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Thought I should post this quick, before the sockpuppets of right-wing doom manage to overrule the weak admin attempts at justice and fair-dealing.

I went from a karma of 50, (maxed, normal) to a -2 in a week or so. Strange, since I did not change any of my normal posting behaviors. Also, I am mod-banned until forever, so this is not revenge for my modding. But there does seem to be a concerted effort by some to "cancel" the aristarchus.

Whether or not you agree with my positions, we all have an interest in keeping free and open debate on all issues alive on SoylentNews, so I would ask my fellow soylentils to rally to the cause. By the Way, the cause is not storming the Capitol, or denying that storming the Capitol ever took place. Just allowing views that someone like myself might put forward, because they are true and reasonable.

If not, I could be put into the situation again where I could not submit submissions, because hostile editors immediately replaced them with their own subs, and I could not post comments to regain my karma, since I was banned from posting, and I could not even do what I am doing now, since if your karma falls low enough, you cannot even journal.

I call it "janrinok's revenge". Put it in your journal. Sure, if you have not been banned from SoylentNews because of your political opinions. Free speech, my ass.

***Update! Welcome to all who have found their way back to this journal entry, even though it has be disappeared from the jounrnal list on the front page! Janrinok has "no idea" how that happened, but is gloating over my karma. What more evidence do we need of a concerted admin attempt to ban aristarchus? Well, I may not be able to post much as me in the near future, but keep your eye out for "aristachish" AC posts. You can't stop the signal, Mal!

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Quick test to see if I can edit my hidden journal! Cannot post to it, or anywhere. Not sure if I am still able to make aristarchus submissions, but even if I can, most likely they will be censored as well. This may well be the end of SoylentNews!

*****
Looks like! Almost none of the accusations against aristarchus are true. This may be my last message to SN. Been fun, people, with a notable exception.

Last Halloween, allegedly, there were fake tombstones on people's lawns, with the eptitaph "I did my own research." The New York Times published a piece on some actual studies (here, and here) that suggest that it is not always as successful as the tyro researcher believes it is.

One of the authors is familiar, a certain Professor Dunning?

A new slogan has emerged in the culture: “Do your own research.” On internet forums and social media platforms, people arguing about hotly contested topics like vaccines, climate change and voter fraud sometimes bolster their point or challenge their interlocutors by slipping in the acronym “D.Y.O.R.”

“Two days after getting the jab, a friend of mine’s friend had a heart attack,” a Reddit user wrote recently in a discussion about Covid-19 vaccines. “I’m not saying they’re connected, but D.Y.O.R.”

The slogan, which appeared in conspiracy theory circles in the 1990s, has grown in popularity over the past decade as conflicts over the reliability of expert judgment have become more pronounced. It promotes an individualistic, freethinking approach to understanding the world: Don’t be gullible — go and find out for yourself what the truth is.

That may seem to be sound advice. Isn’t it always a good idea to gather more information before making up your mind about a complex topic?

Philosophers are always about rejecting authority, and seeking the truth for oneself, so this seems like a sound procedure. Empirical studies, however, differ.

In theory, perhaps. But in practice the idea that people should investigate topics on their own, instinctively skeptical of expert opinion, is often misguided. As psychological studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to technical and complex issues like climate change and vaccine efficacy, novices who do their own research often end up becoming more misled than informed — the exact opposite of what D.Y.O.R. is supposed to accomplish.

Consider what can happen when people begin to learn about a topic. They may start out appropriately humble, but they can quickly become unreasonably confident after just a small amount of exposure to the subject. Researchers have called this phenomenon the beginner’s bubble.

Not pointing out an specific cases, but you know what we are talking about.

Anecdotally, you can see the beginner’s bubble at work outside the laboratory too. Consider do-it-yourself projects gone wrong. Power tools, ladders and lawn mowers are easily mishandled by untrained users who know just enough to put themselves in danger. A study found that U.S. consumer injuries from pneumatic nail guns increased about 200 percent between 1991 and 2005, apparently as a result of the increased availability of nail guns that were affordable for nonprofessionals.

Research also shows that people learning about topics are vulnerable to hubris. Consider a 2015 study by one of us (Professor Dunning) and the psychologists Stav Atir and Emily Rosenzweig. It found that when novices perceive themselves as having developed expertise about topics such as finance and geography, they will frequently claim that they know about nonexistent financial instruments (like “prerated stocks”) and made-up places (like Cashmere, Ore.) when asked about such things.

I spent a week in Cashmere, Oregon, one day. Drilled my hand with a power drill, and looked into the laser with my remaining eye. Doing my own research!

The take-away? Well, first, self-awareness and self-criticism are hard to come by, so do not just check your sources, check your motivation for checking those particular sources.

Likewise, a 2018 study of attitudes about vaccine policy found that when people ascribe authority to themselves about vaccines, they tend to view their own ideas as better than ideas from rival sources and as equal to those of doctors and scientists who have focused on the issue. Their experience makes them less willing to listen to well-informed advisers than they would have been otherwise.

There should be no shame in identifying a consensus of independent experts and deferring to what they collectively report. As individuals, our skills at adequately vetting information are spotty. You can be expert at telling reliable cardiologists from quacks without knowing how to separate serious authorities from pretenders on economic policy.

And on the other hand,

For D.Y.O.R. enthusiasts, one lesson to take away from all of this might be: Don’t do your own research, because you are probably not competent to do it.

Is that our message? Not necessarily. For one thing, that is precisely the kind of advice that advocates of D.Y.O.R. are primed to reject. In a society where conflicts between so-called elites and their critics are so pronounced, appealing to the superiority of experts can trigger distrust.

The problem is compounded by the fact that outsider critics frequently have legitimate complaints about advice provided by insider authorities. One example might be the initial instruction from public officials at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic that people need not wear masks.

So the problem is knowing when to trust those who know, when you don't really know that they know what they are talking about, because you don't know, either. Professional trust is the issue.

Instead, our message, in part, is that it’s not enough for experts to have credentials, knowledge and lots of facts. They must show that they are trustworthy and listen seriously to objections from alternative perspectives.

We strive to offer careful guidance when it comes to our own areas of expertise. Even so, some D.Y.O.R. enthusiasts may reject our cautions. If they do, we hope that they will nonetheless heed at least one piece of advice: If you are going to do your own research, the research you should do first is on how best to do your own research.

Article is NYT paywalled, so beware. And now, my dear Soylentils, time to do your own research, and stop calling those that attempt to do so Dunning-Kroeger idiots. Far more likely that they are lying insurgents and trolls.

Discuss!

They are nothing if not easily suggestible. Seems the waco right in America cannot comprehend "pandemic". No wonder Republicans are dying off in rural areas, and Reddit is keeping a running tab on "Herman Cain Awards". But denial runs deep in the minds of conspiracy theorists, and a recent super-spreader event by the same must, therefore, have some other cause. And what is more plausible, but the underlying plot device of a recent movie? Award winning movie! Yes, the conservatives have been undone by The Power of the Dog.

The coverage is to be found at Vice.

A group of unvaccinated people who attended a huge conspiracy conference in Dallas earlier this month all became sick in the days after the event with symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath, and fever. Instead of blaming the global COVID pandemic, however, the conspiracy theorists think they were attacked with anthrax.

And they weren't even plaiting a rawhide lariat! Of course, all the shouting and spittle could have been a vector, but not usually for anthrax.

This far-right conspiracy claim began after a dozen people spent time together in a confined space at the ReAwaken America tour event in Dallas over the weekend of Dec. 10. And the fact that this was likely a COVID outbreak and superspreader event has been almost entirely ignored.

The anthrax claim was first made by Joe Oltmann on his Conservative Daily podcast earlier this week. In a video recording of the podcast, Oltmann can be seen coughing and sneezing on camera, symptoms often associated with COVID-19 or other illnesses.

Instead, Oltmann, who has spent much of 2021 spreading bogus election conspiracies, claimed that he and his fellow conspiracy theorists who recently attended the conference had been attacked by anthrax. The conference, run by Tulsa businessman Clay Clark, was headlined by figures like disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Eric Trump, the son of former President Donald Trump, also spoke at the event.

More like "Re-Infect America", if you know what I mean. Flynn, Stone, MyPillow guy? And one of the Spawn? Just, wow.

“There’s a 99.9% chance it’s anthrax,” Oltmann said on his podcast, even though no one had tested positive for anthrax poisoning and none of the other 3,500 attendees have so far reported suffering the effects of anthrax.

Oltmann claimed that he and up to a dozen other people who were in the green room at an event fell ill over the following days.

That's funny, 99.9% of all statistics based on no data are totally made up! Coincidence? I think not! But, there is more: Oltmann took an arrow to the knee, or somewhere.

While Oltmann said he was “sick, sick,” he claimed his symptoms were tempered because he was already taking the antibiotic doxycycline as a result of impaling his leg on an arrow in an accident in his brother’s garage weeks previously.

Evidently, you can be not careful enough. But, now for the tie-in. Power of the Dog is trying to Stop the Stop the Steel!

Jovan Pulitzer, an election conspiracist who was also at the conference, apparently experienced more severe symptoms.

Pulitzer, a failed inventor who once created a barcode scanner listed as one of the 50 worst inventions ever, was heavily involved in the bogus Arizona recount, consulting for the Cyber Ninjas and promoting the idea that box of ballots had been flown into Arizona on election night from Asia to swing the vote in Biden’s favor.

According to Oltmann, Pulitzer has not been heard from in several days and he reported more severe complications including “body lesions and weeping skin.”

Not been heard from, except, of course, to report suspicious symptoms. Takes a special mind to hold these two facts together.

The claims that these illnesses were due to an anthrax attack were shared and viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Telegram and other alt-tech platforms like Gab and Parler. The claims have also been boosted on mainstream social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

After Oltmann made the claim about anthrax—without providing a shred of evidence—the conspiracy was boosted by other election fraud conspiracists like former New Mexico State University professor David Clements, and Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne.

The bogus claim was also boosted by QAnon influencer-turned-Congressional candidate Ron Watkins, who called for prayers for those affected.

Of course, Ockham's Razor would suggest that, in the midst of a viral pandemic, the simpler explanation was that all these people, many of whom presumably are unvaccinated, were spreading the COVID-19 virus. That, of course, is a lie spread by the Deep State. Everyone knows that.

You know you love them! The SoylentNews definitive aristarchus submissions! Here are some that the Editorial stiffs do not want you to see! (Especially chromas and FatPhil!)

We have had many productive discussions about the total intellectual bankruptcy of the American conservative movement, what with their racism, misogyny, and basic ignorant moronity, but there is more! Yes, much more! And Soylentil Eds have prevented this from coming to your attention. I wonder why. Well, actually, I do not. But here it is, regardless.

Note that this is not irregardless, which I am at a loss to interpret!

  (excuse me if I do not edit up the original submission too much, the eds expect too much already).

From the fine website, History News Network.
What Will We Lose if the Anti-CRT Movement Wins?

Using the disingenuous label of Critical Race Theory, conservative parents and pundits have worked to stifle African American and other minority voices in the school curriculum and to minimize the teaching of race and slavery in America’s past. Coming of age in another time of division – the late 1960s and early 1970s – I had a very different experience.

I grew up just outside a conservative small town in western Ohio. The population was overwhelmingly white with only a few black residents. Goldwater did very well there in the 1964 presidential vote, as did Nixon four years later. Residents usually took a conventional line on the issues of the day, whether it be the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War. Life – and change – moved slowly. But I underwent change because of educational exposure to the history and culture of those who had a different skin color and life experience.

My different experience began with my parents. On my thirteenth Christmas in 1965, they gifted me three books on African American history. Two were compendia of important figures in the black past; one was a young adult biography of Harriet Tubman. The reasons for the specific gifts remain unclear. I had not requested them. I never asked why they made these choices. Likely the gifts had something to do with Mom’s Quaker upbringing and Dad’s egalitarian regard for and treatment of the few African Americans who lived in our community.

I guess we need to go back, further back into American History, into the Runaway Era.

In contrast to what conservative parents and pundits are claiming, none of these educational experiences produced self-loathing or white guilt. They did make me uncomfortable enough to explore further. They did produce awareness and some greater empathy for those outside my own life experience. And they affected my political, social, and cultural attitudes, especially those having to do with race. I was not alone.

Social survey data, most notably that from the extensive General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, suggests that white Baby Boomers, those born (like me) between 1946 and 1964, underwent greater positive change in their attitudes toward African Americans and other minorities than those of any generation before or since. These same surveys posit that it resulted from the broader educational exposure that white Baby Boomers received in learning about the experience of other races and their place (including their brutal mistreatment) in the American past.

Meanwhile, Runaway is still going on about "thugs" and "darkies". Is he going against the entire boomer generation? Is he abby normal?

Conservative parents and pundits want to prevent white students from being exposed to the messiness and inequities of America’s past. What will it mean if they succeed in doing so? My experience and that of other white Baby Boomers suggests the positive role played by such educational exposure – racial attitudes and awareness changed for the better. Stifling such exposure will not mean a continuation of the status quo. It will likely mean several steps backward.

Yeah, they are just like that. Nothing to do with historical attrocities, and white supremacism, and genocide, and how Republicans used to be the Party that Freed the slaves. Nothing.

  And, yes, there is more.

  12/10/2021
Yes, it doesn't stop there. Conservatives, like Nazis, want to burn books, censor intellectuals, and get back at their teachers who made them do hard stuff, like learn to read and figure. So not likely they will stop at Cathode Ray Tubes.
Article to be found in The New York Times, which is not in Texas.
In Texas, a Battle Over What Can Be Taught, and What Books Can Be Read

A new state law constricts teachers when it comes to race and history. And a politician is questioning why 850 titles are on library shelves. The result: “A lot of our teachers are petrified.”

SAN ANTONIO — In late September, Carrie Damon, a middle school librarian, celebrated “Banned Books Week,” an annual free-speech event, with her working-class Latino students by talking of literature’s beauty and subversive power.

A few weeks later, State Representative Matt Krause, a Republican, emailed a list of 850 books to superintendents, a mix of half-century-old novels — “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron — and works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margaret Atwood, as well as edgy young adult books touching on sexual identity. Are these works, he asked, on your library shelves?

Mr. Krause’s motive was unclear, but the next night, at a school board meeting in San Antonio, parents accused a librarian of poisoning young minds.

Days later, a secretary sidled up to Ms. Damon and asked if district libraries held pornography.

“‘No, no, honey, we don’t buy porno,’” Ms. Damon replied.

She sighed. “I don’t need my blood pressure going crazy worrying about ending up on a politician’s radar.”

For background, see my recent journal on these idiots interpretation of Immanuel Kant. Against the dummheit, even the God contends in vain.

Texas is afire with fierce battles over education, race and gender. What began as a debate over social studies curriculum and critical race studies — an academic theory about how systemic racism enters the pores of society — has become something broader and more profound, not least an effort to curtail and even ban books, including classics of American literature.

Can't be letting the kiddies be reading subversive literature. The Bible is enough for any red-blooded fundamentalist right wing Christian nut-job Texan!

The law singles out one text as forbidden: The New York Times’s 1619 Project. Now a book, the special magazine issue attempted to place Black Americans and the consequences of slavery at the center of America’s narrative. The project — for which Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator, won a Pulitzer Prize — is hotly debated among historians and became an ideological piñata for conservative critics.

Thus, Runaway. There is much more, but since janrinok and his Anglo-white supremacist crew will just reject this submission, not really worth my time to quote them here.

Oh, dear!
Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
Makes me and Xenophanes sad.

Interesting recent intellectual history from Salon. What could have been, and how it all went terribly alt-wrong.

What once seemed like a bracing intellectual movement has degenerated into a pack of abusive, small-minded bigots

Yes, those guys.

It was inspiring — really inspiring. I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?

Yes, looked like the Enlightenment was back, Baby! But, then,

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

Fast-forward to the present: What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized. This may sound hyperbolic, but it's not when, well, you look at the evidence. So I thought it might be illuminating to take a look at where some of the heavy hitters in the atheist and "skeptic" communities are today. What do their legacies look like? In what direction have they taken their cultural quest to secularize the world?

Let's see if you can spot a pattern:

Just the first case study, you can read the entire fine article, if you are so disposed.

Sam Harris: Arguably the progenitor of New Atheism, Harris was for me one of the more entertaining atheists. More recently, though, he has expended a prodigious amount of time and energy vigorously defending the scientific racism of Charles Murray. He believes that IQ is a good measure of intelligence. He argued to Josh Zepps during a podcast interview not only that black people are less intelligent than white people, but that this is because of genetic evolution. He has consistently given white nationalists a pass while arguing that Black Lives Matter is overly contentious, and has stubbornly advocated profiling "Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim," at airports. (When Harris believes he's right about something, it becomes virtually impossible to talk him out of it, no matter how many good arguments, expert opinions or hard data are presented to him. Like Donald Trump, he's pretty much unteachable.) Harris has also partly blamed the election loss of Hilary Clinton on "safe spaces, trigger warnings, [and] new gender pronouns," released a private email exchange with Ezra Klein without Klein's permission, and once suggested that New Atheism is male-dominated because it lacks an "extra estrogen vibe."

His primary focus these days is boosting the moral panic over "social justice warriors" (SJWs), "political correctness" and "wokeism," which he apparently believes pose a dire threat to "Western civilization" (a word that has a lot of meaning for white nationalists). Consequently, Harris has become popular among right-wingers, and the sentiment of solidarity appears to be mutual. For example, he's described Ben Shapiro as being "committed to the … rules of intellectual honesty and to the same principles of charity with regard to other people's positions," which is odd given that Shapiro is a pathological liar who routinely misconstrues his opponents in service of a racist, misogynistic, climate-denying agenda.

And to think, Sam started out in Buddhism? THE religion with awakening as a soteriolgical goal? Such a waste. The other cases are equally interesting, or damning.

Not often that the Conservatives prove beyond a doubt why they do not belong in academia, but such an event has just occurred. Intellectual _GIANT Marc A. Thiessen opined about CRT and such, and brought in several "authorities" on the same. One of these was Princeton University professor Allen C. Guelzo. (Are there no standards for faculty hires at Princeton anymore? Reasons follow.)

Guelzo opined:

Critical race theory, Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant believed that “reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives” and so he set about “developing a theory of being critical of reason,” Guelzo says.

Oh My Gawd! This man cannot read? He thinks that Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft is "critical of reason"? As in thinking reason is not a good idea? Has the man never read the text? Evidently. (For those who don't know, Kant never said any such thing.) And, embarrassingly, he goes on:

But the critique of reason ended up justifying “ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations — things like race, nationality, class,” he says. Critical theory thus helped spawn totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century such as Marxism and Nazism, which taught that all human relationships are relationships of power between an oppressor class and an oppressed class. For the Marxists, the bourgeoisie were the oppressors. For the Nazis, the Jews were the oppressors. And today, in 21st century America, critical race theory teaches that Whites are the oppressors.

Well, Old Immanuel, the "Chinamen of Konigsberg" according to Nietzsche, did have some radical liberal views, such as you might find in the essay, What is Enlightenment?" ( Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?), with its motto from Horace, Sapere aude or "Dare to think!". Also some rather racist views in his courses on Anthropology. But he was a staunch supporter of academic freedom, which anyone who can read might garner from "The Conflict of the Faculties, so it is queer that American anti-intellectual conservatives should focus on him in their latest attempt to burn books, which they clearly have not read.

The "discussion" (Allen has tenure?) goes like this:

Allen Guelzo: "Well, I suspect the President's spokesperson probably thinks of critical race theory as simply an intelligent way to talk a lot about race, and it is. But critical race theory may also be the most irresponsible way to think about race in theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason, and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory. The problem was that critical theory got away. It instead justified ways of appealing to some very unreasonable things as explanations things like race, nationality, class and they gave us Karl Marx and Jim Crow, and every dictatorship in between, and that's especially true about race."

When a "discussion" at the American Enterprise Instutute starts this wrong, there is no reason to follow up, really. To take one of the strongest proponents of the Enlightenment, and suggest that he was opposed to it, to take the strongest theorist of a individualist based liberalism, and accuse him of nationalism, or worse, is just, as it has been said, not even wrong. No wonder the philosophical community is in awe of how stupid the AEI, and aforementioned Guelzo. can be!

Some explanations by actual philosphers? Blind leading the blind.

Some of this might come back down to the fact that a lot of conservatives and libertarians read (and adore) Ayn Rand, and Ayn Rand was extremely, extraordinarily hostile to Kant. For Rand, Kant was the beginning of everything that was wrong with philosophy and civilization in general (and so we must return to Aristotle who got everything right). She completely misunderstands Kant of course, but the damage has been done. The quote sounds very much like something Rand herself would say.

[Attribution hidden, to protect actual intellectuals from CRT inflamed Republicans.]

Another comment, on the philosophy forum:

I guess it’s official that we don’t need philosophy education. Why learn or read anything if you can just take wild guesses and still get published in WaPo or hold a directorship at Princeton?

I guess it is official. You'd think Princeton might what to do some damage control?

And, it is not just Kant!

I wouldn’t be surprised if there happens to be a campaign trying to ban philosophy in general because it might, oh you know, corrupt the youth. One of the few classes that high school students are exposed to Western philosophy/philosophers (Enlightenment era) is through AP European History class. Tom Richey, a high school AP European History teacher teaches Kant, Hume, Locke, etc. on Youtube. He might be worried as with other high school teachers.

https://youtu.be/ii2upQ7UV8g

I guess folks who are anti-CRT in the academy didn’t see this unintended consequence happening did they?

I think of conservative anti-intellectualism like zombie-ism. Why do zombies try to bite and infect others, to turn them into the unthinking undead like themselves? They don't know. They're zombies.

But if you think Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is Critical Race Theory, just because it has the same/similar word in the title, you are really in need of some basic education. He has others, you know. . . .

Der Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788)
Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790)
I usually recommend the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten for an introduction to Kant's liberal deontological ethics, which one could argue is the foundation of modern international humanitarian human rights law.
Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?
Yes, all works available at Gutenberg, Ironically.

I do not recommend any works by Allen C. Guelzo, if there are any, because the man is obviously a moron. And Marc A. Thiessen is ever more of one for citing him.

Discuss, Soylentils, but do your homework lest you be hoist on the petard of your own ignorance, like these fine gentlemen!

University of Austin (Not an actual University)
Journal of Controversial Ideas (Not actual ideas)
Heterodox Academy (Also not a real academy)

I guess it is better to be "cancelled" out of college than flunked. We have to acknowledge how tenacious conservatives are in their attempt to appear to be "educated". Now, it seems, they are going to found their own school, a sort of a "safe space" for the politically and scientifically incorrect. Story can be found at The Daily Beast.com

The former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss, known for her diatribes against “cancel culture,” announced on Monday that she is helping launch a new “university” that will be “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.”

        The somewhat vague mission statement suggests that the institution—called the University of Austin, or UATX—will be a home for those who have been shunned from “illiberal” college campuses.

        “Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars,” griped UATX’s inaugural president, Pano Kanelos, in an essay announcing the new venture, which was posted to Weiss’ Substack newsletter.

        Buried in the school’s FAQ section: it does not actually offer degrees, nor is it yet accredited.

Degrees, along with courses and faculty, and curriculum, are not really necessary when you are an entrepreneur. And accreditation is only the mainstream intellectuals tool to cancel conservatives. Now we have a University with none of those things!

Also noted in the FAQs: the school is “fiscally sponsored” by a little-known nonprofit called Cicero Research. According to public filings, Cicero is affiliated with Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of the polarizing data-mining company Palantir. As of 2020, however—the most recently available filing—the nonprofit listed no assets.

        Lonsdale is also a member of UATX’s board of advisors.

        A spokesperson for the school said, “We’re very proud to have Joe Lonsdale both on our board and as one of our financial supporters.”

        While less known than another Palantir cofounder, the former Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, Lonsdale has courted plenty of controversy himself.

Intellectually bankrupt financial support? The very best kind of venture unicorn poop.

The University of Austin says it will launch this summer by offering “forbidden courses” to college students that will stir discussions about “provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.”

        The school hopes to launch master’s degree programs in the fall of 2022 and an undergraduate program two years later.

Yes, start with the Master's. Funny they do not just sell PhDs.

UATX’s unveiling sent social media ablaze.

        “Finally, you can get a degree that almost matches University of Phoenix quality, but without the fear of having to encounter a trans person or a Palestinian on campus,” wrote a Twitter account affiliated with District Sentinel, which bills itself as a left-wing news cooperative.

Oh, noes, here come the SJWs, trying to cancel the non-university before it can even get founded! The Horror, the Horror! Alert the Quillette and notify the Journal of Controversial Ideas! Rally Tuning Fork USA, and its community college dropout! And FIRE (Florida Indignant Republican Educators).

Going to be more Huge than Trump University, everyone is saying.

Biting commentary over at The Intelligencer, where Sarah Jones takes them to task, over many things, but mostly being modeled on really stupid universities, like BoB Jones and Liberty (voted most sex Christian school!) and other failed attempts to create a "conservative" university.

In 1971, the televangelist Jerry Falwell embarked on an ambitious new venture. With the help of Elmer Towns, a Christian academic, he founded a new institution of higher education: Liberty University. Falwell had grand dreams for his new school, as his official biography on Liberty’s website makes clear: Not only would it function as an ideological factory for churning out new conservative activists, it would do so on a grand scale. Falwell wanted the school to grow to 50,000 students, a goal the school says it has now achieved. Liberty wasn’t Falwell’s first educational experiment, either. He’d previously founded a K-12 school as a segregation academy. Before “wokeness” entered the right-wing’s lexicon, desegregation was the enemy of the hour.

Yep, Southern Baptists were (are) racist. Who knew? But back to the attempt to forge a university that "thinks right", and provides a safe-space for the racist, misogynist, and fascist types:

Kanelos implies the existence of a past where the university was once free of donor pressure or administrative cowardice or, more to the point, pesky student activism. But this history only exists in his imagination. Universities have always been fraught places, where the free exchange of ideas often results in intellectual turbulence.

It’s precisely that intellectual turbulence that Kanelos, Weiss, and their comrades seek to escape, much as Jerry Falwell did in the 1970s. Falwell was no outlier. The right has long dreamed of alternatives to traditional higher education. The televangelist Pat Robertson founded Regent University for similar reasons. Michael Farris, the founder of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, founded Patrick Henry College in 2000 to shelter homeschool graduates and funnel them into Republican politics. Hillsdale College has assumed a sharply right-wing political identity over time, and rejects federal funding “as a matter of principle.” (A Hillsdale professor sits on the University of Austin’s board of advisers.) These schools exist as laboratories for right-wing thought; they are committed not to free expression but to indoctrination. The University of Austin will be no different.

Oh, mourning in America/Make America Racist Again? Imagined past that never existed, and never will be. Sorry, "Controversial Ideas" people!

So what rights will a University of Austin student actually possess? They can’t count on a right to free expression, that much is clear. The presence of Lonsdale and Katz raises further questions about the university’s position on due process for survivors of sexual misconduct. Students won’t even benefit from an intellectually diverse faculty. Survey the school’s website, and you won’t find a single leftist scholar. Nor should we expect to find one. Lonsdale’s nonprofit, Cicero, says it’s committed to “free-market based solutions to public policy issues.” And as a private institution, the University of Austin will retain the broad freedom to censor students and faculty as it sees fit — as does Liberty and my alma mater. What we’ve got, then, is a Bible college for libertarians. Those disturbed by progress will find shelter on campus. Pledging freedom from wokeness, the University of Austin actually seeks freedom from free exchange. There is a soupçon of social liberalism, which extends no further than equality for LGB people and not to trans people and which is too inadequate to greatly distinguish the school from other conservative institutions. In this university, Falwell would see kindred minds. There’s nothing new here.

Gotta say, when the head of the Dept. of Economics is "khallow", you know something ain't right.

Other coverage at:
MSN: Conservative thinkers, ideologues announce creation of 'fiercely independent' University of Austin alternative college [msn.com]
Or, more MSN: Who’s Afraid of Higher Education? [msn.com]
More MSN: Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan’s New University of Austin Is Already Getting Trump University Comparisons [msn.com]
More at Austin-American Stateman
Anti-Woke University of Austin Hires Professor Accused of Transphobia
Not to be confused with UTAustin, or University of Texas, Austin, which is an actual accredited state university with actual faculty and degree granting programs. Just saying.

(Did you ever suspect, that conservatives do not have many positions in universities, because they are just too stupid? Is this alleged University going to have a Masters in Anti-vaxxing? Doctorate in Q-studies? Advanced degrees in Stopping the Seals? So far, only Forbidden Courses, whose credits are non-transferable, for some reason.)

Seriously, I thought we had a reformed, more just, and less alt-right and less pro-sexual assault of children SoylentNews. But perhaps I am mistaken.
*****
I could just complain to the admins, either on IRC or by private messages, but there seems to be little reason that either would have any effect. The fact is, aristarchus has been mod-banned, again, only six days after having his unexplained mod-ban expire, and again it is totally unexplained. Admins? Care to share what pernicious deed the aristarchus has done to justify a mod-ban for the next decade?

*****
I, for one, welcome our new Soylent overlords!

O Lord, please don't burn us.
Don't grill or toast your flock.
Don't put us on the barbecue
Or simmer us in stock.
Don't braise or bake or boil us,
Or stir-fry us in a wok.

Of course, it would be nice to know what precise rule one has run afoul of, since previous violations were inexplicable, and this one just as much so. Have I moderated badly? Have I excessibly downmodded the Runaway, again? (Actually, he deserves it, and I am far too lenient on him.) Or is it the Spam mods of Whit superanalists, which I do notice are not being rescinded, so that should not be the reason. So the remaining justification, suspected puppetry of sock! You know they are out there, the deep ones, UID of less than 7000, just waiting to be actualized when janrinock wakes up one fine French morning.

*****
Of course I deny any such violations. I am innocent, I am aristarchus. But for the sake of SN in general, I will admit that, yes, I down mod idiots. Often that includes Runaway1956. And others. But this is not mod abuse, it is just moderation, as every other Soylentil is entitled to, and for any admin to call in to question the moderation of any regular Soylentil smacks of tyranny and authoritarianism. I have been mod-banned not for any violation of the rules, but for the sheer left-wing bias of my moderation, which is what we would expect to find on Gab, or any other fascist site hosted by Epik (search the recent subs for details).

*****

Remember, you may exile aristarchus, but as Heraclitus himself said:

ἄξιον Ἐφεσίοις ἡβηδὸν ἀπάγξασθαι πᾶσι καὶ τοῖς ἀνήβοις τὴν πόλιν καταλιπεῖν, οἵτινες Ἑρμόδωρον ἄνδρα ἑωυτῶν ὀνήιστον ἐξέβαλον φάντες· ἡμέων μηδὲ εἷς ὀνήιστος ἔστω, εἰ δὲ μή, ἄλλη τε καὶ μετ' ἄλλων

Sorry, no time to translate, and throwing pearls before swine is not a practice of mine.

*****
I would suggest the admins regroup, and attempt stifle the more paranoid amongst you, and restore aristarchus to full membership in SoylentNews. I have been here since near the beginning, and I believe in the mission. But, I will not let the right wing take over SN as yet another bubble of insanity. I will mod down right wing nut jobs, and report them to law enforcement, and put microphones under their beds. Just who I am, a philosopher, on the side of truth, as I have always been. Reverse the mod-ban, admins, or provide the explication.

[Oh, FatPhil, before you get started, just shut the fuck up. You do not know what you are talking about. Have some more beer. I prefer Belgian Wit, at the moment. ]
 

Former neo-con and speech writer for G.W. Bush, David Frum, has a fine article in The Atlantic on how guns make people less safe. Like the rogue Marine in Florida, the family in Houston, and the good 'ol boy in Athens, Georgia, not to mention America's Capitol. All these Americans, making America safe! Here's what David says:

When the coronavirus pandemic struck last year, people throughout the developed world raced to buy toilet paper, bottled water, yeast for baking bread, and other basic necessities. Americans also stocked up on guns. They bought more than 23 million firearms in 2020, up 65 percent from 2019. First-time gun purchases were notably high. The surge has not abated in 2021. In January, Americans bought 4.3 million guns, a monthly record.

Last year was also a high-water mark for gun violence—more people were shot dead than at any time since the 1990s—though 2021 is shaping up to be even worse. There was one bright spot in 2020. When Americans self-isolated, mass shooters were denied their usual targets. But as America began to return to normal, so did the mass shootings: 45 in the single month between March 16 and April 15.

Of course, those above are just from one day.

They were not buying weapons for hunting. Only about 11.5 million Americans hunt in a given year, according to the latest Department of the Interior survey, fewer than the number who attend a professional ballet or modern-dance performance.

Nor were they buying weapons to play private militia. Fewer than 10 percent of Americans amass arsenals of five weapons or more. And for all the focus on assault rifles, they make up a small portion of the firearms in private hands: approximately 6 percent of all guns owned.

And the safety dividend?

The weapons Americans buy to protect their loved ones are the weapons that end up being accidentally discharged into a loved one’s leg or chest or head. The weapons Americans buy to protect their young children are years later used for self-harm by their troubled teenagers. Or they are stolen from their car by criminals and used in robberies and murders. Or they are grabbed in rage and pointed at an ex-partner.

The record shows case after case of guns escalating ordinary disputes into homicides or attempted homicides. In March 2020, a man was fatally shot in the head after an altercation over a parking space at an Atlanta shopping mall. In August 2020, a 75-year-old Nashville homeowner reportedly shot and wounded a landscaper for not properly hauling brush from his property. In November 2020, a gun owner shot and killed a teenager for playing music too loudly in the parking lot of the motel they were both staying at, police said.

Cannot but think that Rand Paul got off easy with the spraying clippings onto his neighbor's property. If his neighbor had chosen to stand his ground, it would have been a massacre at Mowling Green.

Altogether, about 500 Americans a year die from unintended shootings. That’s four times the rate of deaths from unintended shootings in peer nations. Yet this grim statistic still understates the toll of Americans fooling around with weapons. Unintended shootings tend not to be lethal. They account for only about 1 percent of all U.S. gun deaths. But they account for more than one-third of American gun injuries—injuries that can leave people disabled or traumatized for life. A majority of gun owners fail to store their weapons safely, according to research by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That’s why the annals fill with so many heartrending stories of children shooting themselves or others.

It's the toddlers shooting their unvaccinated parents that always strikes me as the most tragic Walmart scenario.

Above all else, guns are used for suicide. In any given year, twice as many Americans die by suicide as by homicide. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults, behind only accidents. The good news is that suicide is highly preventable. Most suicide attempts are impulsive, an act of depression or panic. If a person survives an attempt, he or she will almost certainly survive the suicidal impulse altogether. A gun in the house massively raises the likelihood that a suicide attempt will end in death.

At least there is some bright side!
But time for an apt analogy.

Drunk driving has been illegal in the United States since automobiles became commonplace. Yet laws against drunk driving went lightly enforced until the 1980s. Police and courts treated drunk drivers leniently. The offenders seemed so remorseful. Had they not suffered enough?

That practice of leniency began to change in 1980, with the founding of Mothers Against Drunk Driving by one determined woman, Candy Lightner, who had lost her daughter to a repeat hit-and-run driver. From Fair Oaks, California, MADD spread across the nation. Before it pressured politicians to amend laws, before it persuaded courts and police to enforce those laws, it enabled those reforms by working directly on public attitudes. MADD convinced American drivers that they were not weak or unmanly if they surrendered the car keys after drinking too much. MADD empowered the families and friends of those drivers to insist that the keys be surrendered.

That kind of cultural change beckons now. The mass gun purchases of 2020 and 2021 have put even more millions of weapons into even more hands untrained to use and store those weapons responsibly.

Gun nuts are like the old drunk drivers of the pre-seat belt days! All we have to do is shame, and prosecute, and shame, and force these gun nuts to go where the drunk drivers have all gone. Easy peasy! Thanks, David!

Yes, due to overwhelming demand, and mod-banning, we are back to the nefarious campaign against Critical Race Theory, now with extra "race" to wind up the racists.

OK, since our last episode, Nell has been tied to the railroad tracks by Snidely Whiplash, or khallow, I forget which. We examined the flow of money to front organizations that pretended that CRT was a thing being taught in primary and secondary schools, and that it made rich white people look bad. Well, none of that was true, but you know what they say in show biz! What? You don't? OK, LBJ once suggested to his campaign manager that they start a rumor that his opponent had sexual intercourse with livestock. Yes, this is now known as the "Runaway gambit". The adviser said, "But no one would believe that!" To which LBJ replied, "Doesn't matter, I just want to hear him deny it!". Damage done, mischief managed.

      So now we have a piece that connects the anti-CRT to a certain conspiracy mind-set, anti-semitic, anti-intellectual, at once both very American and very right wing German of a former party. So I present to Soylentils,

Critical Theory Opposes the Right Wing's Cancel Politics

History News Network seems to be a network of actual historians, which is interesting, since they deal with facts and evidence, rather than opinions about how fact checkers are all biased and how the victors write the history, and how Hitler did some things right. I guess being defeated by the Allies was not one of them? But, on to the article itself.

Although right-wingers like Rudy Giuliani argue that left-wing cancel culture is dangerous to free speech, the ongoing right-wing movement to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) from school curriculums fits into the right’s long history of attacks on progressives’ free speech. The Texas Senate bill removing Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Native American history, and the history of white supremacy from public school curriculums may be blocked from passing right now, but it has made waves throughout the internet. This bill comes amidst nationwide right-wing outrage over CRT, which Fox News reportedly mentioned nearly 1300 times between March and June this year.

Rather dense, excuse me if I do not replicate all the links.

We continue:

This hysteria reached a boiling point last month when a Virginia school board meeting was shut down by right-wing protestors over a curriculum that allegedly promotes CRT, although Loudoun County Schools officials publicly stated that CRT is not part of their curriculum. The ongoing distress over CRT is fueled by a massive, right-wing media-backed movement to control school curriculums. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for example, recently called for teachers to wear body cameras to monitor CRT teaching, despite previously arguing in favor of free speech on campuses.

Sorry, these are liberal scholars, so there are so many links and citations. Apologies to those who are functionally illiterate.

The main point of our Fine Article, however, is how the anti-CRT "movement" is part of a much older and even more stupid conspiracy theory among rightists, The Frankfort School!

The panic over CRT may seem to have come out of nowhere, with media coverage of it skyrocketing in recent months, but progressive movements in academia have caused alarm for decades. This began with conspiracy theories about critical theory (CT), a method of systemic critique which was the predecessor of CRT. These conspiracy theories focus on the developers of CT, the Frankfurt School thinkers, who were mostly Jewish, and claim that they infiltrated American universities with the goal of destroying Western culture and implementing “Cultural Marxism.”

As Mr. Universe said in the movie "Serenity", been seeing these memes all over lately, and its high anti-semite.

While these theories may seem far-fetched, they are still promoted today by right-wing thinkers like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. Frankfurt School historian Martin Jay traced these conspiracy theories back to LaRouche movement writer Michael Minnicino’s essay that relies on little to no source material to make false, exaggerated claims. Minnicino claims, without evidence, that “the heirs of Marcuse and Adorno completely dominate the universities” and teach their students “’Politically Correct’ ritual exercises.” The essay reduces the Frankfurt School’s complex “intellectual history into a sound-bite sized package available to be plugged into a paranoid narrative,” according to Jay. Despite the suspicious beginnings of this conspiracy theory, right-wing thinkers like Jeffrey A. Tucker and Mike Gonzalez continue to blame the Frankfurt School thinkers for today’s attacks on free speech, going as far as to suggest executive action to prevent their influence.

But the conclusion of the authors is that the Frankfort School was far too diverse to have ever been the basis of a universal Marxist plan to infiltrate American hotdogs with Critical Race Theory microchips, and throw the 1919 World Series for the Reds.

I will close with reference to a recent SN journal on the topic of "fact-checking". It appears that the tendency toward conspiracy theory is a powerful influence in Conservative thought today. Set aside the "Stop the Steel" or the "Playtpusses Run Everything!" conspiracy theories. Is is enough to believe that truth is relative, and that "cultural Marxism", or "My Little Ponies" could be a foul plot to infiltrate and destroy the beliefs in guns and white superiority that are the bedrock of conservative American delusions. No, the Frankfort school was not that unified, and many of them fled the Nazi regime to come to America. And Gramsci's ideas of a "organic intellectual", working class woke people, is not a artificial thing. Capitalism requires people to work together, and this increases social capital and technological know-how (also capital), so the observation that this is happening can in no way be countered by a propaganda campaign funded by rich right-wing foundations, and not too bright media personalities.

And this is why the anti-CRT program is doomed to fail. It is just another conspiracy theory, very close to the old John Birch ones, generated out of a conservative fear of intellect. But, as was said in "Space Balls": "Good will always win, because evil is stupid!" Perhaps I versed that, but, I did see him playing with his dolls.

Party on, Soylentils! I am still mod-banned, and roving gangs of mod-bombers are still about! Stay safe, and don't eat no horse medicine. "Cocaine is for horses, not for men. "

Only now, at the end, do you realize the true power of the Dark Side!
Citation from Eratosthenes Journal

Re:Text of emails (Score: 0)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24, @11:38PM (#1170706)

Anecdotal evidence, much? Single occurance? Definitely the cause! Post hoc, ergo propter hoc!
Reply to This Parent

        Re:Text of emails (Score: 2)
        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge Friend of Friend on Wednesday August 25, @12:40AM (#1170725) Journal
        Aristarchus - YOU IDIOT. You do realise that you have just compromised this Anonymous Coward comment! You should give this game up - you are not very good at it! Go back and inspect everything connected with that comment.
        --
        It's always my fault...
        Reply to This Parent

                Re:Text of emails (Score: 2)
                by FatPhil (863) Friend of Friend on Wednesday August 25, @12:53AM (#1170729) Homepage
                When people are cornered, they panic. When people panic, they start making sloppy mistakes.

                However, you're a very naughty boy for *alledging* that that Aristarchus-supporting AC comment was actually posted by Aristarchus himself. No-one non-admin could possibly have known that, and I'm certainly *not* going to confirm it, because I'm not a naughty boy, and I support Ari's right to post as AC, no matter how silly he is.
                --
                I know I'm God, because every time I pray to him, I find I'm talking to myself.
                Reply to This Parent
                Re:Text of emails (Score: 0)
                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 25, @01:05AM (#1170731)

                Are you claiming that aristarchus posted that AC comment? Did you just abuse admin privilege and expose a soylentil who, for whatever reason, wished to post AC? I take that as a breach of Etiquette and IT Admin professional ethics. The Mighty Buzzard would never have done such a thing.

                Remember, posting as AC is not sock-puppeting. It is a founding right of every soylentil. At least until this becomes the Green place.
                Reply to This Parent

                        Re:Text of emails (Score: 2)
                        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge Friend of Friend on Wednesday August 25, @02:07AM (#1170745) Journal

                        I am currently standing in the corner facing the wall and whipping myself with branches of thorns - but enough about how I spend my own time...

                        I partly apologise for my action - but I did so to make the point that even when Aristarchus thinks he is masking what he is up to he is not. I have not compromised his identity - indeed I do not know it nor have I a wish to know. ACs who are more knowledgeable about the internet can manage their comments with ease, but there are many who make simple schoolboy errors or pretend to be more than one person. If he is logged in and posting under the name of Aristarchus why would he go to the length of switching to AC to make a particular comment? I can explain why:

As close as we will ever get to an apology by janrinok? He is prone to pointing such out. As he says in the IRC #editorial as of Aug. 25:

[07:33:01] [janrinok] This is as close to an apology from AzumaHazuki as we will every see: https://soylentnews.org https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=44527&page=1&cid=1170626#commentwrap
[07:33:03] [systemd] ^ "03SoylentNews Comments | Reduction. ( https://soylentnews.org )
[07:35:56] [janrinok] At least she had the decency to make it.

https://logs.sylnt.us/%23editorial/2021-08-25.html

But he has not yet apologized to aristarchus, for falsely accusing him of "collusion, sock--puppetry, or moderation abuse. I await your apology, janrinok, but I expect you to turn tail, as you did when I challenged you to a duel on the field of honor. C?️ie la vie!

We pleblian Soylentils have long suspected that our anominity was not as real as it seemed. We all have the option of posting under AC instead of our username, unless we, or someone using our or a common IP, has been doing "bad posting". I have never found out what "bad posting" was, other than that I apparently was doing it.

But that is not what I am here to talk about today. I am here to talk about the War, and the Draft, and admin abuse in SoylnetNews.

As you can see from the exchange above, janrinok quite explicitly identified myself as the author of an AC posting. Lots of people claim to be able to identify me posting AC, by my distinctive literary style, or vast erudition, but here janrinok identified be because he had admin privileges, and evidently could see that the ID of the AC post, and my IP were the same. Now, I ask you, what is the point of posting AC, if a random admin can just come along and say, "Oh, that AC is actually Joe Bleu"? It is a violation of the code of system admin to out a user! Privacy of information is one of the first principles. I remember when involved in a labor action against an organization, the union said we all needed non-company email addresses for communications. The IT department took umbrage, and said they would never release the content of private communications to management. We hoped they were principled, but we understood that they could be put in a hard spot, if it came to that. At least they asserted their professional principles.

SoylentNews, on the other hand, is run by amatuers. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But it does lead to some lapses in ethics, as the above one by janrinok. The Mighty Buzzard, whatever his flaws, (and they were many), never lowered himself to such a violation of principle. He often threatened to, or suggested he could identify ACs or even find the actual IP of any Soylentil. But all just talk of violations. Here, we have an actual case.

As a rectification, I would suggest that all punitive measures against my account be lifted. Some may think this is not fair, but given the "unexplained" mod-bans placed upon me, of many years, the attempted censorship of my account, which led to the #Freearistarchus!! tag, I believe it is only fair.