© Federico Talens-Alesson 2017
Introduction
There is a video on Youtube in which Jordan Peterson claims that it is better to suffer the adverse consequences of speaking up, because remaining quiet brings its own kind of damnation. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WTftKxMJas). That sounds about right. He also claims that Humanities in academia are gone as a domain of intellectual honesty, and that without them Academia is lost. He then goes on to say that even now corporations are wising up to the fact that they should do their own college training. That sounds about right, too, and has already started to be noticed as a mainstreaming phenomenon. Doug Guthrie published about it in Forbes in 2013, regarding the corporate competition with Business Schools. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougguthrie/2013/01/22/corporate-universities-an-emerging-threat-to-graduate-business-education/#2fcc050f17a0). How this has come to be the state of affairs makes an interesting story, in itself part of a fascinating story about Established Academia and the Legacy Media.
By the way, at some point in this text there will be some scientific digressions about global warming and the ozone layer. At that point, and to answer the perfectly good question of why my opinion should matter, I will tell you in more details of a fact about me: In 2015 the Maven probe found out that the solar wind was responsible for depleting Mars atmosphere. I had predicted this behaviour two years before, and I can demonstrate it. This will hopefully give me enough credibility for you to ruminate on my arguments with an open mind.
A Tale of Two Serpents.
The fascinating story I want to describe is that of how the press and academia mirrored each other as they morphed into fake news and fake science, in the process of shifting from doing their original jobs of disseminating information and producing knowledge, to create propaganda for their collective advancement as two new types of priestly castes. Entwining themselves around each other like serpents, as it were. Of course, journalists stepped into the tradition of chroniclers and travelers, who would either describe places, peoples and facts as closely to truth as they could, or make up really tall tales. But scientists stepped into a role originally played by natural philosophers, who thought about nature in a philosophical manner (hence the name) seeking to construct the right questions about the world and, as a welcome bonus, find from time to time the semblance of an answer. Scientists replaced them, but also replaced their outlook on research with the conviction that the answers were for the taking as, to scientists, human perception is absolute and quite possibly perfect. One would believe that the endeavors of Humanity suggest that our perceptions and thinking are actually in the foggy side of the park, but they think otherwise.
But this may be not the key question here. The fact is that we have academics claiming that our reality is something somehow artificial (a “hologram” created and looked at by people who are “realer” than us), that the Earth will overheat (although the Earth has been alternatively freezing and heating up for a long, long time) unless we do something about it (which smacks of “hey, we should sacrifice someone so that Spring comes back!”), that people who eat meat are either murderers or not really different from drug addicts, or both and, frankly, not quite human (“let us stone some sinners”, that never gets old) could be regarded by somebody with a suspicious mind to be a set up to suddenly come with “the watchers and creators of reality SURELY want those things we want to be the rule and, verily, anybody who opposes these things must be punished. Possibly in a lavish way so that the creators are pleased (Aztec sacrifices, anyone?) because if not they will restart the hologram again because what they would see would displease them and this will destroy us. Long live the hologram and its creators. Quick, let us set up some organization to weed out the unbelievers (Watch out! Inquisition incoming!) so that the Gods (Notice the upgrade there?) be pleased”. Of course, I am not saying that this is what is happening. But the level of irrationality for such evolution is already there. Let us go step by step and find out how we got here.
- Where is the money? The age-old question.
Decades ago it became a requirement for academics to show that their work had a potential for socioeconomic impact because, apparently, knowledge in itself has no social value. You can count on somebody with an MBA to come up with that. Thus, to acquire funds and to profile themselves and their institutions became their core activity. Not to advance knowledge, not to produce research, not to teach, but to bring in extra money and attract the public attention. Think Cosmos by Carl Sagan as a prime example of capture of the public's attention. Shame he blamed the destruction of the Library of Alexandria on the Christians, to prove how religion (Christianity, that is) had damaged the progress of science. Never mind that there are all kind of versions, from the fact that the Library itself was destroyed during that fracas with Julius Caesar, to it being the Christians (though some contemporary accounts describe the destruction of pagan religious artifacts but do not talk about any books left at the time to destroy) to it being the Muslims.
There is a tendency in Academia to claim that the Muslims were respectful of culture in spite of their efforts to destroy European culture, with early sacking and sieges of Rome and Constantinople already in the IIV century. And, on a larger scale, economically destroying with their conquest Europe, specially ruining its maritime trade. And when economy goes down, education and knowledge follow because they need maintaining. With money. Take Visigoth Spain. The only four new cities built in Europe between the V and VIII in Europe are found in Spain. Well, their ruins are. These include Reccopolis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reccopolis) a city with even its own Roman style aqueduct, being dug out at present. The remains of Visigoth art, in particular the horseshoe arch, give a good example of how the famed Moorish architecture in Spain was based on preexisting Visigoth architecture. But we are supposed to believe that Visigoth Spain was a cultural dump, saved from ignorance by the sons of illiterate camel herders from Arabia whose idea of paradise was the eternal deflowering of teenagers. But there was an agenda to follow in the 70s and 80s. In yonder days the priestly caste to remove was the Christian one in these Western parts. More recently freethinkers like Richard Dawkins have noticed there may be something very wrong with Islam and... got no-platformed from US (and British) universities for saying so. But I digress.
The money obtained by this brave new academia was never enough. It had to pay for the burgeoning class of academic administrators (yep, the guys with the MBAs and without the common sense), who did not produce any teaching or research and therefore did not produce any income or reputation themselves. They were a different breed from the older style academic managers, themselves meeker academics who only thought they were the keepers of the secrets of the Universe (as if) and did the paperwork for a while, on some sort of rota basis, because they thought they had to take one for the team. Of course, nothing good could come from the entrenchment as “Great Helmsmen” of people who needed somebody else to get the money for them to be paid for a job that didn't add value to the institution.
This led over the years to the expansion of undergraduate and also of postgraduate degrees (new degrees of all kinds, Further Education, Continuing Career Development, etc), the later resulting in extra income for the new and hungry breed of money-focused academics spawned by the academic administrators themselves, and to the clamor for more and more public funds for research. How academia came to enable itself to be able to clamor for ever increasing funding will be discussed later. For now we will follow the students and, most importantly, their fees. We will completely skip on the fact that the inflation of people with degrees mean an inflation of people without a job for which they are “qualified” (more on this later) but with a debt they, because they did not have a job, are “unqualified” to pay for. Which is why Jill Stein came up with the idea of “easing” students from their loans. Because students have been shafted somehow. Oops. I mentioned it. My bad.
Student fees rose, which led to candidates wanting to enroll in institutions of all levels of prestige (even a British University who offered the post of Arch-chancellor to an actor famous for his lead role in a very famous SciFi franchise) to question whether they could afford to try and fail. But allowing a student to fail was certainly too old style for this brave new academia. Thus a change in the ways of teaching took place. From test based evaluation to unsupervised homework. The kind you cannot tell if it was created by the student in the first place or by a ghost writer (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/i-ghostwrote-hundreds-of-chinese-students-ivy-league-admissions-essays-897) from organizations like US Essay Writers or Buy Essays US. Such organizations allow a student to commission an essay or dissertation for a fee and pass it as his/her(/zer?, I am not sure...) own.
Of course, that was not enough. New “soft” courses on subjects like “Gender Studies” or “Women Studies” flourished like mushrooms to attract more “soft” students who would not make the cut for a proper course in STEM. We will come later to the political sideshow these courses represented. It will blend nicely with the explanation of how academy enabled itself to clamor for more funding. But let us now do a full stop, leave academia for a moment, and feel the zeitgeist.
- Let us lie, shall we?
Because all this was happening against the background of a long ongoing morphing of media outlets from organizations dedicated to disseminate news and where the anchors and journalists were far less important than the news, to agencies creating opinion, by means of “great communicators” acting as some sort of Priests of Established Truth, preferably financed or sponsored by an interested party. These people had, as they say in Britain, “views”. The kind of view by which you magnify a section of a picture to show a hardhearted South Vietnamese police chief putting a bullet in the brain of a defenseless prisoner, because you do not want to show a mass grave full of the corpses of civilians killed by death squad leader Nguyen Van Lem and his Vietcong comrades during Tet, and lead the reader to reach the logical conclusion: that Major General Nguyen Loan had caught him red-handed and there was no need for a trial under the state of siege circumstances.Fifty years on, same old, same old. A Black Lives Matter demonstrator throws himself on top of the hood of Mizzou Uni's president's reversing car (after the car has been stuck for half an hour by several black demonstrators stopping the university's annual parade) and claims he has been run over. The University's president has to resign after a media fabricated outrage, in which the facts are completely hidden.
US President Trump makes his “Here goes the special relationship” joke during the press conference with British PM May when he is asked a pressing question, and the incident is presented as some sort of diplomatic fracas. At the same time the media “forget” to mention that he answers the question – about the use of torture - admitting that General Mattis sat him down and explained that torturing prisoners is off the table, and that he will be following Gen. Mattis lead although he is not convinced. Most people would consider this one for the books: somebody with strong opinions yielding to a subordinate who thinks differently because he knows that the subordinate knows better although the decision to accept his lead is gut-wrenching.
All this is done by the media because there is a Fundamental Truth which needs putting out because it is more important to serve it than to be true to the facts, which may blur the Truth or even show it for the priestly delusion it is. We should not stray into doing things right when we can do The Right Thing. A few weeks later apparently President Trump trolled MSNBC by having a tax return leaked. They jumped to report about Trump's dirty secret without reading the tax return first and unwittingly busted the myth he hasn't been paying taxes. But they had been going on and on about Trump being a tax evader for months. Because it was the Right Thing, even it the thing was not right.
And this is copied by Academia, who felt they had to “send a message” to take their “rightful place” leading society on moral and political matters instead of doing their job. We should not blame them: priests of all denominations have had a think about work. Namely a knack to avoid it. At the beginning there were fiascoes like “cold fusion”. A beginners mistake: you tell the common people that you are going to deliver on something tangible and then tank on it. By the way, how is that commercial nuclear fusion coming? But they are scientists and can learn from their mistakes. All you need is something that does not allow for confirmation. The ozone layer gap, global warming. That's the ticket. Now we can explain to people that we known secrets they don't, and that they should pay us to save them. That's it, we will get money to do whatever is it that we want to do for our own reasons and in the process we will pretend that we are their saviors. 'If we muddle things for the wider society and future generations a bit, who cares?', they think. After all, they are already muddling things for a lot of people who are spending time and money getting degrees that are going to get them nowhere because they are useless or because there is going to be an excess in the offer of manpower for certain jobs.
Cash Cowing... Shaman Style!
In fact, it is very likely that academia is saving us from the same kind of things ancient shamans saved the Neolithic humans: namely the risk of Spring not following Winter. Give us some human sacrifices and we will make sure Spring comes back. Of course, after years and years it dawned that Spring was always coming back. The solution: if you want to pull the Neolithic caper again, think long term. A year is too short.
- Climate change, Part 1: Stopping climatic improvement?
Regarding the current money machine, climatic change, it is enough to say that paleo-climatological evidence shows that there were other periods of global warming, leading to extreme changes like the transformation of the western Sahara Desert into a green region (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2997337?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents). The reason for that is that higher temperatures mean more evaporation from the seas, and water persisting as vapor or airborne droplets over longer distances. And, as a matter of fact, there are already reports on higher precipitations over the Sahara in recent years. But, most crucially, Claussen and Gayler, the German authors of the work, show that the expansion of photosynthesizing biomass negates heating due to solar radiation: photons impacting on plants have their energy transformed into chemical bonds, not heat. Of course, the Sahara is not a place that people have normally in mind for current affairs, but there is a question. Considering that winds on average travel from West to East, and rains too, why don't we have studies on whether global warming would bring rains into the western southern USA? Because the radiation/biomass climate model above mentioned justifies the development from desert to savanna and shrub of an area of the Sahara which from North to South is equivalent to the distance between Northern Oregon and Southern California and, from West to East, from California to Texas. Where there is a vast desert area. Certainly savanna is not the most magnificent of agricultural lands, but it is viable. If this is true, what is the drama with global warming?
If some German researchers unknown to the general public come with such conclusions on a region nobody really cares there is no risk of anybody making the connection, but of course if one is suspicious about Academia and its perceived honesty, then obviously some questions arise. What is bad about all the water sitting on the poles being freed by melting and becoming part of the precipitation cycle and filling underground water reservoirs and inner seas (the nearly desiccated Aral Sea comes to mind) within the continents and providing on average more rain? What is actually that bad about Greenland becoming suitable for extensive food production? What is doomsday-like in the fact that, in the USA and Canada, Japan, Russia and Northern China, Central Asia and Europe, the heating bills in winter will drop? NADA.
People who ask these questions are shouted down as “regressives”. And there are two good reasons for that. One is simply that these campaigns about environment and climate are aimed at obtaining funding for research, even if the purpose of the research can hardly be understood. Let us take an example of such research: to collect CO2 emitted by fossil fuel power plants, compress it to super critical condition (a hybrid state between gas and liquid), pump it across the country through pipelines to the nearest spent oil or gas well, and inject it in there. Ignoring the fact that re-engineering the power plant so that the gas is not released at atmospheric pressure but compressed instead, pumping it around and injecting and keeping it in the well is all going to cost energy. But, hey, meanwhile research teams across the USA and abroad are getting research funding. So, no rocking the boat, please!
Although there is something odd that is not being said about carbon. Namely that fossil fuel originates from organic carbon, meaning that it is carbon which has been LOST in the past from the organic carbon cycle as CO2 got transformed into cellulose or animal fat and buried. Funnily, if one takes the estimate of 13.000 metric tons of carbon per square kilometer of average forest given by Hans-Werner Sinn in his book The Green Paradox, and calculates the amount of organic carbon required to transform into forest the about 49 million square kilometers of desert on Earth (ice areas excluded), the amount is about 636 gigatons of carbon, or about 78% of the carbon in the atmosphere and THREE times the total anthropogenic generation of carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Of course, because CO2 does not know where to become biomass, preexisting biomass would take the lion's share and the CO2 needed for such expansion of the greenlands would be much, much higher.
Notice that if all this CO2 was transformed into organic carbon, the level of CO2 would be greatly reduced, to half of the pre-industrial era level. This would mean that the CO2 available to plants for their photosynthetic processes would plummet. And the next question is: this drop would go below plant survival levels? Or plants would still survive but grow stunted? Because one thing is the photosynthetic process which only provides the plant with chemical for cellular respiration and survival, but growth and renewal of flowers and production of fruits and seeds requires secondary transformations.
- Climate change, Part 2: The Relentless burial of biomass.
While regular gas and oil wells have developed as some sort of open spaces sandwiched between rock layers, fracking wells are basically porous layers which, when put under pressure, develop craks and release through them oil and gas. These layers are present at depths comparable to those of 'conventional' oil wells, but by their nature they illustrate much better the fact that, as strata become buried under newer strata, organic matter trapped within then cannot be degraded by aerobic digestion, and instead becomes degraded under anaerobic conditions. Because this is the reason there are hydrocarbons there. Organic matter incorporated into these strata has been covered by newer strata. In the process, as they got deeper and deeper, oxygen became unavailable and anaerobic decomposition took place, producing hydrocarbons. With this in mind, we can look again at fossil prints of leaves on anthracite, and see what facts are telling us: organic carbon has been lost to mineralization at a gigantic scale over eons. It means that there was more organic carbon, and therefore more CO2, because more plants needed more CO2. Notice that I do not say a HIGHER concentration of CO2. Because there would be a circulation of CO2 through the biomass, there will be both CO2 held within the plants and in the atmosphere. So the total amount of 'free' carbon dioxide will have to be higher for the concentration in the air to be equivalent to what is regarded nowadays as 'pre-industrial' levels. For all we ignore about the subject, the halt of the expansion of the Holocene Green Sahara a few thousands of years ago, described by Claussen and Gayler, may have been influenced by the already limited availability of water and carbon dioxide.
- Climate change, Part 3: Are we snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?
In other words, we live in a planet were vast amounts of organic carbon have been lost to mineralization after “going under”, and we are really putting it back into the cycle as we burn it back into the atmosphere. The only real problem may be in fact that we could be doing much more to expand green areas. To begin with, we could stop shrinking them. Brazil comes to mind as an offender. We should keep in mind that the estimates from the Australian National University rate tropical rainforest at 25,000 Tm of carbon per square kilometer, and cold temperate dry forest at 28,000. Warm forest (moist) is higher at 50,000, and cold forest (moist) is even higher at 62,500 Tm of carbon by square kilometer. As they are far higher than the rate of 13,000 Tm C/square km given by Sinn, at 13,000 we are talking about a rather sparse forest and large bush scenario, with not a very large amount of organic carbon blended in the soil.
So, current availability of carbon may be well below the needs for a greener and wetter planet, and stopping carbon release may keep the planet on track to loose its life by literally burying it, while releasing CO2 should help melting the polar caps to produce the atmospheric water needed elsewhere to create large green areas. The aforementioned Sahara, North American Desert, and Great Australian Desert come to mind. This combination of biomass and carbon dioxide may be the way to prevent the next Ice Age, which would actually be devastating. Because another Ice Age it would obliterate most of the industrialized world and largely expand tropical deserts, like the Sahara. But the academics into climate science and carbon free technology are not botanists or agronomists. Obviously, they have no interest in rerouting research funds to people who might make better use of them.
- And Now On Something Completely Different: Let us not talk Ozone, shall we?
Before the climate change it had been the ozone gap. For years CFC's (chlorofluorocarbonates) were blamed for the ozone layer gap. Apparently the fact that the gap is on top of the Pole and that solar radiation goes TANGENT to it and not into the planet never suggested that a gap in the ozone layer there is actually meaningless. I suppose there is no point in saying there is no way we can tell if there were ozone gaps in previous eras. Never you mind. Never you mind either that the gap had about half of the average planetary concentration of ozone. Finally academia had its glory day and CFC's were banned. A decade after that, the ozone gap closed. However, the levels of CFC's remaining in the atmosphere are much higher than expected. CFC's are degrading at a quarter of their predicted rate. That rate had been calculated on the basis that CFC's, and they alone, were responsible for the gap. So, if the rate of degradation is not right, then was the ozone gap a consequence of something else? Fact is, atmospheric scientists are willing to admit that the levels of CFC are much higher they should be when asked. What they do NOT say is if, with the present level of CFC's, the ozone gap should still exist according to their models. Because if they answered yes, then we could think that there is a systemic planetary behaviour by which ozone gaps appear and disappear which has nothing to do with CFC.
Back on the day, they also somehow “forgot” to point out to the fact that, next to the gap, there was also either one or several patches of high ozone concentration orbiting around it, something like two times more concentrated in ozone that the planetary average (Figure 1). That is, more like a gap due to depletion, it really looks like a gap caused by misplacement. Dunno, maybe the reason is found in the fact that the Earth moves in a corkscrew movement around the Sun as the star moves in orbit around the galaxy. This involves the Earth surging ahead or behind the Sun as we orbit around the galactic core and the Sun itself surges ahead or falls behind the galactic plane as the galaxy moves in a similar way. The result is that Earth is actually doing some sort of cosmic aerobatic barrel roll with the Sun as reference (Figure 2).
FIGURE 1. Two examples of the ozone distribution around the South Pole. The content in the crimson/yellow regions seem to be more or less enough to compensate the decreased amount in the deep blue region.
Figure 2. A symbolic representation of the Earth as a plane “flying” around the Sun. (Original artwork by the author.)
This would explain why the south pole would not be the real “rear” of the planet as it moves into space and a high concentration of a heavier gas with lots of inertia may be spinning around the gap AS THE EARTH ROTATES AROUND ITS AXIS.
You may say that this is a random statement by a random guy, but remember, this random guy in 2013 predicted that the solar wind had been responsible for the removal the atmosphere of Mars, which was found to be the case later, in 2015, by NASA's MAVEN prove (propelled by solar wind, by the way).(http://astro-chemical-engineering.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-solar-system-could-have-been-set-up.html). And you have never heard about this because the science sections of newspapers in the US, UK and Spain would not be interested in the story of a Spanish scientist, shafted by the British academic establishment through plagiarism and defamation and who, working as a postie, had figured out how scientists in academia actually manage to screw their thinking the wrong way, and then proceeded to reverse engineered some of their nonsense. I will later discuss how there is a potential for academy washouts or even people getting a degree and then walking straight away from academia, to actually use online resources, make findings and then disseminating their content through the internet, to replicate the competition between new media and legacy media.
Some More Politics: The Ideological Fleshing Out of Yet Another Popular Front. (Really, again?)
A phenomenon closely associated to this Messiah complex of Academia and Legacy Media is the obsession of the regressive left with bandwagons. The Popular Fronts across Europe prior to WWII were a mix of factions (anarchists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, socialists) who really had nothing to do with each other. For reasons hard to understand, some of these popular fronts even had some sort of old style liberals (a foretaste of things to come, apparently), whom you would assume democrats, joining in. Lots of “intellectuals” side with these movements. Nowadays, BLM have little to do with gay rights activists or feminists or environmentalists or Islamists. Well, apart from no-platforming the likes of Richard Dawkins. mostly out of a hatred of the white cisgender heterosexual patriarchy and also of freedom of speech, demonstrated by the Berkeley riots against speaker Milo Yannopoulos. Whose sexual preferences are not white or heterosexual, by the way. And this presents an opportunity to Academia. Be it because the academics are politically biased, or because sponsoring some viewpoint lets them borrow a power base. That in turns means acquiring a capacity of image projection and of influence which may result in more funding opportunities and general professional advancement. Either way, by embracing and giving some semblance of backbone to positions viewed as politically correct, Academia presents itself as savior of Humanity and Truth. And facilitates the bandwagon. And it becomes difficult to know which is which: political dogma or opportunism. For societies that allow themselves to go down this slippery slope, the end result anyway is the same: in Spain there was a popular front. It managed to get to the power after a general election, two years after staging a revolution because they did not like having lost the previous election. Then there was a war. Correction. Three wars. Because the Popular Front had two civil wars within itself while fighting the conservatives/nationalists/fascists. Who only fought one. And won. But the country was destroyed in the process. Just saying.
Ideological bias?
On the one side there is a brutal imbalance between left leaning academics and right leaning ones, with the later sometimes not even being represented in certain departments like social sciences as reported by Sean Stevens. (http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/12/14/langbert-quain-klein-faculty-voter-registration-in-economics-history-journalism-law-and-psychology/) This is followed up by the impact of the prevalence of leftist positions in academic research, creating a bias on academic “findings” which need to conform to “reality”. Jonathan Haidt et al., from New York University,
(http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/) suggested that radical leftism leads to three kinds of scientific distortion.
- The “right kind” of results.
The first is the adoption of “progressive” assumptions in the theory and method used for a given research. For example, Haidt et al. cite a particular social science study in which researchers decided that if a manager does not side automatically with a woman who claims sexual harassment, in the absence of any evidence, he is automatically an example of unethical behaviour. This bias was used to “prove” that Social Domination Oriented bosses and Conservative Authoritarian subordinates are the most likely combination to engage and facilitate unethical behaviours in the work place.
- Don't you dare say that!
Another is the cherry picking of subjects and the preemptive veto of conclusions, the declaration of some subjects as “No go” subjects. Which changes with time. I present an example different from Haidt et al. British historian Bettany Hughes produced the documentary “The Spartans” in 2003. At the time, when toxic masculinity and problematic topics were still non-existent in the broader society, she stated that the Spartan army was an homosexual one, and explained the procedure by which Spartan men were programmed to be homosexual during military training and then had to be re-programmed to act as heterosexual men and be able to have children. Now this is a no go topic because would force to acknowledge that homosexuality may be induced on an individual by a variety of means. Current claim is that homosexual sex was NOT part of Spartan army life. And there is a pattern here. Only very briefly, even at the time the seams were bursting with the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church, the question about why girl's abuse was more focused on was touched. Because the answer is uncomfortable: the pedophile priests are mostly homosexual. The logical conclusion (the kind of conclusions SJW and their academic “intersectional allies” are uncomfortable with) is that, with a higher chance of a pedophile being homosexual, allowing homosexuals to have children in adoption may in due time come to be considered a criminal mistake. Yet you already have media outlets like Salon breaking a lance in favor of pedophiles, whom according to some “academic research” are more common that we would believe. (http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/40492857/Hall_and_Hirschman_Quadri.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1489242164&Signature=9bnqRf5s6EmgFE3DIz0wYbuoQJM%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DHall_and_Hirschman_Quadri.pdf). And of course there is the possibility of children being made homosexuals through sexual abuse. That is what makes Milo Yannopoulos downfall very interesting: he explained that he actually enjoyed it, although eventually figured out that he had been robbed the opportunity to make his choices. Which is why in the first place you used to keep underage persons at arms length of sexually defining experiences. And also seems to be the reason why now the SJW's demand that children be explained that they may be queer, gay or transgender: so that their own childhood confusion can be preyed upon. In my own country, Spain, it was common knowledge that rural priests would have sex with the widowers or mature singletons who were appointed to look after their parish house while they were about their business. So much so that my childhood neighbor, who went into priesthood, refused the offer to assign him a woman from the rural community he went to serve, to avoid the speculation of whether he would and when he would do it. At some point, when civil marriage was introduced in Spain, Catholic priests, who were fed up with priestly celibacy and who had asked to be released from their vows, got civilly married and sent copies of their marriage certificates to their bishops with a very clear threat: “If you do not release me from my vows I am going to have sex with my wife and on Sunday I am going to give the Eucharist while in mortal sin. And my community will know. Your call...”. So. No. Catholic priests do not become gay because of celibacy. They quit because of celibacy. They are gay because they were, to begin with.
Changing subject, but on the same topic of 'No go topics”, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has published extensively about the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon region, describing amongst other things their bellicose nature. But in recent years he came under attack because only white people can be aggressive. Apparently the proponents of this curious social theory never heard of Genghis Khan. And it goes on. People in different areas have different skin characteristics, different lung capacities, even different tolerances to the consumption of, for example, milk. All this comes down to genetic variability, as DNA mutations occur all the time and those which are stable and give a better match for the environment are beneficial. Enter James Watson, of Watson and Crick's DNA fame, saying there is no particular reason why human intelligence needs to have evolved to the same level in different geographic areas. Verdict: messy, hideous racist bigot.(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-james-watson-scientist-selling-nobel-prize-medal) . Fast forward to any of those SJW videos where people find they are 10% Samoan and 5% Zulu when they thought their family was from Scotland. Meaning that people from different parts of the world have different genetic characteristics that can be traced down the generations. And therefore do not lead to the same physiological development. But no, saying that people from different parts of the world are likely to have different characteristics is racist.
- Labeling the opposition.
Going back to Haidt et al., last is the tendency (and this is specific to social/political/gender/etc studies) to attribute certain traits of character to the ideological right. For example, that the right is more intolerant and dogmatic. Haidt et al. use the following example. In a certain study two groups, one with an Right-wing Authoritarian leanings and another with an opposite outlook. They are asked about whether they favor of compulsory prayer, and further what is their view of it being compulsory Christian or compulsory Muslim. The authoritarian group favors compulsory prayer, but is more reluctant in the case of the Muslim one. The anti-authoritarian group opposes compulsory prayer uniformly. But, when they are asked about voluntary, the authoritarians have the same outlook. They are OK, but less OK if it is a Muslim prayer. However, the anti-authoritarian group, which this time is favorable to VOLUNTARY prayer, shows preference for Muslim prayer. Which means that there is an underlying anti-Christian bias in the anti-authoritarian sample. Thus Haidt et al show that the left is bias-free and non-dogmatic is not true.
And it goes on and on. Academia pretending that although the evidence is that human beings have hunted forever we are really “herbivores” (that is, grass eaters against the evidence we cannot digest grass). Never mind that statistics show vegans of the first generation, already in their old age, dying on average 3 years younger than people with a regular diet. Heck, vegetarian researchers (that is, the ones who eat dairy) are actually puzzled they simply match “omnivores” in life expectancy and try to figure out what dietary deficits they are incurring that cancel out their lower tendency to cardiovascular problems. And let us not forget that first generation vegans are NOT affected by a vegan gestation. What will happen if second generation vegans show that a vegan gestation has left sequels? Will hateful “carnivores” fork the bill for the academics who claimed vegan-ism was all well and sundry? Because if those academics are still around they should answer for their words and deeds. Because even if SOME fanatics with non-scientific beliefs and causes infiltrate academia, the majority should have called them out on their nonsense.
Or Opportunism? The neo-Neolithic Brave New Religion.
Unless, of course, there is more in siding with such movements than opportunities for professional advancement through becoming sycophants to some fanatics. And then we smoothly slide into these brave new degrees on “gender studies”, “women studies” and the like. You not only save the world, but you also confirm the bias of any inter sectional allies that come to the doorstep of your institution. Because they are right, and you show them they are. What you are all about, is to demonstrate that you are the keeper of the knowledge of what amounts to the justification of a range of irrational fears, beliefs and the all-powerful desire to be an insider and become able to dictate the destiny of the outsiders. So you pander to people who cannot remain believers of a traditional religion because that is so intellectually last century for them, but sadly are NOT rational enough to be atheists. They need a religion of sorts, because that is what any system granting moral high ground is, but they do not want the moral codex with the ability to articulate a society, because they want to destroy what is there. They are actually nihilists, but they want to believe that, by adhering to the core of their beliefs, everything will miraculously be right. So anarcho-communism is right, Islamism is right, woman's rights is right, homosexuality is right, pedophilia is right, Halal butchery is right, animal rightism is right, transgenderism is right... Problem is, ALL of them at the same time?
And therein lies yet another problem. While some people are happy to point out the inconsistencies of what now are traditional religious, nobody seems to want to point out to the fact that previous religions were in fact absolutely nonsensical. Gods who can be cheated on, like the complete Greek pantheon? Gods who need you to disembowel some specimens of your species to appease some apparently all-powerful creator of the Universe so that he may abstain from destroying it, like the Aztecs? Who came with the idiotic idea that Baal needed children roasted alive inside a bronze statue? And that is actually the origin of all ancient religions: the putting together of assemblies of Gods or guiding spirits or whatever, brought together by different tribes after they unify.
Enter the era of the Intellectual Ronin.
But Academia and the Legacy Media have shown students so hard that all this nonsense is right that they have exceeded their expectations, only in the wrong (for them) direction: they have created generation-Z, the upcoming generation, complete with students who are Trump supporters and on the verge of being the most conservative generation in a long time. And this has happened because, following cultural Marxists rituals, Academia and the Legacy media have summoned into being a radical opposition at their nonsense. Just a mistake, like cold fusion. And they are facing now the consequence of having tried to sell utter nonsense in order to become what they were not meant to be in the first place. Media are already showing this. And panicking. Let us consider the attack on Youtuber PewDiePie, accused of antisemitism by WSJ by taking out of context some of his materials, originally intended precisely to point out how taking out of context things can be highly manipulative. With PewDiePie having 12 million views a day against the WSJ mere 240,000, what the WSJ really wanted was for him to be part of a piece about him “defending” himself of Nazism accusations on the WSJ online content so that they could borrow views from him. Because the Legacy Media, apart from alienating a significant proportion of the public, has fallen into click and bait, news on the cheap. Of course, in the era of Internet, with vast information resources available, if the capabilities of a corporate journalist are similar to those of a Youtuber, and his intellectual integrity is lower because of his own character or restrictions placed on his work, he is in a lose-lose situation. Either he does his job as expected and fails, or he fails because he did not do his job as expected and was fired. The clearest example of this corruption in the legacy media is how people who actually critically followed YouTube contents knew that Donald Trump could well win, unless the kind of voter fraud denounced by Project Veritas got the best of him. Even the recent hearing in which Trev Gowdy grilled FBI Director Comey is being presented as the momentous event signaling the imminent impeachment of President Trump.
This is on the political and media side, but there is the intriguing question of the scientific, technological and natural philosophical side. Working technology, in spite of what people in academia pretend, is mostly the product of work done by industry. Science, in itself, is mostly a rationalization of the observed fact. The fact would be the same whatever its explanation, and as long as technology is based on fact, technology will work. It is perfectly possible to obtain correct predictions from a model of the solar system based on the geocentric principle. For example, Schirleus model from as late of 1650. Therefore, a model predictive compliance does not mean it is true.
So, as academic corruption develops, and if industry sponsored training facilities bloom in order to self-supply with people who actually are trained to do their job, people who have spent decades in industry doing real work and have reached retired age will be able to sit back and reflect on what looks like it is true and what is not. And then will be able to put forward their ideas to their peers, who will be people like them, not members of the Academia. And use the internet both for dissemination and for collection of data, from sources like the Russian site sci-hub.cc. Because we should not forget that, if academia hoards the information and makes it unavailable to us (who can pay $40 for each of a 30-40 papers batch required to get a foundation of a specific subject, even if you are basically conversant in the discipline, and that only to have an opinion?) exactly how can we be sure they are telling us the truth?
Se, we will end in an information environment in which there will be Academia and Legacy Media, existing in a non-sustainable form because of their own sins. Academia because of cluttering itself with administrators and business management transferring from elsewhere the idea that economic results absolutely overrule function, and Legacy Media by cutting down the resources and therefore becoming unable to provide insightful and honest information. And, opposite to them, masterless individuals or small groups of individuals sharing their findings, both in terms of evidence and conclusions, pertaining to current or historical facts of any kind: from how to make sushi to WWII armaments and tactics to political satire to archeology. Crowfunding and followers donations would support those amongst them who are too controversial to have commercial sponsorships, at least until the present dark time for free speech is over, and for the others in fact the sky will be the limit. Which will bring about the end the principality of Established Academia and the Legacy Media as a consequence of the activities they engaged in, not to become irrelevant, but to become too relevant.
Problem is, will the lights go out in the West, in the process?
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