The Elites (Part 1)

Plus more Woke professoring at Bucknell

First installment of what promises to be a fun ongoing conversation with Brandon Van Dyck (his YouTube channel is here) on the title topic and assorted others, including a little bit on the loneliness of the dying in contemporary America.

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Immediately after Professor Jason “Watch Out! Fascism is Sneaking Up Behind You!” Stanley’s visit, here’s still more cutting edge Wokeness from the Bucknell Philosophy Department.

The take home here would seem to be the following: “We ought to be restricting research based on a number of unique and underacknowledged harms…[which] are poorly understood and lack clear definitions.”

I have some guesses as to what these “harms” look like.

The Woke playbook on this is fairly clear: Anything a researcher might propose that might conceivably provide evidence against Woke understandings of human nature, or that might be manipulated and used—even in ways that clearly distort the research intentions and findings—by any political agents who are not fully Woke, or that might conceivably be seen by even a single member of some aggrieved victim population as “offensive” (and so, by Woke rules, it will therefore inevitably cause that individual grave and debilitating psychological harm if it comes into existence) must be stopped on ethical grounds.

It is a totalitarian ethics at work here, pure and simple. Only things that are fully and resoundingly consonant with our values can be permitted. The slightest possibility that what you are doing might run contrary to those values is enough to justify us stopping you.

I note too that, according to the speaker’s webpage, the speaker is the founder of a “queer phenomenology reading group.” I have btw read a fair bit of phenomenology—Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Alfred Schutz, among some others—over the years, but I can only imagine what kind of astounding things “queer phenomenology” might have to offer us in the way of expanding our knowledge of ourselves and the world.

And here the speaker is (also from her webpage) suggesting that, even though we have the technical ability now to do it, maybe we shouldn’t eliminate mosquito species that kill more than half a million people annually because we’re not 100% absolutely positively certain of all of the potential ecological implications, and though people earlier in the video with ecological expertise she doesn’t have say we can be pretty certain it won’t cause any significant other effects.

And of note, which is not mentioned in the video by any of the talking heads: the overwhelming majority of the malaria deaths from mosquito bites annually are children in Africa.

This seems to be the direction of a lot of what goes under the aegis of “bioethics” at present. Scientific research is harmful in all sorts of understudied ways, and that means we should probably prevent a good deal of it from ever being done in the first place. And we might also want to avoid using existing science to do anything that causes any changes in the ecosystem, at whatever level, and however trivial, and even if doing so would e.g., save the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor African kids every year because there’s some risk involved to the broader ecosystem in the method for doing that.

The abstraction “nature,” you see, is typically far more valuable in the Woke perspective than the lives of any number of merely empirically existing human beings. Abstract, noble (i.e., Woke) values and ideas are always more important than actually existing things. So, many of these folks profess to love “Humanity” while they can find only a handful of existing humans they can tolerate (mostly because so many of these messy creatures fail to adhere to their value system, which makes them fallen sinners to be shunned and condemned).

As I’ve said before, if they wanted to be more honest, the yard signs would read: “Hate has no home here…except of course if you are not fully on board with what we believe, in which case we will hate you with a ferocity beyond your wildest imagination.”

I can imagine, though, her stance on this mosquito question might raise at least some discussion among the Woke authorities, given the identities of the majority of the victims of the mosquitoes. If it were heterosexual white men in the West whose lives would be saved by exterminating mosquitoes, the unanimous Woke position would be on the side of the insects. But for the Wokeist, what is more valuable: African children or mosquitoes? Astoundingly, incomprehensibly, it is seen as a real question in this group. The most committed environmentalist and antinatalist Woke would almost certainly still vote against the humans.

Let enough people like this into positions of influence in higher education and let’s see how things go. Let’s just see.

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Hi all,

I’ve been at this project now for around eight months. Hardly seems possible, but I just checked the calendar and I believe that is the right math.

So, this is a note to you: Thank you.

I’m tremendously flattered by your interest in what I have to say about life, art, politics, death and I’m grateful that you read my ramblings. Every writer desires to be read (Lovecraft’s letter accompanying his submission to an editor notwithstanding) and thus owes a debt that cannot really be repaid to readers, however much the writer sometimes pretends not to recognize this (it’s part of the persona, you see…).

So that’s something I want to be sure to say and say again: THANK YOU.

Now, the other reason for this little note.

I finally got around to doing the technical stuff necessary to provide a paid subscription option.

What does a paid option mean?

It means it’s an option. At present, everything on this account remains open to all subscribers, paid or free. Even if I move at some currently unforeseen point to separating material here into paid and unpaid categories, I still plan to always make the great bulk of it available when it’s produced without cost to everyone interested in seeing it. I’m tremendously appreciative that you read this site and want to do everything I can to ensure you continue to be interested in doing so.

I am hopeful though, and I make so bold as to ask, that if you have a few extra dollars rattling around, you’ll consider kicking some of them my way to help make it more feasible for me to spend more time on this project.

Inevitably, and despite my deepest feelings about writing, I think at least a bit about possible material returns when I am allocating time to writing projects. I have two kids who eat and are in constant need of new clothes and a house in which things are constantly breaking down. Add to that the fact that, to my great regret, I do not have infinite time to dedicate to writing, and it emerges necessarily that sometimes the possibility of writing things for pay trumps writing things here. This is so even though I much prefer writing here precisely because it allows me more freedom to engage with the topics I find most interesting.

If I can generate some paid subscriptions, then, I can spend more time doing this writing, the writing I most care about, and the writing that I hope you find valuable. If I generate enough, I may even finally find enough time and energy to get around to dipping my toes into Podcast World, which is professionally speaking probably the last thing I should do, given my tendency to say things that get me into trouble, but YOLO, as I’ve heard they say.

I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription and, whatever your decision on that, I look forward to writing more for you as All Things Rhapsodical Phase II gets underway. Should you decide to “go paid,” you need only click the button below and it should lead you in the right direction.

Cheers, and thanks again! And very special thanks to those who have already switched to a paid subscription!

ATR