Some gems from the article.
… We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn. There was James, who studied computer science. Then there was Cameron, who also studied computer science. David and Peter studied computer science, while Luke and Albert studied computer science. As for Mike and Jason, the former studied computer science, whereas the latter studied computer science. Ethan was not unlike Max, in that both studied computer science. Some people studied business, too.
The students’ demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room.
(And if you need to leave to use the bathroom, you’ll get to pass by a massive oil painting of George W. Bush making the Hand of Benediction in front of the wreckage of 9/11, beside a Madonna-figure whose halo glows, I shit you not, with the Coca Cola logo.)
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”
What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.
Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to “the atrocities of the 20th century.” And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Police—sour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to “free and open inquiry.”
If I go to school and take “Forbidden Courses” I BETTER be coming out with necromancy and demon summoning. Otherwise we gonna fight.
Necromancy is a dying art.
Better not fight on the bus; that’s where he’s at his most deadly.
Pour one out for Street Epistemology, I guess. Now I’m wondering if Anthony Magnabosco, the guy who does those Street Epistemology videos for Youtube, is also a chud.
Boghossian deserved to lose his job, though. It’s one thing for scientists — mathematicians, physicists, etc. — to sneer at soft sciences by mocking their lack of empirical rigor; it’s another thing entirely for a non-tenure-tracked philosopher to do it. And Portland State was relatively gentle with him, telling him that he had to take a course on ethics of human experimentation before continuing to publish; he quit himself out of a decent teaching position because he wanted to be a proud crybaby. May he never move back to Oregon.
Richard Hanania, one of the featured speakers mentioned in the article:
Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one’s gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that’s for darn sure.
“I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.”
My goodness, the cringe level. Be carefull y’all, he studied the blade 🤣
How can you not just laugh and leave when earing that.
My first response would be “that’s a rather shite superpower then, innit?”
I’m sorry, even putting aside that he absolutely could not, being able to kill anyone in hand-to-hand combat is extremely useless as far as superpowers go. Like, in what circumstances would you want to do that? You’re going to hit the streets and fight crime like Batman? You’re just gonna get shot mate. Or are you just going to crack the skulls of your 15 coworkers on openspace? Congratulations, you’re now in maxsec prison where you’re gonna act tough until you get shanked by 20 people, since your “superpower” doesn’t include stabbing damage immunity.
Also, anyone with a 10 dollar hammer can kill everyone on a bus.
@Tar_alcaran @V0ldek That’s why you need the good guy with a hammer!
delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy
I thought I was terminally online but clearly I’ve missed something, his what now
They have a website and an instagram page with 100K+ followers but the content of the courses is not specified yet.
Im personally looking forward to a lesson on how to interpret my dreams:
What the fucking fuck?
I haven’t checked but I wouldn’t be surprised if this came from the period when he was taking so many substances it fucked his health
It’s from Maps of Meaning, per the caption, so no this is from his original theory of everything.
Nonetheless, to be perfectly honest, I honestly can’t complain that he put something weird like that in the book as such. What, after all, is actually wrong with it, assuming a certain amount of charity about context relevance? That it’s gross to recount weird sexually charged dreams you had about your grandmother?
For a psychologist in the tradition of Jung, and therefore to a great extent Freud, such material might actually be quite useful! Amongst the worst things therapy culture - and perhaps the whole ideology of post-Freud psychology/iatry/therapy - does is to rehabilitate prudishness about what it is and is not acceptable to talk about in our psychic lives, when liberation from those oppressive norms is precisely the best achievement of those aspects of Freud which remain uncontroversial (not to mention those which are only controversial for bad reasons).
You know the whole thing: “we don’t talk about that wanting to have sex with your mother stuff”, well why on Earth not? Amongst the most obvious things in the world is that people are incredibly weird and complex. Why cave in to propriety and ignore it?
Lots of people have experiences like this, and therefore by definition it’s important to discuss them - non-pathologically - if you want to understand (and improve) people’s psychic life.
Originally I had a longer and more nuanced gut response that was along the lines of: “ok people have weird dreams and whatever, sure, but why would you publish this instead of just talking about it in therapy?” which you have answered more or less
