense is dropped and the violence becomes blatantly arbitrary. This has always preceded collapse, revolution or civil war, none of which is appealing but one or more of which will happen. The inevitable BIPOC opposition to its Regime benefactors marks the point of no return.
So, by whose authority? The one with superior firepower, as always, and that is actually transitioning.
The question of authority isn’t even that interesting to me any more. It is so plainly obvious that authority is that power to exert the will that ultimately and invariably accrues only to those willing to use force.
Agreed. When some people reach your conclusion they adopt an “every man for himself” outlook.
However, no rugged individual, not even John Galt, can beat a group. Therefore, we must join a group for protection.
The question then becomes, “What are the bonds that bind a group together?” Religious people and civic nationalists believe that values can provide those bonds. It looks to me like race goes deeper than values.
Hatred for a shared enemy and oppressor has a long history of demonstrated magnetism. Our rulers rely on it to unify a coalition of the various identities that make up the set : not Normal White People !(NWP) for instance, characterizing NWP as the oppressors. It is possible that the normalization of explicit scape-goating has made it easier for a movement to inflame the same passions among NWP, especially among the fighting age cohorts who have been steeped in such a moral training from kindergarten on.
There are two types of authority – moral and physical. Nice when they coincide (makes for stability). But physical authority (might) is a lot less interesting to me. Short hand would be simply that “might makes”.
[…] A Question Of Authority […]
This is because the manager’s are morally and intellectually bankrupt. Moralizing is not morality. They have no basis to think themselves legitimate – no useful function that comes from a higher calling. They were not called to a solemn and sacred duty – to preserve and transmit the titans of our civilization and if worthy contribute. In their formative years they convinced themselves that the system was evil. Yet, they lusted after the positions and prestige it offered them. Now they run the institutions whose moral and intellectual standing was developed, honed, questioned and explored in good faith by succeeding… Read more »
“We must be prepared to play by the rules that they have made.” “The time to apply their rules to them and their heirs approaches.” Isn’t this what conservatives have tried to do for the last 100 years and always lost? For example, a black federal agent shoots Ashli Babbitt and no one cares. A conservative challenges a liberal, “Imagine if the races were reversed.” The liberal just laughs because he is not concerned with upholding race-blind laws. He is anti-white. For this reason, I believe we should attack progressives and many conservatives as anti-white. If you find yourself about… Read more »
That is exactly what I am saying. The conservatives are playing by the rules that were written in the Enlightenment and at the founding. The Progressives are playing by new rules that were never agreed upon, that were hiding in the shadows and only recently have been fully unmasked and unveiled. So, I agree with you. The only difference is, we call them names not to slander and obsfucate, but to clarify, identify and illuminate. Anti-white racist! The other set of rules are: Whoever holds power enforces the rules by kicking out the enemy. We are 100% in agreement. Might… Read more »
Their rules are: friend/enemy all else be damned, power uber alles, and use it or lose it. Conservatives don’t play by those rules that I have seen.
Conservatives hit a wall when they try to play by the progressive rules because at a certain point you have to fundamentally abandon the idea of objective truth. Note that while liberals routinely say “all conservatives are racist”, conservatives will never counter with “all liberals are pedophiles”. It’s always a more rationally defensible but milquetoast “Well gawrsh, now sure I know plenty of liberals who are good people, but I kinda think some of them might be promoting child molestation by hiring child molesters in the schools.” Obviously not all liberals are pedophiles, but fighting liberals on their own terms… Read more »
“By what authority” has always been some combination of force and morality. You need both.
The managerial class is rapidly losing its moral authority, so it will rely ever more on force. Wax is an example of this.
But every open use of force reduces our rulers’ moral authority. It’s a vicious cycle.
Well put. Default violence is an admission of illegitimacy and the last refuge of a diminishing power.
Outstanding commentary, Z. I might point out a few things about the conflict between Galileo and the church – the clergy were not necessarily the bad guys in that. They did not fear “the devil at your elbow” – they feared the heretic. Not the petty criminals that infested the politics of their day; rather, the poisoned minds. Truly harmful heresies could spread at the speed of a fast horse and the printing press could put them in the hands of everyone in the village in a day. Today heresies propagate at the speed of light through the internet. Feminism… Read more »
FWIW, I’m Catholic. The claim that, “If the church controlled the narrative, I don’t think we’d have half the crushing issues we have today,” is simply wrong. The bulk of our issues come from the church’s control of the narrative, pre renaissance. The reason the protestant heresy happened and had traction was due to abysmal church leadership, and the consequences of that poor leadership.
An excellent and unique article largely because it raises a question others rarely broach–On whose authority? In attempting to answer that question, allow me to don my postmodern dunce cap, the likes of which is worn by the vast majority of the Power Structure’s intellectuals. Authority is not an objectively real and justified element of any society. Rather, it is a linguistically constructed micronarrative embedded in a much broader system of discourse. “Authority” (we must use scare quotes), whether it be divine, democratic or something else, is nothing more than the ineluctable outcome of a massive exchange of signs and… Read more »
Ostei: This may be off base, or not relevant to your comment, but it made me think of the fiat currency concept. To wit: there was the real “authority” (value) of the dollar based on gold (real in that it can be seen, touched, felt) and this was agreed to by (or forced upon) the participants at Bretton Woods circa 1944. Come 8/15/1971 (another date some might say lives in infamy), the gold window closed, the dollar fiat currency was born, and deemed to be the authority…just because someone said so, and which we all (now +/- 144 nations) accept… Read more »
That is indeed relevant, SISL. I would only add that the authority of 1971, although it was merely spoken as regards the currency, still stemmed from the democratic discourse (keeping to pomo terminology). This democratic discourse was the dominant narrative and the subject peoples were bound up in it. Still, the logic enmeshed in that narrative manifested a certain rationality because democracy was still plausible at that time. That is no longer the case. All intelligent, openminded people can see that we are now in a post-democratic discourse where raw/naked power determine authority. But, at the end of the day,… Read more »
“by what authority?” Might makes right. We had freedom of speech when WASP’s (who considered it important) imposed it. WASP defeat by Jewish-led multiculturals in the struggle for possession of the control nodes of American civilization led to the imposition of what the latter considered important: censorship and cultural suppression of European people, preparatory to our planned enserfment and miscegenated extinction. The world is permanent clan war, permanent tribal war, permanent ethnic war, permanent religious war, and permanent race war. Humanity gets fat, lazy, and stupid during the brief lulls when empire suppresses the natural tendencies of the sub-imperial local… Read more »
“…. just another oleaginous rumpswab” (from the Taki piece) One can only hope Ruger reads it…. Ruger doesn’t see the need to justify his accusations, because he assumes that his audience— at least, all the right-thinking people in it— share the same radical egalitarian value system he does. That assumption— assuming that all good people will agree with him— attributes a universality to the radical egalitarian values he espouses, which appears to lend them credibility and authority. If all good people believe it— (especially in an academic environment, which all right-thinking people know reflects elite, expert opinion)— then it must… Read more »
The greatest difficulty of the Perfect Equity For All In All Things cult is that their proposed arrangements aren’t actually equal. If person A is more talented and makes more effort but is forced to have equal outcomes to person B (who is less talented and/or makes less effort), person A has been made unequal to be person B (who is in fact privileged.) Team-based work often reflects this reality, resulting in one person doing all the work while the others reap equivalent benefits. Interestingly, managerial elite types know this from experience but seem to believe they can have their… Read more »
Harrison Bergeron is the desired outcome.
Exactly! They’re discriminating against Whites, in order to “fix” supposed discrimination against Blacks. But if discrimination is wrong, aren’t they just substituting one wrong for another?
And yeah: anyone not blinded by PC dogma recognizes that people, and people-groups, aren’t equal. Progs have to keep maintaining a high level of not-noticing in order to believe otherwise.
The real Bill: Not merely racial egalitarianism, but all egalitarianism is unnatural. As Zman wisely notes, modern egalitarianism assumes everyone should benefit equally from society. That ‘fairness’ (by whoever’s definition) is the highest principle. We are not equal in genetics or ability or temperament or behavior. We cannot and ought not benefit equally from others’ labor or intellect. One of the West’s major mistakes was exporting not merely its culture and beliefs, but its scientific and industrial developments. The third world population explosion (green revolution, antibiotics) is on us.
Yep: individuals are unequally-endowed in virtually every human trait, as are racial and ethnic groups. Men are differently endowed than women. Life isn’t “fair” in that sense.
That’s why the notion of ever attaining “equity”— equality of outcome— is so absurd.
Like it or not, life simply isn’t like that. Our grandparents knew that.
The Left’s ongoing search for Egalitarian Utopia is an indication of seriously-deranged thinking. In a sane society, it would have its own category in the DSM.
In a sane society, most all those true believers in equity and equalitarianism would be *dead*. You can only have such beliefs in a reasonably safe world—one that your “betters” produced. A world where you can live off another’s efforts, and get away with it. In the old days, men’s unequal endowments meant that they had to protect home and hearth and kill something to bring home to eat. Women were damn glad to see such unequal endowments! Same goes in today’s world. I challenge anyone to simply stare about their room and not find many things that better men… Read more »
“Anytime we find an inequality in outcome, that’s all that’s necessary to show that discrimination has occurred against the under-performing group.” Unless inequality in outcome constitutes Asians, or members of a certain Tribe, having better average outcomes than the villainous White goyem. Our progressive overlords tend to simply ignore it when Asians in America do better than Whites on certain measures (income, crime rates, out-of-wedlock birthrates, etc.). The impressive averages that Asians demonstrate cause a lot of problems for that whole “White Privilege” narrative, so it’s best to pretend that Asians don’t exist. Meanwhile, on the rare occasions when our… Read more »
Indeed! Asians screw up the prog narrative by succeeding like they do.
Could that be why Blacks are so fond of ganging up on them and beating them up?
And for sure, there’s a tremendous amount of anti-White hatred behind the “movement for equity and social justice”. We’re resented for our superiority-of-achievement, which history documents and which can’t be denied.
That’s why the Left has seized on the “evil slaveowner” trope: it gives them a “legitimate” (from their twisted pov) reason to condemn and disparage us.
I don’t want to speculate too much as to the motives behind “teens” (to borrow one of the media’s ridiculous euphemisms) committing so many attacks on Asians. My own suspicion is that “teens” tend to view Asians as soft targets unlikely to fight back (or be armed). Positing that “teens” might be angry over the way that Asians screw up the prog narrative is probably giving “teens” credit for more thinking than they are wont to do. That said, envy/resentment of Asian success almost certainly plays a role in some of those attacks. But I reiterate that it’s difficult for… Read more »
IQ as an analytical tool is probably obsolete. I guess it still provides usefulness in judging one’s academic potential. And from there how much money you can make or gadgets you can create via your analytical brain power. But it seems to have come into a blind alley. Rather, the vaccination is a real life contemporaneous measure of intelligence, and the Tribe largely failed it if Israel’s high vaccination status is factually reliable. At minimum, what it suggests is that a high conventional IQ no longer provides an indication of a person’s true intelligence. Could be that IQ testing is… Read more »
IQ was never a be all and end all. If it was, life would be much simpler. However, it is a necessary condition as vs a sufficient condition.
You seem to hint at *new* measurements of intelligence which entail new definitions. I’m not aware of such that have not been taken to task. Intelligence to me still seems to be the “ability to solve complex problems quickly”.
I interpret Falcone’s comment to mean the ability to think for oneself in stressful and confusing circumstances. The vaccination center as a risk assessment test and a test in a person’s ability to understand the wisdom of forfeiting bodily sovereignty. A person who can solve complex problems quickly may still be a lemming who can be lead over a cliff if left to their on devices. Hi suspect whites are very high in dimensions of IQ that relate to good long term outcomes for the group. Even though some groups may focus on the group, that doesn’t mean they are… Read more »
[…] ZMan looks at the Big Picture. […]
Apparently academics welcome a diversity of opinion, except when such opinion is “racist”, based upon “outdated science” or otherwise anathema to Official Dogma.
I wish Dr. Wax great success. Remember the old saying: Even bad publicity is good publicity. If you’re going down, go down swinging, and take as many of the bastards with you as you can, Amy.
“Government is force.” – I don’t know who quoted that but it’s the most accurate representation of our reality. “Because I said so” is the most honest expression that can be made. Too honest for our society to hear, hence the “muh democracy” witch doctors attempting to give blessings to the use of force. In the words of Mao, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The current elite, like old lines of kings, simply inherited a system that like all forms of government, rests on people with guns pointed at the population. You fail to pay… Read more »
The take-home lesson is that either your tribe or nation controls the machinery of state violence and uses it against its enemies, or hostile tribes and nations will use it against you. The alternative is to simply not have inside your country enemy tribes or nations who want to destroy you, but that would be racist (only if you are European).
Bingo! Democracy is just tribal raiding parties formalized with paperwork and in slow motion.
The second take-away is that violence works. You really do get what you want if you stick to it. (See BLM protests).
Horace: Well said. We may not want to rule anyone (classic “I just want to be left alone”) but if we don’t, someone else will fill the void and rule others and us. Satanists and leftists love a vacuum.
Aw, the struggle of the atheist. It is fascinating watching so many supposedly “smart” people twist themselves into intellectual knots in order to avoid accepting simple truths.
emphasis on “simple”…
“There’s an Invisible Man in the Sky because I want there to be!” 🙂 This is a prime example of the logical fallacy called “Argument from ignorance.”
Believe what you wish. Yes, we atheists cannot explain everything, nor do we purport to, at least if we are intellectually honest. Axioms must exist if we are to have any form of knowledge. These are usually, if not always, unprovable assertions about the nature of reality.
‘Intellectually honest”? I’ve yet to meet one. All got a grudge, a different belief system, or a buried hurt.
Nonsense. The invisible man in the sky is an article of faith. You have no faith, this is fine, there have always been non-believers—but you also have no explanations to some of the deepest mysteries of the universe and man’s development and place in that universe. In reality, as you like to use the term, you too place a great deal of “faith” in “unprovable/unproved” theories/explanations, and in these you claim to be superior to the benighted’s reliance on their “faith”. This too is acceptable, but you have no more claim to understanding fundamental truth than those individuals you decry… Read more »
Faith and science are diametric opposites: two different and mutually-incompatible ways of attempting to understand the Universe. Science does ‘take things on faith’, in the sense of tentatively accepting unproven hypotheses about the nature of reality. The difference is, that the scientist is (or should be) always ready to give up his faith, if evidence arises that warrants doing so. ‘Losing faith’ in a particular theorem does not signal a breakdown in the scientific method; on the contrary, that’s precisely how science advances. Science can even be agnostic, as in Richard Fineman’s statements about quantum physics (close paraphrase): ‘If you… Read more »
@The real Bilk: Whether it is technically correct or not, the hyper-rationalist perspective that you promote denies any objective meaning in our universe and, once adopted by enough people who matter, ultimately leads to the nihilistic society that ours has become. Human beings evolved to be religious; as such, hyper-rationalism has no long-term staying power unless it too becomes a religion of sorts. It seems we’re better off putting our faith in a Higher Power if only because it (ideally) deters grossly fallible humans from trying to make gods of themselves.
Science is only believing what can be demonstrated to be true
Nonsense. Science only deals with the physically or materially measurable. Nothing else. You need to use metaphysics even to begin “science” and science cannot measure metaphysics. Yet metaphysics is just as true if not more so in the se.se of being more fundamental.
How is it being intellectually honest to relegate the entirety of Christian theology into something as simplistically glib as “an invisible man in the sky”?
Tells me you haven’t done much reading of the great theological works. Not saying you have to believe any of them, but you should at least be honest enough to admit that these guys had/have arguments that are often unassailable and far more durable and profound and persuasive than anything an atheist has ever come up with.
The Big Bang Theory? really? That’s the best the atheists got?
There is a huge body of evidence supporting the Big Bang theory. Scientists can explain in great detail why they believe it to be true: why they believe it to be the best explanation for what we’re observing about the Universe. Describing theological arguments as “unassailable” simply isn’t accurate. Theologians start out trying to ‘prove’ something they’re already committed to believing. They’re constructing arguments in a deliberate effort to support a pre-ordained conclusion. By contrast, scientists start out following demonstrable facts, and are only committed to believing what can be supported by factual evidence. And are ready to surrender their… Read more »
Everything came from nothing and as 10 billion years (relatively speaking) was stirred in along the way, everything got more and more complex. Voila – here we are at some point in the meaningless time and space continuum.
Big Bang, or great expansion, is a theory not fundamentally different than Genesis of the Bible. You assume a void and a great singularity and then an unexplained “expansion”. Genesis simply states that God created the universe from nothing.
Science then says we know all about this because we can figure out how, given nothing, everything from there seems logical—at least after a few million years of cool down.
I don’t particularly care one way or another, but I won’t worship on the alter of “scientists” nor take their acolytes—the scientists—word for it.
Big bang was first proposed by a priest, and ridiculed be ause it was too close to “fiat lux.” My how times have changed.
It’s “intellectually honest” because I want to know about what can be observed, tested, measured, verified. The “invisible man” is a term of derision yes, but I challenge you to examine the tenets of your religion (or indeed, nearly any other religion or mystical belief) and tell me with a straight face that they aren’t as batshit crazy as the man in the sky. Virgin birth? Raising the dead? Lest I be accused of trashing only Christianity: Mohammed the goatherd visited by Archangel Gabriel and is anointed Prophet? I’m fated to be reborn into a new life, a series of… Read more »
Falcone
The Big Bang Theory is the only time scientists believe in “magic”.
I certainly don’t have any answers or solutions, but if someone could explain how one gets “something” from “nothing”, I’m all ears.
I’m not sure there’s a final solution to the pendulum. While I recognize the value in searching for the ‘right’ ideas, I think it should be seen as a necessary and perpetual struggle to maintain civilization. Iow, I doubt there’s a finish line, an end of history. Besides, who wants an end? It wouldn’t be heaven or earth— it would be the grave. Gotta keep that tomb empty lol. More topically, I do believe this is still a Christian civilization, but I think it’s become infected with a twisted notion of martyrdom, as if dying for the faith is the… Read more »
I’ve seen no evidence of a “pendulum” in terms of politics/society. I believe it is a downhill slope to insanity, a race to the bottom. I could be talked into believing there are little flat spots where we catch our breath every couple of decades.
Cthulhu swims leftward to infinity.
There’s this idea in the back of my mind that civilization is insane, satanic, fallen, etc., but I try to ignore it lol.
If these things have lives like the flesh, maybe they’re renewed in the same way. Like generations in a family. Idk.
All I know is we weren’t put here to commit suicide.
There actually is an “axiom of the Universe”, or more precisely, an axiom of life on Earth. And that is . . . “That which works, persists.” And all forms of life exist within an environment, and that local environment is the dominant determinant of what “traits”, be they individual or societal, have proven to “work” in the uniqueness of that environment over a long enough period of time (typically a minimum of a few dozen generational cycles). And, once again, “work” in this context means significantly contributes to the survive and thrive imperative of that local cohort of the… Read more »
I would only add that good models need to be strongly guided by prior reality and tightly judged how closely their output aligns with future reality.
Any model failing to do this is mere fantasy, which leads to insanity like the coof hysteria.
And the climate modeling that gave us global warming. May the next Maunder minimum comense post haste.
Seeing masking ramp up here, and management just reinstated a mask mandate for in the office (even though only 3 people have actually returned).
Unfortunately, they will remain crazy longer than we can survive.
According to the most recent models, in my lifetime alone:
we started a new ice age,
acid rain did something bad,
the hole in the ozone layer killed all of the penguins in Antarctica,
global warming killed all of the coral reefs and cuddly polar bears,
I died from Covid three times (after infecting/ killing my parents 1.5 times), and,
Joe Biden won the most votes of any president, ever.
…and white cops have shot and killed more black people than moustache guy.
That one may actually be true.
Agree on the modeling argument. A successful model should have high descriptive and predictive value, for whatever (presumably) real world system it purports to model. This observation remains as valid whether you are considering one of Einstein’s arcane theories or your folk wisdom of what makes women tick. The brain is, by one definition, an organ that seeks to create and keep up to date a reasonable model of the reality it lives in. That’s a survival value. All models are imperfect (or “wrong”) but some are useful. Even life might be argued to be a model. The genome of… Read more »
All models produce what you tell them to produce. Not much more to it than that. We’ve had much experience recently with models involving the weather (Climate Change) and disease (Covid). These models reflect what scientists believe, and therefore program into them. Problem is that the phenomenon under “study” may be of such a complex nature as to exceed current human understanding, and hence simulation. And as far as scientists following the data and changing their minds when the data “tells them to”, nothing has been shown to be further from the truth. Scandal after scandal, failure after failure have… Read more »
The auto manufacturing business (like many other such commodity businesses) is highly competitive. This means that engineers are continually optimizing the design of critical components in order to achieve design goals at minimum cost. Almost all of this work is now performed using sophisticated engineering models that trade off such things as structural strength/integrity with material type and shape/thickness. This includes items like the steering train and critical suspension components. Your life on the highway at 65 mph is literally dependent upon these models being viable and suitably accurate enough to risk getting the car every morning. There are far… Read more »
Yes, but do those models (really tools of engineers by your description) do the wide spread damage that of my example of modeling of disease and weather? I think not. Nonetheless, the basic truth as I stated, that modeling and models produce what the modeler wants them to produce is basically correct. The modeler “assumes” he understands the phenomenon and programs the model with a number of given inputs and then looks at his outputs (again based upon his “understanding”). The tool is useful only if his understanding is basically correct. Engineers get paid to produce useful and working products.… Read more »
Yes to all the skeptics that properly caution that bad models equal bad prediction, and corrupt modeling yields intentionally false or misleading output. But just because someone does it wrong doesn’t invalidate all of modeling science, and almost all diagnostic and remedial medicine today is based upon modeling the outcomes of millions of patient episodes, so don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fundamental choice in today’s topic is that you can study philosophical history out the wazoo and hope to get an inkling of idealist perfection, or you can buckle down and do the hard work necessary… Read more »
The elites are fighting against reality, which of course, includes race differences and biology, but also against nature itself. That’s a very tall task they’ve taken on, combating something that won’t budge. (“and yet it DOESN’T move.”)
Wolf Barney: Was just trolling over at Sailer, and saw yet another example of how both left and putative right proceed from only slightly different variants of different fallacious assumptions. Sailer (and HBDers and most conservatards) mock or castigate the left for denying biological reality, while they themselves deny the same. They will easily agree that if other races’ skin all turned White, it would not change their genetic makeup or social dysfunction – witness black albinos. But they simultaneously aver that if those social behaviors changed while their physical appearance did not, we would achieve peace on earth and… Read more »
I also read and occasionally comment (really troll) over at Sailer. Not because what he writes is interesting but because he so very well represents a kind of thinking. In essence, Sailer believes that “white” values are the best. Indeed, he’s oddly chauvinistic about it. He most certainly believes that blacks and Hispanics would be much better off adopting white values. (Whites would also be better off because of the lower crime.) Of course, he’s right in a sense, but, ironically, Sailer – Mr. HBD himself – doesn’t seem to understand that blacks and Hispanics can’t as a group live… Read more »
Citizen, I’ve seen many of your comments at Sailer’s site, and I appreciate them and agree with you, but I notice that Sailer doesn’t respond to you, although he does respond to a lot of other comments. Has he ever pushed back and defended his CivNat stance to you?
Yes, WB, I too have seen and profited from Citizen’s thoughtful ripostes to the pervasive CivNattery over there, and noticed the lack of engagement.
I don’t spend much time over there in the wake of the Coof debacle. Engagement aplenty there with posters the like of That Would Be Telling (You Off) [he didn’t like my modification to his handle. Heh.], but only occasionally drop by. Often enough, my posts would wind up in Mr. Sailer’s moderation queue, only appearing, if ever, a day or two later. I got the message…
Wolf, No, Sailer has never responded to any of my comments on: 1. The 50-year failure of colorblind civic national to move the country in its direction 2. Why whites shouldn’t think and organize as a group is every other group is doing the same 3. Whether he’s against white identity politic/organizing (he is) and, if so, what should whites do to protect themselves I’ve also never seen Sailer respond to anyone else who ask similar questions, which is why I’ve lost all respect for the guy. I don’t care that he disagrees with me and others, but he won’t… Read more »
May have to disagree somewhat. If Blacks did adopt White behavior (middle class White behavior) things would be better. Essentially pre-sixties America.
It wouldn’t change their genetics, sure. But that’s their problem. When those genetics are allowed social expression it becomes everyone’s problem.
And just how exactly would you force them to adopt our values? Sure, both blacks and whites would be better off. But we’d be better off doing a lot things, like executing violent teenagers so they couldn’t breed. Whites forced our values onto blacks as best that we could before the 1960s through a lot of effort and, occasionally, force. Do you really think that we could do that again? No chance. The deal should be: Is you want to live in our society, you have to live by our rules. But we don’t have will to impose that deal… Read more »
I am not saying it is possible in current AINO, just saying it happened before. We Jim Crowed before and it worked better for all.
Or we could just separate. Enough with the White Man’s Burden.
There is a lot of cost, energy and effort in getting blacks to hold to white middle class values. It’s a full time job for society. I agree that life superficially would be better if they did adopt these values, but the reality is it would mean every white would basically have to have a part time job getting blacks to stick to the program so life in fact would be worse off for these whites. Who wants to spend his life making sure blacks stick to the program? What kind of life is that? There’s no winning. We are… Read more »
“We are stuck with them and have to either let them drag us down or jettison them so we can keep aloft.”
A good start would be not paying them to breed. Barring that, real widespread scarcity could solve the problem more quickly than we imagine.
Thus the appeal of accelerationism.
Sailor, but I’m no expert on him, seems to do what many others do. He ignores contradictions to remain in good stead with the general crowd he caters to, or wishes to cater to. In the case of an HBDer, he just blithely ignores the logical contradictions of his application of HBD science, which in essence dictates significant biological determinism of behavior/culture. Others here are aware of this problem, but don’t fall into this contradiction, e.g., 3g4me.
you win again, gravity!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w4Ja_CiaXE&ab_channel=profbaratinha
As a graduate of the business school up Walnut Walk from the Penn Law School, I can tell you first-hand that I have never, in 35 years of doing business in finance, ever dealt with a Black lawyer. Not even an associate! The free market somehow deals with this problem. I wonder where all the Black Penn Law types end up. I’ve never seen one in the wild. The corporate/finance law business is just hard: long, brutal hours and pressure to bill/bill/bill. There’s no room for SJW B.S. in daily operations at major firms, despite their PR B.S. The minority… Read more »
We’re becoming fossils, Willard. I think the top law schools today are like 50% non white. At some point just the sheer number of them means they will start taking jobs at elites firms and handed over to elite clients. Who by then won’t be so elite because even they will have been dumbed down. Moral of the story is that the elite institutions like the Ivy League are doomed. The entire northeast and the dc area are. You can’t be physically located in a ghetto and not have the ghetto rub off on you like a kind of brain-eating… Read more »
Falcone: Smart fraction theory in a nutshell. As Z has so often written, we are facing a crisis in competency due to an increasing shortage of intellectually qualified White people. Due to abysmal White birth rates as well as massive social pressure and ideological indoctrination, this won’t be fixed anytime in our lifetimes. The rapidly shrinking capable fraction can no longer carry the rapidly increasing dumb and violent fraction.
There’s really no stopping this; just various means of avoidance and strategies for surviving it.
I’ll write this again.
Avoid living:
Near diversity;
Below hydroelectric damns/ tailing ponds;
Down wind from a nuclear power plant.
“Idiocracy” is 500 years early.
One of my kids attended an all day sports camp recently. I dropped him off early in the morning and picked him up about 12 hours later. Most of the kids are heading into their senior year of HS, so 17 and 18 year old young, white men. About 2/3 of the parents (both moms and dads) stayed to watch their kids, take photos and videos, cheer them on the entire day. They brought chairs and lunches and sat in the heat for 12 hours. My son told me it was funny and slightly annoying to hear the parents cheering… Read more »
Melissa: While White parental involvement is indicative of K selection strategy, this has also been perverted by Clown World. By the time kids are in their high teens they ought to be expected to behave with a certain degree of autonomy and responsibility. Not totally left to their own devices (brain is not fully matured, they’re highly susceptible to peer pressure, etc.) but helicopter parenting ought to be unnecessary. Too many White parents send their kids to daycare or leave them with the Guatemalan nanny when they ought to be home inculcating their core cultural and intellectual values. Instead, they… Read more »
All of that is strange to me I also suspect, based on my experience, that there is something of a correlation between a helicopter parent and a parent who may be open or susceptible to having an affair. Because that is all I saw at these sporting events with the kids. Parents getting tipsy and dad hitting on the mom of someone else, and who knows where it all ended up. But we know where it all ended up because my daughter would tell me that, yeah, they ended up having an affair. Etc etc. I have to wonder if… Read more »
Yeah, l’m thinking of all the one year olds birthday “parties”, I’ve been invited to. No thanks. Seems to start there.
There are a lot of competent people. A town like Boise, for example, doesn’t grow overnight unless there are competent people there to do the work. I am sure you are seeing the same thing in Texas; things actually work (except the woke windmills). But they are the wrong kind of people. It seems to be that simple. Even Sailer to his credit realized the true diamonds in the rough were middle class white high schoolers with high test scores but with no interest in going to elite universities and living in the NE, and they wouldn’t be admitted anyway… Read more »
It starts at the very top and works down. There are plenty of higher level ability folk mismatched with some mid level employment, but at the very top are the people who make important decisions and such. We name names here all the time. These people may very well run circles around me, but I’m not in a position to make your life miserable as say a top politician would be.
” I wonder where all the Black Penn Law types end up. I’ve never seen one in the wild.”
The various offices of the different levels of government. Which explains a lot.
My observation is they start as associates at a firm a click or two above where they should. They stick around a little longer than they should, but end up moving on to an in-house position or government/non-profit work. Government law is very diverse. Most of the work is administrative and the hours are what you expect from government.
That may explain why at 2pm on week days the bars in Center City Philadelphia fill up with black city, state and federal lawyers. Great hours.
isn’t that pretty much what obma did?
Maybe he was Joe’s tutor in “putting the lid on it”.
Yep. The firms hire a few for show and then let nature take its course.
Big law is absolutely brutal for the even smartest guys. Blacks never stand a chance either intellectually or willingness to put in insane hours.
This is what I’ve always perceived. The AA bunch get hired to check the boxes, but then the competent get looked for/to to do the work. However, those “show” positions are being filled and vacancies are getting scarce. Government is filled up at State and Federal levels with AA hires. This keeps the lid on for now and produces a faux middle class for lower class workers.
It can’t last forever and I’m thinking we are seeing the result in many organizations/institutions.
It’s just amazing that Laquisha’s juju so powerful she can bring down the Ivy League of all things. And this is the law school lol. Not the undergrad.
Anyway, couldn’t happen to a better bunch of a-holes. They worshipped these animals before going between the sheets with them and now they’re paying the price. Essentially, the Ivy League caught an STD and doesn’t know how to get rid of it.
Hoo rah!
Ed Dutton explained that universities go through a cycle: first all the smart, curious and creative guys move in, the nerds. When a degree consequently becomes prestigious, the rich kids move in and the university becomes basically a finishing school for the higher bourgeoise, teaching them the table manners and the opinions they need to succeed in Cloud People life. The smart people flee to a new university, the new university outshines the old one, the rich kids move in, etc. By the time of the English Reformation, conformists had made places like Oxford and Cambridge branches of the Established… Read more »
Yeah but Cambridge and Oxford didn’t have Laquisha !!! She is a special kind of stupid, and I doubt even the dullest rich Brit was ever so hopeless. Look at Joy Reid and that lady who was up before congress talking about trannies. This is their best. At least some of the black men have street smarts like Don King or even Sharpton who can can scam a living. They dont get invited to college, typically. But someone like Obama does who was a bit of a hermaphrodite, and after all is said and done all he was was a… Read more »
White peoples insane obeisance to the sacred jogger has been going for several decades, but has really hit ludicrous speed ever since that damn Kenyan arrived on the scene. It is absolute exhibit A for not being able to speak (or practically think) of obvious, observable reality. The inability to speak, let alone discuss these truths, along with the decisions (of course made by our betters) to basically not hold the jogger population in practically any way responsible for their actions and dysfunctions (and concomitantly blame Whites for all of it) has encouraged the substantial criminally inclined and violent proportion… Read more »
If only our people had listened to Albert Schweitzer.
Is he the guy who said pick your own dam*ed cotton?
I’d say he pretty much inferred it…
Some of the heresies from the complaint: – Telling Jaime Gallen L’12 that Black students don’t perform as well as white students because they are less well prepared, and that they are less well prepared because of affirmative action. – Emailing Gregory Berry L’10, a Black student, that “[i]f blacks really and sincerely wanted to be equal, they would make a lot of changes in their own conduct and communities.” – Stating in class that people of color needed to stop acting entitled to remedies, to stop getting pregnant, to get better jobs, and to be more focused on reciprocity.… Read more »
Except number one.
She should have told them that yes, blacks are congenitally underprivileged in the brain department and that there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it even, if you grind homework like a Korean. You’re wasting your time in my classroom and everybody else’s too, so please pack up your stuff and leave this instant.
Felix: Spot on. Yet another variant of what I wrote a few comments earlier. Even if they stopped their whining and emulated White behavior, they would still fall short. They would still be denying their basic instincts. They would still look and be biologically different. Jim Crow laws recognized and managed this. Yes, blacks were somewhat better behaved back then . . . because they were forced to a certain degree of social conformity despite their genetic inclinations. NOT because Johnson et al destroyed the magic phantom of the black intact family – but because they are a biologically distinct… Read more »
one thing that is counter-intuitive about American blacks, is that they behave worse and are less intelligent than their African brethren – despite having white admixture. now i am talking about the africans that are here, not the overall population of africa (although who knows how they compare to that larger cohort).
That can happen when you import the low-watt peoples who lost their wars with other low-watters.
Difficult to tease out as conflated with immigrant bias—both in IQ and behavior. But I agree, those a blacks who come here, and I’ve seen/met a few, are definitely different from American Blacks as we perceive them typically.
Felix goes slightly wrong in his comment. It is true that the average Black is not as intellectually prepared as a White for Law School, or indeed, any cognitively demanding task. But there is still the chance that highly intelligent Blacks exist, that would be equal to the task. We know from the IQ data that such a Black among Blacks is statistically very rare, but the law of large numbers dictates that a few will exist. Of course, the entire issue of unqualified minorities in demanding positions would not even exist if a strict merit system existed. We all… Read more »
There was a push some time back to push The Great Books of Western Civilization back into the standard canon of college campuses. These books ranged from the Ancient Greeks to the modern existential philosophers, and was considered a way for students to be able to participate in the great debates. The core question, ‘by whose authority’, was one of those questions, and answers spanned from the State of Nature, Divine Revelation, Pure Reason, to brute force. Modern academics simply assume the right side of history with no reflection, and therefore brute force is always acceptable for higher moral beings… Read more »
Some times when talking about the war in the Ukraine, I tell a normie that the Russians are winning and let us have faith that right makes might. Poor Ukraine, sucks to be on the wrong side of history
Black people don’t have bad feelings about the differences between them and us. They just leverage white sentimentality for immediate advantage, like the street beggar who snatches your iPhone when you put it in your weak/ignored hand so you can dig in your front pocket for change.
They *endlessly test* society, propriety, “whiteness,” etc. for error. They’re natural defectors. It’s their best quality. But also it’s a problem.
Great Taki post. Please, please, God, let Greenblatt somehow read it and see the comparison to Jared Taylor and Amren with the ADL.
Deep down, Theodore Ruger understands that there is no way could truly even approach the intellect of Amy Wax or Jared Taylor. In a just world, Ruger would be standing next to the crazy antifa guy with a boot on his head, protesting at an Amren event, employed at a car wash.
Excellent post Melissa. Just to be accurate, (and maybe a little annoying) Zman compared Amren to the ACLU, not ADL.
For the future legend printers, I humbly suggest Prof Wax’s closing line as she holds up the bell curve graph should be “And yet it tolls.”
I wish it weren’t so but I believe people like Amy Wax are fighting the battle of the Alamo and are destined to become martyrs. Amy Wax is an honorable person who speaks her ideas and thoughts to her peers and students, in the modern academic system this is no longer tolerated.
Well, if it is the Alamo, here’s to hoping a Battle of San Jacinto soon follows.
Enthusiastically seconded, but in all honesty, it is a hope somewhat wistfully sustained.