Posts Tagged ‘Frankfurt School’

LinkSwarm For August 21, 2026

Friday, August 21st, 2026

Trump’s winning in Iran, Russia’s losing in Ukraine, Democrats committing fraud left and right, the data center debate rages on, a crappy movie in China gain sudden popularity because it’s crappy, and Orlando PD get to wrestle an alligator.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • National Review comes to the shocking conclusion that Trump’s Iran strategy might actually be working. 

    The “rhetoric” coming from both sides of the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz has “caused considerable confusion and doubt,” CNN’s David Goldman understatedly observed. Yet, at present, “The evidence is clear,” he conceded: “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway.”

    One month ago, the number of commercial ships transiting through the strait via the U.S. approved route along the Omani coast was close to zero. Today, however, over 80 percent of the vessels that have made it through the strait are taking the U.S.-authorized lane. And even though the United States has not responded with kinetic force to every Iranian attack on commercial traffic in the strait, sometimes to the consternation of America’s Gulf partners, that has not dissuaded countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates’ tankers from making “dark traffic” runs on the strait.

    CNN could not independently verify Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s claim that “combined oil transits through the strait and rerouted around the waterway totaled around 15 million barrels per day,” which approaches the pre-war average of 20-million barrels. But it couldn’t gainsay the experts. As one industry analyst conceded, “It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait.”

    The Iranian regime is feeling the pain. As Hot Air’s Duane Patterson explained, the economic conditions on the ground inside the Islamic Republic are catastrophic. “Iran’s economy is currently experiencing around 90 percent inflation, and it turns out the worst may be yet to come,” he wrote. Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Miad Maleki concurs. “Nearly every part of Iran’s oil economy,” he wrote, “owes massive, growing sums to each other, with no real money moving through the system to pay any of it back.”

    The gas lines are growing, and the petrol that Iranians are allowed to buy may soon be rationed. Iranian authorities are triaging their resources by prescheduling hours-long blackouts. The regime is ramping up executions and cracking down on dissent as the prospect of economic collapse brings with it the risk of renewed civil unrest.

  • “Socialists Now Say That Shoplifting Is A-OK.”

    Brooklyn Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher (D-50th District) wants New Yorkers to believe that walking out of a CVS with a fistful of stolen toothpaste isn’t a crime. It’s a “biological need.”

    Yes, really.

    Gallagher, who represents Greenpoint and other parts of northern Brooklyn, made her case Thursday at a news conference outside Manhattan Criminal Court, flanked by fellow far-left officials and activists from Court Watch NYC. The group said it monitored 360 arraignments over four days and found that more than half involved misdemeanor offenses. Gallagher used those numbers to argue shoplifters swiping basic necessities shouldn’t be prosecuted at all.

    “Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty-people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap,” Gallagher said. “And that means if you’re stealing those things, you need them.”

    Funny how all those films of riot never show people stealing soap and toothpaste, just flat screen TVs and Nikes. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) 

  • “Minnesota Government’s ‘Outstanding Refugee’ Charged With Medicaid Fraud Connected To Sex-Trafficking Ring.”

    Salman Ahmed Elmi was charged last week with three counts of aiding and abetting by swindle and five counts of aiding and abetting by false representation.

    He made his first court appearance on Monday. Authorities say some of Elmi’s co-conspirators at Reva Health in Golden Valley have connections to a sex trafficking ring bust last week.

    Elmi is accused of billing Medicaid for more than $1 million in services that were not provided or not eligible. Reva Health provided autism services and adult rehabilitative mental health services.

    “The Minnesota Department of Human Services awarded Elmi an ‘Outstanding Refugee Award’ in 2021.” Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that “Outstanding Refugee” is an award for those that stole the most taxpayer money to give to Democrats?

  • “FBI Raids Eric Swalwell’s Home, Seizes Electronics in Connection with Sexual Assault Investigation.”

    FBI agents seized electronic devices from former Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) at the San Francisco airport on Saturday and then raided his home in connection with an investigation into sexual assault allegations against him, according to several reports.

    Federal authorities executed a search warrant at Swalwell’s home in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, law enforcement sources told CNN and the Associated Press.

    The FBI declined to comment.

    Swalwell resigned from Congress and suspended his campaign for California governor in April after a former staffer came forward with allegations that he had sexually assaulted her twice, including once at a hotel while he was in New York City for a charity gala in 2024.

    Three other women then accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct as well. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department opened criminal investigations into Swalwell in response.

    At the time, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg encouraged “survivors and anyone with knowledge of these allegations to contact our Special Victims Division.”

    The reports that the FBI’s investigation into Swalwell is picking up steam comes days after the White House Transparency Task Force released FBI files indicating Swalwell previously admitted to having “physical relations” with suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang on a “handful of occasions,” providing confirmation of the public sphere’s longstanding suspicion that a sexual relationship had transpired.

    I’m hoping the investigation also sheds light on Swalwell receiving money from communist China.

  • Ukraine continues its war on Wildberries. “Best Wildberries Strike Yet! Koledino Near Moscow–Biggest Wildberries Hub in Russia.”
  • “Ukrainian forces hit at least five workshop buildings at Russia’s Kombinat Kamensky defense plant in Rostov region, penetrating several layers of air defenses from Pantsir to S-300 systems. The plant produces solid rocket fuel for Uragan, Smerch and Tornado-S MLRS, as well as other missile and aviation systems. Key workshops had anti-drone protection and were surrounded by earthworks. Several air-defense vehicles were also hit.”
  • “Drone Strike on Moscow Region: Atlant Warehouse Complex Hit.” Not technically a Wildberries warehouse.
  • “Big Flamingo Missile Strike on Russian Rocket Factory in Samara! Only Soyuz Rocket Factory.”
  • “Russian Convoy of Trucks Destroyed on Berdiansk-Mariupol Supply Road.”
  • Updated damage assessment from last week’s Novorossiysk strike. “Admiral Makarov & Admiral Essen Confirmed Out of Action in New Imagery!”
  • The Russian fuel situation has gotten so bad that even Russian newspapers are talking about it. “As of the 16th of August, across Russia, 28.1% of petrol stations had fuel. A week before, it was 41%.” Imagine more than two thirds of stations having no gas and long lines at the ones that do.
  • “Two federal agencies routed taxpayer dollars to terror-linked charities.”

    The State Department worked with World Vision to distribute $2 billion in global health foreign assistance even though an Israeli court convicted the nonprofit’s Gaza affiliate operations manager of sending up to $50 million to Hamas in 2022. Separately, the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) provided nearly $80 million to 14 organizations linked to terrorism and extremism.

    The Middle East Forum (MEF) recently reported that 14 terror-linked and extremist organizations, led by CAIR, collected nearly $80 million from HHS through the Refugee Resettlement, Health, and Mosque Renovation grants. Through this fund, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) California chapter received the most of any Islamist group, collecting $42.2 million in funding from the HHS to provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees.

  • Concerning: “Chinese Spy Official Who Is Also A Trained Sniper Buys Property Overlooking White House.”

  • “Liberal white woman fights fascism by defacing national memorial to soldiers who died fighting Hitler.” ‘This morning, we are filing two felony charges, Depredation Against Property of the United States and Destruction of Veterans’ Memorials, in Federal District Court against Melissa L. Farris, offenses that carry penalties of up to ten years in prison.” TDS strikes again.
  • How is this legal? “Karen Bass brags that Los Angeles will use tax dollars to provide a 6:1 match for every dollar donated to her campaign.”

    Karen Bass is very worried about losing her mayoralty to left-winger Nithya Raman, who squeaked past Spencer Pratt in the primary election due to a bunch of election shenanigans, and Bass has an interesting campaign strategy.

    Using city tax dollars to fund her campaign!…

    The city of Los Angeles “donates” money to Bass’s campaign in a matching program? If you give $10, the city chips in another $60? And she’s pushing this program?

    Through the foreign-donation-taking ActBlue, no less.

    Per the City Ethics Commission (I kid you not), the city charter allows for “public matching funds.”

    Left-wing group Common Cause California brags about “strengthening” this public match fund in 2019.

    The program is intended to help less-funded candidates get access to funding, but in actuality, all it does is take YOUR tax dollars to fund politicians you hate.

  • Background on the Frankfurt school, one of the intellectual fathers of the poison that is social justice.

    The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.

    1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.

    2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.

    3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it.

    This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.

    4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name.” Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

    5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.

    6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.

    7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

    The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Kurt Schlichter: “The Death of Academic Fraud Jason Arday Won’t Shut Us Up.”

    Fake Professor Jason Arday was found dead in the wake of being exposed as a complete fraud, and if it were my choice, he would still be alive and suffering the humiliation that should be the result of his crimes. I would prefer that he did not likely choose to kill himself instead of facing the consequences of his actions. My preference is irrelevant. If he decided to do himself in, it’s crushing for his wife and kids, and that was a selfish, cruel, and stupid decision. But it was his decision, as was his decision to commit fraud upon fraud. I don’t celebrate his death, and his death changes nothing. We’re not going to stop rooting out the charlatans.

    Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to his cowardly and apparent self-deletion has been to insist, loudly and with quivering outrage, that his death is our fault. You see, we normal people pointed out that he lied about his background, his achievements, his credentials, and his work. The fact that we did what a functioning institution should’ve done itself outraged his boosters, so these moral illiterates now invert the moral calculus to keep the exposure of academic fraud from happening again. Arday lied pathologically and endlessly, enabled by a ridiculously solicitous academia, then likely killed himself when his lies were exposed. Obviously, the villains are the people who did not lie and did not choose to end his life.

    And you’ll never guess their key accusation in a million years.

    Okay, you guessed it: RACISM!

    Snip.

    Regardless, it was entirely predictable that the left would use his unfortunate demise to try to shut us up, to place all criticism of woke charlatans off limits because the subject of the critique might decide to do something desperate. They can’t help themselves but act out irrationally, you see. The fact that this tactic deprives the minority of any agency is no shock; there’s no racist like a leftist, who considers minorities to be nothing more than political marionettes unable to control their own actions. We’re supposed to give them a pass because the targets of our criticism have no agency. It’s like that NSFW scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff keeps the townspeople from lynching him by sticking a gun to his head—“He’s just crazy enough to do it!” Except this time the townspeople were not trying to lynch an innocent man and didn’t back off, and he did pull the figurative trigger.

    We’re not going to play their game. We’re not going to hold fire for fear of feelz. We’re not going to ignore the truth lest the liar lash out at himself or others. Sometimes the truth hurts, but the only people the truth hurts are people exposed doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The truth is more important than feelings. And the truth is more important than Arday’s life. If the choice we are presented with is that Jason Arday will go on living a lie and degrading our civilization by doing so, or that Jason Arday might hurt himself, it’s Option 2 every day of the week. We’re not going to be held hostage or intimidated or shamed into silence and, therefore, complicity.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Here’s a Look at the State of Firearms Access in Texas Tribal Territories.” The problem is tribal law enforcement seems to fall between state and federal stools.

    Texas has three federally recognized Native American tribes: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, located in the western part of the state in El Paso; the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, located near Eagle Pass along the Rio Grande; and the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, located in the eastern part of the state near Livingston.

    And two of those are along the Mexican border, which means drug smuggling is a big problem.

  • Bookseller Scott Brown has his own piece on destructive scanning of books for AI. I’m quoted in here, but Brown also points out that a lot more companies are doing such destructive scanning, including:
    • Anthropic
    • Meta
    • Amazon
    • He says Elon Musk has promised that SpaceX/xAI will not to do such destructive scanning, but expresses doubt.

    He also lists the company’s buying books for destructive scanning:

    • Zoom Books
    • Far Corner
    • Last Token
    • Innodata
  • “Here Are the Data Center Companies That Agreed to Comply With Gov. Greg Abbott’s Standards.”

    I’m going to quote a largish chunk here just so I can tag the various companies.

    In June, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to require data centers to pay for their own electric infrastructure costs, scuttling at least one project planned for East Texas.

    Then, earlier this month, Abbott asked these agencies to audit all data center projects in the process of connecting to the Texas grid. According to his directive, data centers in the pipeline must provide and verify information about their water usage; their noise, light, and traffic mitigation efforts; how they plan to obtain electricity; whether they receive taxpayer money; and the real identities of their owners.

    A flurry of affirmative replies ensued, including assurances from some of the best-funded users and most prolific developers of data centers in the world.

    Many of these companies have already made use of a sales tax exemption for data center equipment — a 13-year-old state law passed before the remote work boom of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) this decade propelled the industry well past the state’s expectations.

    Here are the data center companies that have agreed to comply with Abbott’s standards, cross-referenced with the state’s list of companies that benefit from the tax break.

    QTS Data Centers

    On August 6, Virginia-based Quality Technology Services (QTS) “applauded” Abbott’s “efforts to increase transparency on power use, water and resource consumption, and community considerations associated with data center development.”

    QTS data centers built after 2019 use fans rather than water for cooling, according to the company.

    The company operates three facilities in Texas and has three more in the pipeline, according to its website. The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts certified one QTS facility, a 56-acre campus in Irving, to benefit from the state sales tax exemption.

    Vantage Data Centers

    Vantage Data Centers sent a letter of support to Abbott on August 7.

    The company, based in Denver, Colorado, only lists one active data center in Texas, at an undisclosed location in Shackelford County. However, it has secured a sales tax exemption for 12 projects listed by the comptroller, all for Oracle.

    Skybox

    Texas-based Skybox Datacenters agreed to Abbott’s standards on August 7.

    The company has built nine data centers around the state. Besides one in Wichita Falls, all are in the Dallas, Austin, and Houston metropolitan areas, according to its website. The comptroller’s list of qualifying data centers doesn’t include a project with Skybox in the name or one associated with its address at 3131 Turtle Creek Boulevard in Dallas, based on a search of the state’s franchise tax database.

    Digital Realty

    Digital Realty stated on August 7 that it would comply with Abbott’s standards. The Austin-based company claimed in its statement to be “the world’s largest cloud- and carrier-neutral data center platform.”

    Digital Realty operates more than 300 data centers that serve companies including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia and IBM. Twelve of its 14 Texas data centers are in the Dallas area, its website shows.

    Stream Data Centers

    Dallas-based Stream Data Centers agreed to Abbott’s standards on August 7.

    Altogether, nine Stream data centers are either active or in development across Texas, with one on the outskirts of Houston, three in San Antonio, one in Austin, and four in the Dallas area.

    Mara

    Mara agreed to abide by Abbott’s standards on August 7.

    The Florida-based company operates a Bitcoin mining fleet, and it “colocates data centers with power sources to convert stranded energy into digital capital,” its website states.

    The company name doesn’t appear on the comptroller’s list of qualifying data centers, nor do any subsidiary companies registered under the address of its Florida headquarters.

    Rowan

    Rowan Digital Infrastructure, another developer based in Denver, issued a press release in support of Abbott’s orders on August 7.

    The company owns and operates four data centers in Texas that benefit from the sales tax exemption, including one in Temple for Meta and another in Cinco for Google.

    Meta

    Meta, the California-based parent company of Facebook, pledged to comply with Abbott’s standards on Monday.

    Meta’s three Texas data centers are in Fort Worth, Temple, and El Paso, according to its map.

    Multiple data centers owned or used by Meta benefit from the state’s sales tax exemption. One subsidiary company, Polmer LLC, owns the certified data center in Temple and occupies two other data centers on the comptroller’s list of certified projects. The El Paso facility is owned by a Meta subsidiary, Wurldwide LLC, which also makes use of the exemption.

    OpenAI and Oracle

    California-based company OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, agreed to comply with Abbott’s standards on Monday. Oracle, also based in California, made the same commitment on Tuesday.

    OpenAI is collaborating with Oracle and SoftBank on Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project based in Abilene and funded in part by chipmaker Nvidia. Lancium, a company backed by New York-based investment firm Blackstone, is constructing the facility, according to its website.

    Eleven Lancium data centers and projects appear on the comptroller’s list, spanning Fort Stockton, Turkey, Childress, and Abilene. Seven projects in Abilene are associated with Stargate, with Oracle listed as an occupant.

    Core Scientific

    Core Scientific issued a press release in support of Abbott’s directives on Monday.

    The company, based in Miami, Florida, operates three data centers in Texas: one in Austin, one in Denton, and one in the Callahan County town of Cottonwood, according to its website.

    All three benefit from the state tax exemption, the comptroller’s list shows.

    Google

    The California-based Big Tech titan expressed support for Abbott’s standards on Monday.

    The comptroller lists Google as the owner or user of nine data centers that benefit from the sales tax exemption.

    CleanSpark

    Data center developer CleanSpark Inc. agreed with Abbott’s standards on Monday.

    The Nevada-based company doesn’t publish a comprehensive map or list of its data center locations, but as of February, it owned two plots of land in Brazoria County and Austin County with plans to develop facilities there, according to an investor relations press release.

    Neither CleanSpark nor the only Texas entity registered to its corporate address, Eagles Nest 138 LLC, appear on the comptroller’s list of data centers.

    EdgeConneX

    Virginia-based EdgeConneX announced support for Abbott’s standards in its Tuesday press release.

    The company doesn’t specify how many discrete data centers it operates in Texas, but it’s only active in the Houston and Austin areas, according to its online map.

    The state has certified two EdgeConnex projects for the tax exemption, both in the Austin area.

    SB Energy

    SB Energy sent Abbott a letter on August 6 expressing support for his directives and publicized it on Tuesday.

    The Redwood City, California-based company is building a facility in Milam County in support of Stargate, with Orion listed as an occupant on two projects that benefit from the state sales tax exemption.

    Data Center Coalition

    The Data Center Coalition, a trade association that represents data center companies, expressed support for Abbott’s directives on Tuesday.

  • Speaking of data centers, Trump is in the pro-data center camp.
  • “Former Fauci Adviser David Morens Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Hide Covid-Related Records.”

    David Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to hiding federal records from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Morens, a senior adviser at NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022 under Dr. Anthony Fauci, was charged by the Department of Justice in April with five counts related to the scheme.

    He agreed to a deal with federal prosecutors this week that would see him plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses or to defraud the United States. The charge carries up to five years in prison.

    Snip.

    The indictment came after the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic found evidence that Morens had used his personal email to discuss Covid-19’s origins and National Institutes of Health grants with EcoHealth Alliance, including a terminated coronavirus grant, in an attempt to keep the communications hidden from hypothetical future FOIA requests.

    The committee obtained a communication between Morens and EcoHealth President Peter Daszak in which Morens wrote, “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

    Why it was almost like their was a conspiracy of secrecy against the American people…

  • “Tajik killer who avoided jail due to insanity ruling flees U.S. the moment his mental hospital grants him a day pass.”

    Abdulloi Toshpulodzoda left the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute (NVMHI) on July 6 for an authorized 48-hour pass. He was required to return two days later, but he never did, FOX 5 reported, citing court documents.

    Instead, Toshpulodzoda traveled to Washington Dulles International Airport and boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul before continuing to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, court documents show.

    Snip.

    FOX 5 reported that Toshpulodzoda had previously been allowed to travel to Washington, D.C., in 2024 to obtain a passport, with support from the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.

    Sorry, a what? Passport? And then they gave him a 48-hour pass? And then they were surprised that he fled the country and never came back?

    Well done, everyone.

    You may not be surprised to learn that it was the office of far-left Steve Descano, the prosecutor for Fairfax County, that allowed him to get the passport.

    The Trump admin is suing Descano for releasing violent criminals. You may recall that Descano went viral for allowing a registered sex offender to change in the girls’ locker room at multiple HIGH SCHOOLS because the sex offender now identifies as a woman.

    Is Descano backed by George Soros? Of course he is.

  • It’s quite concerning that the USS Benfold, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, was was dead in the water for four days in the South China Sea due to a power systems failure.
  • Nigel Farage wins his election and returns to Parliament.
  • Very suspicious: “Bastrop City Council Holds Official Workshop 100 Miles Away from their Constituents.”

    On August 7th, the Bastrop City Council conducted official workshops not in Bastrop (where one might reasonably expect), but more than one hundred miles away in Fredericksburg. The posted agenda lists the location as the John Wm. Klein Meeting Room at 115 N. Crockett Street in Fredericksburg, roughly a two-hour drive from the city those officials were elected to serve.

    And no, these were not informal “retreats” for city council members to relax and blow off steam. These were formal City Council workshops covering the very decisions that hit taxpayer’s wallets and daily lives hardest: the city budget, setting the tax rate, Hotel Occupancy Taxes, capital projects, the Master Transportation Plan (including an East/West connection north of Highway 71), water and wastewater planning, street projects, and “Future Goals” that include a recreation center, expanded fire and police service, data center policies, and Legislative “advocacy.” An extensive list of hot-button issues all to be discussed far away from their constituents.

    State Rep. Stan Gerdes (R-Smithville), whose district includes Bastrop, correctly called out the problem: “The City of Bastrop is holding a City Council meeting hours away in Fredericksburg, making it nearly impossible for the people they represent to attend and participate.” He noted the agenda’s weight on budget, tax rate, data centers, and surveillance technology and announced plans to file legislation requiring city council meetings to be held inside the city they serve so residents can actually show up, speak, and hold officials accountable.

  • Flock says “I can change!” 

    Security camera company Flock Safety has announced changes to its privacy safeguards amid public opposition to use of the devices and concerns about law enforcement abuse.

    However, U.S. Rep. Keith Self (R–McKinney) told Texas Scorecard that although these changes are welcome, Flock is obviously “trying to gain acceptance and put lipstick on a pig amid the intense pushback they have received from Americans across the nation who are rightfully concerned about their privacy.”

    “The bottom line is Americans do not want to be spied on, and they reject the surveillance state operating in America,” said Self. “The Fourth Amendment is not a suggestion. Federal and state legislation are still needed to ensure the government cannot access this data without a warrant—and that taxpayer dollars are not spent purchasing or installing this invasive spyware. That’s why Congress needs to pass my bill, the PRIVACY Act.”

    Self filed the PRIVACY Act last month. It would require federal law enforcement to obtain official warrants before accessing or querying data collected by state and local systems, including automated license plate readers.

    Powered by artificial intelligence, Flock cameras have been a hotly debated topic across the U.S., with concerned Texans requesting that state lawmakers create guardrails for the technology during the upcoming legislative session.

    Since law enforcement officials do not need a warrant to access the Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) database, citizens are raising concerns about potential Fourth Amendment violations.

    Among the technology updates is a new default setting of 7-day data retention instead of the previous 30 days. This change is based on Flock’s analysis that all searches “without a full plate are done within a week.”

  • “Cami Clark, the low-profile wife of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, tried to court Jeffrey Epstein as an investor for her “luxury porn company.”
  • WNBA Reddit bans mention of WNBA player.
  • The Critical Drinker/Gamer covers a hacker group penetration of Rockstar games, evidently including full playable source code of the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6. They’re even threatening to release the ending if Rockstar don’t promise to eschew the greedy enshitification of games (like ending physical media) that’s now standard practice in the industry.
  • Orlando PD vs. one pissed off alligator.
  • Ubobtanium cars.
  • Rick Beato and The Professor of Rock interview take 2.
  • Merica:

    (Hat tip: According to Hoyt.

  • Niu Lai is a sleeper hit in China, mainly because the animation is so bad, something that might have been a 3D animation demo reel in 1994. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has a new episode where a transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into Muppets.

  • In news that may be of interest only to me, both BattleSwarm and Futuramen had huge upticks in Views this week, at least ten times normal traffic, though a smaller uptick in unique Visitors, and I notice no single post generating such traffic. I can only assume some AI scanned the entirety of the site. 
  • “DeSantis Explains To Newsom Secret To Counting Ballots In One Night Is Not Committing Fraud.”
  • “Kentucky Derby Convenes Committee To Determine What Is A Horse.”
  • “Chicago Principal Concerned As High School Senior Only Assaulting Teachers At Fifth-Grade Level.”
  • You made me love you…

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ..)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Technology, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 8 Comments »

    The Totalitarian Epistemological Closure of Social Justice

    Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020

    I have this ginormous post on Social Justice that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, with more and more links, and I’ll never finish it unless I start breaking it down into smaller chunks. So this post focuses on two meaty pieces about the theoretical underpinnings of Social Justice, and how it suffers from epistemological closure.

    First up: James Lindsay on why the woke will not debate you:

    There are a number of points within Critical Social Justice Theory that would see having a debate or conversation with people of opposing views as unacceptable, and they all combine to create a mindset where that wouldn’t be something that adherents to the Theory are likely or even willing to do in general. This reticence, if not unwillingness, to converse with anyone who disagrees actually has a few pretty deep reasons behind it, and they’re interrelated but not quite the same. They combine, however, to produce the first thing everyone needs to understand about this ideology: it is a complete worldview with its own ethics, epistemology, and morality, and theirs is not the same worldview the rest of us use. Theirs is, very much in particular, not liberal. In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. That’s not the same thing as being willing to play the liberal game themselves, however, including to have thoughtful dialogue with people who oppose them and their view of the world. Conversation and debate are part of our game, and they are not part of their game.

    The first thing to understand about the way adherents to Critical Social Justice view the world is just how deeply they have accepted the belief that we operate within a wholly systemically oppressive system. That system extends to literally everything, not just material structures, institutions, law, policies, and so on, but also into cultures, mindsets, ways of thinking, and how we determine what is and isn’t true about the world. In their view, the broadly liberal approach to knowledge and society is, in fact, rotted through with “white, Western, male (and so on) biases,” and this is such a profound departure from how the rest of us—broadly, liberals—think about the world that it is almost impossible to understand just how deeply and profoundly they mean this.

    In a 2014 paper by the black feminist epistemology heavyweight Kristie Dotson, she explains that our entire epistemic landscape is itself profoundly unequal. Indeed, she argues that it is intrinsically and “irreducibly” so, meaning that it is not possible from within the prevailing system of knowledge and understanding to understand or know that the system itself is unfairly biased toward certain ways of knowing (white, Western, Eurocentric, male, etc.) and thus exclusionary of other ways of knowing (be those what they may). That is, Dotson explains that when we look across identity groups, not only do we find a profound lack of “shared epistemic resources” by which people can come to understand things in the same way as one another, but also that the lack extends to the ability to know that that dismal state of affairs is the case at all. This, she refers to as “irreducible” epistemic oppression, which she assigns to the third and most severe order of forms of epistemic oppression, and says that it requires a “third-order change” to the “organizational schemata” of society (i.e., a complete epistemic revolution that removes the old epistemologies and replaces them with new ones) in order to find repair.

    This view is then echoed and amplified, for example, in a lesser-read 2017 paper by the Theorist Alison Bailey. Therein she invokes explicitly that in the neo-Marxist “critical” tradition, which is not to be mistaken for the “critical thinking” tradition of the Western canon, critical thinking itself and that which is seen to produce and legitimize it are part of the “master’s tools” that black feminist Audre Lorde wrote “will never dismantle the master’s house.” Since nobody ever believes me that she really writes this, here’s the quote:

    The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life… the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living.” In this tradition sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly.

    Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions rooted in the neo-Marxian literature on critical theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Here, the critical learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities. Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world. This is the first step toward resisting and transforming social injustices. By interrogating the politics of knowledge-production, this tradition also calls into question the uses of the accepted critical-thinking toolkit to determine epistemic adequacy. To extend Audre Lorde’s classic metaphor, the tools of the critical-thinking tradition (for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity) cannot dismantle the master’s house: they can temporarily beat the master at his own game, but they can never bring about any enduring structural change. They fail because the critical thinker’s toolkit is commonly invoked in particular settings, at particular times to reassert power: those adept with the tools often use them to restore an order that assures their comfort. They can be habitually invoked to defend our epistemic home terrains. (pp. 881–882) .

    Here, the “master’s tools” are explicitly named by Bailey as including soundness and validity of argument, conceptual clarity, and epistemic adequacy (i.e., knowing what you’re talking about) and can easily be extended to science, reason, and rationality, and thus also to conversation and debate. The “master’s house” is the “organizational schemata” laid out by Kristie Dotson as the prevailing knowing system. Her claim is that these tools—essentially all of the liberal ones—cannot dismantle liberal societies from within, which is their goal, because they are the very tools that build and keep building it.

    Bailey’s point is clear: the usual tools by which we identify provisional truths and settle scholarly disagreements are part of the hegemonically dominant system that, by definition, cannot be sufficiently radical to create real revolutionary change (a “third-order” change, as Dotson has it). That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way they deem necessary. The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.

    The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.

    Their analysis would insist that their methods aren’t weak; it’s that the dominant system treats them unfairly. By being forced to participate in the dominant system, they therefore believe, they’re being cheated of the full force of their cause. To them, if we set the legitimization of the system part aside, to engage in scholarly conversation or debate is like a boxer stepping into an MMA match in which kicks, punches, throwing, and grappling are all on the table for the MMA fighter whereas gloved punches are the only thing the boxer is allowed to use, only far worse.

    Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place. Critical Social Justice Theorists genuinely believe getting away from the “master’s tools” is necessary to break the hegemony of the dominant modes of thought. Debate is a no-win for them.

    Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.

    For adherents to Critical Social Justice Theory, then, there’s just no point to engaging in conversation or debate with people with whom they disagree. They reject the premise that such a thing is possible at all, because what is discussed or debated are, if changeable, in some sense matters of opinion. They don’t see the world this way at all, though. “Racism is not a matter of opinion” is, after all, one of their thought-stopping mantras. For them, disagreements across a stratifying axis of social power are a matter of being, experience, reality, and even life and death. These are not matters to be debated; they’re far too important for that.

    Snip.

    Secondly, the organizing principle of their worldview is that two things structure society: discourses and systems of power maintained by discourses. Regarding the systems of power, their underlying belief is genuinely that of the Critical Theorists: society is divided into oppressors versus oppressed, and the oppressors condition the beliefs and culture of society such that neither they nor the oppressed are aware of the realities of their oppression. That is, everyone who isn’t “Woke” to the realities of systemic oppression lives in a form of false consciousness. Members of dominant groups have internalized their dominance by accepting it as normal, natural, earned, and justified and therefore are unaware of the oppression they create. Members of “minoritized” groups have often internalized their oppression by accepting it as normal, natural, and just the way things are and are therefore unaware of the extent of the oppression they suffer or its true sources. In both cases, though in different ways and to different ends, the falsely conscious need to be awakened to a critical consciousness, i.e., become Critical Theorists.

    Adherents to this worldview will not want to have conversations or debate with people who do not possess a critical consciousness because there’s basically no point to doing such a thing. Unless they can wake their debate or conversation partner up to Wokeness on the spot, they’d see it as though they’re talking to zombies who can’t even think for themselves. Unwoke people are stuck thinking in the ways dominant and elite powers in society have socialized them into thinking (you could consider this a kind of conditioning or brainwashing by the very machinations of society and how it thinks).

    Much discussion of Foucault postmodernism snipped.

    The knowledge principle is that knowledge is socially constructed and the result of political processes, and therefore objective truth is unattainable and irrelevant except in that some people make unjustified claims upon having access to it. The political principle is that these unjustified claims create a form of hegemonic dominance that needs to be deconstructed and dismantled through manipulations within the discourses at the level of the meanings of ideas.

    You really do have to understand this like a religious view, very much like a Holy Spirit that is the Word, where the “Word” is the prevailing discourses, and the “Spirit” isn’t really holy: it’s systems of power and attempts at their disruption. Power is viewed to work through all people at all times as a result of the discourses that they accept and participate in, and so participating in conversation or debate with people who uphold the dominant discourses causes that power to work through you as well. That makes you complicit in the dominant discourses, even if you think you reject them, which makes having a conversation with the wrong person tantamount to a sin. This attitude is overwhelmingly present in the critical whiteness literature, which devotes a considerable portion of all of its proliferation to pointing out that white progressives who try to help out are the worst kind of racists because they no longer think that they’re equally significant conduits of the problematic dominant discourses and systems of society.

    Snip.

    Thirdly, adding to this is a theme we draw out significantly in the eighth chapter of Cynical Theories: they believe all disagreement with them to be illegitimate. If we followed from Dotson in the paper named above and another slightly earlier one (2011) about “epistemic violence,” it could be pinned on what she calls “pernicious ignorance.” Robin DiAngelo would call it “white fragility” to disagree. Alison Bailey refers to it as an attempt to preserve one’s privilege under the kind of term George Carlin lived to make fun of: “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback” (four words, twelve syllables, one hyphen). Further, Bailey said all attempts to criticize Critical Social Justice thought, because they come from that “critical thinking” and not the “critical theory” tradition (within which they’d obviously agree), generate “shadow texts” that follow along but don’t truly engage (in the correctly “critical” way; i.e., agreement with her). Barbara Applebaum said similar in her 2010 book, Being White, Being Good, wherein she explains that the only legitimate way to disagree with Critical Social Justice education in the classroom is to ask questions for clarification until one agrees (which, you might notice, isn’t disagreeing at all).

    In general, as mentioned a bit earlier in the essay, if you disagree, you either have false consciousness or the willful intention to oppress, and so your disagreement isn’t genuine. Only disagreement that comes from a Critical Theory perspective would be genuine, but this isn’t actually disagreement with the Woke worldview, only with superficial aspects of how it is playing out. The Woke view genuinely is that unless you agree with the Woke worldview, you haven’t disagreed with the Woke worldview in an authentic way, and therefore your disagreement cannot be legitimate. Read it again: unless you actually agree, you didn’t disagree correctly.

    Remember how shocked Bret Weinstein was at finding that Social Justice Warriors at Evergreen College not only rejected the enlightenment, but the very idea of enlightenment. To them, capitalism, democracy, the rule of law, critical thinking, logic and the scientific method are not just flawed, they are inherently racist systems of oppression that must be destroyed and replaced by Social Justice.

    Social Justice isn’t at war with “oppression” or even “whiteness,” it is at war with the entirety of western civilization.

    Remember my post about Social Justice as sick religion? Here Bradley Campbell expounds upon the religion theme:

    The “snowflake” language fails to capture the moral seriousness of social justice activists. If you understand them mainly as undisciplined and self-absorbed, you’ll expect the movement to fizzle out, but it’s clear that’s not happening, and won’t happen anytime soon. The activists’ seriousness is better captured by critics who see them as adherents of something like a new religion. John McWhorter has written about what he calls the new religion of anti-racism, with its own notions of sin and Judgment Day and its own rituals. For example, anti-racist classes and seminars commonly teach whites to regularly acknowledge their privilege, which McWhorter sees as a “self-standing, totemic act… based on the same justification as… fundamental sinfulness is as a Christian.”

    This is closer to the mark, but the problem with many of these comparisons is that they’re coming from those who have negative views of both the social justice movement and religion. McWhorter says that some of the key anti-racist ideas aren’t very well thought out, but that this is a feature of religion: “It is inherent to a religion that one is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief. Certain questions are not to be asked, or if asked, only politely—and the answer one gets, despite being somewhat half-cocked, is to be accepted as doing the job.” Others may point to the “cancel culture” aspects of the social justice movement and compare it to religious people persecuting heretics, apostates, and unbelievers. This is all fine as it goes, but it is limited to criticism as opposed to analysis, and it overlooks a more fundamental aspect of the social justice movement: that social justice culture is a moral culture, similar in some ways and different in others to other moral cultures. It also overlooks other, more positive ways the movement resembles religious movements.

    In 2014 Jason Manning and I first wrote about the rise of a new moral culture. We called it victimhood culture because among those who embrace it, victimhood comes to act as a kind of moral status. While there are right-wing versions of it, most of the activists embracing this new culture are on the Left, and they see themselves as pursuing social justice. This culture, then, which can also be called social justice culture, is a moral framework concerned primarily with documenting and fighting oppression.

    This new moral culture differs from prior ones, particularly in dealing with conflict. The honor cultures of many traditional societies valued bravery above all else, and in these societies people needed to stand up for themselves, often by engaging in violence, to demonstrate they weren’t cowards and wouldn’t let others take advantage of them or insult them. A duel over an insult, which seems so strange to most of us, made sense in this context. Surely if someone calls me a liar, we might think, our firing guns at one another doesn’t prove I’m not a liar. But what it does prove is that I’m not willing to let such an insult stand without a fight, that I’m willing to risk death to try avenging it. It may not prove I’m honest, but it does demonstrate my bravery, which may be more consequential.

    In the United States and elsewhere, honor culture eventually gave way to dignity culture. It became more important to recognize one’s own and others’ inherent worth, so reputations weren’t so important. People came to believe they should let most insults stand, and that they should rely on the legal system for solving more serious disputes.

    Social justice culture is similar to honor culture in that people might be concerned even with small slights and insults (microaggressions) that would be ignored by people in a dignity culture, but it’s similar to dignity culture in that people often appeal to authorities and other third parties rather than handling the slights themselves. The elevation of one virtue over others—from demonstrating bravery in honor cultures, to recognizing the worth of every individual in dignity cultures, and opposing oppression in social justice cultures—occurs along with different ways of conceiving of and responding to transgressions. It is important to note in this context that people immersed in different moral cultures commonly find each other’s behavior offensive or incomprehensible. And just as those in dignity cultures object to the violence of honor cultures as being foolish and cruel, and just as those in honor cultures object to the avoidance of conflict or the appeal to law in dignity cultures as cowardly and weak, those in dignity cultures sometimes see social justice activists as self-absorbed and childish—snowflakes. What they miss is that their behavior makes sense given their assumptions. That doesn’t mean it’s always sincere—people don’t always have pure motives when they express moral outrage and condemn wrongdoing—but it seems it often is, and it’s probably as sincere as that of any other activist group.

    That the activists are usually sincere doesn’t mean that they’re right. I have been writing for some time about the threats the new culture poses to free speech and due process. But those who are concerned about problems arising from the new culture would do well to understand that these problems don’t come because people just haven’t learned how to be adults, or how to live in the real world. Problems that arise come from the culture’s elevation of social justice concerns above all else and from the interpretation of nearly all human interaction and all social institutions in terms of oppression and victimhood.

    As part of its axiomatic tenets, Social Justice decrees that it cannot be criticized from any viewpoint outside Social Justice. By automatically and schematically rejecting all outside critiques, Social justice is a totalitarian system suffering epistemological closure. Where no outside critique is possible, no change is possible. In decrying every competing system as a system of repression, it becomes a system of totalitarian repression itself, in which every challenge to its own power is illegitimate. As a religion substitute, its axioms are not debatable, but unchanging and unchangeable dogma.

    Like Communism, its totalitarian ancestor, Social Justice decrees that it is the only true path to building utopia on earth. Like Communism, all opposing systems, institutions and viewpoints must be destroyed. Like Communism, those who reject its tenets, or just embrace them too weakly, must be made to renounce their sins, and those who refuse to do so must be destroyed. (“For those outside the Party, nothing. For those inside the Party, everything.”) “If you want to know what the future looks like, imagine everyone in the world forced to denounce themselves in a perpetual struggle session…forever.”

    But there’s one key difference between Communism and Social Justice. Marx cloaked his theory in the language of science as “scientific socialism.” Social Justice Warriors reject the scientific method as a system of oppression. The basis of modern civilization is just another instance of the “master’s tools” to be cast down.

    Social Justice cannot measure an electron’s charge or whether a load-bearing concrete pillar can support a floor’s weight, but only whether those things are racist or not.

    To quote Lindsay again:

    One of the biggest mistakes we keep making as liberals who do value debate, dialogue, conversation, reason, evidence, epistemic adequacy, fairness, civility, charity of argument, and all these other “master’s tools” is that we can expect that advocates of Critical Social Justice also value them. They don’t. Or, we make the mistake that we can possibly pin Critical Social Justice advocates into having to defend their views in debate or conversation. We can’t.

    These principles and values are rejected to their very roots within the Critical Social Justice worldview, and so the request for an advocate to have a debate or conversation with someone who disagrees will, to the degree they have adopted the Critical Social Justice Theoretical ideology/faith, be a complete nonstarter. It’s literally a request to do the exact opposite of everything their ideology instructs with regard to how the world and “systemic oppression” within it operates—to participate in their own oppression and maintain oppression of the people they claim to speak for.

    Social Justice cannot be reasoned with. It can only be isolated, quarantined, fought and destroyed.

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