One thing that isn't adequately appreciated about humanities academia in recent decades is that its obligatory dogma was anti-humanism. You could be a feminist, Marxist, postcolonialist, etc, but the thing you weren't supposed to be was a humanist, which was simply cringe./1 A few things strike me about this. One is that it created an ultimately unsustainable gap between esoteric and exoteric. Undergraduate students mostly continued take humanities classes on humanist grounds, while faculty and TAs viewed such assumptions with contempt./2

My first objection here is to Cooper’s and Tucker’s strawmanning of WW2 historiography. Their claim that “we’re not allowed” to ask how economic and social conditions in Weimar Germany led to Hitler is ludicrous. This question is commonly explored in even the most pop versions./1

https://twitter.com/tuckercarlson/status/1830652074746409246

My second is to the obfuscation in the discussion about Holocaust denial, which they refuse to name as such, saying just: "if you ask the wrong questions, you can be put in jail," with Tucker claiming that can even happen in the US! The debate about Europe's legal restrictions/2

There seems to be a rule by which every cosmopolitan political formation in the West hostile to nationalism at home becomes deeply invested in *other people's* nationalisms./1 The most obvious examples are on the left, where people who demand open borders and accuse anyone espousing the symbolism of bland American civic nationalism of fascism are also deeply invested in the nationalist struggles of the Global South./2

Later this week, @Nina_Compact and I will record the first installment of a “Blame Theory” series the French intellectual most often blamed for ruining the West: Foucault. (We already covered Derrida in our first episode!). There are multiple “Blame Foucault” narratives./1

https://twitter.com/quillette/status/1787661455124574247

One narrative, mostly from the right, blames Foucault for gender and sexuality stuff, queer theory and so on.
Another, from the right and center, blames him for epistemic relativism, conflating power and knowledge, and thereby undermining any stable notion of truth./2

The co-author of this op-ed was among the signatories of a 2020 letter to the NYU provost demanding that @mcrispinmiller be investigated for leading his class in a critical discussion about Covid mask mandates./1 The letter, spearheaded by Miller's department chair and colleagues, was directly prompted by a thread from a student demanding Miller be fired/silenced for "propagating an unhealthy amount of skepticism around medical professionals." NYU did investigate him./2

Around a decade ago, in a tulip-mania type episode, the entire pundit class spent a year or so breathlessly proclaiming MOOCs were about to end higher education as we knew it. Elite universities competed with each other to get ahead of the trend, so you have stuff like this./1

https://twitter.com/pronounced_kyle/status/1746424968173531413

What happened was pretty predictable to anyone who had a basic grasp of the sociology and political economy of higher ed. The free online courses proved useful to a small cohort of self-motivated students, but didn’t amount to much more than an expansion of extension courses./2

There’s a genre of leftist writing whose function is to provide plausible deniability for some flagrant contradiction of the current left consensus. It doesn’t have to make sense, just offer something sophisticated-sounding that people can point to. Prime example below./1 The contradiction in question is that the left wants to keep calling for the deplatforming of “transphobes” while also denouncing the deplatforming of anti-Zionists. The resolution, apparently, is that free speech is a “crucial public utility” but not the “soul of justice”… 🤔/2

“Chile will be the tomb of neoliberalism,” declared the young president Gabriel Boric in 2021, to the acclaim of the international left. But the dream of replacing the country’s Pinochet-era constitution turned into a nightmare—before collapsing altogether. What happened?/1 The short answer is that the glorious future promised by the left evaded a fundamental problem that all political factions have been unable to address: despite its vaunted economic “miracle,” the country remains a resource colony, heavily dependent on exporting copper./2

This article accidentally helps make sense of why some people have left the left by showcasing the preening moral self-regard, staggering incuriosity, and total incapacity for self-criticism of some of its prominent spokespeople. Not only so the authors see no room for self-criticism on pushing hyperbolic Trump narratives or supporting unprecedented public health mandates, they assume that anyone who does so has already “cracked up.” It is precisely this contemptuous dogmatism that many find repellent.

This is all traceable to Christian bad conscience about empire. It all began with the Black Legend, which originated among internal critics of Spain’s nascent empire and was soon weaponized as propaganda by upstart Protestant rivals (Dutch and English)./1

https://twitter.com/jsmilbank/status/1701261843430289894

What’s remarkable about European empire is that the moral critique of empire originated alongside empire itself, and had a huge influence very soon: for good or for ill, Las Casas’s attack on the conquest won the war of ideas and reshaped Spanish policy in the New World./2

The sexual revolution made gays and lesbians the vanguard of liberation—a model of an authentic self waiting to “come out” from under repressive social mores. But now, faith in this ideal has begun to waver.

This is the predicament @SamuelBiagetti explores in this rich essay./1 This isn’t the first time, of course, that the project of sexual liberation has met with backlash. But it comes, in this instance, after an apparent total victory in the culture wars—and it now comes from the left as well as the right./2

One common thread in the left critiques of @SohrabAhmari’s book is to point out that he opposes coercion and domination in the workplace but doesn’t reject hierarchical structures like, say, the church and the family. I’m not sure this is as strong a point as they think./1 In theory, the left’s “no gods, no masters” ethos of consistent opposition to hierarchy has obvious appeal, but it also has a pretty bad record./2

The imperative to “épater le bourgeois” began as a haughty posture of elitist spiritual aristocrats; later, surrealist pranksters who turned to communism rebranded it as an attack “from below” (albeit from mostly well-off, educated adepts of proletarian revolution)./1 Today we see a different split between right and left practitioners of avant-garde tactics. On the left, the shock tactics now operate *from within and depend upon* a hypertrophied bourgeois morality rather than assailing it from the outside./2

99% of the people ridiculing this take never read and know little about poetry. In the eras in which poetry was a *popular* form, as opposed to an obscure pursuit of overeducated oddballs, much of it could be criticized in the same terms as rap: vulgar, repetitive, frivolous, etc

https://twitter.com/johnhmcwhorter/status/1694132245722722676

Taking some canonized work and comparing it to the lowest common denominator of today’s rap is completely beside the point. During the periods those works were written people were composing and circulating all sorts of vulgar nonsense. Canonization is a retrospective process.

During the trucker protests, Justin Trudeau’s government put itself at the forefront of cracking down on free expression. Now, it may do so once again with a proposal to outlaw “residential-school denialism.”/1 In effect, this would mean criminalizing any dissent from the already aggressively enforced consensus around the residential schools in which indigenous Canadian children were placed in the 19th and 20th centuries./2

Greta Gerwig’s “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing” re Barbie seems like a variation on what Zizek identified as the dominant structure of consumption a good while ago: the product that incorporates a critique of itself into the act of consuming it…/1 This isn’t just ironic consumption, as it contains a moral dimension as well as an aesthetic one. Zizek’s examples are fair trade coffee and Tom’s shoes, where the damage done by consumerism is acknowledged in the choice of product, which incorporates a compensatory gesture./2

The old blue check system functioned as a kind of hereditary caste system where you “inherited” your status from your offline position. The new regime is “democratic” in the precise bourgeois sense described by Marx: it attempts to “resolve personal worth into exchange value.”/1 Status, once opaque, is now demystified because it is bought. But the result is that it’s not clear what it’s worth, especially once whatever minor residue it retains is entirely gone (it already mostly is). So the value proposition has to be something other than status./2

Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed,” reports student Abigail Anthony. “They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras.”/1 Although the university had a reputation as the more open-minded, less orthodox-progressive of the Ivies, the DEI bureaucracy charged with promulgating and enforcing orthodoxy has expanded to an astonishing extent in recent years./2

“How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” a new thriller, takes its title from Andreas Malm’s manifesto urging climate activists to turn to violence and sabotage. “Perhaps unintentionally,” says @nukebarbarian, “the movie reveals a great deal about the dark heart of climate extremism.”/1 At the core of the film, and of Malm’s worldview, is a variety of antinomianism—the idea that the good may disobey laws—stripped of any transcendental horizon. What legitimates the protagonists’ actions is not God or a higher law, but their status as supposed victims./2

A year in, it’s rare to find a reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that doesn’t call it “unprovoked.” But from the standpoint of Russia’s national interests, the invasion was a rational response to decades of Western encirclement, argues @battleforeurope./1 The idea of an unprovoked invasion is the propagandistic linchpin of the Western case for refusing any diplomatic solution to the disastrous war—which is precisely why it’s important to contest it./2

Nixon, we have been told, was a corrupt, megalomaniacal politician who got his comeuppance when some plucky journalists uncovered his most egregious misdeeds. There's just one problem: this story is at best incomplete and at worst straight up propaganda./1 At this point there is a vast trove of research showing "Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him," as Nathan Pinkoski puts it./2