New Discourses

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 34 Society depends upon the people in it being able to rely upon expectations about how it and the other people in it will function. This requires a sense of what is and isn't reasonable. Some of this is, as the Woke contend, socially constructed, perhaps even partially arbitrary and up for debate. Much of it isn't. Wokeness doesn't agree, however. By having adopted a strict adherence to Critical Theory and the social constructivism of postmodernism, Wokeness rejects the entire idea that there is any such thing as a reasonable person or standard. In place of a sense of what is and isn't reasonable, the Woke ideology sees only one thing, its sole obsession: power. This is a catastrophe for society and the laws upon which a functioning society depends. Join James Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses podcast to learn about the long history of unreason in Wokeness and even its all-out rejection of the notion that anyone or any position at all can be reasonable in any meaningful sense. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 33 Following in the footsteps of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, the University of Texas, Austin, has initiated a campus-wide plan to force diversity, equity, and inclusivity into the administrative operation of the university, particularly in hiring, promotions, recognition, and awards. This is a bold step by the university administration in making the university functionally religious and, more importantly, unmaking the university as an educational institution. Of course, this isn't to pick on UT Austin. Most universities are doing the same thing to themselves now, much to our detriment as a society. So are most companies, schools, churches, and everything else. The ideas are shallow and functionally identical, so even if UT Austin isn't interesting to you, these kinds of plans are likely to be infecting something closer to your life. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay takes this jargon-heavy plan (http://bit.ly/UTAustinDEI) and reads through it, breaking it down so that people outside of the inner circle of UT Austin's diversicracy can make sense of what these plans entail. The short answer is an ideological reworking of the institution to make it into something it never should have been: a seminary to a new totalizing ideology that is taking over our society and poisoning our minds. Join Dr. Lindsay as he reads through this document and breaks down exactly why the requirements it entails amount to creating de facto discrimination, quotas in employment and advancement, and wholesale corruption that is to be enabled by a raft of expensive new equity commissars who add nothing of value to the institution. If UT Austin is something close to your life, this might be especially alarming and informative to you, as it is setting itself on the same path that destroyed The Evergreen State College in 2017. If not, you'll still find much value in the discussion of this document because something approaching a facsimile is likely to be in place or in the works wherever you learn, work, or worship. James's goal in this episode of the podcast is to inform you about what these documents really entail wherever they arise. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 32 Wokeness exists in a crisis of authenticity. This is no surprise since both of its main philosophical predecessors, neo-Marxist Critical Theory and postmodernism, are both their own forms of reaction to a perceived crisis of authenticity in the world. For the postmodernists, the real is remote, inaccessible, and simulated. Meaning is infinitely deferred. Authenticity, which is to say being who you are when you're not attempting to be anyone, is passe and embarrassing, even as we crave it so much that the world itself needs to be done away with and replaced with raw experience. In Critical Theory, nothing is authentic because a consumerist society has already commodified, marketed, and sold it to us as a good life that doesn't exist and controls us. Wokeness inherits all of this cynical legacy and generates inauthentic identities doing inauthentic scholarship to achieve inauthentic political goals. In this sense, authenticity is a form of kryptonite against Wokeness because Wokeness can't abide or manipulate the authentic. Its deconstruction has no power over the truly and comfortably real. But what is authenticity and how can you be more authentic? In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, join James Lindsay for a detailed discussion of the crisis of authenticity at the heart of the Woke project and its predecessors as well as a discussion of what it means to approach authenticity for yourself. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 31 At the heart of communist and communistic thought is faith in a kind of historical trajectory toward utopia that's driven by social alchemy. There are many reasons why this fails in practice, but the simplest thing to say is that communism fails because communism doesn't know how communism will succeed. The fundamental belief driving communists is that once enough people become true believers that the communist utopia lies on the other side of certain social changes, a perfect society will manifest. How? Because they will. The details aren't meant to be known or told; they're meant to be figured out. This is in exact alignment with the historicism in Marx's dialectical materialism: once we get capitalism out of the way, we'll enter a worker-managed system (socialism) that can start figuring out how to make the state redundant to its purposes, at which point a stateless improvement of the same will emerge and the communist utopia (and end of History) will emerge. On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay gives an example of how a contemporary police abolitionist activist has made almost exactly this same argument perfectly explicitly and walks you through how you can spot it for what it is. Join Lindsay for one of his more important discussions. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 30 What is the end-game of the Woke ideology? It's a hard question to answer, mostly because it's hard to tell where it will stop, but a proximate answer to that question is easy and needs to be understood. The immediate goal of the Woke agenda is to turn everything into a Woke organ. That's it. This is more alarming than it may sound, however. You may be Catholic or Protestant, a scientist or a doctor, a rockclimber or a musician, but if the Woke agenda proceeds far enough, you will in time find yourself being a Woke person professing Wokeness in Catholic or Protestant language, or through science and medicine, or in rockclimbing and music. That is, the Woke agenda is to flatten all the variety out of life and make every aspect of life do one thing and one thing only: serve Theory. This means that Wokeness is a totalizing ideology and will lead to totalitarian outcomes unless we reject it and put a stop to its relentless takeover of our society and every aspect of our lives. Join James Lindsay on this latest episode of the New Discourses Podcast to dive more deeply into this alarming truth about Wokeness. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 29 If we are fortunate enough to leave Wokeness and Critical Theory behind us, we need a map. We need to know what a post-Woke world would look like and, more importantly, which values will get us there. In a recent essay (https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/values-post-woke-world/), James Lindsay presented four values he thinks are core to the establishment of a post-Woke world, which can repel Wokeness anywhere they are adopted. These are truth, beauty, liberty (thus responsibility), and merit. Join James in this episode of the New Discourses podcast, wherein he discusses why these are the right values as well as why we should hold the narrow way against other competitors in the space that will not produce results as good, including both the Very Smart "respectability" (blue pill) approach and the relatively hopeless "post-liberal" or "neoreactionary" approach (black pill, mostly). Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 28 The agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko should be a household name throughout the world in roughly the same way that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong are or should be. That is, Lysenko shouldn't be known for his successes, which are none of his legacy, but for his catastrophic failure. He was the agriculturalist of the Soviet Union, first under Stalin, and his ideological biology (Lysenkoism) led directly to the deaths of tens of millions, first in the Soviet Union and then in Maoist China. Lysenkoism implied famine and mass death, and disputing Lysenkoism, despite its catastrophe, meant a trip to the gulag or a bullet in your head. We should be aware of Lysenko because it is crucially important to understand how the ideological perversion of science, especially the biological sciences, can lead to catastrophes. In fact, if we were more aware of Trofim Lysenko and his legacy of death, we might be more cognizant of the threat we're currently stumbling our way into under the banners of "antiracist medicine" and "health equity." These are the dawn of Medical Lysenkoism, which is a tragedy in the making, potentially on a grand scale, and this is already well underway. The threat of Medical Lysenkoism is rapidly growing around us already, and we have to take it seriously and demand it be put to a halt. In this case, Critical Race Theory and its perverse doctrines of "antiracism" and "equity" are being leveraged to transform healthcare away from a science- and patient-oriented endeavor to an activist opportunity to "level the playing field." Further, under the banner of "health equity" and Covid-19, our society's concerning lurch toward medical dictatorship (governed by this new "equitable" Medical Lysenkoism) is becoming the standard throughout our medical schools, hospitals, and research universities. This is a preventable catastrophe in the making. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he reads through a recent essay (https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-race/bram-wispelwey-michelle-morse-antiracist-agenda-medicine) published in Boston Review outlining an advance in the "health equity" agenda wherein even racially preferential care is described as already being implemented and reparations are demanded at a major Boston-area teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard University. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 27 There is a fair amount of criticism of my recent book Cynical Theories (https://amzn.to/3sEJF5X) (written with Helen Pluckrose) out there now, mostly from philosophers who aren't up to the task. It is both fair and correct to say that the book isn't perfect. Given their inability to criticize the book adequately, however, I decided to take matters into my own hands and am discussing the issue at length in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast. Join me to hear what I think of these philosophers' criticisms (not much!) and what a proper criticism of the work would look like (and why the book "falls short" in this way). -James Lindsay Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 26 As most New Discourses fans will know, back in October 2018, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose burst onto the scene with a scandalous expose of Critical Social Justice scholarship within academia. This effort to show the world what was going on in the humanities and (to lesser extent) social sciences research literature was billed the "Grievance Studies Affair" (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/01/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/), and the trio told their story in detail when the Wall Street Journal ended up breaking the story. The expose involved (https://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/project-summary-and-fact-sheet.pdf) their having written 20 academic papers in about 10 months and seeing 7 of those accepted, 4 published, and 1 (about dog sex) having received recognition for excellence in scholarship. A further 7 papers were still under consideration or revision, and it has been assessed that at least 4 of these would probably also have been accepted (and eventually published). Among these papers, one very controversial example rewrote a chapter of Adolf Hitler's infamous book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and was accepted for publication by the feminist social work journal Affilia (title: "Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism," available in full here, https://drive.google.com/file/d/18DoO44m2G5tvJcQaMdau6d8CSrdKDRBf/view). This paper has predictably garnered a great deal of attention and has been the center of much controversy, including recently in an article by the progressive Israeli magazine Haaretz, where Swedish "Hitler expert" Mikael Nilsson recently brought (https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-hitler-hoax-academic-wokeness-culture-war-1.9629759) the issue back up (dated March 21, 2021) two and a half years later. His objective was to discredit the entire Grievance Studies Affair by showing the infamous "Feminist Mein Kampf" paper to have been a fraud (and darling of "right-wing" nonsense). He even makes the argument that the paper rewrites the least bad part of Mein Kampf, which is easily revealed to be horrifically misguided and believable only by removing the relevant context of the chapter. On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay, who helped to write the paper and perpetrate the Grievance Studies Affair, talks about the project and the creation of this particular paper at unprecedented length and in unprecedented detail, revealing Nilssen not to know what he's talking about. If you have ever wondered about the backstory of the creation of the "Feminist Mein Kampf" paper really was, including why its authors did it, you won't want to miss this long-form discussion and rare response to yet another underinformed critic of Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose's work. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 25 In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay continues his abridged reading of Kimberlé Crenshaw's famous (or infamous) paper, "Mapping the Margins," which appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. While not the birthplace of intersectionality, this paper is the first full-throated appeal for its application, not just in the world but also in the movements from which it was born: radical feminism and black liberationism. In part 1 of this series, James read the introduction to the paper, wherein he claims the Woke One Ring was forged to form one model of systemic oppression to rule them all: intersectionality, by which all the radical and civil rights movements were ensnared and brought under the dominion of postmodern neo-Marxist thought. Here, in part 2, James reads through the conclusion of "Mapping the Margins" and illustrates exactly how Crenshaw's ideas will achieve the complete subordination and redirection of all leftist, left-wing, and civil-rights thought. This episode of the New Discourses podcast is the second part of a two-part series reading an abridged version of Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins." You can find Part 1 here: https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/forging-woke-one-ring-kimberle-crenshaws-mapping-margins/ Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.