Could it be? A drug that reverses cognitive decline?

The New Neo Posted on by

Could this be true?:

Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice, according to a new study by UC San Francisco scientists. The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome, prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer, and even enhance cognition in healthy animals.

In the new study, published Dec. 1, 2020, in the open-access journal eLife, researchers showed rapid restoration of youthful cognitive abilities in aged mice, accompanied by a rejuvenation of brain and immune cells that could help explain improvements in brain function.

“ISRIB’s extremely rapid effects show for the first time that a significant component of age-related cognitive losses may be caused by a kind of reversible physiological “blockage” rather than more permanent degradation,” said Susanna Rosi, PhD, Lewis and Ruth Cozen Chair II and professor in the departments of Neurological Surgery and of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science.

“The data suggest that the aged brain has not permanently lost essential cognitive capacities, as was commonly assumed, but rather that these cognitive resources are still there but have been somehow blocked, trapped by a vicious cycle of cellular stress,” added Peter Walter, PhD, a professor in the UCSF Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Our work with ISRIB demonstrates a way to break that cycle and restore cognitive abilities that had become walled off over time.”

However, my caveat is that a great many drugs that seem to work in mice do not work in humans.

Instapundit linked to a story about this recent research, and in the comments there I saw the following quip: “Trump should recommend this therapy to ensure that nobody tries it out on Biden.”

RIP Walter Williams

The New Neo Posted on by

Walter Williams has died at the age of 83. He was an economist of the classical liberal and libertarian persuasion. Like Thomas Sowell – with whose work I am far more familiar – Williams was a black man possessing the special courage it takes to be black and on the right.

Here is Williams speaking with Mark Levin on liberty (2018):

Some interesting facts about Williams’ early days:

He grew up in Philadelphia. The family initially lived in West Philadelphia, moving to North Philadelphia and the Richard Allen housing projects when Williams was ten years old. His neighbors included a young Bill Cosby. Williams knew many of the individuals that Cosby speaks of from his childhood, including Weird Harold and Fat Albert.

Following graduation from Benjamin Franklin High School, William went to California to live with his father and attend one semester at Los Angeles City College. He later returned to Philadelphia and drove taxi for Yellow Cab Company. In 1959, he was drafted into the military and served as a Private in the United States Army. While stationed in the South, he “waged a one man battle against Jim Crow from inside the army”. He challenged the racial order with provocative statements to his fellow soldiers. This resulted in an overseeing officer filing a court-martial proceeding against Williams. Williams argued his own case and was found not guilty…

Speaking of his early college days, Williams said: “I was more than anything a radical. I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence. But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence.” While at UCLA, Williams came into contact with economists such as Armen Alchian, James M. Buchanan, and Axel Leijonhufvud who challenged his assumptions.

While Williams was at UCLA, Thomas Sowell arrived on campus in 1969 as a visiting professor. Although he never took a class from Dr. Sowell, the two met and began a friendship that lasted for decades.

Discovering that Sowell and Williams were friends is no surprise.

RIP, Walter Williams.

Evidence and more evidence: the Arizona hearing, Bill Barr, and overturning an election

The New Neo Posted on by

Republican state representatives held a hearing to air election fraud allegations yesterday, and here are some highlights.

For example:

There are YouTube videos of the whole thing, which seems to have lasted ten-plus hours. I don’t have the stamina, but here it is:

You can find shorter excerpts among these videos.

Of course, if an Arizona hearing falls in the forest and no one but the right is there to hear it…

Today AG Barr said this:

Barr said U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but they’ve uncovered no evidence that would change the outcome of the election. Barr was headed to the White House later for a previously scheduled meeting.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the AP.

Note how lawyerly the wording is.
–“To date” = up to this point
–“attorneys and…agents have been working to follow up” = working, but how many agents, how much are they working, for how long, and on what? Just to follow up on information they’ve received? No effort whatsoever to obtain information themselves?
–“on a scale that could have effected a different outcome…” So, is that the standard now? If the challengers don’t have access to the information that they would need in order to prove the scale, how can they ever prove it? So if there’s an election and fraud is committed on a vast scale, and yet it’s covered up by computer programs that can’t be audited, envelopes that are tossed or not allowed to be examined, required observers who are nevertheless thrown out, unexplained counting stoppages in the wee hours of the morning that aren’t stoppages at all but that involve huge vote dumps, all in Democrat-controlled cities and changing the election from a win for the Republican to a win for the Democrat – that’s not enough to raise a high enough suspicion that something must happen?

Apparently not.

And in fact that doesn’t surprise me. Barr and all the rest do not want to overturn an election without something on the order of, not just a smoking gun, but a radioactive smoking nuclear blast. That kind of evidence can never exist in a situation like this where the alleged perps were careful to cover up or dispose of the evidence, and the proof positive must somehow be discovered and proven in record time.

If there really was no evidence, it wouldn’t be such a problem. Only a fringe group would believe the election had been stolen by fraud. But that’s not the case. The evidence is actually quite strong, just not strong enough to meet what amounts to an impossible standard of proof when combined with the speed that’s necessary because of election deadlines. If the election was indeed stolen, the thieves were counting on exactly this state of affairs.

Here’s the response from the president’s lawyers:

And here’s a distinction that Kemberlee Kaye of Legal Insurrection points out:

Barr’s statement appears limited to criminal prosecution: “He said people were confusing the use of the federal criminal justice system with allegations that should be made in civil lawsuits. He said such a remedy for those complaints would be a top-down audit conducted by state or local officials, not the U.S. Justice Department.”

That’s a legal distinction that’s probably lost on most people.

[ADDENDUM: And in a related matter – the emergency application for writ of injunction in one of the Pennsylvania election cases – here’s a piece by none other than commenter “Cornhead,” AKA attorney David Begley.]

A year and a half ago, it was the left that was (or pretended to be) concerned about election fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

A year and a half ago there was a pretty good 2-part series on the subject of possible US voting machine fraud that appeared in the leftist British Guardian, of all places. But that was back before Biden’s nomination and before COVID, during the time when the press was still trying to peddle “Trump won because of Russian intervention,” and when Stacey Abrams was declaring herself the true governor of Georgia.

Part I: America’s new voting machines bring new fears of election tampering.”

Part II: ‘They think they are above the law‘: the firms that own America’s voting system.

You may note that in that second piece, it says this:

Now lawmakers, election officials and national security experts are joining in on the clamor after Russian agents probed voting systems in all 50 states, and successfully breached the voter registration systems of Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

That’s the reason the Guardian is covering it – the allegations about 2016 came from the left. We also have this:

[House Democrat Raskin learned that there are next to no federal laws that govern or regulate private sector companies involved in US election infrastructure, he hurriedly introduced a bill that would prevent states from contracting with firms owned or influenced by non-US citizens. He plans to reintroduce an updated version of the bill in this legislative session, he told the Guardian. While it has a decent chance of passing the Democratic-controlled House, it would require Republican support in the Senate to become law.

That is not likely. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has been antagonistic to election reform bills, as has the whole Republican party. The party narrative is that Democrats are trying to use the federal government to take over state and local elections; the political angle is that recognizing vulnerabilities or flaws in the election system could raise doubts about the legitimacy of the party’s – and Donald Trump’s – victory in 2016.

Let me translate. As far as I can tell, this bill only dealt with the prohibition of states’ contracting with election machine firms owned (or “influenced”) by foreign entities, rather than with more major issues with election machines that have come to the fore in 2020. In addition, no matter what the Guardian was predicting would happen to the bill, it died in the Democrat-controlled House. So the Senate never voted on it.

As far as McConnell’s and the GOP’s antagonism to what the Guardian calls “election reform bills,” their opposition comes because Democrats are indeed “trying to use the federal government to take over state and local elections.” The newly-Democrat-controlled House did pass – as its very first bill – the “For the People Act” in March of 2019, portions of which had exactly that purpose:

One feature of the proposed legislation is that convicted felons could not be denied the right to vote unless currently in prison…

Another part of the proposed legislation instructs the Judicial Conference to establish rules of ethics binding on the Supreme Court…

The proposed legislation also calls for statehood for the District of Columbia…

On January 29, 2019, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement criticizing the Act as a “one-sided power grab” by the Democratic Party and assuring that “It may pass the House, but not the Senate”. He called the bill the “Democrat Politician Protection Act” in the statement. He further criticized the bill for giving the federal government more power over elections, saying it would “[give] Washington D.C. politicians even more control over who gets to come here [Congress] in the first place.”

More about the bill:

The legislation includes a national expansion of early voting, redistricting reform, automatic voter registration and stricter disclosure rules for a bevy of political activities. One particular ethics provision would mandate presidential and vice presidential candidates to publicly disclose 10 years of tax returns — a measure taken after Trump has refused to do so despite decades of precedent.

In other words, a Democrat wish list rather than any sort of reform involving the prevention of possible voting machine fraud.

Norway bans hate speech at home

The New Neo Posted on by

What could possibly go wrong [emphasis added]?:

Gay men and lesbians have been protected from hate speech under Norway’s laws since 1981, with those found guilty facing up to one year in prison or a fine for private comments or up to three years in jail for public comments.

However, that was as far as the law went, with bisexual and trans people left out in the cold.

Now, the 1981 ban has been updated to prevent hate speech based on “sexual orientation”, which also protects bisexual and pansexual people, as well as those with other queer identities, Reuters has reported.

Unlike Europe, the US has a more robust tradition of protection for free speech and for individual liberty in general. For example, we have not yet criminalized “hate speech.” But if the left has its way, we will. You can see how advanced the process is already in the universities of the US, and the left is determined to Gramscian-march us right into the glorious anti-hate realms championed in progressive Europe. Note that this law in Norway involves private speech, as well, which seems to have been a recent change.

Not only does the US not have such “hate speech” laws, but it is one of the only countries in the world that lacks them. If you look at that list, you’ll see that the US is nearly alone its protection of this particular liberty.

How do most countries define “hate speech”? In a way that can be stretched almost indefinitely, if need be. Norway is fairly typical:

Norway prohibits hate speech, and defines it as publicly making statements that threaten or show contempt towards someone or that incite hatred, persecution or contempt for someone due to their skin colour, ethnic origin, homosexual orientation, religion or philosophy of life.

You can see how elastic that definition is, especially since in recent years offensiveness has increasingly become defined by the reaction of the complainant rather than by any objective standard. However, interestingly enough, so far the hate speech laws have not been enforced very much in Norway despite having been on the books for a long time:

…[T]he Norwegian Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, and there has been an ongoing public and judicial debate over where the right balance between the ban against hate speech and the right to free speech lies. Norwegian courts have been restrictive in the use of the hate speech law and only a few persons have been sentenced for violating the law since its implementation in 1970. A public Free Speech committee (1996–1999) recommended to abolish the hate speech law but the Norwegian Parliament instead voted to slightly strengthen it.

These laws are far more dangerous than the speech they want to ban. Like so many of today’s tyrannies, they masquerade as attempts to be nice.

How hard did the GOP try to stop the voting rule changes?

The New Neo Posted on by

I see it everywhere now on the right, in articles, blogs, and comments – the urge to turn on the GOP in anger at its failure to fight effectively.

I feel it myself to a certain degree. The situation is extremely frustrating, and the rage so satisfying and familiar.

And yet I’ve seen this impulse before, and I’m fairly certain that it’s one of the things that does most to warm the cockles of leftist hearts.

Commenter “Aggie” states the case against the GOP here:

The legal battles to safeguard against absentee voter fraud should have begun last summer to set the stage properly before the counting started. I bet the seasoned pols all knew this; but it looks like they decided to stay quiet rather than suggest support preemptively. The gambit now, during election contests, is simply to fold arms, fade back, and watch.

Now Trump’s team is jumping through their ass fighting battles that should be handled by the bench. Important battles, lots of them – Signature Match arguments in all the key states, for instance – but the “A” Team should be reserving their focus for the Supreme Court confrontations that are coming.

The Republican Party hasn’t changed, the party of self-interested good losers with skin-deep principles who love the lifestyle. They can see that Trump is ready to miss a payment – and they want to get their mitts on that great ‘new car’ smell in the modern Republican Party. If they play their cards right, they can get it well under market value – they’ll just pick up the payments. They’ll market it as the New GOP, hitting the same Trump donor lists and demographic groups looking to score big by mouthing the words of the message without having to mention that dreaded name. They may be in for a surprise.

My first response, however, is this: are you sure they didn’t try to fight prior to the election? After all, most of the changes – the loosening of the rules – were squeezed in during the last few months with the argument that it was necessary to protect people from COVID. However, the usual absentee ballot system was already available for those who really felt they could not brave the polls, and others certainly could have gone with proper distancing and other safeguards. Some states did it that way and there was no problem. In the states that did make changes, the changes were quite last-minute and done under cover of the COVID scare, but there certainly was opposition by the GOP. There were several cases involving PA, for example, that went all the way to SCOTUS, which decided to let the lower (Democrat) PA court’s ruling stand.

There most definitely were challenges in other states as well. See this article from August about various challenges in which the RNC was involved. This was a GOP challenge to mail-in voting expansion in Illinois. This was a challenge in Houston. There was also one in California, one in Nevada, another in North Carolina, one in Michigan, and even in Montana. That’s by no means an exhaustive list, either.

I don’t know the disposition of all the cases, but I also recall reading about some were won by the GOP and of course there were some that they lost (the latter especially in Pennsylvania). For an idea of the volume of cases brought by the GOP, see this article published on September 30. An excerpt:

They’ve been fighting in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania over the cutoff date for counting mailed ballots, and in North Carolina over witness requirements. Ohio is grappling with drop boxes for ballots as Texas faces a court challenge over extra days of early voting…

The lawsuits are a likely precursor for what will come afterward. Republicans say they have retained outside law firms, along with thousands of volunteer lawyers at the ready. Democrats have announced a legal war room of heavyweights, including a pair of former solicitors general.

The race is already regarded as the most litigated in American history, due in large part to the massive expansion of mail and absentee voting. Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department elections official, has tallied some 260 lawsuits arising from the coronavirus. The Republication National Committee says it’s involved in more than 40 lawsuits, and a website operated by a chief Democrat lawyer lists active cases worth watching in about 15 states.

Democrats are focusing their efforts on multiple core areas — securing free postage for mail ballots, reforming signature-match laws, allowing ballot collection by third-parties like community organizations and ensuring that ballots postmarked by Election Day can count. Republicans warn that those same requests open the door to voter fraud and confusion and are countering efforts to relax rules on how voters cast ballots this November.

“We’re trying to prevent chaos in the process,” RNC chief counsel Justin Riemer said in an interview. “Nothing creates more chaos than rewriting a bunch of rules at the last minute.”…

…[M]ost of the closely watched cases are in states perceived as up-for-grabs in 2020 and probably crucial to the race.

That includes Ohio, where a coalition of voting groups and Democrats have sued to force an expansion of ballot drop boxes from more than just one per county. Separately on Monday, a federal judge rejected changes to the state’s signature-matching requirement for ballots and ballot applications, handing a win to the state’s Republican election chief who has been engulfed with litigation this election season.

In Arizona, a judge’s ruling that voters who forget to sign their early ballots have up to five days after the election to fix the problem is now on appeal before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a six-day extension for counting absentee ballots in Wisconsin as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. The ruling gave Democrats in the state at least a temporary victory in a case that could nonetheless by appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In neighboring Michigan, the GOP is suing to try to overturn a decision that lets the state count absentee ballots up to 14 days after the election.

In battleground North Carolina, where voters are already struggling with rules requiring witness signatures on absentee ballots, the RNC and Trump’s campaign committee have sued over new election guidance that will permit ballots with incomplete witness information to be fixed without the voter having to fill out a new blank ballot.

In Iowa, the Trump campaign and Republican groups have won a series of sweeping legal victories in their attempts to limit absentee voting, with judges throwing out tens of thousands of absentee ballot applications in three counties. This week, another judge upheld a new Republican-backed law that will make it harder for counties to process absentee ballot applications.

Pennsylvania has been a particular hive of activity.

It’s been hard to keep up with all the news, both pre- and post-election. But just because you didn’t hear about something, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There definitely was some fighting in the courts, although it was nowhere near as successful as we would have hoped.

As I’ve already indicated, I have my own quarrels with the Republican “establishment” and certainly with the NeverTrumpers. The Georgia Secretary of State, Raffensperger, seems a particularly good example of a worse-than-useless GOP official who agreed to changes that enhanced opportunities for fraud. See this:

Back in March, Georgia election officials agreed to a settlement in federal court with the Georgia Democratic Party, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had sued the state over its rules for absentee voting….

Previously, the signature on the absentee ballot had to match the signature on eNet, a computer database that maintains Georgia’s voter registration and absentee ballot information. If the signature on the ballot didn’t match, it was thrown out.

In a cleverly worded section of the settlement, Georgia election officials agreed to a subtle but profound change. Instead of having to match the signature on file with eNet, the absentee ballot signature only had to match the signature on the absentee ballot application. The key word in the settlement was “any.” That is, an absentee ballot can only be rejected if it doesn’t match “any” of the signatures on file—either in eNet or the signature on the absentee ballot application.

The situation is different in each state, but Georgia seems to have been an especially egregious example of Republican caving – perhaps because of the Stacey Abrams factor. Georgia remains an enormously key state because of the pending runoffs there, and if nothing changes to tighten up the election rules it doesn’t bode well for the results.

[NOTE: And speaking of Georgia, Dominion’s server just crashed during the latest recount. But recounts there are somewhat futile, anyway, because there are many other problems such as the signature match vulnerability described in the quote above, which cannot be corrected by a recount.]

Biden and the decision to give illegals citizenship: it’s the whole ball of wax

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden announced during the campaign that he had plans to send a bill to Congress that would give “11 million” illegal aliens (he didn’t use that term) citizenship. He also made the pledge during the final debate, so it’s not as though his plans were a secret.

We can quibble over how many people are here illegally – estimates are that it’s actually much more than 11 million, but no one knows. But you can’t say Joe didn’t warn us. I wonder, though, if quizzed, how many Biden voters were even aware that he had made the promise – although perhaps, if they were, they’d support it. It’s hard to get a bead on how popular such a proposal is, because polls not only are suspect, but the way the question is asked varies greatly. Sometimes it’s just a “path to citizenship” or a chance at citizenship (vague, and especially vague as to how many would qualify and how long it would take) and sometimes it’s a “legal status” that’s asked about rather than citizenship itself.

At any rate, it’s one of those things that sounds “nice” to many good-hearted people. But in the past when it’s come to the legislature such a bill has never gotten enough votes in Congress. I make no predictions about a Biden-sponsored bill, in part because we don’t even know what party will dominate the Senate.

I can say a few things, though. The first is that, even if the legislature doesn’t pass such a bill, Biden and/or his administration will do everything they can to turn back the tide of all of Trump’s immigration orders. They may even attempt to use executive orders to provide some sort of “legal status” or even a “path to citizenship” for people here illegally, if they can. In other words, they’ll do whatever the public and the courts let them do.

That was always the weakness of executive orders, whether made by a Democrat or Republican president – they can be reversed by a successor in a vast pendulum swing.

What would be the economic consequences of such a move? There is no dearth of articles from the left saying it would be a great thing for all and articles from the right saying it most certainly would not be. I’m not going to hash that out in this post except to say that I see no reason to trust any forecasts on it, although I suspect the effect would be negative – and, coupled with much more relaxed rules on enforcing border security, would also be a motivation for a vast increase in future illegal immigration. In other words: après Biden le deluge.

The political effect is easier to predict, I think, and it is the real reason that Democrats are so in favor of the change: if given citizenship, these voters would swell the ranks of the Democratic Party enormously and probably would ensure one-party rule indefinitely (and that’s even without any fraud).

If the GOP retains the Senate I’m going to assume this won’t occur through a legislative path – for now. But are there some RINOs who would vote for it? Perhaps. In the past, of course, the filibuster/cloture rules made it impossible for a bill like that to pass without a large majority, but if in charge the Democrats will be jettisoning that rule, pronto. They mean business, and the business they have in mind is the business that benefits them and keeps them in power as long as possible, without any more challenges from the deplorable American public. Giving illegal alien residents the vote is just one means to that end.

S’awright

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember Señor Wences from the Ed Sullivan Show. I loved him, and would watch the show every Sunday night, always hoping he’d be on:

Wences (real name: Wenceslao Moreno) had a pretty amazing attitude to go with his amazing skills, a continuing example of “Life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” And he lived to be 103:

At age 15, Moreno became a bullfighter, but he had to give up the sport after a serious injury. Doctors advised him to exercise his injured arm, so he learned to juggle and joined a circus act of some friends…

The inspiration for Johnny came from his school days when the teacher punished him for imitating classmates and answering “present” when they were absent. His punishment was to clean the inkwells and he smeared some of the ink on his hand, then clenched his fist to create the face…

Another popular Señor Wences character was the gruff-voiced Pedro, a disembodied head in a box. Wences was forced to suddenly invent the character when his regular, full-sized dummy was destroyed during a 1936 train accident en route to Chicago. Pedro would either “speak” from within the closed box, or speak with moving lips – simply growling, “s’awright” (“it’s all right”) – when the performer opened the box’s front panel with his free hand.

I loved this guy, too, and kept waiting for his appearances, but he didn’t seem to come on Ed Sullivan quite as often. I had forgotten his name, but he was easy enough to find on YouTube, that great aid to memory and nostalgia:

And then, watching that dance reminds me of something else. I saw this performed by the Moiseyev folk dance company as a child in 1958 when the Russian company first came to the US during the Khrushchev “thaw.” They’ve been performing the dance ever since – same costumes, same shtick, same everything. I think the dancing musicians at the end are fake-playing their instruments, but I’m not sure: :

Some of the dances the Moiseyev did – Partisans, Gopak – were the most thrilling things I’d ever seen on stage till then, and they remain that way in memory.

Here’s Gopak, a dance of Ukrainian origin. Imagine being a young child who’s never been exposed to a particle of Russian dancing before, and then seeing this in person. The music, the costumes, the energy, the athleticism, the sheer theatricality of it all, transported me. And I very badly wanted a pair of red boots like these, and flowers and flowing ribbons in my hair.

When I saw that performance in 1958, I noticed that during the ovations there were a number of grown men standing and screaming and clapping, with tears pouring down their faces. Even then, I sensed that they were people who many years earlier had left areas that were now part of the USSR. For them, the performance was a harbinger of hope that things would get better:

And why should the world protect you if you feel “unsafe” because of speech?

The New Neo Posted on by

Since when did the world exist to guarantee your feeling of safety?

When I was a child – which now begins to seem like it was further in the past than it actually was, so different has the world become in the interim – we used to respond to taunts this way: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

It was a chant of some antiquity, and it had a purpose:

The rhyme is used as a defense against name-calling and verbal bullying, intended to increase resiliency, avoid physical retaliation and to remain calm and good-living.

Resiliency seems like a quaint notion as well. The idea was that the world could often be a tough place and that growing up involved a requirement to meet it with inner strength. That involved the ability to shake off relatively minor hurts and offenses, knowing that the world did not exist to meet your emotional needs. A related principle – unstated in the rhyme but nevertheless implied – is that there is a value in allowing people to speak their minds.

Those days are gone. Even in the workplace, which previously was not expected to be the warmest and fuzziest of environments, we often hear of young people (mainly women, but not exclusively women) clamoring for the elimination of any speech that makes them feel “unsafe.” And the definition of what constitutes such speech is left to the offended person, not some objective standard. These days many workplaces seem to have even jettisoned the very concept of an objective standard, in the best postmodern “critical thinking” manner, in which the subjective “narrative” has replaced nearly everything else.

Note the prevalence of scare quotes in the above paragraph. That’s because jargon – and what Theodore Dalrymple has described here as cant – has replaced meaningful speech.

What began in academia and in particular in postmodern philosophy has moved out into the world with a vengeance and a mission: to make the world safe for its young acolytes. Businesses and other entities are eager to fall in line, encouraged by Twitter mobs and Chinese money and fearful of accusations of racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and whatever other names that they believe can hurt them.

I have blamed academia, philosophy, and feminism, but in some ways therapy is also to blame, although it’s a misunderstanding and misapplication of the notion that the client’s feelings must always be treated with respect. I don’t know how it goes now with therapists, or what they’re taught these days, but thirty years ago they were still taught that although they needed to show an understanding of and empathy for the client’s feelings, as therapists they also ultimately needed to guide the client according to some reality principle that did not depend on the client’s feelings – that is, to steer clients towards seeing that their perceptions of the world may not be reflective of reality, and that it might be best to find a more productive way of looking at things.

An incident in the early 90s when I was in grad school brought the current trends to my attention – the hegemony of feelings was already in full sway in the university. A professor was relieved of his teaching duties and told to attend sensitivity training classes for saying something utterly innocuous to which a few students had objected because it made them uncomfortable. There was a discussion of this issue in a class of mine, where I was one of just a few grad students in a sea of about a hundred undergrads.

I was also about twice as old as most of the people in the room, although that still made me very young by the standards I hold today. But it did make me a member of a different generation than my fellow students, and what seemed utterly reasonable and right to them seemed horrific to me, so horrific that I stood to speak before the group.

I gave a short but impassioned talk on how the final decision about what is offensive speech should not be the judgment of each listener. That way lay madness and an almost infinite variety of standards that infringed on speech itself. I said that the proper locus of judgment about this was not in the individual’s feelings, but in an objective standard about what constitutes an offensive remark that might justify some sort of official action.

I had expected some response to what I was saying, some discussion of the merits of the points I had raised. Instead, I was ignored. It was as though I hadn’t spoken, as though I was expressing some relic of thinking that was so passé it didn’t require engagement of any kind.

I knew that I had encountered something that was already dangerous. But back then I hadn’t the tools to understand its historical or philosophical or political underpinnings, or that it would in due time take over the outside world.

But that has come to pass. As Dalrymple writes towards the end of his piece (I suggest you read the whole thing):

The judge was enunciating what might be called the eggshell theory of the human psyche. If someone takes offense against something someone says, that is sufficient to be a justiciable harm. Gone is the “reasonable man” of traditional English jurisprudence, in assessing whether behavior is threatening or so insulting as to constitute mitigation for a loss of temper: one is threatened, bullied, insulted, offended if one says that one is, and that is enough to be actionable at law. Feelings become legislators.

That’s exactly what happened in the university I attended thirty years ago. And that’s also what alarmed me in the Larry Summers incident of 2005. In one of the earliest posts I ever wrote on this blog, I described what as happening this way:

Whatever happened to the Enlightenment? If Galileo were to return at this point, he might be in grave danger again–at least, if he were to suggest that the earth didn’t revolve around women.

That post of mine was entitled “Harvard in peril.” Now it’s the entire US that’s in peril, and the hour is late and getting later.

[NOTE: See also this post by David Foster on related trends, plus this Benjamin Boyce video on recent attempts to cancel Jordan Peterson’s newest book.]

On being told what to think

The New Neo Posted on by

Whatever happened to “show, don’t tell”? Now social media, Wiki, and Google searches not only purport to give us information but deign to tell us what to think about it.

Social media blocks stories it doesn’t like or warns us about them. Wiki starts out quite a few articles (as described here) by calling something a right-wing conspiracy (“without evidence” is their next-favorite phrase, but it doesn’t mean what they think it means – or what they want you to think it means). Google often thwarts searchers if they have the temerity to search for something anti-left or pro-right, and often tries to correct the searchers’ error by first giving them articles that say the opposite before finally getting down to brass tacks.

They feel this is successful in shaping people’s opinions, and I assume it is or they wouldn’t do it. Much of the time, the goal is to cause people to not even read a story. The Hunter Biden laptop story – which quite a few poll respondents who voted for Biden said would have changed their vote had they known about it – is an excellent example. With the internet and TV news united in this propaganda effort to tell you what to think about a story that hurts the left and to block information about it to make it harder for you to form your own opinion, what’s the right to do?

The right still has talk shows, but the giant of the genre Rush Limbaugh is apparently on his way out because of a terminal cancer diagnosis, and radio seems a small force anyway these days compared to all the groups now arrayed against it.

And yet I wonder whether people like being force-fed this way. Americans have changed a lot since I was young, but isn’t there still a kind of rebellious spirit, especially among the youth? It may be difficult to voice it these days because the consequences can be serious, but as leftism becomes the new prescribed orthodoxy, wouldn’t young people start resenting it? I’ve heard that something of the sort may be happening among Generation Z, although I know nothing about that group.

Have Americans really become such obedient little sheep? I do see a lot of groupthink among my friends, and not all that much intellectual curiosity about the other side even though they know a person willing to talk about it: me. But I wonder in particular about kids growing up today. Are they really like Strasbourg geese, to be successfully force-fed to make a pâté that in this case is poisonous?