I've been in academia for ~50 years and I've had a front row seat to its decline. There is no question that the increased representation of women in academia has played a major role in the rise of wokism. This is most easily understood for the reasons outlined by Carl. What surprised (and disappointed) me the most, though, was the extreme deference most males showed to the woke mindset pushed by essentially all of their younger women colleagues. It seems clear that this deference was born out of a lack of principle, poor self esteem, and a pathetic desire to simply "be accepted" by the younger generation. Their calculus was to simply sniff out which way the wind was blowing, and go all in. The faculty from the boomer generation may have once held classical liberal core beliefs, but in the end they abdicated their responsibility, dropped the ball, and had no problem hitching their wagon to the woke train when it rolled through the university.
I personally know a couple (untenured) academic men who wear dangly earings, flood their Instagram accounts with photos of them at drag shows, and who paint their nails, not because they particularly support any of this, but because they are absolutely terrified to be seen as anything other than an "ally". I find it pathetic and disgusting. But these are the kind of men that academia now selects for. Intelligence and ability is far less important than worshiping at the feet of the woke goddess for all your colleagues to see.
are you a koran alone agnostic. lol. the word hijab isn't in the koran either. you do knows muslims extrapolate most of sharia from the koran and sunnah. not much is as clear as 24:2. and even that ayat depends on how you interpret zina. muhammad asad translates it both as fornicatiors and adulterers apparently abrogating rajm for adulterers.
"clearly contradicts" but that is the problem. it is not clear. it is funny, the sahih koran translates zina as [unmarried] adultery. (lol). but muhammad asad translates it as adultery [meaning both fornication and adultery] and almost all the others just as fornication.
[Does this contradict]: Narrated Ibn 'Abbas: 'Umar said, "I am afraid that after a long time has passed, people may say, "We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book," and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession." Sufyan added, "I have memorized this narration in this way." 'Umar added, "Surely Allah's Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him."
[This]: [24.2] (As for) the fornicatress and the fornicator, flog each of them, (giving) a hundred stripes, and let not pity for them detain you in the matter of obedience to Allah, if you believe in Allah and the last day, and let a party of believers witness their chastisement.
I agree. It's also the only variable that looks like a regression line in the history of wokism in academia especially, and makes sense causally. You can see that dynamic everywhere. There's also a bias toward women that Bo Winegard studied with Cory Clark and it's the most politically invariant bias. That means even dissidents would come up with alternatives to that explanation and I think that's a factor with less causally serious explanations about Marxism and postmodernism being so popular.
I have to disagree with the idea that intelligent people are most drawn to or accepting of "woke". It seems to me that the Left is suffering a massive brain drain as they force out all critical independent thinkers, leaving weak minded cult members. The left has been consistently alienating intelligent potential allies for at least 10 years, creating and empowering massive personalities that rise up against them on podcasts, social media, etc. and dedicate themselves to fighting against the Left.
The "massive personalities" statement was more of a side note or follow up highlighting how the Left alienates potential allies.
It seems that the ideological capture required to be a far left academic also requires a good bit of irrational thinking and disdain for, or eschewing of, logic in order to maintain that position. I would argue that irrational intelligent people are less effective than rational intelligent people, and that rational intelligent people are forced out of the Left. I can't even say that they are moving to the Right, but more likely that they are just politically homeless. As intelligent rational people are forced out of the Left, you are left with a pool of irrational intelligent people who all think the same, and are thus overall less effective at problem solving, understanding different points of view, or just generally acting rationally. So maybe I'm not specifically talking about an "intelligence" brain drain, but instead of a "rationality" drain, which really seems like in the long term would set the far left academic system up for failure.
I'm really just thinking as I type, so I'm sure there are some flaws here.
even bill maher is denouncing wokism and you generally don't get much more liberal then him. i think when a supreme court judge can't define the word 'woman' you will definately loose the rational intelligent people.
Thank you for making the point that in our degenerate matriarchy suffering from dementia, those who prefer Truth, Logic and Morality have been made politically homeless.
As for the "rationality drain" that you mention, could you perhaps mean "folly"?
what do you think of thomas sowell? but he won't be around much longer. have you ever read the book: 'evil geniuses' [not about the IQs of the nazis] by kurt andersen? my socialist cousin gave it to me. this guy thinks the right-wingers, or at least the big business of the right have taken over america since reagan. nothing about wokism be it talks a good bit about all the 'right wing' think tanks that have been set up and funded since the 70s.
When you say "the left", do you just mean unprincipled establishment orthodoxy that opened the way to feminism and its other moral and social diseases?
I really don't care about morality, I don't care what consenting adults do behind closed doors, what body parts they cut off in order to be a more effective cosplayer, or if they shoot heroin. I am far more concerned with academia driving out rational, critical, analytical thinkers who refuse to take on a moronic ideology that should have stayed marginalized in dark back rooms of insignificant and unimportant humanities departments. As you push out the great thinkers who refuse to put up with ideological nonsense, all you are left with are two types of people: Spineless weak-minded and easily manipulated academics, and academics who are absolute sociopaths who will promote whatever toxic ideology that will get them ahead and get them power.
The end result to all this is that science, knowledge, and understanding grinds to a halt as ideological worms and psychopaths are all that will be left in academia, and we are then left in a dark age of moron ideologies, where virtue signalling is more important than learning and discovery.
I know nothing about "fundamental British Values". Moronic ideologies are ones that say "the stiffer the penis and the larger the testicles, the more of a woman a person is".
Wouldn't heroin addicts who are consenting adults committing incest, adultery, fornication and sodomy lead to degeneracy, ever lowering standards of education and behaviour as well as the end of your civilisation?
I don't care about the religious concept of morality. My disinterest in the religious concept of morality is unrelated to my personal concept of morality and is not a reflection of my personal morality.
(I commented here instead of under https://substack.com/home/post/p-144004787 since this is more recent and the IQ-moral worth question was discussed at the end of the pod.)
I think that intelligence only matters instrumentally for moral worth. I.e. IQ is only important in so far as it helps the person improve the well-being of other people, or as far as it furthers human progress, or similar. If you remove these aspects, it becomes much less clear that IQ matters for moral worth.
Thought experiment: Two old men have each decided to retire to their own private islands, to contemplate life and wait for death in solitude. None of them will ever have contact with anyone again. One of the men has an IQ that's thirty points higher than the other. Both set sail to their islands the same day, but both are lost at sea and you only have the resources to try to save one. Your experience with sea rescue tells you that there's a minimal higher chance of rescuing the lower-IQ man (say 80,1% chance that you manages to rescue the lower-IQ man if you try vs 80% chance that you mange to rescue the higher-IQ man if you try). The man you rescue will be grateful but won't rethink his self-imposed exile and he will thus take the next boat to his island. Which one do you try to save?
To me it seems obvious that the moral thing to do is to rescue the lower-IQ man (since the chance is higher) or to toss a coin (since the chances are functionally similar), but I would strongly disagree with anyone who wanted to rescue the higher-IQ man because of his higher IQ.
(You might want to argue that the higher-IQ man statistically has made more contributions to society and thus deserves rescue more: if so assume that the lives of both men have been evaluated in depth by a trusted party which concluded that both men have been equally fairly rewarded and punished for their societal contributions before exile, through the wages of their own labor and through luck.)
Now of course, the example above is contrived (but not unrealistic, exiles and hermits exist and similar situations have likely occurred). Most humans live in society and high IQ is socially beneficial. But I still think the experiment shows that high IQ isn't intrinsically valuable. (But if the IQ of the lower-IQ man becomes too low I can see an argument to save the higher-IQ man, but then I think "low-IQ" is a proxy for some cutoff of autonomy/human-ness. I don't think this argument changes the conclusion for say men with IQ 100 vs IQ 130.)
I don't see the feminization hypothesis as simply blaming women because it's really how institutions made up of both men and women assimilate to the increased female leadership and influence. I imagine of you tried to analyze wokeness with regression, female participation over time would be the best causal variable, it also is coherent with my own experience. I think just discussing it more would be helpful to shed light on how our society works because our current popular explanations in my opinion are false.
I think Nathan's premise makes logocla sense, that environmentalism necessitates wokism and it's implied. I think that's analytically true more than it being a practical explanation of how it took over. There I personally think sex differences seems the most causal since the increase in women's influence is so correlated. I like sociobiolgy to explain things and tracks with my experience. At any rate they are compatible and much better than the popular story of magic postmodern texts triggering a mind virus.
I'm still inclined to think that wokeness is mainly caused by overcorrection (rather than "taking the equality thesis seriously"): people turned from persecuting certain groups to privileging them instead.
You and Noah speculate as to why women in academia, journalism, etc. are disproportionately more woke compared to men. What would your reply be if someone countered that it’s not due to sex differences but something more akin to a “default hypothesis” for women?
On my account, wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously. The feminization of the institutions is a separate phenomenon, though it influences the form that wokism takes.
Perhaps the default assumption should be that women will be more attracted to wokism with respect to sex (i.e., sex disparities favoring men must be corrected). But self-interest doesn't explain their wokism with respect to race.
There are clear parallels between cancel culture and traditional female culture, which is characterized by reputational attack and social ostracism over physical confrontation, and places a great deal of value on empathy and caring. So it's no surprise that women will be somewhat more inclined to participate in it. Cancel culture acts in the service of the dominant ideology, which happens to be wokism.
Wouldn't it not be self-interest, but altruism? So personality differences between the sexes that make narratives about victimization and privilege attractive to women much more so than men. So those ideas are "female coded" because of altruism and may or may not involve benefits to them.
I agree with you but I could imagine a cheeky person asking why we can’t just ignore your answer above and, instead, just explain disproportionate woke women as due to them having above average IQs like many of their woke male counterparts?
No, I meant why can’t we use the default hypothesis of high IQ that Cofnas applied to Jews to explain their disproportionate leftism/Wokeism to apply to women in academia, journalism, etc. as well?
1:36:00 Your moral worth is linked to your adherence to your moral principles and this assessment would be made by members of your religious group or political party.
I've been in academia for ~50 years and I've had a front row seat to its decline. There is no question that the increased representation of women in academia has played a major role in the rise of wokism. This is most easily understood for the reasons outlined by Carl. What surprised (and disappointed) me the most, though, was the extreme deference most males showed to the woke mindset pushed by essentially all of their younger women colleagues. It seems clear that this deference was born out of a lack of principle, poor self esteem, and a pathetic desire to simply "be accepted" by the younger generation. Their calculus was to simply sniff out which way the wind was blowing, and go all in. The faculty from the boomer generation may have once held classical liberal core beliefs, but in the end they abdicated their responsibility, dropped the ball, and had no problem hitching their wagon to the woke train when it rolled through the university.
I personally know a couple (untenured) academic men who wear dangly earings, flood their Instagram accounts with photos of them at drag shows, and who paint their nails, not because they particularly support any of this, but because they are absolutely terrified to be seen as anything other than an "ally". I find it pathetic and disgusting. But these are the kind of men that academia now selects for. Intelligence and ability is far less important than worshiping at the feet of the woke goddess for all your colleagues to see.
No question that virtue signaling has become a real "thing" for the left. I suspect that the prevalence of social media has really amplified it.
Don't say "Wokism", say "State-Sponsored Degeneracy".
luke is talking about loneliness is a huge problem. that it is a national security problem.
Are you referring to Luke Ford? Lonely men are desperate men. That is why they state should support marriage.
what did you think of the pakistanis beating the guy to death on friday for blasphemy?
The Koran doesn’t even mention blasphemy.
https://islamqa.info/en/answers/14305/it-is-essential-to-respond-to-those-who-defame-the-prophet-peace-and-blessings-of-allaah-be-upon-him
There is no verse in the Koran that mentions blasphemy. quran.com/2/256 supports the First Amendment.
can't blasphemy be considered 'spreading corruption'?
are you a koran alone agnostic. lol. the word hijab isn't in the koran either. you do knows muslims extrapolate most of sharia from the koran and sunnah. not much is as clear as 24:2. and even that ayat depends on how you interpret zina. muhammad asad translates it both as fornicatiors and adulterers apparently abrogating rajm for adulterers.
I reject the Hadith where it clearly contradicts the Koran.
"clearly contradicts" but that is the problem. it is not clear. it is funny, the sahih koran translates zina as [unmarried] adultery. (lol). but muhammad asad translates it as adultery [meaning both fornication and adultery] and almost all the others just as fornication.
[Does this contradict]: Narrated Ibn 'Abbas: 'Umar said, "I am afraid that after a long time has passed, people may say, "We do not find the Verses of the Rajam (stoning to death) in the Holy Book," and consequently they may go astray by leaving an obligation that Allah has revealed. Lo! I confirm that the penalty of Rajam be inflicted on him who commits illegal sexual intercourse, if he is already married and the crime is proved by witnesses or pregnancy or confession." Sufyan added, "I have memorized this narration in this way." 'Umar added, "Surely Allah's Apostle carried out the penalty of Rajam, and so did we after him."
[This]: [24.2] (As for) the fornicatress and the fornicator, flog each of them, (giving) a hundred stripes, and let not pity for them detain you in the matter of obedience to Allah, if you believe in Allah and the last day, and let a party of believers witness their chastisement.
???
I agree. It's also the only variable that looks like a regression line in the history of wokism in academia especially, and makes sense causally. You can see that dynamic everywhere. There's also a bias toward women that Bo Winegard studied with Cory Clark and it's the most politically invariant bias. That means even dissidents would come up with alternatives to that explanation and I think that's a factor with less causally serious explanations about Marxism and postmodernism being so popular.
I have to disagree with the idea that intelligent people are most drawn to or accepting of "woke". It seems to me that the Left is suffering a massive brain drain as they force out all critical independent thinkers, leaving weak minded cult members. The left has been consistently alienating intelligent potential allies for at least 10 years, creating and empowering massive personalities that rise up against them on podcasts, social media, etc. and dedicate themselves to fighting against the Left.
"Massive personalities" like Bret Weinstein, Candace Owens, and the n-word girl? I discuss several lines of evidence that intellectual elites overwhelming lean left/woke: https://ncofnas.com/p/why-we-need-to-talk-about-the-rights
The "massive personalities" statement was more of a side note or follow up highlighting how the Left alienates potential allies.
It seems that the ideological capture required to be a far left academic also requires a good bit of irrational thinking and disdain for, or eschewing of, logic in order to maintain that position. I would argue that irrational intelligent people are less effective than rational intelligent people, and that rational intelligent people are forced out of the Left. I can't even say that they are moving to the Right, but more likely that they are just politically homeless. As intelligent rational people are forced out of the Left, you are left with a pool of irrational intelligent people who all think the same, and are thus overall less effective at problem solving, understanding different points of view, or just generally acting rationally. So maybe I'm not specifically talking about an "intelligence" brain drain, but instead of a "rationality" drain, which really seems like in the long term would set the far left academic system up for failure.
I'm really just thinking as I type, so I'm sure there are some flaws here.
even bill maher is denouncing wokism and you generally don't get much more liberal then him. i think when a supreme court judge can't define the word 'woman' you will definately loose the rational intelligent people.
Thank you for making the point that in our degenerate matriarchy suffering from dementia, those who prefer Truth, Logic and Morality have been made politically homeless.
As for the "rationality drain" that you mention, could you perhaps mean "folly"?
what do you think of thomas sowell? but he won't be around much longer. have you ever read the book: 'evil geniuses' [not about the IQs of the nazis] by kurt andersen? my socialist cousin gave it to me. this guy thinks the right-wingers, or at least the big business of the right have taken over america since reagan. nothing about wokism be it talks a good bit about all the 'right wing' think tanks that have been set up and funded since the 70s.
When you say "the left", do you just mean unprincipled establishment orthodoxy that opened the way to feminism and its other moral and social diseases?
I really don't care about morality, I don't care what consenting adults do behind closed doors, what body parts they cut off in order to be a more effective cosplayer, or if they shoot heroin. I am far more concerned with academia driving out rational, critical, analytical thinkers who refuse to take on a moronic ideology that should have stayed marginalized in dark back rooms of insignificant and unimportant humanities departments. As you push out the great thinkers who refuse to put up with ideological nonsense, all you are left with are two types of people: Spineless weak-minded and easily manipulated academics, and academics who are absolute sociopaths who will promote whatever toxic ideology that will get them ahead and get them power.
The end result to all this is that science, knowledge, and understanding grinds to a halt as ideological worms and psychopaths are all that will be left in academia, and we are then left in a dark age of moron ideologies, where virtue signalling is more important than learning and discovery.
When you say "moronic ideology", do you mean "fundamental British values"?
I know nothing about "fundamental British Values". Moronic ideologies are ones that say "the stiffer the penis and the larger the testicles, the more of a woman a person is".
The official religion of the British is no longer Anglicanism but "fundamental British values".
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/guidance-on-promoting-british-values-in-schools-published
Wouldn't heroin addicts who are consenting adults committing incest, adultery, fornication and sodomy lead to degeneracy, ever lowering standards of education and behaviour as well as the end of your civilisation?
You are choosing to ignore what I wrote and inventing your own categories to fit your narrative.
I have acknowledged what you are saying without accepting your premises.
Is a person who says he does not care about morality an immoral person or an amoral person?
I don't care about the religious concept of morality. My disinterest in the religious concept of morality is unrelated to my personal concept of morality and is not a reflection of my personal morality.
Do you have any moral principles?
"Wokism" will not be put away until we outgrow the myths of "Martin Luther King" and the "Civil Rights Act".
what myths do you speak or?
Sharia would easily deal with feminism. Call things by their known names instead of using neologisms and confusing people.
claire are you familar with the term mukhannath?
I had to look it up to refresh my memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukhannath
so much for calling a man a man?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA9BwA4uO1o
For practical purposes, the overwhelming majority of humanity are recognisably male or female.
true. but laws and morality often deals with the anomalies. under your sharia would women be allowed to wear pants?
The problem there our entire culture is base upon the 1964 Civil Rights Mandate as the central point of history.
I don’t think so:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380729229_Fractal_Vindication_of_CRT
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380427514_Kalergi_and_Hart-Cellerand_Memetics_White_Antifragility
Hey cough now I read this thing https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5 this article is straight up copying how dare it yes how dare the day to not fit progressive ideals how dare you
(I commented here instead of under https://substack.com/home/post/p-144004787 since this is more recent and the IQ-moral worth question was discussed at the end of the pod.)
I think that intelligence only matters instrumentally for moral worth. I.e. IQ is only important in so far as it helps the person improve the well-being of other people, or as far as it furthers human progress, or similar. If you remove these aspects, it becomes much less clear that IQ matters for moral worth.
Thought experiment: Two old men have each decided to retire to their own private islands, to contemplate life and wait for death in solitude. None of them will ever have contact with anyone again. One of the men has an IQ that's thirty points higher than the other. Both set sail to their islands the same day, but both are lost at sea and you only have the resources to try to save one. Your experience with sea rescue tells you that there's a minimal higher chance of rescuing the lower-IQ man (say 80,1% chance that you manages to rescue the lower-IQ man if you try vs 80% chance that you mange to rescue the higher-IQ man if you try). The man you rescue will be grateful but won't rethink his self-imposed exile and he will thus take the next boat to his island. Which one do you try to save?
To me it seems obvious that the moral thing to do is to rescue the lower-IQ man (since the chance is higher) or to toss a coin (since the chances are functionally similar), but I would strongly disagree with anyone who wanted to rescue the higher-IQ man because of his higher IQ.
(You might want to argue that the higher-IQ man statistically has made more contributions to society and thus deserves rescue more: if so assume that the lives of both men have been evaluated in depth by a trusted party which concluded that both men have been equally fairly rewarded and punished for their societal contributions before exile, through the wages of their own labor and through luck.)
Now of course, the example above is contrived (but not unrealistic, exiles and hermits exist and similar situations have likely occurred). Most humans live in society and high IQ is socially beneficial. But I still think the experiment shows that high IQ isn't intrinsically valuable. (But if the IQ of the lower-IQ man becomes too low I can see an argument to save the higher-IQ man, but then I think "low-IQ" is a proxy for some cutoff of autonomy/human-ness. I don't think this argument changes the conclusion for say men with IQ 100 vs IQ 130.)
I don't see the feminization hypothesis as simply blaming women because it's really how institutions made up of both men and women assimilate to the increased female leadership and influence. I imagine of you tried to analyze wokeness with regression, female participation over time would be the best causal variable, it also is coherent with my own experience. I think just discussing it more would be helpful to shed light on how our society works because our current popular explanations in my opinion are false.
I think Nathan's premise makes logocla sense, that environmentalism necessitates wokism and it's implied. I think that's analytically true more than it being a practical explanation of how it took over. There I personally think sex differences seems the most causal since the increase in women's influence is so correlated. I like sociobiolgy to explain things and tracks with my experience. At any rate they are compatible and much better than the popular story of magic postmodern texts triggering a mind virus.
I'm still inclined to think that wokeness is mainly caused by overcorrection (rather than "taking the equality thesis seriously"): people turned from persecuting certain groups to privileging them instead.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/woke-a-libertarian-viewpoint?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WYp5xmvI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w568RWb8CB4
You and Noah speculate as to why women in academia, journalism, etc. are disproportionately more woke compared to men. What would your reply be if someone countered that it’s not due to sex differences but something more akin to a “default hypothesis” for women?
On my account, wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously. The feminization of the institutions is a separate phenomenon, though it influences the form that wokism takes.
Perhaps the default assumption should be that women will be more attracted to wokism with respect to sex (i.e., sex disparities favoring men must be corrected). But self-interest doesn't explain their wokism with respect to race.
There are clear parallels between cancel culture and traditional female culture, which is characterized by reputational attack and social ostracism over physical confrontation, and places a great deal of value on empathy and caring. So it's no surprise that women will be somewhat more inclined to participate in it. Cancel culture acts in the service of the dominant ideology, which happens to be wokism.
Wouldn't it not be self-interest, but altruism? So personality differences between the sexes that make narratives about victimization and privilege attractive to women much more so than men. So those ideas are "female coded" because of altruism and may or may not involve benefits to them.
I agree with you but I could imagine a cheeky person asking why we can’t just ignore your answer above and, instead, just explain disproportionate woke women as due to them having above average IQs like many of their woke male counterparts?
Should wokism be called "state-sponsored degeneracy" to dignify this mortal moral disease with a proper name?
When you say default hypothesis, do you mean women instinctively and unquestioningly submitting to the current political orthodoxy, whatever that is?
No, I meant why can’t we use the default hypothesis of high IQ that Cofnas applied to Jews to explain their disproportionate leftism/Wokeism to apply to women in academia, journalism, etc. as well?
Are you saying Jews just take liberal ideas further than liberal gentiles?
1:36:00 Your moral worth is linked to your adherence to your moral principles and this assessment would be made by members of your religious group or political party.
1:32:00 Nathan proudly displays his atheism, but atheism is exactly the problem, and I speak as an agnostic.
1:31:00 God if He exists would value obedience, belief, faith and God consciousness.