If you google the name of beleaguered academic Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania, you will find much outraged condemnation of her racism and white supremacy.
Another embarrassment for universities in the U.S. The principle of freedom of speech is only relevant when people disagree with its content. Also, hurt feelings do not constitute grounds for dismissal, but rather an opportunity for discourse and conflict resolution. What better learning opportunity for any college? Instead, they condemn.
gracias for bringing this example forward. it seems so crazy that i suspect that we are near when this anti-speech anti-thinking anti-life baloney will begin to be recognised as the junk food of a poisoned mind and that it begins to fall even more quickly than it is to the ground under the instability of its own stupidity.
"... and it begins fall to the ground under the instability of its own stupidity."
It will fall to the ground like a plane flown by a diversity-hire pilot and guided by diversity-hire air-traffic controllers, while in the final seconds, passengers who complain about diversity hiring will be harangued for creating an unsafe cabin space by diverse air hostxs. That's how fast it will fall.
I signed and shared the petition. Professor Wax is eloquent in her articulation of the need for and the merits of a counternarrative to woke DEI. Unfortunately, she is seriously out of fashion, as can be seen from the relative numbers who have signed the petitions: 86000 against her, 110 for her.
Yes, it's quite a statement, isn't it? 86,000 believe with no evidence that she said non-white students were "litter" and thus must be fired. But even her own colleagues, in the main, will not stand by her.
I read the essay at heterodox academy you linked. The author was keen to show his unwoke credentials yet signed a letter criticising Wax, along with about 30 other UPenn academics. Is this letter writing usual conduct for academics?
And his argument about Chinese migrating to Africa is weak: belt and road projects are most likely the main reason for Chinese moving to Africa, not political, cultural and legal infrastructure.
Gregory, I too read the essay (quickly) and meant to go back, as I found the author's argument somewhat difficult to credit. I would like to see those immigration numbers in context and with full discussion of migrant preferences and options.
I was an academic for 23 years, never signed a letter denouncing a colleague. Academic debate is supposed to be conducted in the pages of academic journals or newspaper op/ed pages, not through mobbing campaigns.
Thanks Janice. I wonder if that academic was spinelessly distancing himself as much as possible from Dr Wax while trying to make it look like academic integrity was behind his actions.
Yes, that cries out for an explanation; I am often puzzled that so few actually see how bizarre this behaviour is. Has anyone ever done a study of the few who stand up to wokeness, seeking to see what makes them so unique?
It doesn't matter. The facts she has outlined are well understood in academia. Group average differences in IQ and quite distinct behavioural profiles in different ethnic groups have been studied in some considerable detail. Nobody expects Korean immigrants to be mass murderers, but nor do they expect them to win the 100m sprint at the Olympics. How do we know this? Lol
The academics are beginning to realize this will not remain verboten forever. It is openly discussed in China and Russia, for instance. Their religion is falling, and the backlash will be epic.
We'll probably never get over the combination of the Civil Rights movement with woke socialism. The pipe dream of the DEI demons is that if you just take impoverished underachievers and install them in middle class housing, study programs and jobs that they can't really handle, and throw money at them they'll somehow absorb middle class life skills through immersion and osmosis. God only knows how long it's going to take for people to see that it doesn't work.
The best students I ever taught were unquestionably African: Nowhere near a majority of Black Americans are worthless ghetto dwellers who have no ambition, but the African American middle class is far outshone by immigrants from Africa, and the Caribbean. None of those people want to have anything to do with ghetto scum.
Thank you very much, Janice. I am very grateful to the University of Philadelphia, where Morton Benson worked and produced his iconic Serbo-Croatian-English and English-Serbo-Croatian dictionaries. It is a shame that it is now engaged in persecuting Amy Wax. I signed the petition. I must say though, that I also enjoyed Jon Haidt's column attacking her views.
Here it is, Unfortunate. I particularly liked his beginning, where he pointed out that Russia was the third most important country for taking in foreigners and Saudi Arabia the fourth largest. No year was specified and I am sure it changes from one year to the next, but it shows that having an autocratic ruler doesn't necessarily mean a country is not a magnet for foreign workers. I know that Tajikistan, in particular, has been a big source of mostly seasonal workers for Russia. The economic sanctions directed against Russia have hit Tajiks hard, although they have no part in the war against Ukraine. Here is the link:
Sorry, Unfortunate, my admiration for Haidt’s comment was largely based on his attack on Wax’s comment that ““Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” She said this as a follow-up to how wonderful Anglo-Protestant values are, and no-one would argue that Russians share Anglo-Protestant values. Not all of Russia’s rulers have been white (Lenin had very obvious Asiatic features) and some, like Boris Yeltsin have been born in Asia. So it was quite something to me that the third country in the world for taking foreigners in was Russia. The controversy about the impact of the pill doesn’t interest me so much. If Janice wrote something on the subject I would certainly read it but I wouldn’t go out of my way to study it.
There is a British guy, Konstantin Kisin, who seems to be all over the web these days. He is Jewish, Russian or Ukrainian as the mood strikes him. He claims he has a dark complexion, so maybe he qualifies as black-adjacent. He is always pounding on the drum that his family moved from the Soviet Union to the UK and this was the natural only path of flow for people. Edward Snowden moved from the US to Russia and he is now a Russian citizen but he doesn’t prate endlessly that this is the only direction in which immigrants between the two countries might flow. So-called intellectual analysts like Kisin should really grow up.
I don’t know if you are right about Haidt. I can’t get into his brain and I rather doubt that you can either. It might make a great film though, “Being Jon Haidt”, like a sequel to “Being John Malkovich.” Malkovich is of Croatian descent on his father’s side by the way, although I don’t think he speaks Serbo-Croatian. If you want to push Haidt’s motivations further, more power to you, but I have other fish to fry.
Rather of a blunt question, but are you of Yugoslav (any of the ex countries) ancestry? Or have you studied the Serbo-Croatian language? I am curious because of your several references to the language and ethnicity. My parents are Macedonians (the former Yugoslav republic), and there is a long lasting friendship and cultural affinity between us and the Serbs (we were the only Orthodox Christians in all of Yugoslavia, and the only natural users of the Cyrillic alphabet). As someone who has been born and raised in Canada, it is always interesting to hear academic references to the lesser known South Slav nations. It brings one closer to (ethnically speaking) home. I am also pleased to hear you describe Slavic values as Anglo-Protestant. Although we may not have ever achieved anything to the likes of Western Europe, we have still a rich and bucolic culture of our own. In particular, Byzantine architecture in the form of ancient Orthodox churches are haunting and sublime, especially as the age worn frescoes cover the structure from roof to floor.
Very nice to hear from you again, Katie. My roots are mostly British and they are Protestant. My wife Sonja and my stepson Miroslav are from Kraljevo, Serbia. I am trying to learn Serbian, but am lazy and not that bright, so I am not making great progress. One of the textbooks I use, “Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian” is from University of Wisconsin Press and they also publish a couple of books by Christina Kramer on Macedonian. Unfortunately, it is too late for me to learn Macedonian. I might think about learning it if I were younger. The number of Serbs and Macedonians is small, and they were under Turkish occupation for centuries, but, as you say, they still have done beautiful things. I love the Orthodox churches and cathedrals too. Since February 2022 I am a member of the Serbian Orthodox Church myself, and hope for salvation. I paid my respects to the Mulroney family when Brian Mulroney’s body was lying in state in Ottawa on Wednesday. Mila and Caroline Mulroney were both very friendly when I tried to speak Serbian to them and they spoke it back to me. I asked the youngest child, Nicholas, if he spoke Serbian too, but he told me he didn’t and I should try the other side of the line (where Mila and Caroline were). Have you visited Macedonia, Katie? I would like to see it sometime myself. I remember the evocative descriptions of Macedonia in Rebecca West’s book on her trip to prewar Yugoslavia.
Thank you for your kind words, Unfortunate. I would be interested on your elaborating on the connections between Russian culture and Protestant culture in Wax's view, if you have the time. If not, I'll try to think about that a little myself.
The zealous emotional reactions to straw men is getting really tiresome. It's so....LOW IQ, ironically. I read somewhere that men, in general, seek truth. Women seek moral superiority. We're now being oppressed by this church lady idiocy everywhere we turn. Perhaps the hardest to stomach are men who fall prey to this hysterical rejection of truth.
It isn't just that they can't take the average intelligence assertion with equanimity. It's that the very mention that there are differing levels of intelligence sends them into spasms of moral outrage. Yet, shouldn't it be obvious to everyone that people shipped to North America from a continent that for the most part was primitive, with people living in a manner that Europeans had left behind centuries before, would say something about what those people value -- and what they don't? Shouldn't we all have observed that perhaps you can't speed-up the process of adapting from a primitive culture to one nurtured by people who sat around indoors half the year, writing philosophy? There are the languages too -- quite indicative of the intellect: fruits are not individually named. They are "tree fruit" or "bush fruit." Note the lack of specificity and word salad that is spoken (NOT ALL!!!!!) I've recognized this pattern -- just as I've recognized, from working with Asian students, that they excel at taking direction, but struggle to come up with an individual opinion, draw inferences, or make connections (despite the assertion that their IQ's are higher than whites.) Again, look at the culture. Whites kept moving. Asians retained the same or very similar culture for centuries until about the 19th century when the world opened up due to whites running around all over the place. Again, this difference should be OBVIOUS. Add to this the neanderthal DNA in Europeans, Denisovan in Asians, and neither in Africans. There is DNA difference that likely caused certain effects.
If we don't listen to people like Amy Wax, we won't be able to lift these people up. Burying the problem does not solve it. And worse -- standards are being lowered to accommodate them. This will bring disastrous effects on our society. It's also "racist."
In the past month, two church ladies fled clutching pearls. One who was misrepresenting the conservative perspective on climate change. Didn't I know it's been settled -- there's a consensus! since he was in third grade (in the 70s). It was nearly impossible to contain my bemused smirk, especially since I was citing a book by a former member of the Obama Administration ("Unsettled," by Stephen Koonin).
The next fainting church lady fled over the "Bloodbath" straw man, and my pointing out that the Times piece on it was irresponsible, that Bari Wiess left the Times due to anti-semitism, and that yes, there IS a problem with flooding "sanctuary cities" with criminals from Venezuela. It didn't seem to matter that my partner is Venezuelan, and that I was citing him when I said people drive armored cars and can't go out without a bodyguard due to the criminals running the show. And speaking of our THREATENED DEMOCRACY, I don't recall on any ballot the following: Defunding police, Men in women's bathrooms, Sanctuary cities, paying off the student loans of people making over 100 grand a year.
Reality will stop it. Those differences you mentioned manifest in everything. Poor impulse control, for example, means more rapes, murders and dysfunction. But it also means you cannot dig wells, maintain basic infrastructure or invent banking systems. The trait is inherited and cannot be socialized out.
We already see what mixing cultures does. It kills you. So the solution is to stop the mixing, which is what will happen.
The environment likely had much to do with how “developed” or not things were. Certainly not mono-causal. Regardless, Europeans arrived in ships with all manner of technological advancement to find people living in huts. Egypt is a different animal— rather like the Northern versus southern US in the 19th century.
I'm going to play Devil's advocate for Wax's detractors. The idea that some groups are better than others has been used to justify terrible treatment of whole groups. Case in point: the idea that women are less violent has resulted in female abusers getting lenient treatment and male victims being discounted. So, yeah, her statements have some... troubling subtext that shouldn't be dismissed too easily. Though I still support her right to free speech - because her ideas should be exposed and challenged based on their merit (or lack thereof).
Talking about differences between racial groups is very difficult and even dangerous, I agree.
I don't think Wax has ever said that one group is better, though she undoubtedly has said that the cultural habits and ways of life developed in the west are better than others and should be maintained.
As I understand her, she believes that differences in IQ and other differences largely account, along with culture, for the disparities in outcome seen in America today; that racism--now the main explanation--is NOT the issue. I would need to do a great deal more research than I have done either to defend or refute that contention, but I believe that experts in the fields of genetics, biology, brain science, and social policy should scrupulously explore all the issues, not push one politically correct perspective.
It's true that claims about differences can underlie horrendous social policies, while it's also true that a fearless scientific exploration (for example, into the fact that women tend to think differently than men and have different areas of competency and interest) can lead to deeper understanding. All should, ideally, be conducted in an atmosphere of civility and generosity--ideals long lost from most universities today, unfortunately.
The claim has been made that Wax herself has not been civil, though from what I can discern, it is mainly her detractors who react with animus. As far as I can tell, she is someone who is trying to say the truth as fearlessly and directly as possible. None of this means that she mightn't be wrong about some things. But I think she's a lot smarter, and more principled, than many of the people calling for her to be fired.
I can agree with all of that. And I'm thankful to you, Janice, for cultivating an intellectual space where people can have these kinds of conversations.
What's dangerous is false beliefs, even false egalitarian beliefs, e. g., our ideology says all groups are inherently equal, but group X is disproportionately successful. They must have stolen their success using witchcraft/shadowy conspiring/racial privilege. Thus group X must be punished.
Let me play Devil's advocate to your point. She didn't say some groups are better. She said groups are different. Which is true. In some circumstances those differences, when ignored, cause mayhem, dysfunction and violence. Things we are told the government will protect us from.
More to the point her detractors want her cancelled because they think she referred to immigrants as litter, by which I assume they translate as trash or equivalent. This is rhetorical manipulation, something academia should be immune from.
Admittedly, I was wrong to say that she said any group was better than the other. And it's true that differences do exist between groups on average. However, humans have used group differences - real or imagined - to justify horrific abuses and that hasn't changed. So, I think it's a valid concern to keep in mind when talking about these things. But I would ever say that Wax should be cancelled for merely bringing up the topic of group differences.
I think we overstate the threat of these things. Facts are facts. People who want to believe horrible things about other groups and to act on them will find all the info they need anyway. If anything facts may derail their fantasies.
So I think academia needs to be fearless. Deal with the data and the observations and worry less about hate groups.
I agree with most of that except for one part: that facts "may derail their fantasies." There's evidence that facts don't necessarily change minds - otherwise none of us would be having debates about group differences.
The point still stands. We have let the fearful dominate for decades. It has failed us. It is time for some extremely uncomfortable truths about the world.
That's an interesting point about overstating the fear.
I remember Ann Coulter, ages ago (more than a decade) saying that we learned the wrong thing from the Holocaust. The lesson should have been 'Don't kill.' The lesson we learned instead was 'Don't discriminate.'
It's not that well phrased, as discrimination can destroy a society too, but the overall point has merit. Discrimination in the positive sense (distinguishing between right and wrong, between the good and the best, between individual and group capabilities) is necessary for a functioning society.
The moral lesson about not harming people is necessary too, but separate.
Sorry, I missed the "may" in that sentence. Otherwise, I agree. Particularly the part where you've said we allowed the fearful to dominate - just look at all the fearmongering nonsense that occurred when COVID-19 came around.
Hi Eugine. Women may be less violent than men outside the home, but not within it, and that's been known for decades. That's relevant to the point Diego made about female perpetrators and male victims of domestic violence.
Women are more likely to be abused by female partners than by male partners, the most violent couples are lesbian couples:
The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
"Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons."
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
"Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male."
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.
I invite followers of Janice's Substack acoount to attend the next International Conference on Men's Issues, to be held in Budapest next August http://icmi2024.icmi.info. Janice will again be the keynote speaker.
Allow me to rephrase. The idea that women are kinder than men, despite being falsified (see Christina Hoff Sommers' video "Are men inferior to women? Let's check the data"), leads to the same outcome of treating women better even when they do wrong.
The case of women in a gynocentric culture is really interesting. It's as E. Belfort Bax said: when it's to women's advantage to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When it's to women's advantage not to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When women commit certain horrible crimes (killing children, killing their male partners), the machinery kicks in to say that women have special needs, women are subject to certain mental illnesses that lead away from accountability for their deeds, that women are more sensitive to certain external stimuli than men; but when it's a debate about why there aren't equal numbers of female airline pilots or high-level surgeons, then suddenly you're not allowed to say that women are in any way different from men.
As a woman, I try to think honestly: would I be comfortable studying under a professor whose main area of research interest was to prove that on the whole, there are far far fewer female geniuses than male: that women are not represented at the genius level of the Bell Curve, that women are not as driven as men, that women are not as interested in abstract math and other very high-level sorts of thinking, and so on. As a result, he would argue that (as Larry Summers famously and suicidally did back in 2006 at Harvard) that we should not be doing anything at all to help women advance in areas of endeavor where women seem to be under-represented at the present time.
I would not have any problem studying under him at all, so long as he believed that some individual women might indeed achieve at the highest level.
If he believed that no woman ever could or should, that would be a more thorny issue.
In the case of Wax, she has certainly never said that no black student can excel at the highest levels. But she has said that many black students accepted on the grounds of racial preference into the Ivy League schools are not intellectually equipped to be there. She may have said the same about some female students. If her position is correct--or even if it isn't, but is based on credible research--it needs to be discussed, and black students will have to get over their outrage.
If only society had listened to Bax, or the author of Towards a Sane Feminism.
I'm glad we could agree on the need to tread carefully with these topics.
I appreciate your willingness to put yourself into that kind of mental space. Shows a level of intellectual honesty and courage that a lot of academics, retired or not, don't have.
As for Wax's comments, I'd agree that she has a point about affirmative action resulting in less-equipped students ending up in classes they're not qualified for.
Thanks again for giving us such thought-provoking stuff Janice!
Towards a sane feminism was misguided. It was written by a woman who simply couldn't bring herself to admit that feminism would always be bunk. It started as bunk and would stay bunk.
I don't think it's cherry picking when it comes to domestic violence. I've looked into the large surveys there. Overall, women evolved to be less violent than men; they kill less often than men do (but men kill other men and themselves far more often than they kill women). But when it comes to attacking children and elders in the home, women definitely do their fair share. Here's an old article by Cathy Young on the issue. Young is no particular friend to men:
Women commit more than their fair share. They kill the majority if the elders and children.
Hard to say that women evolved to be less violent than men when infanticide is a female crime. Especially considering humans are the only mammal were the female does so rather than the male.
Men evolved to be more violent towards other men for sure.
I don't believe men evolved to be violent towards women. Before DV shelters, women killed an equal amount of their husbands. The only reason men kill more today is because they don't have DV shelters.
Male intra sexual competition has definitely always involved some violence. But it's not accurate to say that men are just more violent than women in every context.
Women commit a lot more proxy violence--getting men to do their dirty work. The man goes to jail and goes down as a statistic about male violence; the woman is excused because she's a woman.
I am inclined to attribute the rage Prof Wax has encountered to her work constituting a narcissistic injury to the pathetic university collective ego. Decline & Fall meets Christopher Lasch.
Thank you for your essay. We need to take back pride in Western culture. Those advocating for her dismissal don't understand that it is the very culture they are deriding that allows their expression. I can't imagine China or other cultures firing academics for championing their culture. Of course, previously China did but that was the Cultural Revolution. We have just rebranded it CRT.
Another embarrassment for universities in the U.S. The principle of freedom of speech is only relevant when people disagree with its content. Also, hurt feelings do not constitute grounds for dismissal, but rather an opportunity for discourse and conflict resolution. What better learning opportunity for any college? Instead, they condemn.
gracias for bringing this example forward. it seems so crazy that i suspect that we are near when this anti-speech anti-thinking anti-life baloney will begin to be recognised as the junk food of a poisoned mind and that it begins to fall even more quickly than it is to the ground under the instability of its own stupidity.
"... and it begins fall to the ground under the instability of its own stupidity."
It will fall to the ground like a plane flown by a diversity-hire pilot and guided by diversity-hire air-traffic controllers, while in the final seconds, passengers who complain about diversity hiring will be harangued for creating an unsafe cabin space by diverse air hostxs. That's how fast it will fall.
lol! i saw that image clearly in my mind. thank.
I signed and shared the petition. Professor Wax is eloquent in her articulation of the need for and the merits of a counternarrative to woke DEI. Unfortunately, she is seriously out of fashion, as can be seen from the relative numbers who have signed the petitions: 86000 against her, 110 for her.
Yes, it's quite a statement, isn't it? 86,000 believe with no evidence that she said non-white students were "litter" and thus must be fired. But even her own colleagues, in the main, will not stand by her.
I read the essay at heterodox academy you linked. The author was keen to show his unwoke credentials yet signed a letter criticising Wax, along with about 30 other UPenn academics. Is this letter writing usual conduct for academics?
And his argument about Chinese migrating to Africa is weak: belt and road projects are most likely the main reason for Chinese moving to Africa, not political, cultural and legal infrastructure.
Gregory, I too read the essay (quickly) and meant to go back, as I found the author's argument somewhat difficult to credit. I would like to see those immigration numbers in context and with full discussion of migrant preferences and options.
I was an academic for 23 years, never signed a letter denouncing a colleague. Academic debate is supposed to be conducted in the pages of academic journals or newspaper op/ed pages, not through mobbing campaigns.
Thanks Janice. I wonder if that academic was spinelessly distancing himself as much as possible from Dr Wax while trying to make it look like academic integrity was behind his actions.
That was the flavor I got. "I'm anti-woke, but not like THAT."
Yes, that cries out for an explanation; I am often puzzled that so few actually see how bizarre this behaviour is. Has anyone ever done a study of the few who stand up to wokeness, seeking to see what makes them so unique?
Outraged deans of faculty are thumping away at their keyboards even as we speak, with dismissal notices to the 110 pro-Wax profs.
Guess tenure ain’t all that.
Academics these days are afraid. Very afraid.
Academics are cowards just as often as anybody else. And that‘s far too often. Or take herd animals, if you prefer the term.
It doesn't matter. The facts she has outlined are well understood in academia. Group average differences in IQ and quite distinct behavioural profiles in different ethnic groups have been studied in some considerable detail. Nobody expects Korean immigrants to be mass murderers, but nor do they expect them to win the 100m sprint at the Olympics. How do we know this? Lol
The academics are beginning to realize this will not remain verboten forever. It is openly discussed in China and Russia, for instance. Their religion is falling, and the backlash will be epic.
In defense of free speech we must reject and defend against the bullying, shaming, shunning efforts of cancel culture fueled by misandry.
Excellent post as always.
We'll probably never get over the combination of the Civil Rights movement with woke socialism. The pipe dream of the DEI demons is that if you just take impoverished underachievers and install them in middle class housing, study programs and jobs that they can't really handle, and throw money at them they'll somehow absorb middle class life skills through immersion and osmosis. God only knows how long it's going to take for people to see that it doesn't work.
The best students I ever taught were unquestionably African: Nowhere near a majority of Black Americans are worthless ghetto dwellers who have no ambition, but the African American middle class is far outshone by immigrants from Africa, and the Caribbean. None of those people want to have anything to do with ghetto scum.
I know. I’ve worked with people from all over Africa. It’s amazing to see how a Siouth Sudanese differs from a Sierra Leonian.
Florida State Uni has cancelled its entire DEI bureaucracy. It's expected other red state universities will follow.
Free market forces will eventually make private unis follow suit, unless the Democrats manage a complete Marxist takeover.
Thank you very much, Janice. I am very grateful to the University of Philadelphia, where Morton Benson worked and produced his iconic Serbo-Croatian-English and English-Serbo-Croatian dictionaries. It is a shame that it is now engaged in persecuting Amy Wax. I signed the petition. I must say though, that I also enjoyed Jon Haidt's column attacking her views.
(Too bad the University of Pennsylvania was also in bed with BioNTech and Pfizer in developing the mRNA biologic product.)
Here it is, Unfortunate. I particularly liked his beginning, where he pointed out that Russia was the third most important country for taking in foreigners and Saudi Arabia the fourth largest. No year was specified and I am sure it changes from one year to the next, but it shows that having an autocratic ruler doesn't necessarily mean a country is not a magnet for foreign workers. I know that Tajikistan, in particular, has been a big source of mostly seasonal workers for Russia. The economic sanctions directed against Russia have hit Tajiks hard, although they have no part in the war against Ukraine. Here is the link:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/i-dont-care-if-amy-wax-is-politically-incorrect-i-do-care-that-shes-empirically-incorrect/
Sorry, Unfortunate, my admiration for Haidt’s comment was largely based on his attack on Wax’s comment that ““Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” She said this as a follow-up to how wonderful Anglo-Protestant values are, and no-one would argue that Russians share Anglo-Protestant values. Not all of Russia’s rulers have been white (Lenin had very obvious Asiatic features) and some, like Boris Yeltsin have been born in Asia. So it was quite something to me that the third country in the world for taking foreigners in was Russia. The controversy about the impact of the pill doesn’t interest me so much. If Janice wrote something on the subject I would certainly read it but I wouldn’t go out of my way to study it.
There is a British guy, Konstantin Kisin, who seems to be all over the web these days. He is Jewish, Russian or Ukrainian as the mood strikes him. He claims he has a dark complexion, so maybe he qualifies as black-adjacent. He is always pounding on the drum that his family moved from the Soviet Union to the UK and this was the natural only path of flow for people. Edward Snowden moved from the US to Russia and he is now a Russian citizen but he doesn’t prate endlessly that this is the only direction in which immigrants between the two countries might flow. So-called intellectual analysts like Kisin should really grow up.
I don’t know if you are right about Haidt. I can’t get into his brain and I rather doubt that you can either. It might make a great film though, “Being Jon Haidt”, like a sequel to “Being John Malkovich.” Malkovich is of Croatian descent on his father’s side by the way, although I don’t think he speaks Serbo-Croatian. If you want to push Haidt’s motivations further, more power to you, but I have other fish to fry.
Rather of a blunt question, but are you of Yugoslav (any of the ex countries) ancestry? Or have you studied the Serbo-Croatian language? I am curious because of your several references to the language and ethnicity. My parents are Macedonians (the former Yugoslav republic), and there is a long lasting friendship and cultural affinity between us and the Serbs (we were the only Orthodox Christians in all of Yugoslavia, and the only natural users of the Cyrillic alphabet). As someone who has been born and raised in Canada, it is always interesting to hear academic references to the lesser known South Slav nations. It brings one closer to (ethnically speaking) home. I am also pleased to hear you describe Slavic values as Anglo-Protestant. Although we may not have ever achieved anything to the likes of Western Europe, we have still a rich and bucolic culture of our own. In particular, Byzantine architecture in the form of ancient Orthodox churches are haunting and sublime, especially as the age worn frescoes cover the structure from roof to floor.
Very nice to hear from you again, Katie. My roots are mostly British and they are Protestant. My wife Sonja and my stepson Miroslav are from Kraljevo, Serbia. I am trying to learn Serbian, but am lazy and not that bright, so I am not making great progress. One of the textbooks I use, “Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian” is from University of Wisconsin Press and they also publish a couple of books by Christina Kramer on Macedonian. Unfortunately, it is too late for me to learn Macedonian. I might think about learning it if I were younger. The number of Serbs and Macedonians is small, and they were under Turkish occupation for centuries, but, as you say, they still have done beautiful things. I love the Orthodox churches and cathedrals too. Since February 2022 I am a member of the Serbian Orthodox Church myself, and hope for salvation. I paid my respects to the Mulroney family when Brian Mulroney’s body was lying in state in Ottawa on Wednesday. Mila and Caroline Mulroney were both very friendly when I tried to speak Serbian to them and they spoke it back to me. I asked the youngest child, Nicholas, if he spoke Serbian too, but he told me he didn’t and I should try the other side of the line (where Mila and Caroline were). Have you visited Macedonia, Katie? I would like to see it sometime myself. I remember the evocative descriptions of Macedonia in Rebecca West’s book on her trip to prewar Yugoslavia.
Thank you for your kind words, Unfortunate. I would be interested on your elaborating on the connections between Russian culture and Protestant culture in Wax's view, if you have the time. If not, I'll try to think about that a little myself.
The zealous emotional reactions to straw men is getting really tiresome. It's so....LOW IQ, ironically. I read somewhere that men, in general, seek truth. Women seek moral superiority. We're now being oppressed by this church lady idiocy everywhere we turn. Perhaps the hardest to stomach are men who fall prey to this hysterical rejection of truth.
It isn't just that they can't take the average intelligence assertion with equanimity. It's that the very mention that there are differing levels of intelligence sends them into spasms of moral outrage. Yet, shouldn't it be obvious to everyone that people shipped to North America from a continent that for the most part was primitive, with people living in a manner that Europeans had left behind centuries before, would say something about what those people value -- and what they don't? Shouldn't we all have observed that perhaps you can't speed-up the process of adapting from a primitive culture to one nurtured by people who sat around indoors half the year, writing philosophy? There are the languages too -- quite indicative of the intellect: fruits are not individually named. They are "tree fruit" or "bush fruit." Note the lack of specificity and word salad that is spoken (NOT ALL!!!!!) I've recognized this pattern -- just as I've recognized, from working with Asian students, that they excel at taking direction, but struggle to come up with an individual opinion, draw inferences, or make connections (despite the assertion that their IQ's are higher than whites.) Again, look at the culture. Whites kept moving. Asians retained the same or very similar culture for centuries until about the 19th century when the world opened up due to whites running around all over the place. Again, this difference should be OBVIOUS. Add to this the neanderthal DNA in Europeans, Denisovan in Asians, and neither in Africans. There is DNA difference that likely caused certain effects.
If we don't listen to people like Amy Wax, we won't be able to lift these people up. Burying the problem does not solve it. And worse -- standards are being lowered to accommodate them. This will bring disastrous effects on our society. It's also "racist."
In the past month, two church ladies fled clutching pearls. One who was misrepresenting the conservative perspective on climate change. Didn't I know it's been settled -- there's a consensus! since he was in third grade (in the 70s). It was nearly impossible to contain my bemused smirk, especially since I was citing a book by a former member of the Obama Administration ("Unsettled," by Stephen Koonin).
The next fainting church lady fled over the "Bloodbath" straw man, and my pointing out that the Times piece on it was irresponsible, that Bari Wiess left the Times due to anti-semitism, and that yes, there IS a problem with flooding "sanctuary cities" with criminals from Venezuela. It didn't seem to matter that my partner is Venezuelan, and that I was citing him when I said people drive armored cars and can't go out without a bodyguard due to the criminals running the show. And speaking of our THREATENED DEMOCRACY, I don't recall on any ballot the following: Defunding police, Men in women's bathrooms, Sanctuary cities, paying off the student loans of people making over 100 grand a year.
Enough is enough. But how to get it to stop?
Reality will stop it. Those differences you mentioned manifest in everything. Poor impulse control, for example, means more rapes, murders and dysfunction. But it also means you cannot dig wells, maintain basic infrastructure or invent banking systems. The trait is inherited and cannot be socialized out.
We already see what mixing cultures does. It kills you. So the solution is to stop the mixing, which is what will happen.
The environment likely had much to do with how “developed” or not things were. Certainly not mono-causal. Regardless, Europeans arrived in ships with all manner of technological advancement to find people living in huts. Egypt is a different animal— rather like the Northern versus southern US in the 19th century.
Great work Janice.
How despicable the universities are for collaborating in all this censorship.
I'm going to play Devil's advocate for Wax's detractors. The idea that some groups are better than others has been used to justify terrible treatment of whole groups. Case in point: the idea that women are less violent has resulted in female abusers getting lenient treatment and male victims being discounted. So, yeah, her statements have some... troubling subtext that shouldn't be dismissed too easily. Though I still support her right to free speech - because her ideas should be exposed and challenged based on their merit (or lack thereof).
Talking about differences between racial groups is very difficult and even dangerous, I agree.
I don't think Wax has ever said that one group is better, though she undoubtedly has said that the cultural habits and ways of life developed in the west are better than others and should be maintained.
As I understand her, she believes that differences in IQ and other differences largely account, along with culture, for the disparities in outcome seen in America today; that racism--now the main explanation--is NOT the issue. I would need to do a great deal more research than I have done either to defend or refute that contention, but I believe that experts in the fields of genetics, biology, brain science, and social policy should scrupulously explore all the issues, not push one politically correct perspective.
It's true that claims about differences can underlie horrendous social policies, while it's also true that a fearless scientific exploration (for example, into the fact that women tend to think differently than men and have different areas of competency and interest) can lead to deeper understanding. All should, ideally, be conducted in an atmosphere of civility and generosity--ideals long lost from most universities today, unfortunately.
The claim has been made that Wax herself has not been civil, though from what I can discern, it is mainly her detractors who react with animus. As far as I can tell, she is someone who is trying to say the truth as fearlessly and directly as possible. None of this means that she mightn't be wrong about some things. But I think she's a lot smarter, and more principled, than many of the people calling for her to be fired.
I can agree with all of that. And I'm thankful to you, Janice, for cultivating an intellectual space where people can have these kinds of conversations.
If a problem can't be talked about it's impossible to do anything about the problem.
What's dangerous is false beliefs, even false egalitarian beliefs, e. g., our ideology says all groups are inherently equal, but group X is disproportionately successful. They must have stolen their success using witchcraft/shadowy conspiring/racial privilege. Thus group X must be punished.
Let me play Devil's advocate to your point. She didn't say some groups are better. She said groups are different. Which is true. In some circumstances those differences, when ignored, cause mayhem, dysfunction and violence. Things we are told the government will protect us from.
More to the point her detractors want her cancelled because they think she referred to immigrants as litter, by which I assume they translate as trash or equivalent. This is rhetorical manipulation, something academia should be immune from.
So historical abuse is irrelevant.
Admittedly, I was wrong to say that she said any group was better than the other. And it's true that differences do exist between groups on average. However, humans have used group differences - real or imagined - to justify horrific abuses and that hasn't changed. So, I think it's a valid concern to keep in mind when talking about these things. But I would ever say that Wax should be cancelled for merely bringing up the topic of group differences.
I think we overstate the threat of these things. Facts are facts. People who want to believe horrible things about other groups and to act on them will find all the info they need anyway. If anything facts may derail their fantasies.
So I think academia needs to be fearless. Deal with the data and the observations and worry less about hate groups.
I agree with most of that except for one part: that facts "may derail their fantasies." There's evidence that facts don't necessarily change minds - otherwise none of us would be having debates about group differences.
A brilliant YouTuber, Aydin Paladin, goes into the science behind this issue here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elqi0QmMHnc
Hence the use of "may." Some will, some won't.
The point still stands. We have let the fearful dominate for decades. It has failed us. It is time for some extremely uncomfortable truths about the world.
That's an interesting point about overstating the fear.
I remember Ann Coulter, ages ago (more than a decade) saying that we learned the wrong thing from the Holocaust. The lesson should have been 'Don't kill.' The lesson we learned instead was 'Don't discriminate.'
It's not that well phrased, as discrimination can destroy a society too, but the overall point has merit. Discrimination in the positive sense (distinguishing between right and wrong, between the good and the best, between individual and group capabilities) is necessary for a functioning society.
The moral lesson about not harming people is necessary too, but separate.
Sorry, I missed the "may" in that sentence. Otherwise, I agree. Particularly the part where you've said we allowed the fearful to dominate - just look at all the fearmongering nonsense that occurred when COVID-19 came around.
The problem is that women are in fact less violent. Attempting to lie about this fact only causes problems.
Hi Eugine. Women may be less violent than men outside the home, but not within it, and that's been known for decades. That's relevant to the point Diego made about female perpetrators and male victims of domestic violence.
Women are more likely to be abused by female partners than by male partners, the most violent couples are lesbian couples:
https://j4mb.org.uk/2022/12/09/are-women-more-likely-to-be-abused-in-lesbian-or-heterosexual-relationships/
The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
"Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons."
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
"Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male."
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.
I invite followers of Janice's Substack acoount to attend the next International Conference on Men's Issues, to be held in Budapest next August http://icmi2024.icmi.info. Janice will again be the keynote speaker.
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS http://c4mb.uk
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com
Useful references—thank you, Mike. I’d also add this classic from Dutton & Corvo: http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/Dutton_Corvo-Transforming-flawed-policy.pdf
Thanks Stephen, interesting. Professor Dutton spoke at the 2019 International Conference on Men's Issues in Chicago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrksEyW_Lko
Allow me to rephrase. The idea that women are kinder than men, despite being falsified (see Christina Hoff Sommers' video "Are men inferior to women? Let's check the data"), leads to the same outcome of treating women better even when they do wrong.
The case of women in a gynocentric culture is really interesting. It's as E. Belfort Bax said: when it's to women's advantage to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When it's to women's advantage not to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When women commit certain horrible crimes (killing children, killing their male partners), the machinery kicks in to say that women have special needs, women are subject to certain mental illnesses that lead away from accountability for their deeds, that women are more sensitive to certain external stimuli than men; but when it's a debate about why there aren't equal numbers of female airline pilots or high-level surgeons, then suddenly you're not allowed to say that women are in any way different from men.
As a woman, I try to think honestly: would I be comfortable studying under a professor whose main area of research interest was to prove that on the whole, there are far far fewer female geniuses than male: that women are not represented at the genius level of the Bell Curve, that women are not as driven as men, that women are not as interested in abstract math and other very high-level sorts of thinking, and so on. As a result, he would argue that (as Larry Summers famously and suicidally did back in 2006 at Harvard) that we should not be doing anything at all to help women advance in areas of endeavor where women seem to be under-represented at the present time.
I would not have any problem studying under him at all, so long as he believed that some individual women might indeed achieve at the highest level.
If he believed that no woman ever could or should, that would be a more thorny issue.
In the case of Wax, she has certainly never said that no black student can excel at the highest levels. But she has said that many black students accepted on the grounds of racial preference into the Ivy League schools are not intellectually equipped to be there. She may have said the same about some female students. If her position is correct--or even if it isn't, but is based on credible research--it needs to be discussed, and black students will have to get over their outrage.
If only society had listened to Bax, or the author of Towards a Sane Feminism.
I'm glad we could agree on the need to tread carefully with these topics.
I appreciate your willingness to put yourself into that kind of mental space. Shows a level of intellectual honesty and courage that a lot of academics, retired or not, don't have.
As for Wax's comments, I'd agree that she has a point about affirmative action resulting in less-equipped students ending up in classes they're not qualified for.
Thanks again for giving us such thought-provoking stuff Janice!
Towards a sane feminism was misguided. It was written by a woman who simply couldn't bring herself to admit that feminism would always be bunk. It started as bunk and would stay bunk.
Thank you for this. So well said.
This is false. Depends on the type of violence. Women are as violent as men in cases of domestic violence.
In other words you want to cherry pick data and possibly redefine "violence". Hint: look at violent crime statistics.
I don't think it's cherry picking when it comes to domestic violence. I've looked into the large surveys there. Overall, women evolved to be less violent than men; they kill less often than men do (but men kill other men and themselves far more often than they kill women). But when it comes to attacking children and elders in the home, women definitely do their fair share. Here's an old article by Cathy Young on the issue. Young is no particular friend to men:
https://time.com/2921491/hope-solo-women-violence/
Women commit more than their fair share. They kill the majority if the elders and children.
Hard to say that women evolved to be less violent than men when infanticide is a female crime. Especially considering humans are the only mammal were the female does so rather than the male.
Men evolved to be more violent towards other men for sure.
I don't believe men evolved to be violent towards women. Before DV shelters, women killed an equal amount of their husbands. The only reason men kill more today is because they don't have DV shelters.
Male intra sexual competition has definitely always involved some violence. But it's not accurate to say that men are just more violent than women in every context.
Hint: look at who's thr victim of violent crimes.
Men evolved to be more violent towards men.
Women are as violent towards men as men are towards women and women are significantly more violent towards children and the elderly.
Not more or less violent.
They just channel the violence differently. Take Hillary Clinton, for instance.
Women commit a lot more proxy violence--getting men to do their dirty work. The man goes to jail and goes down as a statistic about male violence; the woman is excused because she's a woman.
🎯
Signed and tweeted. What a sham our universities have become. It is hard to believe the ignorance of these elites.
This is a spirited, energetic defense of real academic freedom. You’re courageous, and you’re correct.
A worthy initiative. Signed.
I am inclined to attribute the rage Prof Wax has encountered to her work constituting a narcissistic injury to the pathetic university collective ego. Decline & Fall meets Christopher Lasch.
Thank you for your essay. We need to take back pride in Western culture. Those advocating for her dismissal don't understand that it is the very culture they are deriding that allows their expression. I can't imagine China or other cultures firing academics for championing their culture. Of course, previously China did but that was the Cultural Revolution. We have just rebranded it CRT.
First against the wall are always the useful idiots. Their children too.
Terrifyingly reminiscent of struggle sessions during Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Exactly. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
"would do well to ensure that America remain a white-majority country"
Is that the issue here?
Possibly.