New Discourses
New Discourses
Pursuing the light of objective truth in subjective darkness.
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Apr 23, 2021 • 1h 25min
Communism Doesn't Know How
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 31
At the heart of communist and communistic thought is faith in a kind of historical trajectory toward utopia that's driven by social alchemy. There are many reasons why this fails in practice, but the simplest thing to say is that communism fails because communism doesn't know how communism will succeed. The fundamental belief driving communists is that once enough people become true believers that the communist utopia lies on the other side of certain social changes, a perfect society will manifest. How? Because they will. The details aren't meant to be known or told; they're meant to be figured out. This is in exact alignment with the historicism in Marx's dialectical materialism: once we get capitalism out of the way, we'll enter a worker-managed system (socialism) that can start figuring out how to make the state redundant to its purposes, at which point a stateless improvement of the same will emerge and the communist utopia (and end of History) will emerge. On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay gives an example of how a contemporary police abolitionist activist has made almost exactly this same argument perfectly explicitly and walks you through how you can spot it for what it is. Join Lindsay for one of his more important discussions.
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Apr 19, 2021 • 31min
The Woke Goal: Everything Serves Theory
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 30
What is the end-game of the Woke ideology? It's a hard question to answer, mostly because it's hard to tell where it will stop, but a proximate answer to that question is easy and needs to be understood. The immediate goal of the Woke agenda is to turn everything into a Woke organ. That's it. This is more alarming than it may sound, however. You may be Catholic or Protestant, a scientist or a doctor, a rockclimber or a musician, but if the Woke agenda proceeds far enough, you will in time find yourself being a Woke person professing Wokeness in Catholic or Protestant language, or through science and medicine, or in rockclimbing and music. That is, the Woke agenda is to flatten all the variety out of life and make every aspect of life do one thing and one thing only: serve Theory. This means that Wokeness is a totalizing ideology and will lead to totalitarian outcomes unless we reject it and put a stop to its relentless takeover of our society and every aspect of our lives. Join James Lindsay on this latest episode of the New Discourses Podcast to dive more deeply into this alarming truth about Wokeness.
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Apr 13, 2021 • 1h 22min
A Values-Based Approach to Leaving Wokeness Behind
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 29
If we are fortunate enough to leave Wokeness and Critical Theory behind us, we need a map. We need to know what a post-Woke world would look like and, more importantly, which values will get us there. In a recent essay (https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/values-post-woke-world/), James Lindsay presented four values he thinks are core to the establishment of a post-Woke world, which can repel Wokeness anywhere they are adopted. These are truth, beauty, liberty (thus responsibility), and merit. Join James in this episode of the New Discourses podcast, wherein he discusses why these are the right values as well as why we should hold the narrow way against other competitors in the space that will not produce results as good, including both the Very Smart "respectability" (blue pill) approach and the relatively hopeless "post-liberal" or "neoreactionary" approach (black pill, mostly).
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Apr 9, 2021 • 1h 41min
The Dawn of Medical Lysenkoism
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 28
The agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko should be a household name throughout the world in roughly the same way that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong are or should be. That is, Lysenko shouldn't be known for his successes, which are none of his legacy, but for his catastrophic failure. He was the agriculturalist of the Soviet Union, first under Stalin, and his ideological biology (Lysenkoism) led directly to the deaths of tens of millions, first in the Soviet Union and then in Maoist China. Lysenkoism implied famine and mass death, and disputing Lysenkoism, despite its catastrophe, meant a trip to the gulag or a bullet in your head.
We should be aware of Lysenko because it is crucially important to understand how the ideological perversion of science, especially the biological sciences, can lead to catastrophes. In fact, if we were more aware of Trofim Lysenko and his legacy of death, we might be more cognizant of the threat we're currently stumbling our way into under the banners of "antiracist medicine" and "health equity." These are the dawn of Medical Lysenkoism, which is a tragedy in the making, potentially on a grand scale, and this is already well underway.
The threat of Medical Lysenkoism is rapidly growing around us already, and we have to take it seriously and demand it be put to a halt. In this case, Critical Race Theory and its perverse doctrines of "antiracism" and "equity" are being leveraged to transform healthcare away from a science- and patient-oriented endeavor to an activist opportunity to "level the playing field." Further, under the banner of "health equity" and Covid-19, our society's concerning lurch toward medical dictatorship (governed by this new "equitable" Medical Lysenkoism) is becoming the standard throughout our medical schools, hospitals, and research universities. This is a preventable catastrophe in the making.
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he reads through a recent essay (https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-race/bram-wispelwey-michelle-morse-antiracist-agenda-medicine) published in Boston Review outlining an advance in the "health equity" agenda wherein even racially preferential care is described as already being implemented and reparations are demanded at a major Boston-area teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard University.
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Apr 1, 2021 • 1h 2min
The First Worthy Criticism of Cynical Theories
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 27
There is a fair amount of criticism of my recent book Cynical Theories (https://amzn.to/3sEJF5X) (written with Helen Pluckrose) out there now, mostly from philosophers who aren't up to the task. It is both fair and correct to say that the book isn't perfect. Given their inability to criticize the book adequately, however, I decided to take matters into my own hands and am discussing the issue at length in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast. Join me to hear what I think of these philosophers' criticisms (not much!) and what a proper criticism of the work would look like (and why the book "falls short" in this way).
-James Lindsay
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Mar 26, 2021 • 1h 23min
There Is No Good Part of Hitler's Mein Kampf
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 26
As most New Discourses fans will know, back in October 2018, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose burst onto the scene with a scandalous expose of Critical Social Justice scholarship within academia. This effort to show the world what was going on in the humanities and (to lesser extent) social sciences research literature was billed the "Grievance Studies Affair" (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/01/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/), and the trio told their story in detail when the Wall Street Journal ended up breaking the story. The expose involved (https://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/project-summary-and-fact-sheet.pdf) their having written 20 academic papers in about 10 months and seeing 7 of those accepted, 4 published, and 1 (about dog sex) having received recognition for excellence in scholarship. A further 7 papers were still under consideration or revision, and it has been assessed that at least 4 of these would probably also have been accepted (and eventually published).
Among these papers, one very controversial example rewrote a chapter of Adolf Hitler's infamous book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and was accepted for publication by the feminist social work journal Affilia (title: "Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism," available in full here, https://drive.google.com/file/d/18DoO44m2G5tvJcQaMdau6d8CSrdKDRBf/view). This paper has predictably garnered a great deal of attention and has been the center of much controversy, including recently in an article by the progressive Israeli magazine Haaretz, where Swedish "Hitler expert" Mikael Nilsson recently brought (https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-hitler-hoax-academic-wokeness-culture-war-1.9629759) the issue back up (dated March 21, 2021) two and a half years later. His objective was to discredit the entire Grievance Studies Affair by showing the infamous "Feminist Mein Kampf" paper to have been a fraud (and darling of "right-wing" nonsense). He even makes the argument that the paper rewrites the least bad part of Mein Kampf, which is easily revealed to be horrifically misguided and believable only by removing the relevant context of the chapter.
On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay, who helped to write the paper and perpetrate the Grievance Studies Affair, talks about the project and the creation of this particular paper at unprecedented length and in unprecedented detail, revealing Nilssen not to know what he's talking about. If you have ever wondered about the backstory of the creation of the "Feminist Mein Kampf" paper really was, including why its authors did it, you won't want to miss this long-form discussion and rare response to yet another underinformed critic of Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose's work.
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Mar 15, 2021 • 1h 47min
The End of Civil Rights in Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins"
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 25
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay continues his abridged reading of Kimberlé Crenshaw's famous (or infamous) paper, "Mapping the Margins," which appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. While not the birthplace of intersectionality, this paper is the first full-throated appeal for its application, not just in the world but also in the movements from which it was born: radical feminism and black liberationism.
In part 1 of this series, James read the introduction to the paper, wherein he claims the Woke One Ring was forged to form one model of systemic oppression to rule them all: intersectionality, by which all the radical and civil rights movements were ensnared and brought under the dominion of postmodern neo-Marxist thought. Here, in part 2, James reads through the conclusion of "Mapping the Margins" and illustrates exactly how Crenshaw's ideas will achieve the complete subordination and redirection of all leftist, left-wing, and civil-rights thought.
This episode of the New Discourses podcast is the second part of a two-part series reading an abridged version of Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins." You can find Part 1 here: https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/forging-woke-one-ring-kimberle-crenshaws-mapping-margins/
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Mar 10, 2021 • 1h 12min
Forging the Woke One Ring: Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins"
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 24
"Mapping the Margins," by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is an academic law paper that changed the world (abridged pdf here). It was published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991 and makes the case for putting intersectionality into all cultural analysis. It is also more or less unambiguously the birthplace of Wokeness, as in this paper, Crenshaw indicates explicitly that, to her, intersectionality is "a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory," that is, as Jordan Peterson has it, postmodern neo-Marxism. Crenshaw is no minor figure, by the way. She is the creator of intersectionality as well as the co-creator (with her mentor Derrick Bell) and namer of Critical Race Theory. This paper is, in all likelihood, by far her most influential.
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay reads through the introduction to "Mapping the Margins" and offers his commentary on the paper and its role as the birthplace (though not gestation) of the Woke movement and, as he and Helen Pluckrose named it in Cynical Theories, applied postmodernism. It is in this paper that intersectionality became the Woke One Ring, which would bring all of the other aspects of identity politics and Critical Theory under the dominion of one mode of analysis from which they cannot deviate. Join him as he reads through the text of the paper and explains what Crenshaw means, where she is coming from, and where she intends for this idea to go.
This episode of the New Discourses podcast is the first part of a two-part series reading an abridged version of Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins."
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Mar 3, 2021 • 1h 42min
Aufheben der Dr. Seuss
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 23
Aufheben is a German word that, in Critical Theory, means to "abolish" or to "negate" in the way that Critical Theorists do. It's a somewhat complicated term in that it means both to abolish and to keep or to keep safe, and the Critical Theory use taps into the so-called dialectical process to attempt to use aufheben to tear apart and, as the Marxists translated it, "sublate" whatever cultural artifact they are targeting onto a "higher" level of understanding, namely the one that empowers Critical Theorists and induces misery in everyone else. This process was widely pushed by the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School under a doctrine of Aufheben der Kultur, abolishment of culture, and it continues in the Woke movement today.
One of the latest big targets of Aufheben der Kultur is Dr. Seuss and his wide body of popular children's literature. Why? Because of its success. Seuss becomes a cultural anchor point for hundreds of millions of children and adults, and by tainting Seuss, his legacy, and your own memories of him with accusations of racism and "harm," they can abolish that shared cultural anchor and make more room to advance their own agenda, in which every text is "decolonized" and geared to indoctrinate you and your children into Critical Theory, especially Critical Race Theory. Join James Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast to dig into the Critical Dr Seuss academic literature to see where this Aufheben der Dr Seuss comes from and how it works.
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Feb 15, 2021 • 29min
NO! Critical Race Theory Does NOT Continue the Civil Rights Movement
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 22
Critical Race Theorists like to claim that they have inherited and continue the noble legacy and justice work of the Civil Rights Movement, but this is an abject lie. In this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I take about half an hour to make the case definitively that, while they are content to portray this illusion, it is a grotesque distortion of reality, using their own words. By exploring the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (https://amzn.to/3rzYANN), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Delgado is something of a founder of Critical Race Theory) and the paper "Mapping the Margins" (https://sites.oxy.edu/ron/csp19/readings/mappingmargins-crenshawwilliams.pdf) by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is regarded as one of the true founders of CRT and the founder of intersectionality, the case against the Woke claim on the Civil Rights Movement is easily and definitively made. Join me to hear the details and the argument! -James
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