- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
Some gems from the article.
ā¦ We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn. There was James, who studied computer science. Then there was Cameron, who also studied computer science. David and Peter studied computer science, while Luke and Albert studied computer science. As for Mike and Jason, the former studied computer science, whereas the latter studied computer science. Ethan was not unlike Max, in that both studied computer science. Some people studied business, too.
The studentsā demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room.
(And if you need to leave to use the bathroom, youāll get to pass by a massive oil painting of George W. Bush making the Hand of Benediction in front of the wreckage of 9/11, beside a Madonna-figure whose halo glows, I shit you not, with the Coca Cola logo.)
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of whatās to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity weāre going to experience at UATX. Weāre going to grapple with big issues. Weāre going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. Weāre going, he says, to do something called āStreet Epistemology.ā
What is Street Epistemology? Heāll demonstrate. Itās one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. āI donāt have a life,ā he says. āI talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.ā But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.
āYou gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. Iām telling you.ā Peter did jiu-jitsu. Itād changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. āI could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. Itās a superpower.ā I thought this over.
Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Petersonās forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and ādiscouraging her from seeking mental health care,ā per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to āthe atrocities of the 20th century.ā And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Policeāsour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to āfree and open inquiry.ā
I havenāt checked but I wouldnāt be surprised if this came from the period when he was taking so many substances it fucked his health
Itās from Maps of Meaning, per the caption, so no this is from his original theory of everything.
Nonetheless, to be perfectly honest, I honestly canāt complain that he put something weird like that in the book as such. What, after all, is actually wrong with it, assuming a certain amount of charity about context relevance? That itās gross to recount weird sexually charged dreams you had about your grandmother?
For a psychologist in the tradition of Jung, and therefore to a great extent Freud, such material might actually be quite useful! Amongst the worst things therapy culture - and perhaps the whole ideology of post-Freud psychology/iatry/therapy - does is to rehabilitate prudishness about what it is and is not acceptable to talk about in our psychic lives, when liberation from those oppressive norms is precisely the best achievement of those aspects of Freud which remain uncontroversial (not to mention those which are only controversial for bad reasons).
You know the whole thing: āwe donāt talk about that wanting to have sex with your mother stuffā, well why on Earth not? Amongst the most obvious things in the world is that people are incredibly weird and complex. Why cave in to propriety and ignore it?
Lots of people have experiences like this, and therefore by definition itās important to discuss them - non-pathologically - if you want to understand (and improve) peopleās psychic life.
Originally I had a longer and more nuanced gut response that was along the lines of: āok people have weird dreams and whatever, sure, but why would you publish this instead of just talking about it in therapy?ā which you have answered more or less
re source - fair, I havenāt really looked into it (because I prefer to limit how much brainpoison from these dipshits I allow into my own head)
the spirit of my comment was in the lines of āpeople have been known to have surreal visions/thoughts/ideas amped up by compoundsā, albeit itās on me to not have worded that out well (and to be clear here, this isnāt said in judgement of taking compounds, either). and with aphantasia I guess my reference of perception is a bit slanted, too. as to the rest of your post, broadly I agree with that stance. a lot of things in this world would be better if people werenāt fucking shamed for talking about 'em
Yeah, I kind of used you to grandstand about a broader point that I hoped other people who had the āyuckā reaction would see, and I still havenāt figured out how to tag people (i.e. the person above) on this janky site
Depends what client you use, but itās roughly markdown-ish link format with the bit in () being the username (incl. domain)