We are witnessing an organized pushback against the largest, most powerful insane asylum in history. The perfect storm of cultural, political and institutional adoption of these ideologies has turned reality upside down.
If we allow these maniacs to succeed and completely control our society, it will take decades to undo - and there's no guarantee we will succeed! The inmates are running the asylum, and they will not give up without a fight.
"Pathologically entitled children in adult bodies" will not listen to reason. Trying to debate them results in their tantrums, hateful attacks and knee-jerk labeling of their enemies as being "Nazi", "White Supremacist", etc. We are literally engaged in the fight of our lives.
Thanks to you brave warriors and others like Dr. Malone, Triggernometry Bigotinis and Mattias Desmet I feel some hope! Good luck and thank you all!
The pushback against the corrupt late Medieval Catholic Church, the impact of the printing press, the consequent rise of Protestantism and the 30 Years War has been cited by historians such as Niall Ferguson as another possible comparison.
The 'woke" stuff is indeed a massive televised insane asylum, but the Mongolian Hordes' destruction of every major civilization in the known world over several hundred years was actually a lot worse. I guess it could be argued that the mass slaughter of millions of people from China to India to the Middle East and Russia wasn't an "insane asylum" because it was the final revenge of "nomads" on "farmers", but that would be a stretch.
There a number of historical examples of societies that are disrupted (or just decay, like the Roman empire) and then collapse into chaos and are over-run by "pagans".
I'll take comfort from knowing our deaths will probably be less painful than those of the Mongol victims! But your point is well taken.
My disappointment really comes from believing we should know better. It's a naive belief since we still possess a "working" reptilian cortex in addition to all the evolutionary improvements to our brains such as the prefrontal cortex, etc. Maybe AGI will fix us?😁
A great piece this.... but I fear that all attempts "to highlight the capture of the academic humanities by a defiantly irrational ideology" - however clever -face a big (perhaps insurmountable) problem - human nature. The capture of academia has long since also become the capture of every institution of civil society in the Western world (especially the English-speaking world) And all attempts at highlighting this hit a wall. A wall made of incuriosity...... "Thanks to the internet, there is now a wealth of journalism, of impeccable probity, investigating and interrogating the prevailing left-liberal narratives on race, gender and much else. Now, any open-minded person can - if the will is there - find persuasive, evidence-based refutations of those MSM narratives with their wilful seeking of ‘discrimination’, emotional ‘trauma’ and minority victimisation stories often diametrically opposed to evidence. If the will is there – therein lies the rub. As Saul Bellow put it “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
I'm not sure the obstacle here is "human nature" per se but more accurately (and clumsily) something like: "humans and their brains living inside the digital panopticon and Skinner box that is the Internet". (Unless I'm just quibbling)
My anecdata as someone who lives entirely inside the Social Justice Blue Bubble: my friends (who are for the most part educated, accomplished Gen X urbanites) really honestly deep in their bones believe: 1) that the Republicans/Trump/Deplorable Middle Americans are more or less Nazi Klansmen that want to genocide the marginalized if given the chance; 2) that because of this constant moral emergency, anything or anyone remotely conservative (or just opposed to any aspect of the Social Justice religion for any reason) is not just wrong but actively dangerously evil and must be treated as such; and 3) that when it comes to politics or culture or personal life, nothing else matters but this existential war bw Good and Evil, and thus all your life choices from books to foods to mates must display and proclaim that you play for Team Good and are loyal and obedient to it.
This is more or less a religious mania that has captured our elite class and just about every college-educated urbanite. And like all prior religious manias it will just have to burn itself out in some collapse or cataclysm, and we'll just have to see what we can use to rebuild from the rubble (assuming we're still alive).
Hello again CP. I had missed the '3' in your comment (very true by the way)... but the fact that almost an entire generation of the 'educated' can be captured in this way tells us 2 sobering things. 1) the liberal dream of a society made up of freethinking individuals was always a chimera 2) some kind of religious fervour is the natural condition of mankind in the long run. There will always be a minority of apostates... You and I (and others on this thread) for example.
1) the liberal dream of a society made up of freethinking individuals was always a chimera...
this was just another utopian fantasy brought to you by various "thinkers" who have enormous education but aren't smart enough to realize they are outliers and not representative of the average person, as well as a sales pitch to acquire power and attention.
2) some kind of religious fervour is the natural condition of mankind in the long run.
I don't know if I'd call it "religious fervor" but I think of it as "the Sacred" and no group of people can live long without some conception of the Sacred and some Sacred idea to gather around, that is human history in a nutshell.
Our secular deracinated postnational society was ripe for a hostile religious takeover and the New Left had been cooking up their religion of the Holy & Sacred Marginalized for decades. It was the right cult in the right place at the right time.
Yes all true..... and "someone who lives entirely inside the Social Justice Blue Bubble" that's me too - friends, family and ex-colleagues. (I write about all this in my Substack 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem': https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/)
incorrect, the spell of "wokeism" only exists because of what Nassim Taleb calls "The Dictatorship of the Intolerant Minority" (which reflects the idea that wokeism is a dogmatic cult led by sociopathic social predators).
Wokeism is regressive to the overall trend in cultural evolution toward metarationality.*
Wokeism/postmodernism is a pothole on the path of cultural evolution. Something lies beyond. Wokeism is a tangent and a dead end (see Ronfeldt's TIMN model).
Awareness of the pathological nature of wokeism is spreading, even as corrupt elements of the corporate-state, including NGOs, adopt it as a propaganda tool.
The article I quoted from is a recent piece I did on the tenth anniversary of the death of Margaret Thatcher. There isn't a summary as such but it's basically saying that conservative politics has failed for half a century to counter progressivism's 'long march through the institutions of Western liberalism (and Thatcher was the nearest thing to an exception to that depressing rule). I am a pessimist about Western Liberalism's future but, in my Substack, https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ I do try to make sense of our 21st c zeitgeist. Take a look.
I have seen a similar type of nonsense when it comes to gender-affirming care. Respected magazines and journals like the British Medical Journal or The Economist have written extensively about the abysmal quality of work that is giving intellectual cover for the US medical establishment to practice irreversible changes on young men and women with lifelong consequences. However, the critics always said, "We don't really know what might happen with these hormones." That is no longer true, at least for men on estrogen therapy. We now know that pharmacological doses of estrogen are lethal for men, kind of a slow-moving train wreck that occurs over decades. It has been documented quite comprehensively in this review: https://bit.ly/estro_on_men. Research in the last few years on the effects of estrogen on trans women has been coming in thick and fast, and it is all alarming. The most alarming of all is its effect on the brain. Through myriad mechanisms, estrogen changes the brain, from reducing the hippocampal volume to serum BDNF levels (which leads to depressive disorders), reducing gray matter, reducing cortical white matter integrity, and decreasing brain cortical volume, leading to neuropathologies from Alzheimer's to schizophrenia, mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, drug dependence, and mental retardation The deleterious effects of estrogen do not end there. They change the body's immune responses, leading to a host of autoimmune diseases. And then, there are the established effects on the cardiovascular system and different kinds of cancers. That conclusion does not mean that the young men aren't suffering, just that the therapy for them doesn't bring them any balm at all. Rather, it causes iatrogenic harm with not a single upside, psychological or physiological. The analogy that I can think of is this: it is as if the medical community is saying that since cancer patients are suffering, we should administer cyanide capsules because some “experts” within the community have suddenly decided, without evidence, that cyanide will help these patients. The patients need help, but cyanide is not the answer.
May 26, 2023·edited May 26, 2023Liked by Michael Nayna
I have been totally steeped in learning about the "trans issue" for a few years now. I knew there was a huge problem with the "affirmation only" cult many years back.
As far as girls go, according to detransitioners, testosterone has terrible side effects for many girls. Some say, it initially might make them feel better, then it's absolutely horrible for them.
As the old saying goes, "It's not nice to fool with mother nature."
The "affirmation only" ideology is a cult full of madness and debauchery. Therapists now think it's fine to simply affirm a child's hatred for their body, and surgeons are fine with butchering confused, vulnerable teens.
I find it absolutely insane.
Sweden has a very good series on detransitioners titled, "Trans Train", and Benjamin Boyce has some long form interviews with detransitioners.
These three individuals are supremely brave, intelligent, and insightful. Their work must be spread and their persons protected. Someday, they will be viewed as the Solzhenitsyns and Sharanskys of our time and place.
‘Cynical Theories’ is rigorous, nuanced and very well done. Real work went into it. The book is credited to “Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay”. Given everything I’ve read or heard from them individually since, I now assume the excellent Pluckrose did the bulk of the work. She’s fantastic: intelligent, thoughtful, not a cheap rabble-rouser. She deserves to be better known.
That book was the basis of my email to HR saying that if they instituted mandatory diversity training they were going to receive legal pushback from me. I also warned them that it would wreck the institution. We didn't get mandatory diversity training. Also, please look at Brett Weinstein's stuff on this as well!
Wow. That's great that you managed to do that. I keep reading about people's irritation with what they have to go through at work with nutty "diversity trainings" and such.
Hmmm, while I greatly support the work of Peter, Helen and James, so far this documentary doesn't really paint them in a great light. Why do we need a minutes long tour through Peter's house? Why do we need to have a looong scene where they are looking at bodybuilder porn?
This whole video is rather... unflattering and it's not really giving much information either.
Yes, I agree about the tour of the house and watching the body builder porn being gratuitous. It made them look sophomoric. It was a strange juxtaposition against the noble cause of exposing the pathology of Wokeism.
This is great thanks, i have seen first hand from young parents who have been through university a new morality regarding porn, they actually think that young teens should legitimately view porn. To help with their sexual development and to ease sexual frustration. They were talking about 13 yr olds. This is somethjng i can not accept. Strange times.
I don't get why this is paid for content? That way it's preaching to the "already converted " .
Surely we can organise a Gofundme page to raise the cash to make this open source on YouTube/Rumble etc. It needs to be out there in the Public Domain.
I spent and absurd amount of time and energy trying to get this through industry channels (https://michaelnayna.substack.com/p/announcement-the-reformers-2023), which was my strategic path to people not already familiar with the subject. The middle-people don't get it, or even want to hear about it. I think the delays means Gofundme isn't viable but if you have more faith and energy than me, please, run a campaign and see how you go with it.
I do wonder how much of this is rooted in the development of ectogenesis, and in relation to the notion amongst some academics that humanity will be "upgraded" not by natural evolution, but by design.... is this all based upon some absurdity that ectogenesis (there are many papers upon the topic including justifications that ectogenesis would free women from the monopoly of child birth) will further humanity, and that in order for ectogenesis to be normalised a blurring of gender roles is required? I actually don't think this is a conspiracy theory, it is the only answer that fits all the jigsaw pieces to my mind; ectogenesis at best is surely likely to lead to eugenics and restrictions of reproductive freedoms, next step "upgrading" humanity? This is pure speculation, but based upon joining up the dots, and with a view to how top down and carefully orchestrated the apparent psyops around this issue, and the apparent strong links with academia; so educated deduction if you will. Happy to explain further why I think this if you wish.
The sokal hoax and the grievance studies hoax were only small hindrances to the increasing takeover of far-left, woke, white-people-hating, black-people-worshipping, social justice ideology , but every hindrance is worthwhile since it gives us more time before they achieve complete takeover and no longer need to restrain themselves.
We are witnessing an organized pushback against the largest, most powerful insane asylum in history. The perfect storm of cultural, political and institutional adoption of these ideologies has turned reality upside down.
If we allow these maniacs to succeed and completely control our society, it will take decades to undo - and there's no guarantee we will succeed! The inmates are running the asylum, and they will not give up without a fight.
"Pathologically entitled children in adult bodies" will not listen to reason. Trying to debate them results in their tantrums, hateful attacks and knee-jerk labeling of their enemies as being "Nazi", "White Supremacist", etc. We are literally engaged in the fight of our lives.
Thanks to you brave warriors and others like Dr. Malone, Triggernometry Bigotinis and Mattias Desmet I feel some hope! Good luck and thank you all!
The pushback against the corrupt late Medieval Catholic Church, the impact of the printing press, the consequent rise of Protestantism and the 30 Years War has been cited by historians such as Niall Ferguson as another possible comparison.
The 'woke" stuff is indeed a massive televised insane asylum, but the Mongolian Hordes' destruction of every major civilization in the known world over several hundred years was actually a lot worse. I guess it could be argued that the mass slaughter of millions of people from China to India to the Middle East and Russia wasn't an "insane asylum" because it was the final revenge of "nomads" on "farmers", but that would be a stretch.
There a number of historical examples of societies that are disrupted (or just decay, like the Roman empire) and then collapse into chaos and are over-run by "pagans".
I'll take comfort from knowing our deaths will probably be less painful than those of the Mongol victims! But your point is well taken.
My disappointment really comes from believing we should know better. It's a naive belief since we still possess a "working" reptilian cortex in addition to all the evolutionary improvements to our brains such as the prefrontal cortex, etc. Maybe AGI will fix us?😁
If "we" fix AGI by making it more human, it can probably be used to fix the broken (human) sense making system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-_RdKiDbz4
A great piece this.... but I fear that all attempts "to highlight the capture of the academic humanities by a defiantly irrational ideology" - however clever -face a big (perhaps insurmountable) problem - human nature. The capture of academia has long since also become the capture of every institution of civil society in the Western world (especially the English-speaking world) And all attempts at highlighting this hit a wall. A wall made of incuriosity...... "Thanks to the internet, there is now a wealth of journalism, of impeccable probity, investigating and interrogating the prevailing left-liberal narratives on race, gender and much else. Now, any open-minded person can - if the will is there - find persuasive, evidence-based refutations of those MSM narratives with their wilful seeking of ‘discrimination’, emotional ‘trauma’ and minority victimisation stories often diametrically opposed to evidence. If the will is there – therein lies the rub. As Saul Bellow put it “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
https://thecritic.co.uk/reflections-on-the-counter-revolution-in-finchley/
I'm not sure the obstacle here is "human nature" per se but more accurately (and clumsily) something like: "humans and their brains living inside the digital panopticon and Skinner box that is the Internet". (Unless I'm just quibbling)
My anecdata as someone who lives entirely inside the Social Justice Blue Bubble: my friends (who are for the most part educated, accomplished Gen X urbanites) really honestly deep in their bones believe: 1) that the Republicans/Trump/Deplorable Middle Americans are more or less Nazi Klansmen that want to genocide the marginalized if given the chance; 2) that because of this constant moral emergency, anything or anyone remotely conservative (or just opposed to any aspect of the Social Justice religion for any reason) is not just wrong but actively dangerously evil and must be treated as such; and 3) that when it comes to politics or culture or personal life, nothing else matters but this existential war bw Good and Evil, and thus all your life choices from books to foods to mates must display and proclaim that you play for Team Good and are loyal and obedient to it.
This is more or less a religious mania that has captured our elite class and just about every college-educated urbanite. And like all prior religious manias it will just have to burn itself out in some collapse or cataclysm, and we'll just have to see what we can use to rebuild from the rubble (assuming we're still alive).
Hello again CP. I had missed the '3' in your comment (very true by the way)... but the fact that almost an entire generation of the 'educated' can be captured in this way tells us 2 sobering things. 1) the liberal dream of a society made up of freethinking individuals was always a chimera 2) some kind of religious fervour is the natural condition of mankind in the long run. There will always be a minority of apostates... You and I (and others on this thread) for example.
1) the liberal dream of a society made up of freethinking individuals was always a chimera...
this was just another utopian fantasy brought to you by various "thinkers" who have enormous education but aren't smart enough to realize they are outliers and not representative of the average person, as well as a sales pitch to acquire power and attention.
2) some kind of religious fervour is the natural condition of mankind in the long run.
I don't know if I'd call it "religious fervor" but I think of it as "the Sacred" and no group of people can live long without some conception of the Sacred and some Sacred idea to gather around, that is human history in a nutshell.
Our secular deracinated postnational society was ripe for a hostile religious takeover and the New Left had been cooking up their religion of the Holy & Sacred Marginalized for decades. It was the right cult in the right place at the right time.
have to stop meeting like this CP...will you be writing on your Substack sometime?
nahhh i'm more remora than shark...but thanks!
you calling me a shark!
Yes all true..... and "someone who lives entirely inside the Social Justice Blue Bubble" that's me too - friends, family and ex-colleagues. (I write about all this in my Substack 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem': https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/)
incorrect, the spell of "wokeism" only exists because of what Nassim Taleb calls "The Dictatorship of the Intolerant Minority" (which reflects the idea that wokeism is a dogmatic cult led by sociopathic social predators).
Wokeism is regressive to the overall trend in cultural evolution toward metarationality.*
Wokeism/postmodernism is a pothole on the path of cultural evolution. Something lies beyond. Wokeism is a tangent and a dead end (see Ronfeldt's TIMN model).
Awareness of the pathological nature of wokeism is spreading, even as corrupt elements of the corporate-state, including NGOs, adopt it as a propaganda tool.
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
metarationality. com /stem-fluidity-bridge
Is there a summary of your article?
The article I quoted from is a recent piece I did on the tenth anniversary of the death of Margaret Thatcher. There isn't a summary as such but it's basically saying that conservative politics has failed for half a century to counter progressivism's 'long march through the institutions of Western liberalism (and Thatcher was the nearest thing to an exception to that depressing rule). I am a pessimist about Western Liberalism's future but, in my Substack, https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/ I do try to make sense of our 21st c zeitgeist. Take a look.
I have seen a similar type of nonsense when it comes to gender-affirming care. Respected magazines and journals like the British Medical Journal or The Economist have written extensively about the abysmal quality of work that is giving intellectual cover for the US medical establishment to practice irreversible changes on young men and women with lifelong consequences. However, the critics always said, "We don't really know what might happen with these hormones." That is no longer true, at least for men on estrogen therapy. We now know that pharmacological doses of estrogen are lethal for men, kind of a slow-moving train wreck that occurs over decades. It has been documented quite comprehensively in this review: https://bit.ly/estro_on_men. Research in the last few years on the effects of estrogen on trans women has been coming in thick and fast, and it is all alarming. The most alarming of all is its effect on the brain. Through myriad mechanisms, estrogen changes the brain, from reducing the hippocampal volume to serum BDNF levels (which leads to depressive disorders), reducing gray matter, reducing cortical white matter integrity, and decreasing brain cortical volume, leading to neuropathologies from Alzheimer's to schizophrenia, mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, drug dependence, and mental retardation The deleterious effects of estrogen do not end there. They change the body's immune responses, leading to a host of autoimmune diseases. And then, there are the established effects on the cardiovascular system and different kinds of cancers. That conclusion does not mean that the young men aren't suffering, just that the therapy for them doesn't bring them any balm at all. Rather, it causes iatrogenic harm with not a single upside, psychological or physiological. The analogy that I can think of is this: it is as if the medical community is saying that since cancer patients are suffering, we should administer cyanide capsules because some “experts” within the community have suddenly decided, without evidence, that cyanide will help these patients. The patients need help, but cyanide is not the answer.
I have been totally steeped in learning about the "trans issue" for a few years now. I knew there was a huge problem with the "affirmation only" cult many years back.
As far as girls go, according to detransitioners, testosterone has terrible side effects for many girls. Some say, it initially might make them feel better, then it's absolutely horrible for them.
As the old saying goes, "It's not nice to fool with mother nature."
The "affirmation only" ideology is a cult full of madness and debauchery. Therapists now think it's fine to simply affirm a child's hatred for their body, and surgeons are fine with butchering confused, vulnerable teens.
I find it absolutely insane.
Sweden has a very good series on detransitioners titled, "Trans Train", and Benjamin Boyce has some long form interviews with detransitioners.
See Hannah Barnes Time to Think on The Tavistock. A brilliant dissection of an institution entirely in thrall to an ideology
AMAZING!
Fantastic — this is something I didn't know I was waiting for!
These three individuals are supremely brave, intelligent, and insightful. Their work must be spread and their persons protected. Someday, they will be viewed as the Solzhenitsyns and Sharanskys of our time and place.
‘Cynical Theories’ is rigorous, nuanced and very well done. Real work went into it. The book is credited to “Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay”. Given everything I’ve read or heard from them individually since, I now assume the excellent Pluckrose did the bulk of the work. She’s fantastic: intelligent, thoughtful, not a cheap rabble-rouser. She deserves to be better known.
That book was the basis of my email to HR saying that if they instituted mandatory diversity training they were going to receive legal pushback from me. I also warned them that it would wreck the institution. We didn't get mandatory diversity training. Also, please look at Brett Weinstein's stuff on this as well!
Wow. That's great that you managed to do that. I keep reading about people's irritation with what they have to go through at work with nutty "diversity trainings" and such.
Woke religion magnetizes mediocrities who cannot think through to consequence.
Hmmm, while I greatly support the work of Peter, Helen and James, so far this documentary doesn't really paint them in a great light. Why do we need a minutes long tour through Peter's house? Why do we need to have a looong scene where they are looking at bodybuilder porn?
This whole video is rather... unflattering and it's not really giving much information either.
Yes, I agree about the tour of the house and watching the body builder porn being gratuitous. It made them look sophomoric. It was a strange juxtaposition against the noble cause of exposing the pathology of Wokeism.
Sounds like you don't understand the main point.
This is great thanks, i have seen first hand from young parents who have been through university a new morality regarding porn, they actually think that young teens should legitimately view porn. To help with their sexual development and to ease sexual frustration. They were talking about 13 yr olds. This is somethjng i can not accept. Strange times.
I don't get why this is paid for content? That way it's preaching to the "already converted " .
Surely we can organise a Gofundme page to raise the cash to make this open source on YouTube/Rumble etc. It needs to be out there in the Public Domain.
I spent and absurd amount of time and energy trying to get this through industry channels (https://michaelnayna.substack.com/p/announcement-the-reformers-2023), which was my strategic path to people not already familiar with the subject. The middle-people don't get it, or even want to hear about it. I think the delays means Gofundme isn't viable but if you have more faith and energy than me, please, run a campaign and see how you go with it.
I do wonder how much of this is rooted in the development of ectogenesis, and in relation to the notion amongst some academics that humanity will be "upgraded" not by natural evolution, but by design.... is this all based upon some absurdity that ectogenesis (there are many papers upon the topic including justifications that ectogenesis would free women from the monopoly of child birth) will further humanity, and that in order for ectogenesis to be normalised a blurring of gender roles is required? I actually don't think this is a conspiracy theory, it is the only answer that fits all the jigsaw pieces to my mind; ectogenesis at best is surely likely to lead to eugenics and restrictions of reproductive freedoms, next step "upgrading" humanity? This is pure speculation, but based upon joining up the dots, and with a view to how top down and carefully orchestrated the apparent psyops around this issue, and the apparent strong links with academia; so educated deduction if you will. Happy to explain further why I think this if you wish.
I did see these guys giving a presentation at a conference but had not seen anything further so thanks for this. Absolutely brilliant.
Slightly re-writing a chapter form Mein Kampf is a stroke if genius.
Will cross post on this this evening.
Thanks very much Michael
Dusty
Thank you!
Well done!
The sokal hoax and the grievance studies hoax were only small hindrances to the increasing takeover of far-left, woke, white-people-hating, black-people-worshipping, social justice ideology , but every hindrance is worthwhile since it gives us more time before they achieve complete takeover and no longer need to restrain themselves.