"What's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this."

"[W]omen, men, of all backgrounds discover, invent and create in ways that uplift themselves and others, thousands, millions ... applying reason, thought, research, enquiry and philosophy to humanity, the world and the universe. ...

"[W]hat's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this."

~ Liberty Scott from his post 'The real tragedy of the Jason Arday story'

"Marxism has never died. It has mutated."

"Here are four things every serious anti-communist should understand about Marxism: 

    "First, Marxism is not primarily a set of economic policies. It is a complete philosophical system built on the claim that private property and markets are the root causes of human oppression and alienation. This is why communist regimes did not simply make economic mistakes - they systematically tried to abolish the foundations of voluntary cooperation. 

    "Second, Marxism focuses heavily on social structures and class forces while leaving very little room for individual choice and moral responsibility. Individuals are treated largely as products of their class position rather than as autonomous agents capable of shaping their own lives. This deterministic outlook underpins both Marxism’s repeated predictive failures and its readiness to justify coercive social engineering. 

    "Third, the authoritarianism, terror, and centralised control seen in every communist state were not distortions of Marxism. They were logical consequences of attempting to impose a total transformation of society (and Mark understood that). Once private property and markets are rejected, coercive state power becomes necessary to enforce the new order. 

    "Fourth, Marxism has never died. It has mutated. Much of today’s identity politics, critical theory, and institutional “equity” activism draws directly from Marxist frameworks - simply replacing economic class with race, gender or other identity categories while retaining the same oppressor-versus-oppressed logic."

~ Creative Deduction

"The Maori seats encourage people to ghettoise themselves"

"It has become starkly obvious that the Maori seats are being used by activists to [ghettoise Māori: to isolate them, separate them, cut them off, according to a cultural identity]. ...

"Ghettoisation can be done to a person or group, or people or groups can do it to themselves. ...

"Israr Kasana, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant to the Canadian city of Calgary, explains why he and his family rejected the temptation to adopt the comfortable way of establishing themselves within a Pakistani community. He says 'Ghettoisation or marginalisation of any kind is bad for society. It creates exclusion, imbalance, envy, anger, ignorance and, more importantly, distrust.' ...

"The Maori seats encourage people to ghettoise themselves according to cultural identity, whereas what we must surely want is a society in which people of all races are able to coexist together in peace and cooperation as equal citizens under the law." ...

"[Then National leader Bill] English said [in 2003] the National Party 'stands for one standard of citizenship for all.' ... 'That’s why a National-led Government will abolish the Maori seats.” Of course, it did nothing of the sort when National came back into government in 2008 under John Key. Instead, the Key government abetted the infiltration of all parts of New Zealand society by elements who would substitute authoritarian tribal rule for a free and democratic society, a process which was accelerated by the Ardern/Hipkins governments. ...

"Under pressure from ACT and New Zealand First, the coalition government has walked this back a bit but not to the extent needed to offer meaningful restraint of the authoritarian tendencies which unthinking acquiescence by most of us has unwittingly allowed. ...

"Leadership is needed. We need a Prime Minister who will say loudly and clearly what English said in 2003 ... Today, when NZ First has advanced a Bill for a referendum and ACT says get rid of the Maori seats now, the opportunity is ripe for that sort of leadership.

"Getting rid of the seats, especially by or endorsed by referendum to show it is peoples’ will, would not only remove an anti-democratic excrescence, but also be a signal that enough is enough and that henceforth we shall be a 'multiracial society [where] people of all races are able to coexist together in peace and cooperation as equal citizens under the law.'

"Yet the National Party is silent. ..."

~ Gary Judd, composite quote from his posts 'Ghettoising the mind' and 'National could signal its support for democracy'

SOME HISTORY: 

"[T]he Māori seats were created to bring Māori into the parliamentary system and guarantee representation, rather than exclude them.
 

"By 1867, when the Māori Representation Act 1867(1) passed, Europeans outnumbered Māori roughly four to one. ...

"The Māori seats addressed a real problem: under the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 [2] voting required individual property or household qualification. Most Māori land was communally held, leaving Māori largely unable to meet the franchise. ...

The Māori electorates solved the voting problem by granting all Māori men over 21 the right to vote, decades before universal male suffrage applied elsewhere in New Zealand [3]. Far from limiting Māori rights, the law expanded them. ...

"The seats also guaranteed meaningful participation. Four electorates—three in the North Island, one for the South—were superimposed over existing electorates. Māori with qualifying property could still vote in European electorates, giving many a dual vote. [4] Officials went to extraordinary lengths to ensure participation: in 1890, a returning officer undertook a six-day trek through dense Urewera bush to establish a polling station at Maungapōhatu. [5] Such efforts are hardly consistent with a strategy to suppress Māori voices. ...

"Seats were originally intended as temporary until Māori qualified under the general property franchise [6] ...

"While Māori were under-represented by modern proportional standards [when the Māori seats were created in 1867, each European electorate represented roughly 3,500 people, while each Māori electorate represented around 12,500 people [7]], the four seats ensured guaranteed parliamentary representation, at a time when European immigration was rapidly outpacing Māori numbers. This was enfranchisement, not suppression.' ...

"However today the original rationale for the Māori electorates has disappeared. In the current Parliament 33 MPs identify as having Māori heritage — about 27% of the House — far exceeding Māori’s roughly 17% share of the population. Even without the seven reserved seats, Māori representation would remain substantial, the historical purpose of the Māori electorates has now been fulfilled and, consistent with the 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System and with Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi, they should now be abolished in favour of equal representation for all voters."

NOTES

1. New Zealand History, “Setting up the Māori seats,” https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/setting-maori-seats

2. New Zealand Parliament, “History of the Electoral System,” https://www.parliament.nz/en/visit-and-learn/how-parliament-works/history/history-of-the-electoral-system/

3. New Zealand History, “Setting up the Māori seats,” https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/setting-maori-seats
4. McRobie, Alan, Electoral Atlas of New Zealand, GP Books, 1989.
5. New Zealand History, “Polling in isolated Māori communities,” https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/setting-maori-seats
6. Ibid.; New Zealand History, “Setting up the Māori seats,” https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/setting-maori-seats

7. Te Ara, “Māori representation,” https://teara.govt.nz/en/nga-mangai-maori-representation

"Too often ‘multiculturalism’ is mistaken for ‘multiracialism'"

"Too often ‘multiculturalism’ is mistaken for ‘multiracialism,’ when the two could not be more different. A multiracial society is one in which people of all races are able to coexist together in peace and cooperation as equal citizens under the law. A multicultural society is one in which people are encouraged to ghettoise themselves according to national or cultural identity."

~ Andrew Doyle from his book The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution [hat tip Gary Judd]

"The issue is never the issue. The issue is always Revolution."

"In New Zealand, Māori are being offered [these] promises: co-governance, constitutional recognition, cultural primacy. These are framed as justice, but function as leverage. The goal is not reconciliation; it is ideological entrenchment.

    

    Co-governance is not about partnership; it’s about parallel sovereignty.
    Te Tiriti reinterpretation is not about history; it’s about power.
    Tikanga in law is not about tradition; it’s about jurisdictional capture.

"The race-Marxist machine does not care about whakapapa. It cares about mobilisation. Māori identity is being re-coded as political loyalty, and dissenters are cast as traitors to their own people. ...

"This is a classic Motte-and-Bailey tactic. ... Predictably, defenders of this [approach] will retreat to the motte: 'We just want equity.' But the bailey—the real ideological terrain—is far more radical: constitutional transformation, racial separatism, and symbolic supremacy. ...

" 'The issue is never the issue. The issue is always Revolution.' "

~ Colinxy from his post 'How Māori Are Being Played by the Marxist Machine'

"Interestingly, the right didn’t take the leftist ideas that were intended to build something; they took just the ideas intended to destroy."

"As so many have noted, MAGA is identity politics for white people. It turns out that identity politics is more effective when your group is in the majority.

"… Last year, a writer named James Lindsay cribbed language from “The Communist Manifesto,” changed its valences so that they were right wing and submitted it to a conservative publication called The American Reformer. The editors, unaware of the provenance, were happy to print it. When the hoax was revealed, they were still happy! The right is now eager to embrace the ideas that led to tyranny, the gulag and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, the right didn’t take the leftist ideas that were intended to build something; they took just the ideas intended to destroy."

~ David Brooks from his column 'Hey, Lefties! Trump Has Stolen Your Game' [hat tip Alex Tabarrok ] 

"The idea that female politicians inherently represent women and male politicians inherently represent men embodies a problematic identity-politics fallacy."

"The idea that female politicians inherently represent women and male politicians inherently represent men embodies a problematic identity-politics fallacy. This assumption simplifies complex identities into superficial categories, implying a universal, shared interest among people based solely on gender. Such oversimplification is both logically flawed and practically misleading ...
    "Individuals within the same gender group frequently possess widely varying interests and opinions ... Moreover ... [e]ffective political representation requires empathy, policy alignment, and competence rather than mere identity resemblance. ...
    "Finally, the identity politics fallacy inadvertently perpetuates gender stereotyping ... Representation should ... be rooted in inclusive, nuanced understandings of individual and community needs, transcending reductive demographic categories. Such an approach better serves democratic ideals, promotes effective governance, and fosters genuine equality."

~ Tim Harding on his post 'Identity politics gender fallacy'

'The Moral Case for Globalisation'

"THE TERM TYPICALLY USED to denote advocates of globalisation is 'globalists,' which has emerged primarily as a term of abuse, especially on the far right. 'There is no more left and right [says one]. The real cleavage is between the patriots and the globalists.' ...

"[T]his essay’s definition of globalisation is the relatively free movement of people, things, money, and ideas across natural or political borders. .... A consequence of increasing globalisation is an increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange. ...

"There is a vast amount of evidence that documents the impact of reducing barriers to trade, travel, and other forms of exchange across borders. Much of it is presented in other essays in this series, such as Johan Norberg’s 'Globalisation: A Race to the Bottom—or to the Top?' Contrary to some critics of globalisation, the results have been spectacularly positive for the world’s poor, as wages have increased, jobs have become safer, and the use of children for labor has plummeted. Increasing wealth, in turn, is strongly connected to improving health, and the global spread of improvements in medicines and technologies has improved health outcomes even in regions that have not participated as much in the exchange of goods. ...

"People agree to exchange because they expect to be better off by exchanging than by not exchanging. Making it possible to exchange with more people is beneficial to those whose range of potential exchange partners has increased. Adam Smith titled the third chapter of his 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' “That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market,” a thesis that he illustrated by demonstrating the greater prosperity and progress in the ancient world for those nations with proximity to the sea and to navigable rivers. Due to the lower friction of transportation over water compared to land, that proximity facilitated exchange with much larger areas and with many, many more people. To the extent that policies of governments erect barriers to exchange, it is analogous to making transportation deliberately more difficult, which would generally be understood to be harmful to the vast majority of people. ...

"Globalisation is not limited to the exchange of goods and services across borders; it also encompasses the exchange of ideas, as well as scientific, economic, artistic, and other forms of cooperation. ...

"Ever since Plato’s assault on the open society, critics of globalisation have tended to view cultural innovation and exchange as a pure loss rather than as the emergence of new forms of human life that increase the available store of possible human understandings and experiences. ...

"PEACE AND HARMONY ARE consequences of trade.

Cultural exchange is foundational to living cultures. Pasta, for which Italian cuisine is famous, has origins in Asia, whether it was brought to Italy by Marco Polo, as folklore tells, or earlier, and the tomatoes that form the base of many Italian sauces are cultivated from plants brought from Meso-America by Spaniards. Food has been globalised for millennia, but somehow that has not stopped it from developing an amazing diversity of identifiable cuisines, styles, and dishes with many distinctive characteristics. The same can be said of architecture, traditions, mores, religions, and every other element of human culture. ...

"The key to such peace is not merely the movement of goods and services across borders but voluntary exchange. ... Freedom to trade refers to the voluntary transfers of goods and services and not to state trafficking in tanks and missiles, the sale of products of forced labour (such as the products of Uyghur labourers imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party), or the sale of nationalised products (such as the oil and gas resources that were confiscated by Putin). Exchange and transfers organised by conquest are mutually impoverishing, as Adam Smith demonstrated of the British Empire ...

"SINCE PLATO'S TIME, OPPONENTS of globalisation have sought to protect established orders from the voluntary choices of those who live in them. Increasing the opportunities for exchange, cooperation, communication, and travel is enriching for the majority, although it may threaten the hold on power of the rulers. Some prefer war over peace, because 'making bigger profits in peace' is worse than war. Reasonable people should think before embracing such attacks on globalisation ...

"Rigorous thinking and empirical research refute, one by one, attacks on globalisation in the name of morality. The world is better when barriers to free and voluntary cooperation are reduced. The world is better because of globalisation."

~ Tom Palmer from his article 'The Moral Case for Globalisation'

Hmmm.

"[S]peaking Māori ... is [oft] perceived as 'virtue signalling,' which is a perception that has arisen in the context of decades of fashionable Western self-loathing. Like you, I can’t stand insincerity. It is hypocritical that people who obsess over the every failing of Western culture cannot also acknowledge the good things about it: democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, habeas corpus and trial by jury, to name just a few. ...
    "However, at present thousands of Māori people are enthusiastically pursuing the renaissance of their language and their culture from a place of sincerity. Many white New Zealanders do not realise this and are mistaking them for the anti-Western virtue signalling camp, and are accordingly very hostile to anything Māori. This is met with bewilderment by Māori. They do not understand at all why some white people are so hostile to their culture. ...
    "Rather than realising the true source of the hostility to Te Reo (which is the intellectual dishonesty of postmodernism as a worldview) antipathy towards anything Māori is viewed in the light of historical suppression of Te Reo in schools as well as the devaluing of Māori culture generally. In short, it is perceived as racism. You need only read Māori media outlets to see the enormity of the bewilderment, hurt, rage and even hate this causes. ...
    "We need a new political paradigm in which postmodernism does not harden people to indigenous issues. The key to this is the simple realisation that you can be pro-indigenous without being postmodern."

~ Lucy Rogers from her post 'Why I speak Māori (and it has nothing to do with “virtue signalling”)' [Hat tip PM of NZ]

"Treaty of Waitangi politics intrude ever more conspicuously into many areas of our society and our public life." Including internet access!

"Treaty of Waitangi politics intrude ever more conspicuously into many areas of our society and our public life. 

• "Even New Zealand’s left-leaning mainstream media have picked up on the University of Auckland's compulsory indoctrination-rich Waipapa Taumata Rau course
• "Janet Dickson’s challenge to the Real Estate Authority over their compulsion on estate agents to undertake a compulsory professional development module called Te Kākano (The Seed)
• "another example in tertiary education concerns efforts to decolonise [sic] the Massey University BA degree ...

"Such examples barely lift the lid on the extent of Treaty indoctrination across the public service, the education and research sectors, businesses and professional regulatory bodies. For example, 

• the Midwifery Council’s Scope of Practice
• the cultural safety requirements imposed on practitioners by the New Zealand Psychologists Board, and 
• the Treaty-centric competency standards for New Zealand pharmacists ...

"A very heavy focus on one population is evident in the charters, mission statements and constitutions of many organisations in New Zealand. ... [I]t seems that even the Internet cannot escape the current identity politics. ... [even if s]uch technology is universally available to the entire world and, by its very nature, is not exclusive to any one ethnicity. In fact, it is one of the most democratising of any technology ...

"[And yet] the InternetNZ Council [which operates the regional registry for New Zealand, i.e, the .nz Register]... has on its agenda the ... overarching Strategic Goal of 'Centring Te Tiriti o Waitangi' as a Strategic Priority, and ethno-centric preferences that dominate five Strategic Goals and 13 out of 25 sub-goals [including] ...  

• Implement Ngā Pae: Pae Kākano | Horizon 1....
• understand what it means to InternetNZ | Ipurangi Aotearoa Group to be Tiriti-centric....
• embed Te Tiriti through our strategies, policies, practices, people capability to achieve digital equity, digital inclusion and access for Māori ...
• [ensure] a Te Tiriti o Waitangi perspective guides everything we do. ...
• [ensure] investment priorities are guided by clear objectives that promote equity, align with priorities identified by Māori in the sector.

"It is perfectly reasonable that effective engagement with Māori, as with all stakeholders, should be part of the mission of InternetNZ. However, by declaring that it will be Te Tiriti-centric, InternetNZ, like our universities, is implicitly taking a political stance, when as a user-focused organisation it should remain entirely neutral....

"The stated goals stand at odds with the principles of [worldwide] internet governance as identified, for example, by the global Internet Society[which undertakes] the global management of the Internet.  ...

"As a critical facility for Internet access for New Zealanders, InternetNZ needs simply to recommit to the fundamental principles of a globally interconnected world, that demonstrate no preference for any particular ethnic, religious, social, economic, national, cultural or racial grouping. ... 

"[W]e must avoid even the remote possibility that access to a .nz domain name could be frustrated because the user may not support one or more of the strategic goals outlined above, or New Zealanders’ rights and responsibilities being differentiated by race."

~ John Raine and David Lillis from their post 'In Case You Were Wondering – InternetNZ and the Treaty'

"Nationalism is not patriotism!"

"Alchemy is not chemistry.

"Altruism is not caring.
"Socialism is not sharing.
"Astrology is not astronomy.
"H2SO4 is not water.
"Nationalism is not patriotism."

~ Keith Weiner

"Nationalism is not patriotism! A French patriot roots for their Olympic basketball team; a French nationalist grumbles that almost all the players are black....
    "Note that 'identity politics' is not an inherently left or right wing idea. Where it favours minority groups, it is typically framed as left wing. When it favours the majority ethnic group (or more precisely the group in power – recall South Africa before 1994), it’s typically viewed as right wing. Thus [both varieties of] nationalists tend to oppose immigration, which threatens to dilute the [favoured] ethnic group."

~ Scott Sumner, from his post on 'The authoritarian nationalist playbook'

"The Woke Right ... " [updated]

"The Woke Right is that part of the Right that has decided everything the Left has been saying is bad must actually be good.

"The Left said racism is bad, so racism must be good. 

"The Left said patriarchy is bad, so patriarchy must be good.
"The Left said Fascism is bad, so...

"Because the Woke (or Dissident, or New, or 'New Christian') Right defines itself by glorifying everything the Left said was bad, it becomes an extension of the Left's tortured and destructive caricature of society. They become an extension of the Left and take up its methods.

"The Left wasn't wrong that racism is bad. The Left was wrong about what racism is. The thing the Left referred to as 'racism' isn't racism. Most of it isn't even real. The purpose of most of those claims was to extract power, and it worked because racism is actually bad.

"The Woke or New or Dissident Right ... has adopted a basic reactionary reversal of the Left's pronouncements while accepting the Left's characterisations, framing, and belief in power dynamics."

~ James Lindsay on 'The Woke Right'

UPDATE:

"We have a choice. We can choose to remain a liberal democracy, or become an ethnocentric nation riven by ethnic tensions."

 

"We have a choice. We can choose to remain a liberal democracy where everyone counts, or we can become an ethnocentric nation based on identity politics and riven by ethnic tensions. Make no mistake; the current path where particular ethnicities are granted 'partnership' status can only lead to the eventual appearance of more ethnic parties fighting it out for a seat at the table."

~ Ananish Chaudari from his post 'Debate around ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill essential for a multi-ethnic nation'

 

"Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does."

"[T]he period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861 ... were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union. ...
    "The most disconcerting feature ... are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. ... 

"From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.
    "Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.
    "These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. ... The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the ACT Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the 'principles' of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own. ...

"Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?
    "Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?
    "What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: 'one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character'? ...

"Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does."

~ Chris Trotter from his post 'Are We The Baddies?'

"We have a choice. We can choose to remain a liberal democracy, or become an ethnocentric nation riven by ethnic tensions."

"We have a choice. We can choose to remain a liberal democracy where everyone counts, or we can become an ethnocentric nation based on identity politics and riven by ethnic tensions. Make no mistake; the current path where particular ethnicities are granted 'partnership' status can only lead to the eventual appearance of more ethnic parties fighting it out for a seat at the table."

~ Ananish Chaudari from his post 'Debate around ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill essential for a multi-ethnic nation'

"To tribalists, language is not a tool of thought and communication. Language, to them, is a symbol of tribal status and power "

"A symptom of the tribal mentality’s self-arrested, perceptual level of development may be observed in the tribalists’ position on language…. 

    "To a person who understands the function of language, it makes no difference what sounds are chosen to name things, provided these sounds refer to clearly defined aspects of reality. But to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorised, not understood…
    "But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders….

The tribalists clamour that their language, preserves their 'ethnic identity.' But there is no such thing. Conformity to a racist tradition does not constitute a human identity. Just as racism provides a pseudo-self-esteem for men who have not earned an authentic one, so their hysterical loyalty to their own dialect serves a similar function: it provides a pretence at 'collective self-esteem,' an illusion of safety for the confused, frightened, precarious state of a tribalist's stagnant consciousness. 

    "The proclaimed desire to preserve one's language and/or its literary works, if any, is a cover-up. In a free, or even semi-free country, no one is forbidden to speak any language he chooses with those who wish to speak it. But he cannot force it on others. A country has to have only one official language, if men are to understand one another -- and it makes no difference which language it is, since men live by the meaning, not the sound, of words. It is eminently fair that a country's official language should be the language of the majority. As to literary works, their survival does not depend on political enforcement.
    "But to the tribalists, language is not a tool of thought and communication. Language, to them, is a symbol of tribal status and power -- the power to force their dialect on all outsiders. This appeals, not even to the tribal leaders, but to the sick, touchy vanity of the tribal rank and file.
    "In this connection, I want to mention a hypothesis of mine, which is only a hypothesis, because I have given no special study to the subject of bilingual countries, i.e., countries that have two official languages: But I have observed the fact that bilingual countries tend to be culturally impoverished, by comparison to. the major countries whose language they share in part. Bilingual countries do not produce many great, first-rate achievements in any intellectual line of endeavor, whether in science, philosophy, literature or art. Consider the record of Belgium (which is French-speaking in part) as against the record of France -- or the record of Switzerland (a trilingual country) as against the record of France, of Germany, of Italy -- or the record of Canada as against the record of the United States.
    "The cause of the poor records may lie in the comparative territorial smallness of those countries-but this does not apply to Canada versus the United States...
    "My hypothesis is as follows: the policy of bilingual rule (which spares some citizens the necessity to learn another language) is a concession to, and a perpetuation of, a strong ethnic-tribalist element within a country. It is an element of anti-intellectuality, conformity and stagnation. The best minds would run from such countries: they would sense, if not know it consciously, that tribalism leaves them no chance."

~ Ayn Rand, from her 1977 essay 'Global Balkanisation' [listen to it here; hear it discussed here, back in 2018]

 

2020" When "racial politics " took "a deranged and very strange step backwards."

"What came to be known as ‘wokery’ had long been in gestation. .... The first year of lockdown was ... when ... [p]erceptions of race shifted profoundly. The idea that individuals and institutions were ‘unconsciously’ or ‘systemically’ racist had already been established; but this belief, intimating that there was something inherently problematic with white America itself, was now pushed to its extreme. To be white now became problematic in itself. Whiteness became a mark of original sin.
    "Anything associated with the white man and mainstream America was now deemed racist. A pamphlet titled ‘White Supremacy Culture’, published in the late 1990s by academic Tema Okun, proved highly influential. In it, Okun denounced as racist the following ‘white’ values: perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word, individualism and objectivity. ‘In this worldview’, writes Bowles, ‘if black people do somehow exhibit urgency or perfectionism, it means there has been internalised whiteness. And that is a type of death for that black person.’ The new racism had simultaneously demonised whiteness and pathologised blackness.
    "Racial politics had taken a deranged and very strange step backwards. ...
    "The grotesque excesses of identitarian politics in America may seem like something from another planet."

~ Patrick West, from his review 'The year America went mad' of Nellie Bowles's new book Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History

What's 'woke'? Let me explain.

 

You hear it all the time now. 'Woke.' "He's woke." "She's woke." "That's woke." Woke, woke. woke. You hear it all the time.

But awake to what?

James Lindsay likes tweaking 'woke' noses, and he's a fairly knowledgable chap on the subject. "There's a right name for the 'Woke' ideology," he explains, "and it's 'Critical Constructivism.' 

Critical constructivist ideology is what you "wake up" to when you go 'Woke'." He explains in a lengthy Twitter thread:

Reading this book [above], which originally codified it in 2005, is like reading a confession of Woke ideology. Let's talk about it.
    The guy whose name is on the cover of that book is credited with codifying critical constructivism, or as it would be better to call it, critical constructivist ideology (or ideologies). His name is Joe Kincheloe, he was at Magill University, and he was a critical pedagogue.
    Just to remind you, critical pedagogy is a form of brainwashing posing as education — it is the application of critical theory to educational theory and praxis, as well as the teaching and practice of critical theories in schools. ... [C]ritical pedagogy was developed ... to use educational materials as a 'mediator to political knowledge,' i.e., an excuse to brainwash.
    The point of critical pedagogy is to use education as a means not to educate, but to raise a critical consciousness in students instead. That is, its purpose is to make them 'Woke.' What does that entail, though? It means becoming a critical constructivist, as Kincheloe details.

As some people have said, it always starts with teacher mis-education. 

Note what we've already said, though. Yes, Marcuse. Yes, intersectionality. Yes, CRT and Queer Theory et cetera. Yes, yes, yes. That's Woke, BUT Woke was born and bred in education schools. I first recognised this right after [Helen Pluckrose and I] published our 2020 book 'Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.'
    Critical pedagogy, following people like Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe, forged together the religious liberationist Marxism of [Paulo] Freire, literally a Liberation Theologian, with the 'European theorists,' including both Critical Marxists like Marcuse and postmodernists like Foucault.
    In other words, when Jordan Peterson identifies what we now call 'Woke' as 'postmodern neo-Marxism,' he was exactly right. ["Yes, no, and sort of," says philosopher Stephen Hicks.] It was a neo-Marxist critique that had taken a postmodern turn away from realism and reality. The right name for that is 'critical constructivism.'

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM CONTAINS (OR SYNTHESISES) two disparate parts: 'critical,' which refers to Critical Theory (that is, neo-Marxism or Critical Marxism), and 'constructivism,' which refers to the constructivist thinking at the heart of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Critical Theory we all already generally understand at this point. The idea is pretty simple: 

• ruthless criticism of everything that exists; 

• calling everything you want to control 'oppression' until you control it; 

• finding a new proletariat in 'ghetto populations'; blah blah blah.

    More accurately, Critical Theory means believing the world and the people in it are contoured by systems of social, cultural, and economic power that are effectively inescapable and all serve to reproduce the 'existing society' (status quo) and its capitalist engine.

    Critical Theory is not concerned with the operation of the world, 'epistemic adequacy' (i.e., knowing what you're talking about), or anything else. They're interested in how systemic power shapes and contours all things and how they're experienced, to which they give a (neo)-Marxist critique.
    Constructivism is a bit less familiar for two reasons:
We've done a lot of explaining and criticising Critical Theory already, so people are catching on, and it's a downright alien intellectual landscape that is almost impossible to believe anyone actually believes. 

You're already very familiar with the language of constructivism: 'X is a social construct.' Constructivism fundamentally believes that the world is socially constructed. That's a profound claim. So are people as part of the world. That's another profound claim. So is power. I need you to stop thinking you get it and listen now because you're probably already rejecting the idea that anyone can be a constructivist who believes the world is itself socially constructed. That's because you're fundamentally a realist, but they are not realists at all.
    Constructivists believe, as Kincheloe says explicitly, that nothing exists before perception. That means that, to a constructivist, some objective shared reality doesn't exist. To them, there is no reality except the perception of reality, and the perception of reality is constructed by power.
    I need you to stop again because you probably reject getting it again. They really believe this. There is no reality except perceived reality. Reality is perceived according to one's social and political position with respect to prevailing dominant power. Do you understand?
    Constructivism rejects the idea of an objective shared reality that we can observe and draw consistent conclusions about. Conclusions are the result of perceptions and interpretations, which are colored and shaped by dominant power, mostly in getting people to accept that power.
    In place of an objective shared reality we can draw conclusions about, we all inhabit our own 'lived realities' that are shaped by power dynamics that primarily play out on the group level, hence the need for 'social justice' to make power equitable among and across groups.
    Because (critical) constructivist ideologies believe themselves the only way to truly study the effects of systemic dominant power, they have a monopoly on knowing how it works [despite the contradiction in terms], who benefits, and who suffers oppression because of it. Their interpretation is the only game in town.
    All interpretations that disagree with critical constructivism [they insist] do so for one or more bad reasons, for example:

• not knowing the value of critical constructivism, 
• being motivated to protect one's power on one or more levels, 
• prejudice and hate, or
• having bought the dominant ideology's terms, etc. 

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS PARTICULARLY HOSTILE to 'Western' science, favouring what it calls 'subjugated knowledges. This should all feel very familiar right now [hello Mātauranga Māori], and it's worth noting that Kincheloe is largely credited with starting the idea of 'decolonising' knowledge. 

    Kincheloe, in his own words, explains that critical constructivism is a 'weltanshuuang,' that is, a worldview, based on a 'critical hermeneutical' understanding of experienced reality. This means it intends to interpret everything through critical constructivism.
    In other words, critical constructivism is a hermetically-sealed ideological worldview (a cult worldview) that claims a monopoly on interpretation of the world by virtue of its capacity to call anything that challenges it an unjust application of self-serving dominant power.
    When you are "Woke," you are a critical constructivist, or at least suffer ideological contamination by critical constructivism, whether you know it or not. You believe important aspects of the world are socially (politically) constructed, that power is the main variable, etc.
    More importantly, you believe that perception (of unjust power) combined with (that) interpretation of reality is a more faithful description of reality than empirical fact or logical consistency, which are "reductionist" to critical constructivists.
    This wackadoodle (anti-realist) belief is a consequence of the good-ol' Hegelian/Marxist dialectic that critical constructivism imports wholesale. As Kincheloe explains, his worldview is better because it knows knowledge is both subjective and objective at the same time.
    He phrases it that all knowledge requires interpretation, and that means knowledge is constructed from the known (objective) and the knower (subjective) who knows it. It isn't "knowledge" at all until interpretation is added, and critical constructivist interpretation is best.
    Why is critical constructivist interpretation best? Here comes another standard Marxist trick: because it's the only one (self)-aware of the fact that 'positionality' with respect to power matters, so it's allegedly the only one accounting for dominant power systems at all.

WE COULD GO ON AND on about this, but you hopefully get the idea. Critical constructivism is the real name for 'Woke.' It's a cult-ideological view of the world that cannot be challenged from the outside, only concentrated from within, and it's what you 'wake up' to when Woked. [A different name for 'Critical Constructivism': Cognitive Onanism.]
    Critical constructivism is an insane, self-serving, hermetically sealed cult-ideological worldview and belief system, including a demand to put it into praxis (activism) to recreate the world for the possibility of a 'liberation' it cannot describe, by definition. A disaster.
    There is a long, detailed academic history and pedigree to 'Woke,' though, so don't let people gaslight you into believing it's some right-wing bogeyman no one can even define. It's easily comprehensible despite being almost impossible to grok like an insider.
    People who become 'Woke' (critical constructivists) are in a cult that is necessarily destructive. Why is it necessarily destructive? Because it rejects reality, and attempts instead to understand a 'reality' based in the subjective interpretations of power .....
    Furthermore, its objective is to destroy the only thing it regards as being 'real,' which are the power dynamics it identifies so it can hate them and destroy them. Those are 'socially real' because they are imposed by those with dominant power, who must be disempowered. Simple.

To conclude, Woke is a real thing. It can be explained in great detail as exactly what its critics have been saying about it for years, and those details are all available in straightforward black and white from its creators, if you can just read them and believe them.

 

"Horrendously, anti-Semitism comes to be seen as a morally virtuous position."

 

"First it was Columbia, now anti-Israel protests have spread across America. ... The ‘rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation’ ... now rings out on leafy campuses from California to Boston.
    "In these ostensibly ‘anti-war’ protests, students have demanded the total destruction of Israel, while waving placards in support of Hamas and singling out Jewish professors and students for abuse. The terrifying orgy of anti-Semitism that has been unleashed in America’s top universities should disturb everyone. ...
    "Since the start of their education, today’s students have imbibed a crude understanding that people can be sorted into different groups according to skin colour, gender and sexuality ... indoctrinated into a view that the world can be divided between oppressors and the oppressed. ... taught to loathe their own country and made defensive of their privilege ...
    " In this context, aligning with Palestinians and demonstrating hostility to Israel makes perfect sense. It allows students to identify with an oppressed group and distance themselves from their own nation and culture. That such sentiment can so easily tip over into anti-Semitism is unsurprising. Students have been deluded into thinking that the more extreme their demands for the abolition of Israel, and the more vile their targeting of Jews, the better they show their own virtue.
    "Horrendously, anti-Semitism comes to be seen as a morally virtuous position."

~ Joanna Williams, from her op-ed 'How anti-Semitism became a virtue on American campuses'

"By any measure, the 'School Strike for Climate' was a disaster" [update]

"On Friday, March 15 2019, an estimated 170,000 New Zealand secondary school students took to the nation’s streets. RNZ still ranks that turnout as the 'second-largest' protest in New Zealand history. ... [Last] Friday morning (5 April 2024) RNZ was carrying the School Strike for Climate protest organisers’ predictions of a turnout in excess of 100,000. Protest rallies were scheduled from Whangarei to Invercargill. ...
    "By the end of the day, however, it was clear that something very serious had gone wrong with the plan to unite the Left’s fragmented movements by, in effect, piggy-backing on the huge numbers formerly responsive to the SS4C’s summonses. Rather than a turnout in the range of 100,000: across the whole country, and by the most generous estimate, the organisers of the 'Strike' turned out a derisory 5,000 people.
    "By any measure, the 'Strike' was a disaster ...
    "Certainly, the dismal turnout must have given Green co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, considerable pause. After all, she has staked a great deal of her political credibility on the proposition that she and her party can mobilise, electorally, the young, the alienated, and the disenfranchised. After Friday, however, transforming the 2026 general election into a people’s crusade would appear to be a much taller order.
    "Contrariwise, the failure of the 'Strike' offers Messers Luxon, Seymour and Peters considerable cause for celebration. Their coalition is described on the SS4C website as: 'the most conservative government in our history' – a claim that would doubtless bring a wry smile to the lips of Bill Massey, Sid Holland, and Rob Muldoon. Still, if Friday’s flop is the best the New Zealand Left can set against the Great Strike of 1913, the 1951 Waterfront Lockout, and the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, then our Coalition Government can breathe a huge sigh of relief."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Something Important: The Curious Death of the School Strike 4 Climate Movement.'

UPDATE: This chimes with news from the States "that just 3% of 18-to-34-year-old voters named climate change as their top issue, with most citing the economy, inflation or immigration." (Not that the latter is anything about which to be concerned either.)

"Let’s not forget, [notes Jo Nova] all these surveys are done on people who never see a skeptical expert on TV or a real documentary ... They don’t hear that carbon dioxide was higher for most of the last half billion years, or that 'climate change' causes record grain yields, and saves 166,000 lives a year. Most of the 18 to 35 year olds have been fed the climate diatribe from school — but even they don’t believe it. ...

"So the good news that the young can see through this, despite the wall of propaganda.."