"AI is creating a crisis of authenticity."

"Like it or not, generative AI is becoming increasingly embedded in the process of seeking information, sharing ideas, and producing images. ...

"But I’m not sold on the narrative that generative AI marks the democratisation of communication, a new creative renaissance, or even a particularly good thing for productivity properly defined. As Neil Postman put it almost thirty years ago: “The question, ‘What will a new technology do?’ is no more important than the question, ‘What will a new technology undo?’” And given that AI is frequently pitched as a replacement for any human speech mediated through a screen, it stands to undo quite a lot. What’s at stake is nothing less than authenticity itself. ... AI is creating a crisis of authenticity.

"Why should we care? Because authenticity is foundational to trust, the thread that ties human relationships together ...

"[R]egardless of [a message's] content, knowing that [the sender] did not engage in the deliberative process of writing makes the message ring hollow: No matter how well-intentioned the messenger, it is not ultimately their message. It’s the seed of a thought filtered through an algorithm developed by a tech company. And you wouldn’t be wrong to feel demoralised about that. ...

"Trust does not simply materialise out of thin air ... It requires trustworthiness. ... [W]e might say that in a high-trust space, a well-adjusted person would presume authenticity unless given good reason not to. Unfortunately, knowing AI use is widespread, rarely disclosed, and often occurs without regard to context, it’s much harder to assume authenticity in online communication. ...

"[J]ust because authenticity is difficult to quantify, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value it at all."

~ Talia Barnes from her article 'You Can’t Trust Anything Anyone Writes'

"The danger to 'the West comes not from a handful of terrorists crossing borders, but from the millions of university graduates crossing from academia into adulthood."

"Globalisation is here and cannot be stopped. With cheap and easy transportation around the globe (unless a country walls itself off--like North Korea--with similar meaning and consequences), the differences in race and culture of 100 years ago are going to melt away.

"Take the worldwide growth of English, and American English in particular. The French reportedly hate the growing use of English words. It cannot be stopped. Take the growth of interracial marriage, unheard of 60 years ago. It cannot be stopped. Neither can interfaith marriages and other 'mixed marriages.' ...

"You may bemoan the loss of national or regional identity, but it cannot be stopped.

"Generally, what goes into the mixing process are the best elements of each culture. Or so it seems to me, and it makes sense: why would people of culture B value the things about [a] culture A that are objectively inferior? ...

"So, to the extent that people feel turned off or threatened by people coming into their country who look different and act differently, that concern is going to fade into the background over the next 20 years.

"Differences over ideas, not foods or dress, are an entirely different matter. The difference between Islamic jihadists and [others] is a matter of literal life and death, not something optional. Even there, globalisation will have a big impact. The ultimate defeat of Islamism will be accomplished by young people in the Islamic countries seeing the rational values of the West. That's unless the West commits suicide---a distinct possibility.

"The oft-noted "moral weakness of the West" has become "God damn America!" [and god damn the West]. The cause is not immigrants; the cause is the (Kantian) ideas taught in our schools and universities.

"The danger to [the West] comes not from a handful of terrorists crossing the border[s], but from the millions of university graduates crossing from academia into [adulthood]. ... "

~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'Immigration—some mostly new thoughts'

"And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley."

"Q: 'So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?'

"A: 'That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

"'The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

"'I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.'

"Q: 'Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, 'Succession' is really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.'

"A: 'There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.

"'Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. ... But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading. ...'

"Q: 'What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?'

"A: 'So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?'"

~ from an interview with Henry Oliver on developing literary taste in an age of TV binge-watching and dumbed-down mass culture: 'How to Be a Serious Reader'

Yes, let's keep piling on Anne Salmond.

"Salmond claims to have been guided by a list that reads like a Who's Who in 

Postmodernity... What she does not discuss is whether these thinkers are sound guides."

Anne Salmond, who recently called for thinkers to engage with open rather than closed minds—arguing that "other cultures may have insights that elude us" —was recently called out by Dane Giraud for the very same reason: specifically, for ignoring the insights of Enlightenment culture. The only position that actively suppresses inquiry, pointed out Giraud, is her own. "What is more antithetical to free thought'" he asked rhetorically, "than declaring whole categories of knowledge off-limits to criticism because they belong to the wrong culture."

Salmond, of course, has form. Her own favourite cultural whipping person is Western. Her writing, said Michael King of her 2003 book Two Worlds, gives "a strong impression that, rather than attempting to represent both cultures dispassionately, Salmond [is] straining to case every feature of Māori behaviour in a favourable light and many features of European in an unfavourable one.” 

But in doing so, she fails to learn there either. Reviewing Salmond's work, historian and former Waitangi Tribunal director Buddy Mikaere reckons Salmond's work "turns  our tipuna into cardboard caricatures." Rather than learning deeply from other cultures, he says, she offers only a "one-dimensional characterisation." For her and several other Pākeha historians, he says, "Māori [are] invariably depicted as deeply spiritual beings who only ever acted on the basis of high-minded principles. Pākehā, on the other hand, [are] mostly unprincipled rogues or fools whose behaviour was always motivated by racial arrogance, greed and self-interest."

Such is the accusation, it will be remembered, Salmond throws at the Pākehas of the Free Speech Union. It apparently never gets old.

It begins to look as if Salmond is unable to learn much from either of the Two Worlds of which she writes.

What also never gets old is re-reading the demolition of Salmond's work by the grand old man of New Zealand history Peter Munz, who destroyed her whole platform of post-modern posturing and epistemic duplicity in his 1994 review of her first major book. In her work she is guilty, he says, of not just "disinformation, but of actual misrepresentation."

Salmond claims to have been "guided by 'Heidegger, Foucault, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Habermas, [Mary] Hesse, Derrida, Eco and others.' ... [a] list [that] reads like a Who's Who in Postmodernity ...  all of whom would have helped to confirm her in her prejudices and methods."

What she does not discuss ... [is] whether [these thinkers] are sound guides. It appears that she is under the impression that these postmodern thinkers have solved the problem as to how different systems of knowledge or belief are related or, rather, not related to one another. Could it be that she is simply ignorant of the fact that there is much modern thought which rejects these facile, politically motivated doctrines of Foucault and Derrida, of Eco and Ricoeur? If she takes her stand with these people, she ought, to say the least, have produced some evidence that she has also examined the counter-arguments and, perhaps, found them wanting. But as things stand, she appears simply as an  uncritical camp-follower — which is a poor show for a professional anthropologist.

Furthermore, 

the explanations of the differences in systems of knowledge that these thinkers provide should not, I trust, be considered final. In the pre-postmodern world of good sense, belief or knowledge systems are distinguished according to whether they are true or false. ... What is really at issue and what she is trying hard to disguise by her way of constructing the past, is the brute reality of cultural evolution. ... 

[I]nstead of jumping on the postmodern bandwagon which is nothing more than a belated overreaction to the Victorian age, it is time scholars like Salmond caught up with modern thought and revised their view of evolution.

The limitations of the early mind are the result of isolation and of absence of the kind of contact which would expose beliefs and taboos to criticism. Societies and cultures, which for demographic and political reasons are exposed to contact with others, are more likely to question their own traditions, change their taboos and develop eventually a more universal system of knowledge — that is, beliefs which are more than validations or legitimizations of their own parochial cultures. In a nutshell, this is the heart of cultural evolution.

An evolution — a progress — only made possible by being open to new ideas. Says Munz:

Darwin or no Darwin, we are all descended from black Eve, and every single culture which has ever existed is a departure from the culture of black Eve, whoever she was. [I am using the notion 'black Eve' metaphorically to indicate that all existing cultures are descended or transmuted from a common stock.] ...

I would suggest ...  that one can rank the distance of societies from black Eve according to their exclusiveness. The earliest societies were totally exclusive and would not admit people other than those who belonged to their descent group. Next came societies which would admit people through marriage; and at the other end of the scale, farthest removed from black Eve, there are societies which potentially include anybody who wants to be included. Ranking in these terms is completely neutral and value-free. All it says is that while one cannot 'become' a Maori, one can 'become' a New Zealander, and that, for that reason, there is a structural difference between these two kinds of societies, and that that difference defines the distance of these societies from black Eve and that the actually exclusive structures are earlier than the potentially inclusive structures. Since this criterion is neutral, there can be no question of 'progress', only of progression. ...

[W]hatever criteria one likes to choose, the distances from black Eve can be ascertained because evolution, including cultural evolution, is a reality of life. 

If one wants to understand the coming together of two different cultures, as Salmond does, one must take into account, as Salmond does not, the different distances they have moved away from the earlier forms. Salmond has explicitly rejected evolution. 'Contemporary literature on traditional thought is still bedevilled", she writes, 'with implicit sometimes explicit evolutionism.' If she had her way, it would soon cease to be so bedevilled! I suppose she rejects cultural evolution in the face of overwhelming evidence because by making all cultures more or less equal she thinks she can heal wounds and pour oil on troubled waters and be 'politically correct'. But in the long run, there is no point in burying one's head in the sand: a distortion of reality brings about its own nemesis even if one does not quite yet know what shape that nemesis will take.

Can one say 'Ouch!'? 

"Why Secularists Calling for a Christian Revival Are Wrong"

"Many readers will be well aware of the growing cultural narrative that what we need right now is a revival of Christianity. ... [What's] puzzling is the number of atheists and skeptics who have increasingly taken this position. ...

"Despite their still not believing Christianity to be true, they nevertheless think greater adherence to it has the potential to fix, or at least ameliorate, societal problems. Common arguments for this position are, I would argue, based on existential angst, historical revisionism, and a simple failure to understand human psychology. ...

"A common claim is that humans have a deep psychological need for religion—a Godshaped hole crying out to be filled. Related to this is the idea that Christianity is somehow inherently benign and provides a defense against far worse ideologies, particularly wokeness and Islam. Some argue that Christianity brings structure, order, a unifying narrative, and a sense of the common good that can reduce societal and political polarization. Others claim that all the positive things we value in society—science, reason, liberty, and democracy— are derived from and reliant on Christian values.

"These arguments largely ignore history and are based on an idealistic concept of human psychology. ...

"Atheists and skeptics who want to revitalise Christianity as a shared narrative and social glue are misguided. Their case rests on anxiety, revisionist history, and nostalgia for a culture that never existed. ...

"Christianity may feel benign today, but this is because it has been watered down and constrained by secular, liberal principles. Its authoritarian tendencies, like those of any proselytising faith that promises salvation or damnation, are still inherent within it and would be particularly likely to be activated were it to resurge into a culture already experiencing an alarming rise in radical and authoritarian ideological movements. ...

"Religiosity may be a manifestation of innate human tendencies heightened in times of existential anxiety, but religion cannot resolve the material causes of that anxiety. Atheists and skeptics who flirt with pro-Christian arguments are right to fear militant Islamism and woke authoritarianism, but wrong to imagine that a return to Christianity will protect them. The real safeguard is not mass commitment to any orthodoxy, but a principled commitment to secular liberalism. Rather than replacing one orthodoxy with another, we should strengthen those cultural and political frameworks that allow us to live together without coercion. ...

"I urge skeptics to recognise themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment and not to try to resurrect Christianity, but to rekindle confidence in the liberal tradition that made modern Western civilisation possible: a tradition that values evidence, reason, pluralism, and the rights of individuals."

~ Helen Pluckrose from her article 'Why Secularists Calling for a Christian Revival Are Wrong'

"Israel surrendered"

 

"If you've seen my 'Why I Stand With Israel' video, you would know that I really wasn't interested in talking about things outside of the US when I first started making content. But that changed on October 7th. ... 

"So last week was the 2-year anniversary of October 7th. And it's crazy to think that 2 years have gone by because I don't feel really any better about the state of the world right now. Hamas killed so many of the hostages and hundreds of Israeli soldiers have died in battle since that day. And Hamas is still using innocent people, using children as human shields. They are publicly executing dissenters and promising that they're going to continue attacking Israel. 

"And then there's the West Bank. People talk about the West Bank as if it's any better than Gaza. As if the Palestinian Authority hasn't allowed so many terrorist groups to just flourish under their control. ... 

"And still, with all of this going on, people are pretending that Israel is the villain in this conflict. ...

"So, all this being said, I was very, very disappointed to see that ... President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu proposed another ceasefire deal to Hamas. People are trying to negotiate with jihadists again. Like they haven't tried to do that so many times during this conflict. I mean, we in America keep saying that we don't negotiate with terrorists, but apparently we do. 

"This plan that Trump and Netanyahu proposed has 20 points.... I think this is a very terrible plan. To even contemplate granting amnesty to the people responsible for October 7th is disgusting. It is such an insult to the victims of that day. It is an insult to the soldiers who died in this battle. It is an insult to justice. 

"I mean, this is essentially a surrender. Offering Gaza and the West Bank an independent state is admitting defeat because everyone knows that that is not actually going to solve this problem. 

"[I]t baffles me how many people are still pretending that this conflict is about land. I don't understand why there is still this fantasy that if Israel just gave up enough territory, if they formally recognised a Palestinian state, if they loosened their military presence at their borders, there would just be peace and this conflict would end. Because the two-state solution is not a new idea.  ... 

"Despite decades of negotiations, concessions, and proposals, every offer for a Palestinian state has been rejected and met with violence because they do not want a state. ... 

"This is not a dispute over borders or state recognition. This is a matter of ideology. What Israel is fighting against is the idea that they shouldn't exist as a state at all.... 

"Again, all we have to do is look at Gaza post-2005. They were essentially their own state. They had their own government. Israel was gone. And instead of building infrastructure and being productive, they decided to build rockets and commit October 7th. 

"And it's not like Hamas hid their intentions before October 7th. Their founding charter openly talks about how much they want to kill the Jews in Israel. After they started this war, Hamas paraded the bodies of innocent, murdered Israelis through the streets as people cheered. And their leaders promised to repeat the attack of October 7th over and over again until Israel is destroyed. 

"Now, let me be very clear here because a lot of people think that the issue is just Hamas and that if Israel was to get rid of Hamas that would end everything. But Hamas won the election for a reason. These ideas about destroying Israel are not fringe. They are mainstream culture in Gaza. In Gaza, the anti-Israeli indoctrination is so embedded in daily life. Children's television shows teach kids that they need to slaughter Jews. School curricula completely deny the existence of Israel and glorify martyrdom. Military-style youth camps train young boys to kill Jews from a young age. And public rallies they hold in the streets celebrate martyrs who blew up buses or stabbed Israeli civilians. 

"Yes, Hamas is one of the main issues and one of the main obstacles to peace, but there's not going to be peace if Israel gets rid of Hamas and the citizens of Gaza just rally around another terrorist group to take their place once they're gone. 

"Right now, Gaza is not very happy with Hamas. And a lot of people see this as this really great positive thing that we should be celebrating. But being angry at Hamas because they messed up Gaza is not the same thing as being angry at Hamas because they slaughtered innocent people and attacked a peaceful neighbour that they realise they shouldn't be attacking anymore. 

"So, we'll see exactly what happens because right now it's kind of unclear where the Gazans stand. But most likely the reason that the Gazans are not happy with Hamas is because Hamas was not as effective at destroying Israel as they would have wanted. ...

"[And] support for Hamas skyrocketed in the West Bank after October 7th because the people of the West Bank don't see the Palestinian Authority as effective enough at destroying Israel. So all of this to say there is absolutely no way that Israel can give full independence to Gaza and the West Bank and expect there to be peace. It will lead to more slaughter. It will be a repeat of what happened when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005....

"A lot of people have pushed back and have said, 'Look, all we want are the hostages back, and if Hamas breaks any of their agreements, then Israel will just continue to defend itself and they'll have the full support of the US. So what's the problem here?" Here's the thing. If I thought that this was true, if I thought that the plan was to get the hostages out, and then all bets are off, Israel is going to finish what it started, finish getting rid of jihadism in the area. I would be so on board with this plan. I am so for lying to Hamas to get the hostages back and then attacking them again. But I am almost 100% certain that that is not what is going to happen. And the issue here, like the real issue is that Trump is involved in this deal. ...

"Trump does not care about Israel. I mean, Trump really doesn't care about most things. The thing that Trump cares about is feeling good in the moment. ... his policy decisions are entirely based on who's going to make him feel good in the moment. Right now, Trump likes Israel because Netanyahu is being very nice to him. ... [But] He would drop Israel in a heartbeat. ...

"Trump's whole thing isn't about doing what's right. It's not about recognising the facts and acting accordingly. Trump cares about who's going to suck up to him the most. 

"Having someone like that who is so unpredictable as part of this deal means that his support for Israel is unpredictable. He might say that he supports Israel one day and then full support the next. I mean even when it's come to Israel he has gone so back and forth with his support. When he was elected into office, he said that by his inauguration, all of the hostages needed to be released or else he was going to let all hell break loose on the Middle East. And that did not happen. Then in February, he made a similar threat saying all of the hostages needed to be released by a certain day or else he was going to just let Israel do what they needed to do and support them fully in destroying Hamas. And again, that did not happen. Even with this deal now, Trump threatened this 72-hour deadline on Hamas and they just blew right through it and nothing happened. ... 

"He bullied Netanyahu into accepting this deal. Like Netanyahu has been so public with the fact that he does not want to allow the Palestinian Authority anywhere near this new Palestinian government. 

"So long story short, people are pretending. They are pretending that if Gaza or West Bank attacks Israel, Trump is going to be there to help them and Israel cannot rely on Trump. .... 

"I so understand wanting to get the hostages back, especially because we know that some of them are alive. 

"I know that their families and their friends and just normal Israeli civilians want them back. 

"I know that their loved ones and their friends and really just the average Israeli civilian or even just people with a heart want them back because we value human life. 

"And I cannot imagine what they have had to experience being tortured for 2 years in captivity in Gaza. 

"This is not how you do that. This is not how you get them back. 

"We've seen what happens with these 'hostage exchanges,' right? We've seen what happens when hostages are exchanged for prisoners. They're going to release 2,000 prisoners from Israeli prisons. Just a reminder, Sinwar, one of the masterminds behind October 7th, was released in a hostage exchange. 

"And let's be real about what happened. pulling out of Gaza, participating in this exchange, relying on these other countries to support and defend Israel, like that's just going to cause more deaths. It's going to cause more October 7ths like Hamas has promised. And unfortunately, when that happens, I keep saying this, but the world is not going to stand by Israel.... 

"So for Israel to survive, they are going to have to go it alone right now and for the foreseeable future. Which means they are probably going to have to abandon all of these deals that they have made with the US, with these UN, European countries and with all of these Arab countries because they are not going to stand by Israel when, not even if, when Gaza and the West Bank attack again. 

"But I think Israeli leadership has shown that they are not willing to do that. ... it seems right now like Netanyahu and the Israeli government are more worried about international approval than they are about saving the lives of their citizens. So, Israel really just needs to find the strength to do what needs to be done to destroy this terrorist threat, to destroy the infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank that allows for these attacks to happen and to destroy the bloodthirsty anti-semitic culture that is thriving there. But they cannot do that if they are still pretending that the two-state solution is going to solve this problem. 

"They can't do that if they are still pretending that Hamas will willingly demilitarise and accept Israel as a state. They cannot do that if they are pretending that they have allies in countries that do not care about Israeli safety. But that is what needs to happen here. 

"So I really just don't think this conflict is going to end anytime soon."

~ Kiyah Willis [hat tip Craig Biddle]

"That’s how Netflix erases Citizen Kane and Casablanca. It can’t deny the greatness of these films. But it can act as if they never happened."

"The Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web. 

• Everything on YouTube is happening right now!
• Everything on Netflix is happening right now!
• Everything on Spotify is happening right now!

"Of course, this is an illusion. Just compare these platforms with libraries and archives and other repositories of history. The contrast is extreme.

"When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books. The same is true of the Louvre and other great art museums. A visit to an Ivy League campus conveys the same intense feeling, if only via the architecture.

"You feel the weight of the past. We are building on a foundation created by previous generations—and with a responsibility to future ones.

"The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past. You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past.

"And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

"That’s how Netflix erases 'Citizen Kane' and 'Casablanca.' It can’t deny the greatness of these films. It can’t remove their artistry, even by the smallest iota.

"But it can act as if they never happened."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased? (They call it the "Greatest Generation"—so why is its art disappearing?)'

"The single biggest reason why social media is now a dead-end for musicians is that people can’t remember the names of artists or the titles of songs they like."

"The single biggest reason why social media is now a dead-end for musicians is that people can’t remember the names of artists or the titles of songs they like. ...

"Many will blame GenZ for this disturbing passivity. And even the youngsters admit that the music they hear on TikTok and Instagram is mostly chosen by algorithm, not their own active engagement. But social media platforms are driving these behaviour patterns—and are the real root cause of our threatened culture.

"These platforms aim to control behaviour with their algorithms. They encourage passivity. This is all by design. ...

"In a sane universe, the major record labels would fight against this anonymity and ambivalence. But, instead, they have embraced TikTok—assuming that it will create the next generation of superstar artists.

"I fretted about that in a blistering 2022 article entitled “Record Labels Dig Their Own Grave. And the Shovel is Called TikTok.” I wonder if they have figured that out yet.

"I fear they might still be digging."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'Listeners Can't Remember the Names of Their Favorite Songs and Artists'

Crackers

 

"And while you’re at it, stop worrying about logos and retail decor. That’s a postmodern sickness, and a total waste of time. The first step in a healthy lifetyle is ignoring anything that comes out of the advertising or marketing world."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'We've Reached the Sad Cracker Barrel Stage of Cultural Evolution'

"It’s not really about te reo, tikanga, or even Māori. It’s about power."

 

"It’s not really about the words.

"That so many Kiwis care about [the wording on a passport] shows this is a symptom of a much bigger problem. ... a microcosm of the slow-burning cultural tension that has been building in New Zealand for years. ...

"What began as a well-meaning effort to honour Māori language and culture has, in the hands of our cultural elites, become a tool for ideological conformity and social stratification.

"It’s not really about te reo, tikanga, or even Māori. It’s about power. ... They get to be the priest class. They can sneer at the plumber in Palmerston North who doesn’t want his kids doing karakia at school, and tell themselves they’re not just smarter, but better. ... 

"Today, we’re swimming in a sea of te ao Māori frameworks, mandatory karakia in secular spaces, and public servants scrambling to prove their cultural credentials rather than deliver basic services. The line between recognising Māori as tangata whenua and enforcing a cultural ideology across every aspect of national life has become increasingly blurry and people have noticed.

"I am wound up that we’ve arrived at a place where people can’t distinguish between cultural recognition and cultural imposition. Where using Māori names is no longer about embracing heritage, it’s about enforcing allegiance."

~ Ani O'Brien from her post 'It's just a passport cover... except it's not'

What happened to Quiet?

 

"All our quiet spaces are getting noisier.

“When did museums stop being quiet spaces?” complains a Reddito ....

"Some museums even encourage the din. They tell families to bring their children—and get as noisy as possible. ...

"I now miss ... shushing librarians. Libraries are no longer quiet places. They’re as noisy as the pub after a football match [at which the crowd are noisily exhorted to make noise whenever a game's pause might otherwise allow them to think]....

"People go to libraries to study and read—so it really ought to be a quiet place. ... Once inside, you had access to a sacred inner sanctum of knowledge and learning. Something like this is even better than the Batcave. ... 

[Now however] books are removed, and replaced with coffee bars and spaces for socializing. In case people don’t get the message, librarians now put up signs discouraging quiet study. ...

"But... if we lose libraries as the last public space for quiet reading and reflection, what can replace it? ...

"Why is this happening. ... a theory: 'This all got worse after the pandemic. People spent months in isolation, and when they returned to public spaces, they had forgotten the basic rules of polite behaviour in these communal settings.' 

"This rudeness feeds on itself. ... So violations of quiet spaces after the pandemic quickly escalate. And once we enter on this vicious cycle, the silence never returns."

 ~ Ted Goia from his post 'Why Are Quiet Spaces Disappearing

"The emergence of Ngāti Pākehā has become a feature of modern Aotearoa."

"The emergence of Ngāti Pākehā – that tribe of pale Kiwi with their pounamu lanyards and pained expressions – has become a feature of modern Aotearoa.
    "It is a harmless pantomime, as they cloak themselves in the culturally appropriated korowai of perpetual grievance and benefit from the Kiwi reluctance to cause unnecessary offence....
    "If half of the world’s plumbers were lost in the Rapture, we’d notice. If ninety percent of sociologists vanished who would report them missing? To which, these recent graduates find themselves competing with their equally educated peers for jobs that, a decade past, a Labrador with a good attitude could have secured.
    "This, for the entitled offspring of the muddling classes, is a shocking realisation. They are not important. They are not special. They are not, in truth, entitled to anything more than their inheritance which, thanks to their parents’ regimen of yoga and boiled legumes, is slowly receding along with their own hairlines."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'What being ‘woke’ may really mean'

"There is a constant refusal to admit that the West is founded on the principle of individual rights."

"There is a constant refusal to admit that the West is founded on the principle of individual rights. Individualism. That Each individual ... is free.
    "This issue is always omitted.
    "It is Replaced with democracy.
    "It is Replaced with love of life.
    "It is Replaced with <fill the blank>
    "Is it constantly omitted because of evasion or because of ignorance?
    "I believe it is omitted because of evasion. Individualism requires checking the moral code one grew up with."

~ Felipe Lapyda from his post 'The Evasion that is Destroying America'

"If you’re going to issue a cultural call to arms, it helps to have an idea what 'our own culture' actually means."

"If you’re going to issue a cultural call to arms, it helps to have an idea what 'our own culture' actually means. Reform and the Conservatives only know what they are rejecting: Islam and Europe. As for Labour, when Lisa Nandy became culture secretary a year ago, she pledged to transform Britain into a 'self-confident' country, one where everyone can 'see themselves in the stories we tell.' On the question of what that national story is, however, she was tellingly silent. ...

"Our culture has been impoverished. There are many culprits here. Woke traduces hundreds of years of history as tainted with criminality, leading to swathes of our national story, in all its gore and glory, being lost to sight. ...

"When I asked a young Briton to summarise the dominant culture among his generation, he replied, 'an international version of American culture that can be found anywhere.' The Right demands that immigrants 'integrate' — and rightly so — but if we are not careful there will be nothing left to integrate into. ...

"[T]he cultural emergency is real. 2012 is an age ago. The Queen is dead and Bond is on gardening leave. Society has been further weakened by rancorous lunges for power by aggrieved minorities, whether ethnic, sexual or religious, and the furious reaction of their opponents. ...

"Tell the story of this country, warts and all. But tell it. Tell it and tell it again until we see ourselves in it."

~ Christopher de Bellaigue from his post 'Britain can’t tell its national story' [Q: Can we?]

"New Zealand was supposed to be a secular democracy...."

"New Zealand was supposed to be a secular democracy. But blink, and suddenly we’re living in a tax-funded theocracy built on ghost stories and cosmic real estate claims. Let’s say it flat-out: this country is being governed, influenced, and guilt-tripped by a belief system that no one’s allowed to call a religion — because it’s labeled 'culture.' ...

"We don’t call it [religion], though — because we’re too polite, too scared, or too indoctrinated. ...

"Try this on for size ... a public holiday based on stellar necromancy ... teaching [children] about invisible energies called wairua and mauri ... legal rights, your property, your voice — they all bend to concepts like mana whenua ...

"We are living in a soft theocracy, where only one faith system is state-approved — the one cloaked in carvings and cultural immunity. Criticise it and you’re not debating — you’re blaspheming. ...

"Let’s be painfully clear: this isn’t about Māori culture. Culture is fine. Culture is beautiful. Culture can be danced, sung, and honored.

"But religion disguised as culture, used as a bludgeon against democracy, enforced through law and funded by your wallet? That’s not beautiful. That’s dangerous. ...

"Let’s rip the spiritual scaffolding out of our lawbooks, drop the theological cosplay, and build a country where no one’s ghost gets to overrule your rights.

"Because freedom doesn’t float in the stars.
"It lives down here — under your feet.
"And it's time we fought for it."

~ John Robertson from his post 'New Zealand’s Holy Empire of Make-Believe'

"Race-based policy is not just unsustainable. It is immoral."

"Race-based funding is racist. A statement so obviously true that it ought to be stitched onto the curtains of the Beehive and should be self-evident to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. ...

"Yet... [t]his fetish for ethnic exceptionalism has become the most expensive fiction in New Zealand’s policy landscape. The central myth - that Māori are uniquely deprived and therefore must be uniquely subsidised - collapses under the slightest statistical scrutiny. But facts, regrettably, are of little use to those whose salaries depend on ignoring them.

"The Māori economy now exceeds $70 billion. That is not a typo. Seventy billion dollars, according to BERL. Māori businesses thrive in agriculture, fisheries, energy, tourism, construction - you name it. We are not talking about a struggling underclass. We are talking about a sovereign economic force with the political influence of a Middle Eastern oil bloc. And yet, astonishingly, we are still expected to believe that Māori are victims — infantilised, eternally fragile, and unable to function without a phalanx of publicly funded 'navigators,' 'equity officers,' and 'tikanga consultants' to shepherd them through modernity.

"This narrative is insulting, inaccurate, and intolerably expensive.

"Consider life expectancy. In 2002, the average Māori lifespan hovered around 68 years. As of 2022, it stands at 74.3. That’s an increase of more than six years in two decades. Māori smoking rates have halved since 2006. Educational attainment among young Māori has risen steadily. Tertiary enrolments are at record highs. And in urban areas, Māori household incomes are now statistically indistinguishable from the Pākehā average.

"So where, precisely, was the need for a separate Māori Health Authority? ... [for o]ur state schools [to] have become temples of cultural appeasement ... [for] 'Māori housing strategies] that will [allegedly] solve intergenerational poverty [but simply mean] priority access for iwi developers and whānau collectives ...

"Māori make up 51% of our prison population. We are told this is a result of systemic racism. No - it is a result of systemic dysfunction. ... race-based funding enables this dysfunction. It reinforces dependency. It signals that failure will be rewarded, not rectified ...

"None of this is a call to ignore Māori disadvantage. It is a call to address it with honesty, rigour, and standards. The previous model did precisely the opposite. It flattered tribal elites, funded unaccountable bureaucracies, and delivered nothing but resentment and division.

"So dismantle the rest. ...

"Let the iwi aristocracy, so fond of preaching commercial wisdom, compete on a level playing field in the free market. Let them earn their fortunes without the insulation of state patronage.

"This romanticised vision of Māori as an eternally wounded, noble caste is not merely ahistorical. It is politically corrosive. It distorts justice, misallocates resources, and entrenches mediocrity. ...
New Zealand must decide: do we believe in equality under the law or cultural exceptionalism? One cannot have both.

"Race-based policy is not just unsustainable. It is immoral. And if the National Party had any spine, it would say so."

~ Tony Vaughn from his post 'Racial Romanticism Is Not Policy - The Cost of Coddling a Myth'

When the future was something to look forward to

"Progress used to be glamorous. For the first two thirds of the twentieth-century, the terms modern, future, and world of tomorrow shimmered with promise.... In the twentieth-century, ‘the future’ was a glamorous concept.
    "Joan Kron, a journalist and filmmaker born in 1928, recalls sitting on the floor as a little girl, cutting out pictures of ever more streamlined cars from newspaper ads. ‘I was fascinated with car design, these modern cars’, she says. ‘Industrial design was very much on our minds. It wasn’t just to look at. It was bringing us the future.’

"When Disneyland opened in 1955, Tomorrowland embodied the promise of progress. A plaque at the entrance announced ‘a vista into a world of wondrous ideas, signifying man’s achievements . . . a step into the future, with predictions of constructive things to come.’
    "Back then, the Year 2000 and the Twenty-first-century were glamorous destinations. Newspaper features and TV documentaries described a future filled with barely imaginable wonders. ...

"As a child, I felt lucky to be born in 1960. I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my life in the magical new century. By the time I was a teenager, however, the spell had broken. The once-enticing future morphed into a place of pollution, overcrowding, and ugliness. Limits replaced expansiveness. Glamour became horror. Progress seemed like a lie.
    "Much has been written about how and why culture and policy repudiated the visions of material progress that animated the first half of the twentieth-century ... Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.
    "But the most common explanations for the anti-Promethean backlash fall short. It’s true but incomplete to blame the environmental consciousness that spread in the late sixties. Rising living standards undoubtedly led people to value a pristine environment more highly. But environmental concerns didn’t have to take an anti-Promethean turn. They might have led instead to the expansion of nuclear power or the building of solar energy satellites. Cleaning up smoggy skies and polluted rivers could have been a techno-optimist enterprise. It certainly didn’t require curtailing space exploration. Eco-pessimism itself needs a fuller explanation...."

~ Virginia Postrel from her article 'The world of tomorrow'

 

Young men are resenting being resented

 

"Young men seem to be motivated, not so much by a specific issue, but by their resentment of the current culture. If true, the upcoming elections will express the 'Breitbart Doctrine,' named after the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart. This doctrine states 'politics is downstream from culture.' To change the politics of a society, you must change its culture because politics originates from culture which, in turn, originates from the values of individuals who constitute society. Simply stated, if a person’s values and culture are transformed, his politics transforms accordingly.
    "The culture surrounding young men is dramatically different from that of their fathers, and the change has not been kind. The Brookings Institute notes, 'Young men increasingly feel as though they have been experiencing discrimination.' For decades now, prominent voices of political correctness, which is now called social justice, have blamed men as a gender class for a long slate of social wrongs. And, for young men, the past few decades constitute all of their lives. This means they have heard about their collective guilt since birth, and it would be natural for them to feel resentful for being castigated as a class for social wrongs. Such young men are reportedly turning to Donald Trump as a symbol of more traditional and proud manhood. ... [!]"

   "Women need healthy and well-adjusted men to be life partners, loving family members, friends, good neighbours, co-workers, and the peaceful strangers you pass on the street. The last thing women need is to live beside a generation of resentful men who act on their resentment, especially if the feeling is justified."

~ Wendy McElroy from her post 'Ignore The New Power Demographic at Your Own Risk: Young Male Voters'

"No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilisation, nor even as much."

 

Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his 

wife and collaborator Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, 

Jacques-Louis David (1788)

"The charges against Western civilisation involve slavery, imperialism, and genocide. No doubt, some Westerners and Western regimes have committed such atrocities.
    "The transatlantic slave trade conducted by some Westerners between Africa and the New World was a horror. ... Regarding European imperialism, the cruelty toward indigenous peoples is best illustrated by ... King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo ... [who] hired an army of mercenaries to enslave the native population, demanded that the enslaved meet high quotas for rubber production and ivory harvesting, had his mercenaries chop off the hands of those who fell short, and had them kill recalcitrant natives and burn their villages. ...
    "All these injustices occurred, and objectivity requires acknowledgment of this fact. But we should identify the full truth—which raises several questions about the anti-Western narrative. ...
    "The claim that European and American powers attempted genocide in the New World is worse than either a severe exaggeration or a gross distortion of facts: It is an outright lie. ... To the extent that slavery has been abolished, the credit lies with the abolitionism developed in the West, ending slavery in its own territories and then applying pressure on non-Western nations to shut down the evil practice. ...
    "Even ... a brief survey of history ... is more than enough to raise the question: Why single out white Westerners for the most virulent moral abuse? But we still have not mentioned the major truth overlooked by ... fallacious arguments against the West. .. We refer, of course, to the enormous life-giving achievements of Western civilisation—life-giving for human beings all over the world. ... I’ll merely provide a few examples of these achievements.

• Growing sufficient food is and has long been a terrible problem throughout the non-industrialised world. .... The Green Revolution helped people grow vastly increased supplies of food ... saving upwards of one billion lives ...
• Disease prevention and cure is another critical field for human life in which Western researchers have excelled. [Antoine Lavoisier's pioneering chemistry; Maurice Hillman's and Salk & Sabin's vaccines; Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease; Joseph Lister's call for antiseptic surgery; Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin ... ] How many human lives around the world did these giants of medicine save? An incalculable number. 
• And Aristotle... the first great biologist of whom we know. His pathbreaking work in the life sciences laid the foundation for subsequent medical advances. Above all, Aristotle married his revolutionary work in logic to his commitment to painstaking empirical research, emphasising that knowledge is gained by logical, noncontradictory thinking about observed facts. He, more than anyone, taught humanity how to think, making progress possible in every field of cognition.
• And no discussion of Western science, no matter how brief, could omit mention of several of the greatest minds of history—Galileo, Newton, and Darwin ...
• In literature, from Homer and Sappho through Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters to Ayn Rand in the 20th century ... In music, the West has produced such giants as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Verdi, Dvořák, and Puccini. Michelangelo was a towering sculptor, Rembrandt and Vermeer superlative painters, and Leonardo an all-round genius. Film ... has seen such brilliant directors ... as Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Steven Spielberg, and Clint Eastwood, as well as a host of talented actors and actresses.

"Even a brief recounting of Western genius must cite John Locke and the birth of the moral principle of individual rights in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, leading to ... an Industrial Revolution, and stupendous wealth creation and prosperity across vast swathes of the globe ... Starting in Britain, the principle of individual rights led, for the first time in history, to an abolitionist movement that succeeded, to a significant degree, in wiping out the age-old, worldwide scourge of human slavery. Slavery was ubiquitous. Abolitionism was Western.
    "Western civilisation is and often has been profoundly supportive of human life, not because its progenitors have largely been white but because of its fundamental, driving force: reason and all its fruits—freedom, philosophy, science, technology, business, the arts, and other such life-serving values. Skin colour is irrelevant to moral judgment, but reason, individual rights, political-economic liberty, technology and industrialisation—these are vitally important. Western nations export many intellectual and material values to non-Western countries. But its greatest export is a culture of reason and a politics of individual rights; for, to the extent they are adopted, these facilitate immensely life-giving advances in every field of rational endeavour, as they have done in the Asian Tigers.
    "No culture in history contributed more to human well-being than Western civilisation, nor even as much.
    "Why then, do critics single it out for special moral abuse?"

~ Andrew Bernstein, from his article 'The Case for Western Civilisation' [emphases in the original]

The West's self-destructive morality

 

Philosopher Stephen Hicks nails it here.

Douglas Murray reckons that "the absurdity of the West" is that:

We want everybody to have religious freedom, except ourselves.

We want to praise every tradition, apart from our own.

And we want to promote every belief system apart from the one that got us here.

This is madness."

Except he doesn't fully explain the madness. He doesn't point to its cause. Hicks does. Hicks points out that the reason we got here — to the point that Murray can bewail the madness — is the self-destructive morality that remains at the heart of western culture.

Truly, it is absurd.
Yet ... reflect upon that moral tradition within the West that has urged us to SACRIFICE SELFLESSLY FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS, ESPECIALLY WEAKER OTHERS.
Take those words seriously and you get part of the causal explanation for the absurdity.
It is a moral battle, and much of the West has internalised a self-destructive morality. [Emphasis in the original.]

He's right, you know. 

It's the ethic of self-sacrifice that underpins the phoney idea that all cultures are equal, except this one.

It's that ethic of altruism that needs to be abandoned.