Princetonian Scott Newman spills the beans. Those elite colleges’ Wokery is only a hypocritical form of virtue-signaling. The little supposed revolutionaries are really the swiftest and most ambitious rats in the race, running all out for the status and the bucks.
[Elite colleges’] progressive ideals are mostly for show—as evidenced by the fact that the actual career paths of typical Princeton graduates are guided by a hunger for status and security, not social justice. No one I know mentioned “Goldman Sachs” or “McKinsey” in their admissions essays. But year after year, they flock to places like these.
What I’m describing is a kind of liar’s club. Hopeful high school students lie about their commitment to social justice in a bid to gain admission, while the universities themselves lie about all the risk-taking, world-changing mavericks they’re looking to nurture. Neither side dares to speak the grubby truth, which is that the undergraduate experience will be a pro forma exercise in leftist indoctrination that precedes a march into the hallowed halls of investment banks and management consultancies.
Stag’s Head Rhyton sent to Erdoğan’s regime in Turkey.
The NYT praises NYC District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s latest triumph.
Michael H. Steinhardt, the billionaire hedge fund pioneer and one of New York’s most prolific antiquities collectors, has surrendered 180 stolen objects valued at $70 million and been barred for life from acquiring any other relics, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a statement Monday.
The prosecutor’s office struck an agreement with Mr. Steinhardt after a four-year multinational investigation that determined that the seized pieces had been looted and smuggled from 11 countries, trafficked by 12 illicit networks and appeared on the international art market without lawful paperwork, the office said. …
Mr. Steinhardt, a Brooklyn native who turns 81 on Tuesday, is a major contributor to New York University and to numerous Jewish philanthropies. There is a Steinhardt conservatory at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and a Steinhardt Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. …
As part of its inquiry, Mr. Vance’s office said, prosecutors executed 17 search warrants and worked with officials in 11 countries — Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Turkey. …
[Returned items] include:
A ceremonial libations vessel, or rhyton, that depicts a stag’s head, purchased from the Merrin Gallery of Manhattan for $2.6 million in November 1991. Officials said the item, which dates to 400 B.C., first appeared on the international art market without provenance after rampant looting in Milas, Turkey. In March 1993, prosecutors said, Mr. Steinhardt lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was when law enforcement officials seized it. It has since been repatriated.
A larnax, or small chest for human remains, from Crete, that dates between 1400-1200 B.C. Officials said the item, valued at $1 million, was purchased from a known antiquities trafficker and traced to Mr. Steinhardt through a financial institution based in Malta.
The “Ercolano Fresco,” purchased from Robert Hecht, who had faced accusations of trafficking in antiquities, “with no prior provenance” for $650,000 in November 1995. Dating to 50 B.C. and valued at $1 million, it depicts an infant Hercules strangling a snake sent by Hera to slay him. The fresco was looted in 1995 from a Roman villa in the ruins of Herculaneum, near Naples, officials said.
A gold bowl looted from Nimrud, Iraq, and purchased without provenance papers, officials said, for $150,000 in July 2020, at a time when objects from Nimrud were being trafficked by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. …
Three stone death masks that appeared to be encrusted with soil in photographs recovered by the Israeli authorities. They date to 6000 B.C. and were purchased by Mr. Steinhardt for $400,000 in October 2007.
Prosecutors said Mr. Steinhardt had owned and traded more than 1,000 antiquities since 1987, and his art collection was valued at about $200 million.
It’s obviously vital and morally obligatory to take antiquities out of the Metropolitan Museum in New York (where they were on loan) and return them to places like Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq.
After all, who could possibly argue that the contemporary corrupt and barbarous regimes ruling over the descendants of peoples who invaded and replaced the much earlier peoples who created certain precious objects of art are not 100% entitled to ownership of all objects lost centuries and millennia ago and found and recovered by somebody else?
And why should the Manhattan D.A.’s Office waste its time prosecuting Smash-and-Grab robberies of Manhattan luxury stores, for instance, when it can devote the same time to sending back tens of millions of dollars worth of art to banana republic governments in the Mediterranean and the Middle East?
It’s Empire-building justified by an imaginary problem, and it is disastrously fueling tuition bloat and creates powerful local constituencies committed to opposition to free speech and the suppression of adversarial ideas.
Just out today: @OhioState has a small army of 132 “diversicrats” at an avg. salary of $77,000 and total est. payroll cost of $13.4M, which would cover in-state tuition for 1,120 students.
St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra, d. 6 December 345 or 352
St. Nicholas was reportedly born in the city of Patara in Lycia in Asia Minor, heir to a wealthy family. He succeeded an uncle as bishop of Myra.
Nicholas left behind a legend of secret acts of benevolence and miracles (in Greek, he is spoken of as “Nikolaos o Thaumaturgos” — Nicholas the Wonder-Worker).
One of the saint’s prominent legends asserts that, in a time of famine, he foiled the crime of Fourth Century Sweeney Todd, an evil butcher who kidnapped and murdered three children, intending to market their remains as ham. St. Nicholas not only exposed the murder, but healed and resurrected the children intact.
Nicholas is also renowned for providing dowries for each of three daughters of an impoverished nobleman,who would otherwise have been unable to marry and who were about to be forced to prostitute themselves to live. In order to spare the sensibilities of the family, Nicholas is said to have secretly thrown a purse of gold coins into their window on each of three consecutive nights.
St. Nicholas’ covert acts of charity led to a custom of the giving of secret gifts concealed in shoes deliberately left out for their receipt on his feast day, and ultimately to the contemporary legend of Santa Claus leaving gifts in stockings on Christmas Eve.
St. Nicholas evolved into one of the most popular saints in the Church’s calendar, serving as patron of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, children, and students, Greeks, Belgians, Frenchmen, Romanians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Albanians, Russians, Macedonians, Slovakians, Serbians, and Montenegrins, and all residents of Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Barranquilla, Campen, Corfu, Freiburg, Liverpool, Lorraine, Moscow, and New Amsterdam (New York).
His relics were stolen and removed to Bari to prevent capture by the Turks, and are alleged to exude a sweet-smelling oil down to the present day.
I quit reading Scientific American decades ago. The Gramscian Long March Through the Institutions included that venerable and formerly much respected serial that far back.
Things apparently. however, can always get worse.
Michael Schermer is now another journalist of distinction who has been canned for insufficient fidelity to the radical left’s party line, reduced (like Matt Taibbi and Andrew Sullivan) to samizdat publishing, and rattling a contribution can, on Substack.
“In April of 2001 I began my monthly ‘Skeptic’ column at ‘Scientific American’, the longest continuously published magazine in the country dating back to 1845. With Stephen Jay Gould as my role model (and subsequent friend), it was my dream to match his 300 consecutive columns that he achieved at ‘Natural History’ magazine, which would have taken me to April, 2026. Alas, my streak ended in January of 2019 after a run of 214 essays.
“Since then, I have received many queries about why my column ended and, more generally, about what has happened over at ‘Scientific American’, which historically focused primarily on science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM), but now appears to be turning to social justice issues. There is, for example, the August 12, 2021 article on how ‘Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past,’ which asserts prima facie that the reason there are so few women and blacks in academic mathematics is because of misogyny and racism. …
“Then there is the July 5, 2021 ‘Scientific American’ article that ‘Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.’ Because we are all from Africa and thus black, the author Allison Hopper avers, evolution deniers (AKA creationists) are ipso facto white supremacists. …
The most bizarre example of ‘Scientific American’’s woke turn toward social justice is an article published September 23, 2021 titled ‘Why the Term ‘JEDI’ is Problematic for Describing Programs that Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.’ The JEDI acronym is clearly meant to be uplifting and positive. It isn’t, opine the authors of this piece that is clearly not in the satirical spirit of ‘The Onion’ or ‘Babylon Bee’.” …
My.. December 2018 [column] was rejected entirely.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to reject your December column. It’s not really well argued, and leaves a couple of enormous holes that any critic could drive a large truck through.
You say, essentially, that things are better, especially for minorities of various kinds, than ever in history, your evidence being, basically, “you can look it up.” It may be true in a relative sense—there are fewer lynchings these days, and a man generally can’t beat his wife to death and get away with it as easily as he once could—but you ignore the question of where these and other historically powerless groups stand in relation to those with hereditary privilege. “Driving while black” is still a thing, as is getting shot by cops for failure to be abjectly respectful enough, as is casual, thoughtless racism. Income inequality is larger than it’s been in a long time, which also impacts minorities vastly more than it does privileged groups. Women still suffer constant indignities and violence at the hands of men. And worldwide, fascist and authoritarian regimes are on the increase. …
I’m not looking for a revise here; we need a new column.
Shortly after the December 2018 column I was given my walking papers.
Noah Karl contends that the Woke cultural shift that has swept through the Community of Fashion in recent years can be traced to the Civil Rights Movement and to the massive leftward shift of Academia.
The Professoriate used to be conventionally Liberal. Today it is conventionally Radical. One key reason for that shift is the dramatic increase of female academics.
I suspect that most of academia’s leftward shift was due to self-reinforcing processes: social homophily (conservatives not wanting to enter a profession where there aren’t many conservatives); political typing (conservatives feeling that an academic career “isn’t for them” in the same way that some women feel that a construction career “isn’t for them”); and discrimination (conservatives being discriminated against in hiring, research and funding).
However, one other possible cause of academia’s leftward shift, and of the rise of woke activism in particular, is the influx of women into that institution. …
[W]hy would the influx of women into academia have contributed to its leftward shift, and to the rise of woke activism in particular? As the psychologist Cory Clark notes, women are consistently less supportive of free speech than men, and consistently more supportive of censorship. Compared to men, they’re more likely to say: that hate speech is violence; that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker; that controversial scientific findings should be censored; that people need to be more careful about the language they use; and that it should be illegal to say offensive things about minorities.
Clark argues, convincingly in my view, that this stems from women’s greater aversion to harm and conflict. They interpret various forms of speech as harmful to vulnerable groups, and wish to censor them for that reason. Whether these gender differences are cross-cultural universals remains a matter of debate. Women being more averse to harm and conflict would certainly make sense from an evolutionary point of view, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the differences are hard-wired. As with most traits that vary, I suspect there’s both a genetic and an environmental component. Whatever the precise mix, women’s greater aversion to harm and conflict does show up in many WEIRD countries, not least the United States.
Clark isn’t the only scholar to have noticed that women’s aversion to harm and conflict has profound implications for academia. Drawing on the work of psychologist Joyce Benenson, Arnold Kling notes: “Women have a social strategy that works well for protecting their individual health and the health of their children: emphasize safety, covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them.” This leads him to speculate that adding a lot of women to formerly male domains has made the culture of those domains more consistent with female tendencies. “The older culture valued open debate,” Kling notes. “The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.”
We know that, on average, women are less favourable to free speech and more favourable to censorship.
In this outside-his-paywall-excerpt,Eugyppius argues that Coronavirus Containment has evolved into another ideological obsession of what Curtis Yarvin likes to call The Cathedral.
Many are fond of comparing Corona containment to fascism or communism, while others detect, behind the scenes, the agenda of the vapid globalists at the World Economic Forum or the United Nations. The broad phenomenon of Corona containment, it seems, can never be about the virus itself – it’s either a recurrent historical evil, or a Trojan horse for the fever dreams of Klaus Schwab. While I’d never dispute anyone’s polemical use of historical analogies, and I understand how hard it is to believe we have endured all of these absurdities because of a virus, I think it’s worth taking Corona containment seriously, as a developing ideology in its own right.
Containment is indeed overtly authoritarian, and perhaps that’s the only point that analogies to communism or fascism are trying to make. Nevertheless, these policies are not rooted in the hard authoritarianism of a Stalin or a Mussolini. Excepting the special case of China – special because it is where all of this came from – there is a markedly reduced enthusiasm for Corona restrictions beyond those places that proclaim themselves bastions of freedom and democracy. Most of the hardest-line Corona regimes are members in good standing of the liberal West, and they prefer the softer, distributed authoritarianism pioneered by liberal democracies.
The truth is that no other political system could have produced Corona containment, as we’ve experienced it. First-world democracies are anything but systems for channelling the will of the people. Instead, with the rise of mass media and mass society, they have become elaborate consensus-farming operations. Unique in history, they are governing systems that use mass media to call into being the phenomenon of public opinion, which is then shaped by a combination of propaganda and political participation into a tool of governance and consensus in its own right. The majority is thus first acclimated to the agenda of the state, and then deployed to enforce governmental directives and to repress dissidents, the non-compliant and, increasingly, even the disinterested. Corona containment is an obvious product of a system like this, depending as it does on widely distributed consensus policies that are enforced less by the police than by enthusiastic majorities deputised by journalists.
So, there is an authoritarianism here, but if we’re being pedantic, it’s of a different nature than the kind we tend to encounter in history books. It’s highly significant, and a sign of desperation, that Austria is contemplating brief prison terms for those who refuse vaccination. Austria would much prefer the soft authoritarianism it has used until now, and that most of our countries still prefer: ‘Nudge’ behavioural engineering, disingenuous media messaging, regulatory harassment, and directed public opprobrium. Taken together, these things are more insidious than blunter tactics like imprisonment; they take aim at your will and your soul, not merely your body.
What is the purpose of all this enforcement, then? While nothing any of our countries do is ever at any point about just one thing, for me the most parsimonious theory is still that the underlying, originating policies really are, at their core, about suppressing a virus. This doesn’t mean that the odious people running this circus are sincere, or that they have your best interests in mind. It’s very much the opposite.
Victor Davis Hanson points out how Progressive governance has created our own Third World, right here, and right next to most fantastically wealthiest neighborhoods in the country.
Blue State America has room for the technocrat Nomenklura and for their miserable helot servant class. Just no room for conventional families and a Middle Class.
In a recent online exchange, the YouTuber Casey Neistat posted his fury after his car was broken into and the contents stolen. Los Angeles, he railed, was turning into a “3rd-world s—hole of a city.”
The multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen chastised Neistat for his anger.
Rogen claimed that a car’s contents were minor things to lose. He added that while living in West Hollywood he had his own car broken into 15 times—but thought little of it.
Online bloggers ridiculed Rogen. No wonder—the actor lives in multimillion-dollar homes in the Los Angeles area, guarded by sophisticated security systems and fencing.
Vineyard roadsides used as dumps—a normal scene along rural avenues near my home
Yet both Neistat and Rogen accurately defined Third Worldization: the utter breakdown of the law and the ability of the rich within such a feudal society to find ways to avoid the violent chaos.
After traveling the last 45 years in the Middle East, southern Europe, Mexico, and Asia Minor, I observed some common characteristics of a so-called Third-World society. And all of them might feel increasingly familiar to contemporary Americans.
Whether in Cairo or Naples, theft was commonplace. Yet property crimes were almost never seriously prosecuted.
In a medieval-type society of two rather than three classes, the rich in walled estates rarely worry that much about thievery. Crime is written off as an intramural problem of the poor, especially when the middle class is in decline or nonexistent.
Violent crime is now soaring in America. But two things are different about America’s new criminality.
One is the virtual impunity of it. Thieves now brazenly swarm a store, ransack, steal, and flee with the content without worry of arrest.
Second, the Left often justifies crime as a sort of righteous payback against a supposedly exploitative system.
So, the architect of the so-called 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, preened of the summer 2020 riotous destruction of property: “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” …
In the Third World, basic services—power, fuel, transportation, water—are characteristically unreliable: In other words, much like a frequent California brownout.
I’ve been on five flights in my life where it was announced there was not enough fuel to continue to the scheduled destination—requiring either turning around or landing somewhere on the way. One such aborted flight took off from Cairo, another from southern Mexico. The other three were this spring and summer inside the United States.
One of the most memorable scenes that I remember of Ankara, Old Cairo, or Algiers of the early 1970s were legions of beggars and the impoverished sleeping on sidewalks.
But such impoverishment pales in comparison to the encampments of present-day Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Francisco. Tens of thousands live on sidewalks and in open view use them to defecate, urinate, inject drugs, and dispose of refuse.
In the old Third World, extreme wealth and poverty existed in close proximity. It was common to see peasants on horse-drawn wagons a few miles from coastal villas.
But there is now far more contiguous wealth and poverty in Silicon Valley. In Redwood City and East Palo Alto, multiple families cram into tiny bungalows and garages—often a few blocks from tony Atherton.
On the main streets outside of Stanford University and the Google campus, the helot classes sleep in decrepit trailers and buses parked on the streets.
Neistat was right in identifying a pandemic of crime in Los Angeles as Third Worldization.
But so was Rogen, though unknowingly so. The actor played the predictable role of the smug, indifferent Third World rich who master ignoring—and navigating around—the misery of others in their midst.
