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Aug. 14, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:29
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #718
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, episode 718 on today, the 14th of August, 2023.
Today, I'm your host, Harry, and I'm joined by Stelios.
Hello.
And we're going to be talking about the Mexican culture wars, our trusted experts, and how the New College of Florida have abolished gender studies.
Well, hey, so there's some good news today.
I'm trying to give some good news every once in a while.
It's probably for the best, because sometimes we feed our audience some pretty dense black pills.
So, I think with that, let's just get straight into the news, shall we?
Right, okay.
Now, let's start with the first black pill today.
Apparently, wokeness is getting global.
It's going global.
Now, like every other country in the world, Mexico has a long list of problems.
But it has decided, or at least some officials of its high court have decided to import a further problem to it.
Wokeness.
Now, prominent politicians have made gender critical remarks that have been interpreted as political violence.
And this is not just a criticism that you would see from a generic leftist position.
They have been actually sanctioned and they have been made public examples out of it.
What, for making gender critical remarks?
Yes.
This is while they have the cartels in Mexico.
Well, there are priorities of problems, apparently, and people give their distinctive answers as to what they consider... People being murdered on the internet in various creative and brutal manners is here, but, you know, you said a no-no, so that's up here.
As we said, there are hierarchies of problems and hierarchies of values by which we examine problems, and people give their distinctive answers.
Now, what is key here is that Some gender-critical remarks have been interpreted as political violence.
Now, speaking of ridiculous linguistic tricks, visit our website.
For five pounds a month, you can have access to all our content and subscribe and watch basically everything.
We have really lovely series.
And you can actually watch Conceptual PsyOps, the Linguistic Subversion of Wokeness, which is symposium number 28, I did with Josh and Bo.
And we examine the mechanics of language use and how the language of wokeness is basically a totalitarian attempt to destroy our minds, prevent people from thinking and be able to criticize The establishment, and by all means, watch it.
It's a great discussion.
Now, back to our topic.
Yep.
Now, according to officials of the Mexican High Court, gender-critical remarks constitute political violence.
Now, we will talk about two people who have been charged.
This is Rodrigo Ivan Cortez and Gabriel Quadri.
Now, both have been associated with, let's say, center-right parties.
Excuse me, please.
Yep.
Okay.
Now, if we go on the next link, we will see in Britannica here, the National Action Party is basically a conservative Mexican political party with close ties with, to the Roman Catholic Church.
It generally supports minimal government intervention in the economy.
So, I may be wrong, but it seems to me to be something like center-right, a party with, you could say, conservative social values, right-wing social values, and it's a bit economically liberal.
So, something like that.
Now, let's go and check our first case, which is the case of Rodrigo Iván Cortés.
Okay.
Let's make the case summary, okay?
Rodrigo Iván Cortés is a former member of the Mexican Congress and leader of political advocacy organization National Front for the Family, or FNF.
Beginning in September 2022, the FNF expressed concern on Twitter that a bill presented by Salma Luevano, a congressional representative who identifies as transgender, constituted a grave violation of rights to freedom of speech and religious freedom in Mexico.
The bill, ...aimed to penalize the propagation of Christian teaching on sexuality as a form of hate speech.
It gathered significant attention when Luevano presented the bill wearing the vestments of a Catholic bishop.
Luevano filed a complaint against Cortes, arguing that a series of nine social media posts on Twitter and Facebook constituted a violation of the right to be acknowledged as a woman and a denial of identity.
Mexico's Specialized Regional Chamber of the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Power found that the posts constituted gender-based political violence as well as digital, symbolic, psychological, and sexual violence against Slavona.
There's very little I can do to comment on this other than laugh because 1.
I often hear from Americans who are trying to, shall we say, excuse demographic change that's going on in America from, you know, migration, legal or illegal, from down south of the border coming up north to the USA about how, don't worry, It'll all work out in the end because all of these people migrating over are actually really culturally conservative.
Therefore, we'll just get more Republican voters.
My point being that, well, whether I don't care the quality of the people that I'm being replaced by, I wouldn't want to be replaced in the first place.
Also, this seems to suggest that the same problems that America is facing right now are also being faced by Mexico.
Suggesting, as always, that Sadly, as much as I would like it to be the other way around, it is not necessarily the will of the people that guides these things, it's the will of those in charge, your representatives.
And it's just amusing.
Beyond that, when it comes to transgender issues, Neil Mohan prevents me from saying any more.
Okay, but what is interesting is the kinds of violence that have been associated with remarks such as that, because it is, it says, They were accused of political violence, digital violence, symbolic violence, psychological and sexual violence against Levana.
For a single comment?
Yeah, for some comments.
For some comments, supposedly, he mentally graped her.
Yeah, but what is symbolic violence?
That is one issue.
And the issue to be judged is, why is it symbolic violence?
Why?
Why is it not symbolic violence to dress up like a Catholic bishop to make fun of the Catholic Church while saying that Christianity is spreading across hate speech?
Why is that not symbolic violence?
Well, it's pretty simple to me.
It's because of the fact that the people who have the cudgel of the law say it isn't, whereas with this they say it is.
Symbolize, all of these are just nonsense terms made up so that they can have something to point to to explain why it is that you need to be punished now.
Exactly.
And I think that this confirms a hypothesis I have about the woke movement.
It seems to me basically that it is just a shameless divide and conquer against the people.
Yes.
So we have all sorts of groups that are called protected groups, and someone protects them.
Those people who protect them are not necessarily members of these groups, but they grant them the power.
So if anyone told you about that, if I heard something like that, I would thought that a person would be making fun of me.
If I heard it, if I didn't see, you know, actual documentation for it, I would think that, you know, this doesn't happen.
This is just hearsay and it's completely wrong.
For the people who are the beneficiaries of this kind of action, I doubt that the terms used to excuse away why they get to be in charge and you don't really matter all of that much to them because deep down at the base of it, they know that it gives them what they want.
As you see that it is used blatantly, you know, shamelessly as a form of political assassination.
Now, let's continue.
It says, the chamber held that criticizing a transgender woman constitutes, open quote, undermining the political and electoral rights of women and the unencumbered exercise of their public office, close quote.
Now, this basically implies that there are people who run for office who are exempt from criticism.
How does it not follow?
I mean, I agree with you there.
And we know the kind of, you know, ideologies that are involved into it, where they are so all-encompassing and they try to interpret everything as a sort of oppression or through the eye of oppression and intersectionalism and basically any form of criticism, even if you talk about economic policies or, you know, social policies about stuff that have nothing to do with this issue, everything will boil down to this.
Rhetorically speaking, the other person will be able to, let's say, tell you that, well, listen, everything you're criticizing me because I actually see that you hate me for who I am.
So this is a way in which criticism is being completely destroyed.
And I repeat this, the chamber held, and these people are supposed to be representing justice, the chamber held that criticizing a transgender woman constitutes, open quotes, undermining the political and electoral rights of women and the unencumbered exercise of their public office, close quote.
Essentially, this means you have no freedom to criticize the government, which means that the government will not allow you to criticize.
And this shows the use of playing identity politics, because let's say that you want to exercise political influence and political power within a country, and you don't want people to criticize you, it's useful.
seen through that perspective, to have people who will be able to play these cards and say that, for instance, "No, no, every criticism of mine is a criticism of my identity.
You are denying me my identity." Well, it must be fun to make it so that people criticizing you is literally illegal.
Yeah.
Luevano, together with transgender-identifying representative Maria Clemente, has gained notoriety for fomenting unrest within Mexico's Congress, including an incident where Clemente, supported by Luevano, physically wrestled with the president of the chamber to force him into relinquishing control of a congressional meeting in an attempt to force the expulsion of another lawmaker.
They break the masks out.
Clemente also prompted International outrage by tweeting explicit videos of Clementa's own sex work, citing a right to freely share this kind of content on digital platforms.
Both of them come from a party called Morena that, if I'm not wrong, it's the ruling party of Mexico since 2018.
And it's, you could say, you know, it's basically, it pronounces to be left-wing.
It says basically it's anti-neoliberal and everything you would expect, basically.
I know people have often made the comparison and joke that politicians are like prostitutes, especially in the US when you've got these gigantic lobbying groups and anywhere really in the West where big financial and moneyed powers can basically buy whoever they want if they're in office, but you shouldn't actually be a prostitute as well or have a history of that or a history in pornography that's absolutely ridiculous
if you're getting to the point where you're literally being ruled by hedonistic degenerates with a history of of explicit pornography then you've just got to flush the toilet man it's all going down the drain let's watch the next link by rebel news says here um i i'm i'm trying to find out what i'm allowed to say for for yt no
Now, Rodrigo Ivan Cortes described a transgender legislator, Salma Luevano, as a man who self-ascribes as a woman, after Luevano proposed a bill which regards Christian views on sexuality as hate speech.
Now, you see here, this is Cortes on the left, and this is Luevano on the right.
Now, Luevano has dressed as a Catholic bishop, Mm-hmm.
To make a mockery of it.
To make a mockery of Christianity and say basically that the Roman Catholic Church is spreading hate.
Hatred.
And we see here it says legislation.
So the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico can soon expect to have pride flags adorning all of them, just like we have over here for the Church of England.
Morena party in Congress threatened to deem Christian teaching on sexuality as a form of hate speech.
So the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico can soon expect to have pride flags dawning all of them just like we have over here for the Church of England.
So look forward to that, Mexabros.
Luevano announced the bill while dressed as a popess, Biblia Todo reported.
You see this here.
To be To be fair, at this point, I'm sure the actual Pope would be all in favor of all of this, given some of the statements he tends to make.
I have no idea.
I wish that is not true, but I have no idea.
From what I've heard of the current Pope, it's not looking good.
Enough of speeches against our rights, Lovano said, the outlet noted.
The bill would deem any act conflicting with an individual's gender identity as an infraction, the report added.
In response to the legislation, FNF expressed concern on social media in a series of posts beginning in September 2022, which included a remark describing Luevano as a man who self-ascribes as a woman.
Luevano then filed a complaint against Cortes, arguing nine posts on Twitter and Facebook were a violation of the right to be acknowledged as a woman, constituting a denial of identity.
Former Congressman Cortes was charged for committing gender-based political violence.
Let's go on the next link and you will see where this led.
Now it says, on Wednesday, 9th of August, Mexico's highest court for electoral issues, the Superior Chamber of the Electoral Tribunal, charged Parab held the lower court's guilty verdict convicting Cortez of gender-based political violence, digital violence, symbolic violence, psychological violence, and sexual violence for his social media expression.
The Superior Chamber imposed a fine of 19,244 Mexican dollars, in addition to directing him to publish the court ruling and an apology drafted by the court on Twitter and Facebook daily for 30 days.
Cortez also must take a course on gender-based political violence and register on the National Registry of Persons Sanctioned in Political Matters Against Women.
There is a registry for that?
Yeah.
And there are courses.
So apparently this has been going quite a while.
Mexico's a joke country.
I'm sorry to break this to you.
Wokeness has been a cultural input of Mexico, sadly, to say this sadly.
Now let's watch the next video on GB News.
Now last Wednesday Mexico's highest court for electoral issues upheld the lower court's guilty verdict.
Cortes must pay a fine and publish the court ruling and an apology drafted by the court on Twitter and Facebook daily for 30 days.
So to discuss this I'm joined by lawyer Hermann Saucedo and writer Laura Lecuona.
Thank you both for joining me very much.
Germán, I'm going to come to you first about this.
This is a very scary case when it comes to the idea of freedom of speech and I think a lot of people assume that Mexico hasn't been infected by the culture wars in the way that we have over here.
Are we wrong?
Oh yes, we can see right now that it's true.
Sorry, I can come to either first, but Germán can I come to you first?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
As we can see, this case is radical.
Not only in that it punishes free speech, it makes compelled speech part of the punishment.
And we can see that this global ideological infection is not only part of the United States and of Britain, it's also part of Mexico and many other countries.
People tend to think of Mexico and other Latin American countries or maybe some Asian countries as exempt from this ideological virus, but that's not true at all.
The culture war is raging not only in the United States and Great Britain and in Europe, it's raging in the entire world.
It has consequences around the entire world.
So, as we can see, it's going to trickle down to the rest of the world.
There's an interesting point to be made here on the fact that this is a foreign import, the same way that a lot of the woke ideology is a foreign import over to the UK as well, which is that oftentimes people refer to America at the moment as the global American empire.
And they're one of the only empires that you can reasonably say in the world refuses to acknowledge itself as being an empire.
And I finished reading a book last night that we got early, because the author of it, a particular Welsh rug merchant, sent a load of copies to us early, which we really, really do appreciate.
And in that it's discussing the idea of cyclical history and as part of that you get the idea that you have particular groups who break out and form an empire or emerge at the end of an empire who have a particular way of life, a particular religion, a particular view of the world, that then later on when the empire emerges more globally and takes on more territory, becomes more universalist.
And you could say that with America, this kind of civil rights religion that has morphed into the woke semi-religion, if you want to refer to it that way, that we experience right now, did start out as something that was uniquely American, that related to American history and put things in a very American perspective that related to American history and put things in a very American perspective as a route to power for the elites who are in charge at the moment, a way for them
But it has been exported to the rest of the world as this more universalized religion, which is why it just makes no sense.
It makes absolutely no sense.
Why would Mexicans need to involve themselves in this kind of gender-based politics which was never, never existed?
Even five years ago if I'd heard this sort of thing coming from Mexico, I'd have, you know, said Balderdash to that entire idea.
The problem is that opposed to something like Christianity, Which is a very universalist religion and is very useful for trying to unite people and unite different people's spirits from different backgrounds and such.
Woke is the worst universal religion that I have ever seen, that anybody has ever imposed upon anybody.
Because without trying to overstep YouTube terms of service, it so clearly goes against the history of all of the nations that it's trying to be imposed on.
And also just against biological reality And I'm not saying anything in particular there, but it goes against people's own expressed empirical experience of reality.
That it's just terrible and creates these massive divisions in ways that other universalizing religions, or belief systems if you'd rather use that term, have not in previous empires.
It's just rubbish!
It's absolute rubbish!
I haven't read the book, but it stands to reason, let's say, or at least to anyone who has read at least some history, that wherever you have a, say, superpower, power, empire, call it what you want, you have the attempt to dominate.
Yes.
The people under whose sphere of influence and who are under your sphere of influence.
So I think that wokeness is a form of cultural domination because it does Actually, if you see, it spreads across the world.
And actually, I don't think it's universalistic because it's very divisive.
It's not a message.
That's why it attempts to be universalistic in the way that they try and export it elsewhere in the world.
But it's also so particular that it's rubbish.
But you see, it's always that some groups need to have protected rights and all this.
As a formulation of political science and political tactics, it's terrible.
It's absolutely terrible.
I mean, terrible from an instrumental perspective.
It's not terrible.
It works.
And that's the problem with it.
Well, no, it doesn't actually create unity in the peoples and it doesn't bond peoples together.
It only works because of the top-down legal powers.
It works insofar as the goal is a bad one.
It's to divide people.
Yes.
And to exert cultural dominance and domination on each of these countries.
Right.
Let's go and proceed because we will see that, sadly, this is not the only case.
It's not an isolated incident.
As we said, there is There is another case.
This is Gabriel Quadri.
This was Gabriel Quadri's apologies after calling Salma Luevano, sir.
Now, you see, this is a case where, you know, we have another politician who has basically two sources of conflict with Salma Luevano.
One is that On March 31st, the deputy for National Action Party, Gabrielle Caudry, was the subject of severe criticism due to his transphobic comment before the Chamber of Deputies.
Since during the session, the deputy called Salma Loevano as Sir, despite the fact that she identifies as a woman, which was condemned by different members of political parties positioned on both sides of the spectrum, mainly the National Regeneration Movement, MORENA, the institutional That's the first one.
Later, he asked for an apology.
He said it was an excess and a mistake, so from today on, I'm going to refer to her as a woman and as a deputy.
He also said that he had already asked for an apology following the expressions of rejection by various members of the House.
Now, this is one case, and if we go to the next one here, we will see another case, because what has happened is that From what I checked, since 2019, or somewhere there, the end of the previous decade, there is a law in Mexico that says that there should be 50% split between men and women within the Mexican Parliament.
So it's half men, half women.
I believe there's an Aristophanes play that goes a bit further than that.
Gabriel Quadri protested with that and said that, you know, some people here are not what they say they are, and this violates the law, and he was prosecuted.
Now, let's see.
Let's see here.
The highest electoral court in Mexico ruled that statements made by Quadri on Twitter about the situation are discriminatory, and ordered him to delete his tweets, issue a compelled public apology, and be registered as a gender-based political violator, censorship measures that clearly infringe on his civil and political rights as a Mexican citizen, and breach his international human right to free speech.
But if you see here, is that for standing up for women's opportunities, he could lose the right to run for office again, So if you are registered on that registry, you risk losing your right to seek office in the future.
And that register is just literally a register of official wrong think.
Exactly.
So if wokeness is entirely what we are saying, It is.
And it is.
It is a tool that those who are in power use in order to exert dominance upon those who are ruled.
What's to stop them from saying basically that anyone who disagrees with you is a political violator and loses a right to run for office?
That's just a question.
So the problem is that, you know, this is getting global and unless we counter-wokeness, this is going to escalate and there are going to be new stages on the culture war and this must be addressed.
All right.
Let's move on to the next one, shall we?
Let's bring that down.
Here we go.
All right.
So.
This segment is going to be somewhat of a follow-up to the first segment that I did on Friday where we were joined by Freya India and we were talking about young women being terrified of marriage because it relates to a lot of the information that I brought up there and it relates specifically to the idea of our beautiful trusted experts in the technocracy
that we live in currently, a lot of prestige and a lot of reverence is directed towards those that are deemed by our leaders as being experts.
That being that they have impressive technical knowledge, which they have gained through going through the institutions, academic or otherwise, that grants them some kind of certificate that says that you are the best at thinking about or knowing about these things.
Does being an expert now mean that you say something that is convenient for the government?
Yes.
Typically speaking, yes.
I was just asking.
Just checking to see if I live on another planet.
No, no.
You live on planet Earth, sadly.
Elon, get us to Mars already, for God's sake.
I want to get away from all this.
No, the experts, they have to go through the academies, and we know that the academies are slanted very much in one direction politically, certainly with social issues, and also with economic and other issues as well.
But the fact of the matter is, we can't trust the experts, not just because of the fact, that they are all politically biased, but also because when they try to flex their expertise, it turns out that they're rubbish at it, that they are terrible at the things that they are supposedly expert at.
And this will be an excellent example, an excellent exercise in exemplifying how...
Let me just say this, that it's marvelous to watch because when you have an academia, let's say, or the place where the experts are supposed to be.
Of people who cannot engage in dialogue because they think the dialogue is offensive.
Then, you know, they lose their ability to argue for particular views and it's just sad after a while.
That's sad, but it is wonderful to see that they are even terrible at doing that.
It turns out in the back-patting exercise that is modern academia, they can't even succeed at that.
They end up reaching around so far that they slap themselves in the face while trying to pat themselves on the back.
But before I go any further, let's look at some of the content, some of the videos that we have on the website.
Josh, as always, very, very consistent with his contemplation series.
This was one that he was expecting to be a lot more fun than it turned out to be, from what he told me.
So you were involved in this.
I heard the exact opposite.
It was way more fun.
Oh really because he was he's talking about cults here and he was thinking he was telling me in the office that he was expecting cults to be something that would just be a little bit of fun let's look into some of the silly cults and see the silly things that certain small groups of people believe and he found it a lot more depressing Or a lot more revealing than he initially intended it to.
How was this?
You were in this video.
This is just a marvellous video and we're talking about cults that worship cargo.
I mean, how more Mad Max can you get?
They actually worship cargo.
They glorify V8.
Wait, cargo as in what's in cargo shipments?
Cargo as in cargo.
Or just like the big cargo shipments and the cargo containers.
Just watch it.
Alright, okay.
It's marvellous.
I mean, to be fair, there is...
I've found that there's a weird new aesthetic emerging in British cities.
Have you seen this as well?
Last time I was in Manchester, in the Manchester Square in the middle of the city centre, where there used to be, there still are the fountains, there used to be a big ferris wheel there, now they have this weird ...load of cargo shipment containers that have been placed in such a way that they can add pubs and such into it.
It's a form of inclusivity!
You have people who worship cargo, you need to have cargo so they feel that they're welcome.
I suppose the people are coming over on the boats when they get into the cities, they want to retain that feeling of still being in the shipping container.
I imagine.
That must be what it is.
But if you subscribe to the website, £5 a month, then you'll be able to watch this as well as the entire back catalogue that Josh has on Contemplations and everything else that we have.
So it's really worth checking out.
V8.
That's all I'm going to say.
V8.
All right.
Well, if you want to find out more, then you'll have to subscribe because that's somewhat, just a little bit, cryptic.
Anyway, on to the segment.
The segment on Friday was talking mainly about this particular video that I had commented on and then extrapolating from that some of the things that was going on.
This video where it was being presented with a wedding ring.
But oh no, if I do that, the only thing that will happen is all of these terrible things like washing and cleaning.
There's nothing meaningful that emerges from it.
She's throwing it at Mount Doom.
She really is.
She's going to throw that ring into the fires and vanquish Sauron, i.e.
the patriarchy, once and for all.
There was something funny about this video because I took it, as many others did, on face value originally, but there was something that I hadn't noticed about this that some eagle-eyed viewers had, which is, do you notice the backdrop?
Yeah.
Do you notice the appliances and also the language on some of the things that she's folding?
Some of the clothes that she's folding?
I'm seeing one thing.
Almost everything she's cleaning is already clean.
Okay, she's cleaning the plates.
You're right, she's doing an excellent job.
Here, for instance, she's doing the bath.
The bath is clean.
You're right.
She's doing an excellent job.
I agree with you there.
The living room not so much and the kitchen needs some doing.
There is something a little bit off about the environment.
Does this look like a typical Western environment to you from your travels across Europe?
Does this look like the kind of architecture and style of appliances and bowls and other such things that you typically find in Europe?
You do not, but if you're talking about the country, I think you could say that it does belong to the Western camp in a cultural sense.
Perhaps.
People started to point out that she's living in a house with marble walls, Asian dragon art.
She's pouring oil from a bottle with Chinese characters into a wok in a kitchen with green plastic cabinets and bars on the windows.
Something seems fishy with this.
And just for a better look at this, See here, this person is suggesting that this is Chinese networked warfare.
I have seen some people suggesting that they got a Chinese woman and used AI to make her look like a blonde white girl.
I would say it's not very difficult for people from the West to go over to China and act in various media campaigns and make a bit of money off it.
There's a number of examples of social media stars who've gone over to basically take part in Chinese psyops and propaganda for their own citizens over there, so that's not unusual.
But this does appear to be some kind of grand psyop that the Chinese are pulling over here, because we know TikTok is a Chinese-owned app, Therefore, the Chinese Communist Party will probably have an insider idea of how the algorithm works.
Therefore, they'll be able to push particular content that they want into the public's eye easier than it would just come up naturally from the bottom up.
So they want this.
They want this.
So you can see, there's the background.
Looks pretty Chinese.
Pretty Chinese, Chinese characters, Chinese bowls, Chinese characters on the shirt, Chinese... Everything's very... Chinese people in the background.
So unless this is some... Unless this was filmed very locally in some kind of little Chinatown that you get in some Western cities, this appears to have originated from China and be being pushed by China.
That's not to say that this kind of anti-natal attitude isn't something that's also over here in the West.
But it doesn't help when you have foreign powers also pushing it because realistically speaking they know whether or not there are issues that come with marriage and such things that it is a pro-social thing.
If you want a civilization to survive and to be as strong as possible you want it to be unified and you want it to be unified within families.
China doesn't want that because they're our geopolitical enemy and that's all of the West and so therefore They're going to do stuff like this.
So that was something to point out first as well, just because it was very interesting that this got spotted by a lot of people.
Either way, if I move on, a lot of people in response to mine, as I covered on Friday, were sending me articles like this saying, well, actually, actually, the experts say that women are much happier when they're unmarried.
And I want to highlight some of the texts that I went over in here.
And I'll just read it out so that I can remind everybody who may have missed on Friday.
Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, one of our vaunted experts.
I pray, I pray at the spirit of the experts, I make sure to give all of my sacrifices to them.
I throw in my peer-reviewed studies into the fire to make sure that they are well nourished.
I mean, LSE, Hayek was there.
Imagine the kind of downfall.
Oh yeah.
When you go from Hayek to Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science and also, I think the official term was, expert of happiness, happiness expert, because we can now quantify this.
He said that while men benefit from being married, women generally don't.
The main evidence that he put forward was that, he stated, married people are happier than any other population subgroups.
Only when their spouse is in the room, when they are asked how happy they are.
When the spouse is not present, effing miserable is, is, oh bloody hell, I went too far, that was the wrong button.
Effing miserable was his conclusion.
And I'll just scroll down so you can see that he said, that he said this, yes.
Here it is in this Insider article.
Now, I already mentioned on Friday, this seemed really weird.
This seemed really weird to be a conclusion that he took from the information available because it says in this article the information that he got was from the American Time Use Survey.
Now this is a survey that you take over the phone, people from the Bureau, I think it's the Department or Bureau of Labor in America, will phone you up and ask you about different elements of your life, how you're using your time, and for the purposes of this particular survey he was getting the information from, it was, if I scroll down so that we can see,
So it was for his latest book, Happy Ever After, cited evidence from the American Time News Survey, compared levels of pleasure and unhappiness in unmarried, married, divorced, separated, and widowed individuals.
Okay, so this is qualitative data that he took from people self-reporting when they were called over the phone.
I thought it was really weird the idea that they call you over the phone and then they ask you if you can... Is your spouse in the room right now?
Okay, if they are, I'll take the information, but I'll also take the information if I ask you to shoo them away, at which point the people that you're speaking to over the phone give vastly different information, because if they're in the room with you, you're really happy.
If they're not in the room with you, they're really unhappy.
This seems like a very strange way of going about taking this survey information.
It seems, one, Just to be completely counterintuitive to how you would do it.
Two, as though it would be sneaky in a way you wouldn't expect from these surveys.
And three, what would the purpose of asking these questions this way be in the first place?
I think that if you see how academia operates from the inside, you will see that there is a run for, let's say, making for bringing money into the department.
Yes.
And this happens from all sorts of Yes.
say sources of finance and sources of income.
- You want to be seen as bringing in original data, new data.
- There's a lot of state funding of universities and departments, but especially there are some people who want to say that they are making groundbreaking research.
- Yes.
- And usually-- - Are more than willing to twist information to do so.
Usually, in order to get money from particular, let's say, funds to make a research, you need a research proposal.
In that research proposal, you need to have an idea of what you want to find out.
I'm not saying that everyone is completely ideologically driven and they don't change their mind if they see data.
But at the same time, to get to this point, you still need to have basically passed all of the checks to show that you're relatively on the side.
There are checks.
And if you see at the rapid growth of departments who are basically getting money to say the obvious, or they're getting money in order to make research that has to do with gender studies, all of these studies, you'll see that basically there's a lot of bureaucracy going into it.
And you could say sometimes a lot of ESG going into it.
I would imagine so as well.
But either way, with all of that considered, this all just seemed like really unusual ways to go about collecting information and collecting data and a very strange interpretation to take from all of this.
And it turns out my suspicions were vindicated because one of our subscribers on the website, a man called Grant Gibson, went into the comments of that and sent me this.
article now this is from Vox from 2019.
I'd just like to say thank you Grant Gibson because this was a very illuminating article and very good at clearing up a lot of the issues that I had here because it turned out all my suspicions were right.
This is Vox who are not a right-wing conspiracy publication so that immediately says that they're not going to be pushing it Pushing an agenda in our direction, they're going to be trying to report this from their own perspective.
Depends who you ask.
Are they Maoists?
I don't know.
Then they could be seen as.
Perhaps.
Either way, it's also from 2019, so I'm very interested to see if they would have changed the perspective on this, seeing as we've had the whole COVID debacle since then, when the experts were propelled even higher in prestige than they were considered already in the late 2010s.
Well, let's read through some of this.
So, many books aren't fact-checked, and yet we're increasingly realizing they're full of errors.
Okay, very interesting.
And it explicitly talks about Mark Dolan's research.
Last week, a shocking claim about happiness made the rounds in the press from The Guardian to Cosmopolitan to Elle and Fox.
Women should be wary of marriage, this claim said, because while married women say they're happy, they're lying, according to behavioral scientist Paul Dolan.
I said Mark a moment ago.
Apologies for anyone called Mark Dolan.
Paul Dolan, Promoting his recently released book, Happy Ever After, said they'll be much happier if they steer clear of marriage and children entirely.
Married people, and it goes through the quote again, are happier than the population of subgroups, but only when the spouse is in the room when they're asked how happy they are when the spouse is not present.
Effing miserable, Dolan said, citing the American Time Use Survey, a national survey available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and used for academic research on how Americans Where does this lead?
No, no, no.
Let me just finish this because it's very interesting.
Because obviously he's trying to present some new information with a remarkable conclusion that can be seen as innovative, something you've not seen before.
Because generally you expect people get married, they're happy.
They're happier than they would have been single.
He's presenting this new idea that actually the more miserable They're not just more miserable, they're effing miserable when they're married together, which promotes this anti-natal, anti-family idea which is very prevalent in our society at the moment, to the point where you'll have people using his words and his data in articles that they then send to other people to inform their worldview and counter people's arguments about why having a family and getting married is a very good thing for society as a whole.
This is ridiculous, sorry, because even if you accept That could be the case, even if that still doesn't give you an argument for abolishing the family.
You could be making arguments for, you know, improving families.
He could be writing books saying, OK, listen, I have some ideas for how you can improve families because families are lacking in A, B and C instead.
Well, his solution is, as you would imagine.
What's his solution?
Stop.
Stay single.
That's the solution.
And not have kids due to antinatalism.
Yeah, but it gets better.
It gets better.
Would you like to see how much of a farce this whole exercise is and how badly he misinterpreted the data, okay?
The article continues.
The problem that finding that finding is the result of a grievous misunderstanding on Dolan's part of how the American time use survey works.
The people conducting the survey, as you would imagine, as I suspected, didn't ask married people how happy they were and then shoo the spouses out of the room and then ask again, because let's be honest, all things taken equal, that would just be strange behavior from all things taken equal, that would just be strange behavior from a person who's just a voice on the other side of the Dolan had misinterpreted one of the categories in the survey, spouse absent.
Which refers to married people whose partner is no longer living in their household as meaning the spouse had stepped out of the room.
You are clinically...
Retarded!
If you read Spouse Absent and think that the person who had asked them to shoot, it means that they are estranged.
They're in a marriage where the two people in the marriage are restrained.
So obviously if you're in an unhappy marriage to the point where you're no longer living with one another, obviously they're going to report lower levels of happiness.
You imbecile!
You absolute moron!
And people take this information, they publish it in articles, and then they turn around and use this as a way to attack other people's worldviews on why you should get married and have children and live a fulfilling life, and inform their own worldview on why them going out and getting plastered every weekend and not indulging in anything that would be considered meaningful or long-lasting into the future is a good thing.
Because some idiot Misinterpreted the clearest information possible on this survey!
I'm sorry, I've gone a little bit crazy.
I'm a bit tired.
I'm caffeinated.
And this just... When I read this, it blew my mind that he could be so stupid!
I mean, okay, if that's the case, it seems that it's a problem.
But, you know, methodology is a tricky thing.
I mean, I'm not justifying him, but...
I think the problem is more to do with value.
That, you know, you want to conduct research.
You want to conduct research that says that, you know, many women are unhappy in marriage.
Why do you want to conduct your research?
And what is your, let's say, conclusion?
If your conclusion is you shouldn't have marriage, then I think that's, you know, the problem is fundamentally an ethical one.
And secondarily methodological.
Well, yes.
Because at the end of the day, even if this person has or in the future uses correct methodology, there is the further problem of value, what you want to do with it.
I agree, I agree.
But this person is deemed an expert and with that you expect a certain level of technical expertise and competence that would come to justify that label of expert because people put their trust into experts and this idiot
Either willingly misinterpreted it on the value judgment to justify the conclusion he already wanted to come to, as you may suggest, or is so stupid that he misread it and assumed the farcical situation that I presented that the person over the phone just told him, get your spouse out of the room and then we'll ask again.
No, I didn't suggest anything about the thing, but I said that, you know, methodology is secondary with respect to the value.
Why do you want to do research?
Because, you know, there are so-called experts, you could say, who could be experts in using correct methodology, but for bad purposes.
I understand.
I understand.
Well, that's the old Mark Twain.
You know, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics.
If you manipulate statistics and data however you want, you can come to whatever conclusion you already preordained in the first place a priori.
Either way, I'll just carry on with this article before my ears start to emit steam.
The error was caught by Gray Kimbrough, an economist at American University School of Public Affairs who uses the survey data and realized that Dolan must have gotten it wrong.
I've done a lot with time-use data, Kimbrough told me.
It's a phone survey.
The survey didn't even ask if a respondent's spouse was in the room in the first place, because that would be a very strange thing to do.
Dolan confirmed all of this to me by email, so he even admits himself that, sorry, it turns out they accidentally added an extra zero onto my IQ score when I tested for it back in high school.
We did indeed misinterpret the variable.
Some surveys do code whether people are present for the interview, but in this instance, it refers to present in the household.
I've contacted the Guardian, who've amended the piece, and my editor so that we can make the requisite changes to the book.
The substance of my argument that marriage is generally better for men than women remains.
Using what data?
Okay, whatever.
But still, there are still plenty of articles floating about, like this one, that have not posted a retraction or amended the information.
And this information, because of the fact that he misinterpreted the data so blatantly, is still floating around for people to base their entire bloody worldview on.
On this link, it seems to me that we are talking about a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics.
So, yes, again, I think the most important thing here is how value considerations about value feature into it, because normally you would, there are sadly many people in, let's say, behavioral sciences and in non-ethical disciplines, who they just say, okay, let's, the ethics are secondary, we don't care.
Or there could be an agenda driven research.
I don't know.
I mean, it seems it's an issue.
The problem is how ready people are to throw away completely ethical considerations from research.
It seemed very much to me, reading all of this, that he came in with a pre-ordained conclusion that he wanted to reach and interpreted the data that he had available to him to reach that conclusion.
No matter how stupid that misinterpretation was, willful or not.
But this is only the tip of the stupid iceberg.
We've got an entire titanic of stupidity going around among the so-called halls of expertise that we put all of our faith in these days, because they are our modern churches after all.
The article continues, and it won't go on for too much longer, but I just want to highlight a few more that they leave in here.
So, this is only the most recent example of a visible trend.
Books by prestigious and well-regarded researchers go to print with glaring errors, which are only discovered when an expert in the field, or someone on Twitter, who, let's be honest, Twitter anons these days tend to be the global experts in whatever it is that you may or may not be researching, They get, and I mean that unironically, most of the best information I find these days is either in old books or Twitter.
So thank you for that.
Gets a glance at them.
In May, author Naomi Wolf learned of a serious mistake in a live on-air interview about her forthcoming book, Outrageous Sex Censorship and the Criminalization of Love.
In the book, she argues that men were routinely executed for sodomy in Britain during the 1800s.
Now, in the modern progressive era, I imagine that I would have learnt about this in secondary school history, had it been the case.
But guess what?
It wasn't true because as the interviewer pointed out, it appears she had misunderstood the phrase death recorded in English legal documents.
This is the quality of people we have informing, probably on political policy as well.
They can't even interpret simple terms used in old documents to understand what they meant at the time and what they mean in context.
She misunderstood the phrase death recorded in English legal documents and thought that it meant the person had been executed.
Oh, that means they must have chopped their head off when it actually meant the death penalty had been deferred for their whole natural life.
This meant that the executions that she said had occurred never actually happened and it took some random interviewer to let her know that.
Once again, people base their understanding of the world on these people's claims.
Earlier this year, this is back in 2019, remember?
Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson's book, Merchants of Truth, this is a very ironic name, was discovered to contain passages copied entirely from other authors and alleged to be full of simple factual errors as well.
And around the same time, I, the author of this article, noticed that a statistic in the New York Times Magazine and in Clive Thompson's upcoming book, Coders, was drawn from a study that doesn't actually exist.
Fantastic!
Fantastic!
So they're just making stuff up!
Okay, even better!
In many respects, we got lucky in the Dolan case.
Dolan was using publicly available data, which meant that when Kimbrough doubted his claims, he could look up the original data and check Dolan's work.
It's good that this work was done using public data, he said, so I'm able to go and pull the data and look into it and see, oh, this is clearly wrong.
Many researchers don't do that.
They instead cite their own data and decline to release it so they don't get scooped by other researchers.
With proprietary data sets that I couldn't just go look at, I wouldn't have been able to look and see that this was clearly wrong.
He ended.
So, yeah.
Best thing to do, in my opinion, if it's a mainstream book being pushed by the mainstream media, then just ignore it, because it is most likely 90% completely made up.
These are our experts, gentlemen.
Do not trust a single one of them, for God's sake.
Right, let's go to the next... Right.
Okay, so, goodbye Gender Studies.
New College of Florida has gone full-based.
And it is rolling back its gender studies program.
And this has, as you expect, this has generated heated discussion about, you know, freedom of speech, academic freedom, things like that, from several sides, not just the left, but also from some people, you know, in the center-right, center.
But it's Board of Trustees has decided to go forward and actually reshape the entire curriculum, throw away the gender studies programs and provide basically a classical liberal education, which, if I could capitalize in one sentence, it's supposed to teach you how to think as opposed to what to think.
And you would expect that all these gender studies and all these weird studies, they are telling you basically what to think.
And they're telling you if you disagree with it, or you say anything that implies disagreement with it, you're a bad person.
You're a guilty person.
You shouldn't be allowed to breathe or something, and you shouldn't be allowed to run for office or something.
You should constantly apologize.
That's where it leads.
I'm sorry, Stelios.
I'm sorry.
Don't apologize to me.
I felt the judgment of thousands of years of Greek history falling upon me.
Okay, so, speaking of classical liberal education, visit our website, lotusheeters.com, and for £5 a month, you can subscribe to view all our premium content.
We have all sorts of series, historical series, epochs, run by Beau, we have Brokenomics by Dan, we have Contemplations run by Josh, we have Comics Corner run by Connor and Harry, we have all sorts of stuff, and we have Symposium, Which is a philosophy series run by me.
You can check the debate I had with Carl, debating classical liberalism.
I think that classical liberalism can be saved.
We are having a very lively and interesting debate.
Maybe there's going to be a round two at some point.
I get a lot of criticism for that, but I have also gotten some support and thank you very much.
By all means, just check it and let us know what you think.
Right, let's go to our new link.
Next link, okay.
Christopher Rufo is basically someone who has written a lot of interesting stuff, and lately I've started reading what he has written, and I really like it.
I think he's played a hand in advising Ron DeSantis in Florida about policy change that should be happening.
He's also got a new book coming out, I believe, called America's Cultural Revolution.
He spoke to Oron McIntyre about it the other week, which was very interesting.
So, Chris is an interesting guy.
I don't agree with him on everything, but he has been a force for policy change in Florida.
And he has been involved in the New College of Florida and the Board of Trustees, which voted to abolish its gender studies program.
Now, let's see what happened.
Tonight, the New College of Florida Board of Trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university's gender studies program, becoming the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.
The decision, sure to elicit a fierce response from left-wing critics, is part of a broader transformation.
In January, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to the New College Board of Trustees.
He tasked us with a challenging mission to revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college, which had been established with an appeal to New College at the University of Oxford.
So they're going to go back to teaching Latin.
You will see.
They're going to go back and teach the fundamental canon of Western civilization.
And this is a good thing.
So instead of just saying we shouldn't read, you know, Homer, ancient Greeks, Romans... No, let's do that.
That's what we should be reading.
That's exactly what they're saying.
Now, let's continue.
From the beginning, we knew that this assignment would involve more than a rebranding campaign.
It would require an overhaul of the structure of the college and its programs.
In our first months as a board, we initiated significant changes to the central administration, firing the president, replacing the provost, abolishing the DEI department, and hiring political veteran Richard Corcoran as our interim president.
We got pushbacks, student protests, media condemnation, a disapproving visit from California Governor Gavin Newsom, but we patiently continue to work, deliberating over questions of governance and making hard choices about the college's future.
Now, before I continue with this, it's really funny if you think that Gavin Newsom went there to protest against this, instead of, for instance, trying to make California better.
No, no, no.
It's very important that the streets of San Francisco be literally covered in human feces at all times.
We wouldn't know that they're a progressive state if it wasn't literally covered in human filth.
Let's continue.
These changes have already borne fruit.
Interim President Corcoran has secured millions in new funding from the state legislature, launched an ambitious campus renovation plan, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college's history, putting the school on its strongest financial footing in decades.
Now, I'm not surprised at all.
Wokeness basically is funded by the state, and when you Say no to wokeness, you have people flooding your department.
It's an entirely top-down phenomenon.
Yeah, so go non-woke and you won't go broke.
That's a good thing to get from it.
Now, simultaneously, Corcoran has recruited a new team that is busy rebuilding the institutional capacity of the college, which had atrophied significantly under previous administrations.
And designing a new core curriculum, which will begin with an immersive first year study of Homer's Odyssey and continue to provide foundation based in the logos, cultivation of human reason and technique, the cultivation of applied arts.
So basically, it says it's.
That's very interesting, actually.
Back to basics.
It's good to see them just saying that the first year we'll be studying the Odyssey.
Yes.
That's nice to see.
Yeah.
Let's start when you're part of a civilization, and it's good to think of ourselves as parts of civilizations.
And we are parts of several cultures, all of whom, when compared to each other, have different degrees of continuities and discontinuities.
But broadly speaking, there is such a thing as a Western culture.
And there is such a thing as the Western canon, which is very important.
Exactly.
And just reading and teaching the Western canon, that doesn't mean that you despise other, let's say, canons.
It doesn't mean that at all.
It just means that if you want, you need to create the identity of being a bearer of Western civilization.
You need to understand where a lot of good ideas come from.
Why?
Because those who neglect history, as the saying goes, are destined to repeat it.
Wokeness wants us to forget history because it wants to portray history in such a bad light that we don't read it.
It wants to erase history.
It wants to rewrite history.
It wants to do both at the same time, which is always hilarious.
And I know this is something that's very funny.
Um, because it hits close to home for you.
We're often told at the same time that the past was a horrible, barbarous, uncivilized, unreasoning place wherein people just worked off of their base emotions.
They had no capacity for rational thought, and they were mindlessly bigoted for no reason at all times, in all places.
And then yet at the same time, and this is the most frequent one, and I've even had this from a friend that I spoke to recently, we're told that the past was simultaneously far more inclusive and far more diverse than we were ever told, and that history has been whitewashed.
For instance, I get a lot of the time with a friend of mine that, oh, ancient Greece, and I'm sure you'll love this one, was far more inclusive to LGBTQ plus identities than anybody would ever dare to admit in these days, which is both false and also a complete rewriting of history. which is both false and also a complete rewriting of But at the same time, they would want us to believe, especially if you read the works of Aristotle, that it was at the same time as being overused.
open and inclusive, patriarchal and depressive, because Aristotle made excuses for patriarchal rule and made excuses for slavery as well.
So you've got to choose one.
This is completely nonsensical and contradictory.
I want to make two remarks here because one has to do with comparing, let's say, ancient Greece and ancient Romans.
I think Ancient Rome, in some cases, especially towards the end of the Empire, was a bit more inclusive.
I may be wrong, but I think that if we compare the two, I think Romans were a bit more inclusive.
I don't think Greeks were very inclusive in some cases.
But the most important remark to make is that There are, I think, two mistaken approaches we can take to the past.
One is glorifying it uncritically, and the other is presenting it in the light that you said.
Trying to manipulate it for modern purposes.
Exactly.
So, you know, I regularly feel, let's say, really Annoyed at people who think, who they've never read a book.
Okay.
They've never read a book.
They've never understood the text and they've never bothered.
And they say, okay, all these ancients, the people, they were just ancient.
Now, two centuries have gone by.
One century has gone by.
Let's say problems with particular regimes.
And so those were 200 years ago.
We don't care.
Now it's 200 years after.
That's entirely a wrong mentality.
But I think, on the other hand, we shouldn't, let's say, glorify uncritically the past.
And that is why I think such an education is good.
Even if you want to criticize something, learn first what you're criticizing.
You have to put it in context of the time that it was before you can truly understand it.
Exactly.
And the problem with woke... One of the many myriads of problems with woke education is that it teaches people to completely emotionally reject That is why the curriculum changes constantly and they say, we're not going to do that.
We're not going to do the other.
We're going to cancel all these books because they are, let's say, racist or bad, whatever.
Patriarchy.
They are saying we shouldn't read them.
So people don't bother to sit down and understand the history of, let's say, Western culture, but also understand what it is that they're supposed to hate.
Wokeness in education, it just says, you're supposed to go boo now.
Never mind why.
Just trust me, bro.
Okay.
Trust me, dude.
Trust me, dudess.
You're supposed to go boo.
You shouldn't even read what you're supposed to hate.
I saw them try to, on Twitter, there was some lefty trying to cancel George Orwell, most recently, because in the 1940s, before he passed away, he'd been passing on names to the British government of anti-British communist spies that were operating within England.
They'd say, oh, he's just a complete evil right-winger, he's a white nationalist, because he wanted to support the country that he loved.
Yeah, George Orwell, far right, yeah.
In total, 36 professors have exited, clearing the way for a large number of new hires interested in pursuing the great human questions, rather than maintaining a stifling left-wing echo chamber.
The College's new cohort of scholars boasts PhDs from institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Northwestern.
More importantly, all these professors share a commitment to classical liberal education, which prioritizes the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful, that's so platonic, over the deadening bureaucratic trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
So I think that's good news here.
Now, Chris Rufo has been criticized.
Had to bring up reason, didn't you?
Yeah, because I want us actually to make a conversation here, to have a conversation here about what many people who claim to be classical liberals protest with this effort.
And I do count myself as a classical liberal with, let's say, conservative social values.
I don't think it is.
So I'm going to show what they say against this thing and I'm going to say why I think that it is not, it shouldn't be the case.
I would call reason, what would best, maybe John Stuart Mill classical liberals, which is that they support classical liberalism so far as it allows them to subvert traditional values.
Well, it says, in an essay published this week in City Journal, that was March 2023 of this year, Conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that universities, or rather the state legislatures governing these universities, should shut down activist academic departments.
But rather than protecting higher education, forcibly shutting down left-wing academic departments would be nothing more than routine censorship.
Rufo argued that conservatives don't have to sit idly by while activist academic departments that push left-wing ideology in the guise of dispassionate scholarship grow at American universities.
The activist disciplines are not inevitable, and decline is always, in part, a choice, one that can be reversed with sufficient courage, insight, and will, as Rufo says.
But let's see how the article continues.
But Rufo is plain wrong, they say from Reason.
Both in his legal argument and in his appeal that academic censorship can be justified as part of the normal course of the business.
The argument is incorrect.
Professors are not mouthpieces for the government.
For decades, the Supreme Court of the United States has defended professors' academic freedom from governmental intrusion.
Joe Conn, Legislative and Policy Director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, FIRE, tells Reason.
I mean, that's just wrong.
I'm sorry, if you actually still believe that, you've not been paying any attention whatsoever.
They are given public money, which is taken through taxes collected by the government, to do courses which are regulated and funded by the government.
If they are not doing and saying what the government wants them to, then they are not able to maintain that funding.
Absolute rubbish.
This, and I'm not entirely always against libertarians because I know Reason can be a libertarian publication, they have done some useful work and some useful research in the past, but they are the kind that whenever, they're the kind of libertarian classical liberal that whenever any kind of effective political action can be done and is done, they are so affronted by the idea that you can do so because they are so
It's terrified by the idea of exercising any level of political power that they immediately run away from it and they're more than happy to allow politically biased professors to run rampant over institutions purely off the basis of, well I wouldn't want to be Well, I don't want to do what the left does.
Well, I'm sorry, in that case, you're just going to sacrifice your entire civilization for the sake of a malformed prince.
Yes, and what I want to say is that this here is either arguing in bad faith, but let's say I presume that this is not the case to make, let's say, for the sake of the argument, to make it a bit more interesting.
Or it's just entirely living on another planet.
I think we're in agreement here.
The Civil Rights Act would immediately disbar anybody from teaching anything the government decides is discriminatory.
What I want to say is that the model that these people are using is very reductionist.
And you could say it completely takes community and our social situatedness out of the equation.
And this is something that every time any person who advocates for a political position does, they're not going to have any strong chance to actually realize their ideas.
They will lose.
So, we need to remember that, for instance, any kind of speech, any kind of, let's say, teaching, or any kind of course occurs within a society with particular cultural tendencies that occasionally conflict And this is something to be taken into account.
But what makes me say that the people who say these things are living on another planet, especially when they say, for instance, our nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teacher's concern.
That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that call a pass of orthodoxy over the classroom.
Now, I'd like to know his position on prayer in classrooms.
You cannot, that is the issue here, that you cannot say that you're safeguarding academic freedom when you are giving a blind pass and you're sabotaging people who try to do something about a movement that actually destroys academic freedom.
Who silences academic freedom?
If you have anything to do with universities, if you have the, you know, If you have any remote idea of what is happening in contemporary Western universities, you will see that basically there is a kind of atmosphere that is being imposed on students, particularly center-right and right-wing, and they're afraid to speak up.
I mean, they're afraid that they're going to be marginalized.
They're afraid that they're going to have to resit the class and pay for an extra £50,000 per year in the U.S.
or less in some other countries, because the U.S.
has incredibly Expensive.
Expensive universities.
Yeah.
It's not even just in the US or in universities we've covered before.
There was the case in Scotland where two students had disagreed with her professors, her progressive teacher, and there was the recording of the teacher screaming at them and saying that they were being bigoted and uninclusive for disagreeing with their conclusions.
And because I want to go back to what I said before, that this model, you know, that many libertarians are using is very reductionist.
And I say this, you know, because I do like a lot of what libertarians occasionally say, but here they're just wrong.
Just wrong.
These are the kinds of libertarians that Rothbard would have called left libertarians or modal libertarians, who he wasn't a fan of.
These are the sorts of people that say somebody comes up to you in the street and starts punching you in the face and you defend yourself.
They would turn around and go, No, now you're just as bad as he is!
The issue is that, as we have discussed many times, there is such a thing as what we call value pluralist liberalism.
And that is, let's say, it's an umbrella term of positions that are associated with classical liberalism, where you can have a whole host of values.
You could say liberty is a fundamental value, but there are other fundamental values, such as national identity, national coherence.
National sovereignty.
Peace and order in the streets.
Exactly.
Security.
Fundamental to my own liberty.
Exactly.
You need to make a comparative judgment of what is going to happen if you don't try to combat wokeness in university, and what happens if you do.
So the problem is here that what many times libertarians neglect, but classical liberals they don't have to neglect, Or some libertarians, you could say, that don't have to neglect, is that we are always members of a society and any kind of argument and any kind of human interaction occurs in society.
And within society, we have all kinds of sources of power who are trying to increase their power and decrease the other.
So, for instance, there's a very big classical Republican liberal tradition, for instance, in the U.S.
You cannot say simultaneously that you're a part of that tradition and neglect the fact that, for instance, there has to be all sorts of institutional checks and balances and clauses that try to prevent, let's say, power from becoming imbalanced and from having a, for instance, particular center of power.
Becoming too powerful and destabilizing the rest.
And what wokeness does in a natural is it destabilizes communities.
It destabilizes the population.
So there needs to be some care for increasing the power of the people.
Enrolling back the powers of an increasingly centralized state.
And a means to do that is to actually counter these ideologies in the university.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
Before you can even think about doing that, first you need to exercise political will and power to be able to turn all this stuff around.
And one thing to say is that everything can backfire.
There is no panacea.
There is no, let's say, golden How do we say, no solution for everything?
This is the classic Thomas Sowell line, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
You could say that, yes.
And I think that this kind of mentality here, expressed by those on reason, is actually sabotaging the attempt.
Oh, yeah.
They're internal saboteurs.
Because, OK, let's say we get something like the non-aggression principle that many libertarians have.
The question is, when is someone assaulting you?
At some point, you will have to defend yourself, whether individually or as a society.
If you constantly try and say, no, but actually what people are doing to you, when they hit you, it's not really aggression.
When they're stealing you, it's not really aggression.
You should basically give them a blind pass.
They're stealing your tax money and then turning it around to brainwash your children.
Yes, so this is something that is, I would say, unintentionally for most libertarians.
Maybe some people pose to be or not, it could be intentional.
It seems to me that this is sabotaging the attempt because we must never neglect the environment in which things are happening.
This is the problem that I have with basing your principles of society off of purely a priori deduced principles in the first place because it will always come down to the quality of the deduction that has been made.
I think they have a place.
Personally speaking, I think they do, but they're not the only thing that matters.
It's fine to say that we need some level of abstraction because you cannot govern a society and impose a particular order on society without a degree of abstraction.
But this abstraction is not the only thing that should be on your mind.
You should also exercise judgment and actually look upon society and what is going on.
Why?
Because then actually you will see whether What is happening counts as, for instance, aggression or not.
You will see if this counts as destabilizing the people's power or not.
You will see if this is something like increasing the power of the state to increasing the state beyond the consent of the governed or not.
You cannot see that without exercising judgment.
You need both judgment about particular cases and a degree of abstraction.
Just hiding behind abstractions is too reductionist and it could sabotage good attempts.
Thankfully, it didn't succeed in this case.
Now, we had another video, we won't show it.
I think we should go to the... Yeah, if that's... I think you've said your piece very well put, so let's move on to the video comments now that we've gone through.
Who is this guy here?
He's a real guy.
Put the blade on the guy in the shed.
Don't know.
Don't mind so rare that the guy in the shed.
Just listen.
I want to get caught.
Thank you very much for that.
He's on a mission.
There should be a video where you put the glasses and you have from who?
What is it?
Oh, what the full video?
The screen.
That really was the whole video.
Thank you very much for that.
And whoever that gentleman on screen was, you know, cheers to him.
All right, guys.
A question from a friend, basically.
Exactly.
After a few instances over here with the police not doing their jobs and becoming more of a hindrance to the public, at what point is it you stop following them and start going up against them?
Because at the moment there's a lot of people thinking it's not whether we should, it's when is it going to happen?
As you can imagine, that's an incredibly difficult question to answer on a platform like we're on at the moment, because I would not want to advocate or suggest anything that could be legally detrimental both to us and also to you.
The only thing that I can say is that outside of what you may be suggesting, perhaps first try to see if there's any solicitors who might be
Happy to help you so that you can mount some kind of legal challenge against the way that the police in your area are exercising their powers because that's a really unfortunate situation if the police are beginning to, as we find in a lot of other places, to exercise petty tyranny over the public rather than actually enforce law and order as they're supposed to.
That's a really horrible situation.
I hope you can find some way to manage that.
Hey guys, it's been a while.
So, um, I was a little behind on the podcast and while I was playing Ketchup I saw this and, uh, recognized it immediately.
They stole it from Postmodern Jukebox and you should totally check them out I think you might have tagged me in a few of those on Twitter recently so I will check them out Thank you very much, Luna.
If you're wondering how people can let this clown world happen, you need look no further than the Milgram Experiment.
It demonstrated over 65% of people are willing to electrocute someone into unconsciousness as punishment for answering questions wrong, merely by being prodded verbally.
But they were less likely to if they saw someone else not doing it, or were close to the person getting electrocuted.
As a whole, people obey authority.
Yep, people are sheep.
Most people are just part of the human herd, as far as life has demonstrated to me.
And I believe one of the other factors involved in that experiment that I'm aware of might have been that the people verbally prodding them into it were wearing white lab coats.
So it gave them a particular aesthetic that they associated with scientific authority.
And I think that was actually very relevant to my segment because these are our experts that people will trust because, well, they're an expert.
They've got a fancy title next to their name.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Let's carry on.
Carl, this is something that you neglected to point out on your weekend podcast Democracy Works.
And that is, at the very end when nobody was moving to assist the woman, The dude perpetrating the act that is recorded as black and is of a privileged social class that none of the white dudes around him really could do anything about.
Yep, that's often a factor.
Is this the video on Manchester?
I would imagine so.
I don't know exactly the video, but oftentimes in social situations like what I'm imagining he's describing there, one person falls into what you could call a client class of the regime and therefore benefits from privileges like not having the law applied to him, whereas those from the non-client classes like You or I, for example, do not benefit from those and in fact get the law pushed on us far harder and administered to us much more harshly.
Let's carry on with the next one.
With all due respect, when it comes to men, if we don't start encouraging men to get out of the public education system, then we're just polishing brass in the Titanic.
If you want to save men, get them out of the public education system.
My advice, when you turn 14, drop out, get a GED or an equivalency degree, go become a truck driver, electrician, or plumber, and also check out Men Are Speaking, where I give you one hour of how to meet women and marry them.
So enjoy that.
Well, there you go.
Check that out.
Honestly, I do wish that I might have just dropped out of school at some point and taken on, excuse me, a practical job, but I'm here now, so it all worked out in the end.
If you go through the public systems of education, you can break out the other side, but it's much more difficult than if you never went through them in the first place.
Let's read some of the comments, shall we?
Do you want to go through some of yours?
Yep.
Let's start with Mexican Culture Wars.
Andrew Narog.
For what it's worth, Mexico has long had a troubled history with Catholicism versus Communism.
It makes a fair bit of sense to me that the left in Mexico would willingly embrace wokeism as a new casual against the Church.
Yep.
Yeah, I'm not as well versed on the situation in Mexico.
I'm not either.
So it surprised me to see that it had gotten that bad in Mexico, but I shouldn't be surprised.
Sophie Liv, honestly, this perhaps shouldn't be too surprising.
Mexico already is a very corrupt country.
I knew that as much.
That was always issue.
That was always an issue.
They are corrupt and socialist.
They have been that way since the beginning.
That's what all of South America suffer under.
Amazing countries, crushed by corrupt socialist rulers and communist revolutionaries.
Lord Nereva, oh dear, Mexico being invaded by wokeness doesn't bode well for the rest of Latin America.
Once the woke language is up and running in Spanish, it will be all too easy to infest the rest of the Spanosphere.
Spanos, but I quite like that.
X, Y, and Z. Keep in mind that the IMF has decreed to no longer provide loans to Uganda because they will not kneel before the altar of the alphabet gods.
The irony of imperialism is not... Well, this is... I mean, this is the thing, isn't it?
It's the global American empire and whatever America wants to be imposed on everybody else, they will sanction you and apply financial problems, if not just outright bomb you.
If you don't agree with them.
I mean, they'll be willing to make some exceptions if they have some kind of trade connection with you, like Saudi Arabia.
It's another way of exerting cultural domination.
Hazy Desert Rat, does that mean that a conservative Christian can file a lawsuit when someone makes disparaging remarks about them?
These are important questions, you know.
De Jure, yes.
De facto, no.
Ethelsen95.
Socialism has rocked Latin America for decades, even a strongly Catholic region.
The current communist pope is an Argentinian, and we have seen recently an Ecuadorian right-wing politician was killed.
Yeah, I saw that.
It was viral.
I didn't know that.
Shot on camera.
El Salvador, over the last 18 months, is the exception, not the norm.
Derek Power.
When certain groups have global ambitions, don't be surprised if the battles that are fought are global.
Derek Power.
Speaking of symbolic violence, time was that if you did a drama-debating regicide, you could be charged with dramatic treason.
For a group calling themselves progressive, seem to reveal an old ideas and customs.
I think they meant revel.
Revel, yeah.
AZDesertRat.
Sad.
The left-wing nut culture is moving into Mexico.
Not good at all.
At least something is going that way from America into Mexico, right?
Onto my segment's comments.
Maybe we should return to, as the left said, indigenous ways of knowing.
is true, maybe it's time to question who your experts are.
We here are all experts in what is right before our eyes.
The experts are experts only in what they read in academic papers.
Maybe we should return to, as the left said, indigenous ways of knowing.
That would be much better at this point.
Georgie Swordsman says, I'm sending this segment to my PhD examiners and demanding that they just give me the damn thing right now if this is the goddamn standard.
No.
Yep, pretty much.
Charles Francis Montgomery Gilead Oliver says, they are called white monkey jobs.
Dumb Westerners shilling for the CCP for peanuts.
Yes, I think that's regarding the video that came from TikTok.
Yeah, there's quite a few social media influencers who've gone out there and made a lot of money shilling for CCP propaganda.
Screwtape Lasers says, I miss the wholesome days of behavioral economics when it was just a simple apolitical field dedicated to addicting users to social media.
Oh, if only we could go back.
Take me back.
Ramshackle Otter, I've never been happier since I'd realized I've been lied to, that my career and Ramona Feminist Boyfriend weren't making me happy, and that I needed to be in a relationship with a based man, be a good wife, and have a family.
Thank you, Lotus Eaters.
You gave this to me Well, honestly, that's really wholesome to hear.
I'm glad you got out of a terrible relationship.
I'm glad you found yourself a good man, and I'm glad that you've got a family now.
That's honestly really fantastic on every level.
Derek Power says, "Ah yes, academic consensus, a favorite tactic amongst the midwits." Yes.
Every time.
Matt P, "The people complaining about misinformation and holding up their fact-checked as the gold standard spread misinformation far and wide because some idiot misread something and they just took it and ran with it.
Color me shocked." Feel the same way.
Anonymi says, "I don't doubt that China is pushing degeneracy in the West." And yes, the AI edited video is one evidence, but I have to ask, is it not possible the West has generated so much that this is normal culture?
I did make sure to bring that up.
We get a lot of that just coming internally, but China is trying to take advantage of it and push it even more.
I say China didn't create it as some other online commentary, not yours, suggests.
Thank you.
They merely nudge the weakness the Western societies have created themselves.
Absolutely.
They're just taking advantage of a stupid situation we found ourselves in.
So if you live when someone is labeled an expert, just believe the opposite of what they're saying.
That seems to be the safer bet.
It's like, no, hello, I'm an expert.
Oh great, your opinion is worthless!
There we go.
Derek Power.
To get a bit personal, I studied music while in college.
I have no regrets in doing so, but it did annoy me when my subject was sometimes seen as impractical or useless.
How can music be seen as useless when things like gender studies exist?
This is a good point.
Grant Gibson.
Spot on this time, Harry.
Well, thank you, Grant, for sending in the article in the first place.
That's what inspired me to do the follow-up.
So thank you.
As someone who works with these kinds of surveys all the time, you can't get a result that strange and take it at face value unless you're ideologically predisposed to like that conclusion.
Absolutely.
And let's go on to the last few comments.
Right.
Le French tacos.
There's no such thing as gender.
Therefore, there's no need for gender studies.
Yep.
Omar Awad.
I think it's of key importance that they're not only banning and removing woke, but also replacing it with wholesome or nurturing educational material.
Thomas Sowell economics and a history of the horrors of communism should be mandatory study material.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Get some Rothbard in there as well, and I'm a happy panda.
Derek Power.
I never thought of Plato and Aristotle being mutually exclusive necessarily.
They're not.
You need both a priori and a posteriori thinking available and to be used properly.
One thing to say, Aristotle is not an empiricist in the classical modern sense.
He believes in a priori knowledge.
He just stresses the need for more empirical experiments than Plato.
Derek Power, I'm still libertarian because I'm skeptical of any government using power unwieldy.
However, I do think exercising power to defend values should be exercised, especially if it's by an individual or a group.
The question is when it comes to self-defense, both personally and culturally speaking.
Furthermore, there is such a thing as the non-aggression principle.
If someone is punching you, you should be able to punch back to defend yourself, stop the threat.
I agree.
My complaints was that reason far, far too often fall in this weird gray area where they say any power whatsoever, defensive or not, is just wrong to be used, which is very, very silly.
But that's all we've got time for.
So thank you very much for tuning in today.
We'll be back again tomorrow at one o'clock.
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