One additional connection here. The question then arises why the Woke fight so hard specifically for a strain of Islam that is very much against the very people that make up the Intersectional Blob. There is no sect of religion on Earth that is more homophobic, more anti-woman, or more cisnormative than the radical Islam practiced by Hamas. BUT. The hatred of Western civilization is the tie that binds. For the Woke it’s the capitalist system (if you accept that the underlying philosophical understanding of Intersectionality as Michael outline is Classical Marxism) and for Hamas it’s the Christian foundations.
In their Ideological work it’s forbidden to suggest that any oppressed minority is responsible in any way for their own life outcomes, and any data or ideas that allude to that potential reality are disposed of as if religious blasphemy. I'm not exaggerating that either, I mean exactly like religious blasphemy.
Much of the canon can be viewed as philosophical gymnastics to avoid the concept of personal responsibility and everything is projected onto the ‘system’, which creates an image of the purest of victims no matter how they behave as individuals.
This dynamic plays into what you're talking about here just like the BLM riots were the 'voice of the unheard', no matter how much destruction was caused people were killed.
That’s especially true about their definition of Racism, which was developed specifically to thwart the accusation of “reverse racism” (which is still just racism)
For radical islam, it's more about the depravity (perceived or real) western countries export and influence the rest of the world with. They call the west the The Satan and the US is the Great Satan. The other factor is the power the west projects onto the rest of the world. How can Allah be 'the greatest' (allahu ackbar) if Islam isn't on top? This is a war of gods and right now Allah is disappointed.
Valid points (although it feels like you may be trying to downplay the amount of real religious fervor and the interpretations of the Qoran used to justify the atrocities want to commit against their neighbors). Let’s not use language that lets them off the hook for their actions. Yes, those are definitely factors, but don’t try to reduce it down to the point we end up blaming the West or excusing their actions. I’m not even saying that was your intent, it just had an air of intellectualization to it.
After re-reading my comment, I can see why you'd think that. Just to be fully transparent. I don't, in any terms -- in any context, condone radical Islam's actions.
"Certain feminisms." Thank you for not throwing various women into a globular mass of "The feminists." As a 62-yr-old feminist, I'm fighting all of the above. I go with the assumption that anyone who calls herself a "feminist" should share a belief in self-determination, civil rights and opportunities for all. Just like with various men's rights groups, that is not necessarily how some "feminists" think. As long as I'm alive I will fight the Blob.
You're welcome. At one point in the 2010s many women around me started becoming weird bullies on behalf of something they called 'feminism', so I tried to figure out what it was all about. At one point I counted 12 different branches and most of them hated each other with a wild fury. After that, I decided that anyone who says "I'm a feminist" without being able to explain further is either an ideologue or having their instincts of fairness and decency manipulated by ideologues. The Blob absorbs detail.
Attached to all of this is the admonition that certain people must "sacrifice" in the name of equity or intersectionality. The demographically privileged must give away what they have and do with less in the name of all that is just and right in society.
The aggrieved people taking the lead in whining--or of late in calling for a violent end to their political enemies--are no different than the Red Guards. They are here to accuse the "privileged" and persuade them to voluntarily "sacrifice" for the ambiguous greater good. And those that don't sacrifice voluntarily will be made to do so.
Without a clearly expressed goal and a direct means of achieving the goal, sacrifice (as exhorted by these enlighted people) for an amorphous "good" is wrong. In fact it is the most vile obscenity.
I've come to the conclusion that this ideology is just a hypnotic modern version of the rallying stories a tribe tells before pillaging a neighbouring tribe. These motivational dynamics are essential to make a revolution active.
I watched that whole series and when I went back to watch the Brett/Evergreen series again, I realized the 3 other people at the table are the 3 Reformers.
It's all a bit of a rabbit warren isn't it? I'm sure there's a way to neatly package it all up but the simplifying process has a way of cartoonifying the issue.
More the canary in the coal mine. The vast body of work from the academic disciplines we critique in The Reformers series is where the contagion began if we're using virus terminology. I did notice the Pacific north west is a hub of ideological activity, so colleges like Evergreen are the home of a lot of it.
Great piece, Mike. I was there at that NEA convention where Becky Pringle belted out her sermon. I felt embarrassed and a bit harassed by her words and her tone. I keep paying my union dues so I can have a seat at the table and continue to fight the capture of two institutions I struggle to recognize anymore: my education union and public education!
Ray, you're in the belly of the beast! I know what this all looks like upstream in the pedagogy literature and have spoken to people who have gone through US schools of ed. When you couple that with these clips that circulate from time to time and anecdotal stories from friends kids coming home talking about absurd lessons things look bleak. Would you say it's as far gone as it looks?
Not far gone. Not yet at any rate. I think most of US public schools are waking up to what has been going on the past few years and are beginning to push back. Some are pulling their kids out and others are showing up to school board meetings. I'm an optimist in my heart and a pessimist in my head. Right now, and because I've met so many concerned citizens and teachers in the past three years, I remain hopeful that the West in general, and the US specifically, can survive this social virus. The work you are doing is making a difference, I think. It certainly has buoyed me over the past few years!
Thanks, Ray. Always good to hear from feet on the ground. I haven't been able to investigate in the real world for a while now. This Substack seems to be gaining traction, and I hope to use the resources to do more observational work. There's only so much I can get from a desk.
James Lindsay is declarative: the blob is coming for us, our children, our institutions and our systems of governance. The blob did not arise in a vacuum. It is a counterforce. What is it in reaction to? What collective force gave birth and life to the blob? The blob seeks to dismantle that collective force through a “critical” revolution that replaces that system with a new one in order to find repair and establish equity. Might the blob be pointing out a genuinely oppressive and exploitative force, a collective sociopathic force within imperialist Western civilization which allows for the kind of blatant genocide were seeing on the world stage right now in Gaza? This is one iteration of what the blob is reacting to, and if the war escalates, the blob's subversive activism will fracture the Western world in a major way, and importantly, from within. If you think for one second the blob is on the wane, think again. Liken it to an adolescent, just now maturing. It's revolution is only just now warming up, gaining traction. The ideologues have done, and continue to do a very good job of indoctrinating the Western mind. Looks to me like the blob for all its fallibility is pointing out something valuable, a fundamental, perhaps fatal flaw in how our species is progressing collectively. We dismiss its message at our peril. While these ideological movements since Marx have failed spectacularly, at the cost of millions of lives, we would do well to examine what they were opposing. They emerged in reaction to an illness, a collective sociopathy, alive, flourishing and ascending in the modern world. And if we don't face that illness, history will certainly repeat itself, just with a different flavor in America. Lindsay says we're next, and in my looking it's utterly inevitable. The messenger is obviously deranged but let's not dismiss the message. There is a collective sociopathy in Western civilization driving its collapse, and the rainbow blob is the bellwether.
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
"This reductive, mechanistic conception of culture is Woke’s biggest tell. Underneath all the hypnotic academic jargon lies the same simplistic model, repeated again and again - Cultural norms are “systems” that produce disparate outcomes and we need to reengineer them to produce equity."
I liked very much the use of the word "robot" in the movie TAR, when Lydia Tár calls out her student for his (or they I can't remember the pronoun of choice) closed mindedness. Watching the video above with the robotic pedagogues reminds me of the word "robot" again. Robots need programming, and engineered systems. I wonder if a tendency to feel afraid and not able to deal with uncertainty is feeding the Rainbow Blob.
That scene was something special. I agree, I heard a great short definition for ideology recently “Ideology is political programming for NPCs”, I thought it was perfect.
I shared your response (with the definition for ideology) with a friend, a poet, who is at the apex of the intersectionality coalition's privilege pyramid, but doesn't benefit nor operate from much programming. His response: "a la (meta)Musil's Man Without Qualities we must game among if not with NCP's: non-character players..."
In his book “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution,” David Horowitz, a New Left movement founder in the 1960s, refers to a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society who “once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” Now apply that to the tussle over man’s impact on the climate and things become much clearer.
One additional connection here. The question then arises why the Woke fight so hard specifically for a strain of Islam that is very much against the very people that make up the Intersectional Blob. There is no sect of religion on Earth that is more homophobic, more anti-woman, or more cisnormative than the radical Islam practiced by Hamas. BUT. The hatred of Western civilization is the tie that binds. For the Woke it’s the capitalist system (if you accept that the underlying philosophical understanding of Intersectionality as Michael outline is Classical Marxism) and for Hamas it’s the Christian foundations.
In their Ideological work it’s forbidden to suggest that any oppressed minority is responsible in any way for their own life outcomes, and any data or ideas that allude to that potential reality are disposed of as if religious blasphemy. I'm not exaggerating that either, I mean exactly like religious blasphemy.
Much of the canon can be viewed as philosophical gymnastics to avoid the concept of personal responsibility and everything is projected onto the ‘system’, which creates an image of the purest of victims no matter how they behave as individuals.
This dynamic plays into what you're talking about here just like the BLM riots were the 'voice of the unheard', no matter how much destruction was caused people were killed.
That’s especially true about their definition of Racism, which was developed specifically to thwart the accusation of “reverse racism” (which is still just racism)
For radical islam, it's more about the depravity (perceived or real) western countries export and influence the rest of the world with. They call the west the The Satan and the US is the Great Satan. The other factor is the power the west projects onto the rest of the world. How can Allah be 'the greatest' (allahu ackbar) if Islam isn't on top? This is a war of gods and right now Allah is disappointed.
Valid points (although it feels like you may be trying to downplay the amount of real religious fervor and the interpretations of the Qoran used to justify the atrocities want to commit against their neighbors). Let’s not use language that lets them off the hook for their actions. Yes, those are definitely factors, but don’t try to reduce it down to the point we end up blaming the West or excusing their actions. I’m not even saying that was your intent, it just had an air of intellectualization to it.
After re-reading my comment, I can see why you'd think that. Just to be fully transparent. I don't, in any terms -- in any context, condone radical Islam's actions.
"Certain feminisms." Thank you for not throwing various women into a globular mass of "The feminists." As a 62-yr-old feminist, I'm fighting all of the above. I go with the assumption that anyone who calls herself a "feminist" should share a belief in self-determination, civil rights and opportunities for all. Just like with various men's rights groups, that is not necessarily how some "feminists" think. As long as I'm alive I will fight the Blob.
You're welcome. At one point in the 2010s many women around me started becoming weird bullies on behalf of something they called 'feminism', so I tried to figure out what it was all about. At one point I counted 12 different branches and most of them hated each other with a wild fury. After that, I decided that anyone who says "I'm a feminist" without being able to explain further is either an ideologue or having their instincts of fairness and decency manipulated by ideologues. The Blob absorbs detail.
Attached to all of this is the admonition that certain people must "sacrifice" in the name of equity or intersectionality. The demographically privileged must give away what they have and do with less in the name of all that is just and right in society.
The aggrieved people taking the lead in whining--or of late in calling for a violent end to their political enemies--are no different than the Red Guards. They are here to accuse the "privileged" and persuade them to voluntarily "sacrifice" for the ambiguous greater good. And those that don't sacrifice voluntarily will be made to do so.
Without a clearly expressed goal and a direct means of achieving the goal, sacrifice (as exhorted by these enlighted people) for an amorphous "good" is wrong. In fact it is the most vile obscenity.
I've come to the conclusion that this ideology is just a hypnotic modern version of the rallying stories a tribe tells before pillaging a neighbouring tribe. These motivational dynamics are essential to make a revolution active.
I'm trying to play catch-up, is Evergreen State College patient zero for the woke contagion?
I watched that whole series and when I went back to watch the Brett/Evergreen series again, I realized the 3 other people at the table are the 3 Reformers.
It's all a bit of a rabbit warren isn't it? I'm sure there's a way to neatly package it all up but the simplifying process has a way of cartoonifying the issue.
More the canary in the coal mine. The vast body of work from the academic disciplines we critique in The Reformers series is where the contagion began if we're using virus terminology. I did notice the Pacific north west is a hub of ideological activity, so colleges like Evergreen are the home of a lot of it.
Great piece, Mike. I was there at that NEA convention where Becky Pringle belted out her sermon. I felt embarrassed and a bit harassed by her words and her tone. I keep paying my union dues so I can have a seat at the table and continue to fight the capture of two institutions I struggle to recognize anymore: my education union and public education!
Ray, you're in the belly of the beast! I know what this all looks like upstream in the pedagogy literature and have spoken to people who have gone through US schools of ed. When you couple that with these clips that circulate from time to time and anecdotal stories from friends kids coming home talking about absurd lessons things look bleak. Would you say it's as far gone as it looks?
Not far gone. Not yet at any rate. I think most of US public schools are waking up to what has been going on the past few years and are beginning to push back. Some are pulling their kids out and others are showing up to school board meetings. I'm an optimist in my heart and a pessimist in my head. Right now, and because I've met so many concerned citizens and teachers in the past three years, I remain hopeful that the West in general, and the US specifically, can survive this social virus. The work you are doing is making a difference, I think. It certainly has buoyed me over the past few years!
Thanks, Ray. Always good to hear from feet on the ground. I haven't been able to investigate in the real world for a while now. This Substack seems to be gaining traction, and I hope to use the resources to do more observational work. There's only so much I can get from a desk.
To borrow from “Barbie”, now that we have spoken it, it can lose its power.
Also, major props for this line:
“Like a leotard at a Lizzo concert, the oppressive construct is stretched and contorted to its absolute limit.”
*tasty
James Lindsay is declarative: the blob is coming for us, our children, our institutions and our systems of governance. The blob did not arise in a vacuum. It is a counterforce. What is it in reaction to? What collective force gave birth and life to the blob? The blob seeks to dismantle that collective force through a “critical” revolution that replaces that system with a new one in order to find repair and establish equity. Might the blob be pointing out a genuinely oppressive and exploitative force, a collective sociopathic force within imperialist Western civilization which allows for the kind of blatant genocide were seeing on the world stage right now in Gaza? This is one iteration of what the blob is reacting to, and if the war escalates, the blob's subversive activism will fracture the Western world in a major way, and importantly, from within. If you think for one second the blob is on the wane, think again. Liken it to an adolescent, just now maturing. It's revolution is only just now warming up, gaining traction. The ideologues have done, and continue to do a very good job of indoctrinating the Western mind. Looks to me like the blob for all its fallibility is pointing out something valuable, a fundamental, perhaps fatal flaw in how our species is progressing collectively. We dismiss its message at our peril. While these ideological movements since Marx have failed spectacularly, at the cost of millions of lives, we would do well to examine what they were opposing. They emerged in reaction to an illness, a collective sociopathy, alive, flourishing and ascending in the modern world. And if we don't face that illness, history will certainly repeat itself, just with a different flavor in America. Lindsay says we're next, and in my looking it's utterly inevitable. The messenger is obviously deranged but let's not dismiss the message. There is a collective sociopathy in Western civilization driving its collapse, and the rainbow blob is the bellwether.
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
-William Stafford
"This reductive, mechanistic conception of culture is Woke’s biggest tell. Underneath all the hypnotic academic jargon lies the same simplistic model, repeated again and again - Cultural norms are “systems” that produce disparate outcomes and we need to reengineer them to produce equity."
I liked very much the use of the word "robot" in the movie TAR, when Lydia Tár calls out her student for his (or they I can't remember the pronoun of choice) closed mindedness. Watching the video above with the robotic pedagogues reminds me of the word "robot" again. Robots need programming, and engineered systems. I wonder if a tendency to feel afraid and not able to deal with uncertainty is feeding the Rainbow Blob.
That scene was something special. I agree, I heard a great short definition for ideology recently “Ideology is political programming for NPCs”, I thought it was perfect.
I shared your response (with the definition for ideology) with a friend, a poet, who is at the apex of the intersectionality coalition's privilege pyramid, but doesn't benefit nor operate from much programming. His response: "a la (meta)Musil's Man Without Qualities we must game among if not with NCP's: non-character players..."
Another 1000 pages that I need to read.
Say, They Want A Revolution …
I & I Editorial Board
November 2, 2023
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/02/say-they-want-a-revolution/
In his book “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution,” David Horowitz, a New Left movement founder in the 1960s, refers to a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society who “once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” Now apply that to the tussle over man’s impact on the climate and things become much clearer.
(Snip)
It is so strange that as ideology takes over, political dogma rises and logic goes out the window.
"The Rainbow Blob." I like it!!! Been looking for a shorthand way of explaining what I've (WE'VE) been seeing. The Rainbow Blob s It!.