Thursday, October 5, 2017

The Unbearable Whiteness of Freedom of Speech.

Michael Lumish

Professor of Psychology Jordan Peterson from the University of Toronto is one of the most significant political voices in the West today.

Within the last few years hard-left reactionary students - and professors of a cultural Marxist bent - dragged him into their war against the Unbearable Whiteness of Freedom of Speech.

Camille Paglia is a well-known "rogue feminist" and a controversial intellectual who has been teaching at Philadelphia's University of the Arts for decades. She is most famous for Sexual Personae which is a fairly amazing work of art history "from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson" that was audacious enough in the early 1990s to actually celebrate masculine contributions to Western culture.

Both of these scholars are brave individuals pushing against the current trends of university promoted anti-liberalism, identity politics, en loco parentis, and rising progressive-left racism.

They absolutely deserve a listen.

9 comments:

  1. It's long and she wears me out but Ive got through 3/4 of it in 2 sessions. Fantastic so far. They put my disjointed thoughts into focus.

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    1. It's very interesting material and they are both on the cutting edge. Peterson, of course, is a scientist, while Paglia is a humanist.

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    2. I love her contempt for Foucault. "As a scholar I have total contempt for Foucault. He was a liar and he was a fraud." And, of course, she is right.

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  2. I'm not all the way through it yet. I must go to bed. But it is a fascinating conversation.

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  3. Peterson and Paglia are speaking on a very high level.

    I have tremendous respect for both.

    I read Sexual Personae when it came out but, in truth, prefer Peterson because he is more inclined toward statistics and the social sciences whereas Paglia is... ya know... an English major!

    :O)

    I think that they're both brilliant, but Peterson's sourcing of the current progressive-left political moment to Derrida and the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism rings true to my ear, but I need to read more.

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    1. I found Peterson's analogy about the use of language as camouflage and the story about the zebras becoming identifiable to predators when the scientists marked them as individuals, i.e., that the herd had been each individual zebra's camouflage protecting the individual from predators.
      I enjoyed hearing each of them coming to the subject matter from their different perspectives.

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    2. Yeah, he was talking about cultural Marxism as it informed the academy since the New Left of the 1960s.

      Paglia and Peterson both think that the current academic left is not left at all, but a bunch of mewing, terrified sheep.

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  4. A REAL left would never countenance anti-free speech. A Stalinist left would/did/does.

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    1. A real liberal would never do so.

      That's what I would argue, Doodad.

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