The Wealth Gene

I wrote here on 9/27/16 about the genetic basis for why certain humans are wealthy:

…wealth and poverty have become structural. The children of the poor stay poor and the children of the rich stay rich.  Socioeconomic class is entrenched over many generations.  ….The birth lottery is not random for mass affluent parents.  Their children have already won.

Chapters 10-13 of Human Diversity – The Biology of Gender, Race and Class (2020) presents what we know about the heritability of socio-economic class.  We indeed know these things – the only controversy (level of uncomfortableness) is how one reacts.  Bad, negative over reactions abound, which is why Charles Murray is seen as a provocative figure.  Read this review:

https://www.newstatesman.com/class-race-genetics-science-human-diversity-charles-murray-review

That reviewer takes a dismal, pessimistic view of the book calling Murray positively dishonest.  He alleges that the book is posing as brave resistance to tyrannical orthodoxy and will be used by right wingers to strengthen the most entrenched and damaging hierarchies in our society.  He’s not happy with Murray pointing out that people have fundamentally different brains, capabilities and inclinations – the poor will always be poor because their genes make them less able to achieve jobs that bring wealth.  Public policy interventions do not work.  You cannot escape your genetic destiny.  Sorry if you drew the short straw in the DNA casino.  There’s nothing you can do about it.

I don’t see it that way, not just because my clients are winners in the birth lottery, but also because scientific reality need not be depicted in such a dark, dreary, hopeless light.  Murray anticipates harsh reactions to his highlighting a truth that “raises hackles for so many people because it smacks of self-satisfaction with the way things are and indifference toward those who were unlucky in the genetic lottery”. 

Ultimately, we’ll see that it’s about the ongoing Nature vs. Nurture argument.  Clearly both matter; but how much of what a human is comes from nature/genes and how much comes from the environment/nurture?  Progressives think human minds are 100% nurture and 0% nature – tabula rasa, social construction of identity and all that nonsense.  But that’s just a wrong exaggeration made for ideological reasons.  Genetic differences obviously have more than a 0% impact on us and Murray establishes scientifically that genetic differences are substantially material to human success.

That need not be so upsetting – especially to those who can directly address the fundamental questions of human existence – head on, without embarrassment or fear.  Let’s get to the truth, even if it hurts.  Murray’s propositions (particularly on wealth) are demonstrably true despite the furor surrounding his work.  We will be zeroing in on the wealth gene here in the coming weeks.

Christmas Gift of Knowledge

Human Diversity – The Biology of Gender, Race and Class (2020) is a progress report on the demolition of a leftist orthodoxy that is impeding human knowledge in the social sciences.  The problematic sameness premise is the stubborn idea that everyone’s the same despite biological differences.  Race, gender and class variations are alleged to be entirely social constructs with no basis in biology. 

The first 3 parts of the book are explorations, framed by Murray’s analogy to 3 archeological digs, of buried cities of knowledge, which are at very different excavation levels:

1. The dig for gender differences is well underway – lots of artifacts and the outline of the buried city has been identified.
2. The race differences dig is in its early stages – promising areas have been located and initial probes establish that there’s something down there worth investigating.
3. The dig for socio-economic class is pretty much done.  Scholars are now returning to the site with newly developed tools with which to analyze the artifacts.

It’s sad that people have to be on guard against committing thought crimes; students whine for protection against ideas and speech; and cancel culture constrains honest discourse.  Murray calls out this widespread intellectual corruption.  The good news is that we are now watching the orthodoxy get overthrown.  Continuing to defend the idea that everyone is the same is making them look silly.

Murray is cautious because the current level of animosity and paranoia is comparable to the medieval church’s repression of Galileo’s discovery.  But there’s nothing to fear – no monsters in the closet – no forbidden knowledge.  Murray sidesteps all the angry accusations that he is a purveyor of racist pseudoscience by focusing on facts – the low hanging fruit, “things we don’t have to argue about anymore”.  Nonetheless, allegations that he’s misusing science in the service of bigotry and oppression are the guaranteed responses to findings that people indeed have differing genetic cognitive repertoires.

I’m not afraid of controversy, not under the thumb of a university or woke corporate culture, but I am still going to avoid the risk that something I write here might be construed as sexist or racist.  Therefore, lets jump right to the “Class is A Function of Privilege” section.  It is the lowest of Murray’s low hanging fruit – the most undeniable and thoroughly excavated of the 3 cities of knowledge.  Besides, as an estate planning attorney with a fully mature trusts and estates practice, I understand inherited wealth and power pretty well.  I’m also an intensely persistent explorer of the moral philosophy of wealth, so it’s right down my alley.

Come with me on a journey through what is known about heritability and social class.  We start on page 203 next Tuesday, opening our holiday gift of awareness wrapped up nicely by Charles A. Murray.  Merry Christmas from The Estate Planning War Chest!

Elites Should Be Worried

Before we start our next project I have to tell you about a book I considered covering but then decided not to after studying it:  The Parasitic Mind – How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (2020) by Gad Saad.  It was just published in October.  Its thesis is pretty much the same as Cynical Theories – How Activist Scholarship Makes Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody (2020), which we walked through here from 9/9/20 to 11/24/20.

The author of the The Parasitic Mind has a more aggressive style and is a bit self-aggrandizing in his presentation of the ideas.  Here’s a review of the book that amused me:

https://merionwest.com/2020/12/09/gad-saads-the-parasitic-mind-a-reasonable-premise-gone-awry/

That reviewer is a young, smart lefty criticizing the intellectual rigor of Saad’s work. Nestor de Buen makes some good points – The Parasitic Mind is polemic, tendentious and one-sided.  It has zero chance of changing the minds of its ideological opponents.  But I don’t think Saad cares.  He’s just gleefully piling on to a surging reality that will eventually topple the sanctimonious orthodoxy of elites in power.  I enjoyed the book but of course I am member of the swelling choir Saad is preaching to.

There is an undeniable, rapidly growing body of knowledge highly critical of social justice activism because it’s getting much more difficult to defend it.  Anti-social justice warrior books and articles have indeed become a genre of literature – and I’m a fan.  It leads us to the new book Human Diversity (2020) by Charles A. Murray.  Murray may be the mightiest messenger of the news that the self-anointed, self-righteous elites in power are being harshly dethroned by the irresistible forces of logic, reason and science.  The intellectual cowards at Harvard may hate him but Murray’s voice cannot be silenced.  Truth is truth even if the Left tries to dub it “racist pseudoscience”.  Murray defends his work extraordinarily well (and has done so since The Bell Curve (1994)) because he knows the outrage social justice warriors are gunning for him.

Murray uses the analogy of 3 (race, gender and class) archeological digs to parse the issues – an analogy also used in the book America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019) that we explored last year:

We’ll dodge the controversy in the race and gender digs and focus just on the socio-economic class site.  Next week, we begin an expedition into an already excavated archeological ideas dig to see if we can locate its treasure trove of knowledge:

Wealth Inequality is Natural. It is Not Imposed

A 5 year ongoing weekly blog on why wealth redistribution public policy is immoral and impractical would not be complete without mentioning Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2019).  His previous book Capital in the 21^st Century (2013) caused quite a stir but its ideas were quickly refuted.  The new 1,150 page book also fails to make a compelling case for tackling the “inequality problem” by confiscating wealth from some people in order to re-distribute it to others.  Our wealth is safe from irrational leftist ideology.  Even militant lefty Paul Krugman isn’t buying Piketty’s notion of a forced “fair” global political economy.

Piketty and others misunderstand reality because they think it’s only human ideas that create reality.  It’s the fallacious everything is a social construct argument that we spent the last 11 weeks thoroughly refuting.  Wealth inequality, according to Piketty, is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.  He scoffs at the argument that inequality has a basis in “nature” (he puts the word nature in sneer quotes).  Piketty tries to invent the notion of “inequality regimes” that he argues are contrived legitimizations and justifications for inequality. 

Piketty makes the same moral mistake as John Rawls’ veil of ignorance.  If you were designing a political/economic/legal system and didn’t know where you will be in it, you’d make it more egalitarian because what if you ended up on the bottom.  But guess what.  It is not being designed; it already naturally exists and we all know where we are in it.   An “inequality regime” is not selected and then imposed.  Our political economy is the result of very long-term, vastly complex, natural free market forces and liberalism.  Inequality is economic.  It’s math.  All competitive endeavors (human and in nature) are governed by a wildly skewed power law function (not a symmetrical bell curve).  Read my 8/14/17, 8/22/17 and 8/29/17 posts.  Equality is NOT natural.  Inequality is natural.

Bad ideas may be in best-selling books and fund exorbitant salaries in the diversity/inclusion sham industry, but they remain, demonstrably and unequivocally, false.  The real threats to truth are cancel culture, anti-free speech bullies.  Victor Davis Hanson writes that the culprits are progressives and leftist elites in publishing, the media, Silicon Valley, academia, entertainment and government.  They so lack confidence in the logic and persuasiveness of their own arguments that, in fear, they increasingly try to ban whatever bothers them.  Fortunately, they are not succeeding.  Next Tuesday, we begin a new War Chest project as we turn from a book that falsely asserts that inequality is caused by purposefully, malevolent oppression, to a book that scientifically proves inequality is a natural phenomenon.  Human Diversity:  The Biology of Gender, Race and Class (2020) by Charles A. Murray.

Elite Overproduction

This is the graphic from a 10/24/20 article in The Economist – “Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?”  It illustrates an increasingly obvious and troublesome social phenomenon – elite overproduction.  Universities keep cranking out tons of degreed “Kings of Knowledge” – arrogant know-it-alls who then get smacked in the face by reality.  They are frustrated and angry.

This was predicted by Peter Turchin.  Blogger Scott Alexander wrote reviews of both his books on the topic, to which Turchin responded. 

Book Review: Secular Cycles

Book Review: Ages Of Discord

Why Theory Is Important: Responding to two reviews by Scott Alexander

Read these if you really want to understand why so many bitter elites are upset.  There’s a lawyer/PhD glut! – too many people with credentials and not enough jobs to pay them all well.  This large, seething cohort of people with advanced degrees perceives themselves to be unfairly on the losing side of life.  As Turchin put it:

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.

Finally, this article explains the problem with academia and the graduates they mass produce.  It’s not intolerance – it’s simply false worldviews:

Lessons of the Pinker Affair: The Problem with the Academy is False Beliefs, Not Intolerance

They must be (and are now being) discredited.  Large swaths of academia deserve to be mocked and ignored.  Their resentment is the result of a refusal to accept reality.  Fortunately, this is all cyclical.  Things will eventually get better.  Until then, tighten the clasps of your War Chest of knowledge, wealth and power.  A lot of people, who think they’re really smart, feel strongly that you should not have those things.

The Marketplace of Ideas

Chapter 10 of Cynical Theories (2020) brings us to the conclusion of this important book. In the competitive marketplace of ideas, good, valuable, successful ideas like liberalism, capitalism and science rise to the level of knowledge.  Bad, faddish, false ideas like Social Justice Theory are fake knowledge – they hide from the marketplace of ideas.  Pluckrose and Lindsay masterfully exposes the proponents of these ideas for what they are –> WRONG.

Postmodern Theory and liberalism are opposites.  Liberalism is a self-correcting, knowledge producing system of reason and evidence.  Postmodernism is the antithesis because of its conspicuous unwillingness to engage in debate and “cancel” anyone attempting to engage its ideas as white fragility or privilege preserving.  Critical Theory is bad, not just because it’s wrong/immoral (it is) but also because it attempts to cheat by avoiding the marketplace – it hides from the light of reason and evidence like a scattering cockroach.

I’m not exaggerating; well, maybe a little.  The authors do have respect for the concerns, goals and motivation behind Social Justice but whole heartedly reject its applied turn.  They lament the radical skepticism, nihilism and destructive cynicism attacking human Enlightenment (liberalism, rationalism and empiricism).  They highlight what is considered knowledge and truth and what is not.   The book, Kindly Inquisitors:  The New Attacks on Free Thought (1992) articulates liberalism’s contribution to the “reality industry”.  Liberal science referees conflicting claims to truth using two principles:  1) no one gets final say; and 2) no one has personal authority over knowledge (there is no racial or sexual knowledge, there’s just knowledge).  We have freedom of belief and speech, but NOT freedom of knowledge.  You are free to believe anything you wish and argue for anything you want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand that they be respected as such is bullshit.  It’s wrong to coddle humans by censoring certain ideas believed to cause psychological pain or “epistemic violence”.  Historically oppressed groups get no special consideration in the battle for truth – everyone competes in the same marketplace of ideas – best ideas win. 

The fundamental tenants of postmodernism go up in flames:

Knowledge is a social construct – no it’s not!

Discourse is merely the wielding of power – no it’s not!

Categories must be blurred because of oppression – nope.

Language is power and must be tightly restricted – nope.

Knowledge depends on culture – nope.

Group identity is the only thing that matters – nope.

Lindsay and Pluckrose warn that Social Justice thought is like gasoline on the identity politics fire of the extreme Right.  Arguing that it is acceptable to be prejudiced against white people, men, heterosexual or cisgender people does not go over well with the far Right.  It emboldens and enrages them.

They conclude the book with an important legal principle – secularism (separation of Church and State) – no matter how certain you may be that you are in possession of the truth, you have no right to impose your belief.  We all have the inalienable right to reject the moral mandates of any ideology without blame.  The belief that knowledge is just a cultural construct used to enforce power can be submitted to the marketplace of ideas.  Social Justice thought should not be censored or ignored – it must be engaged and defeated in the marketplace of ideas so it can die a natural death.  Let us arm ourselves with War Chest awareness that these “ideas are demonstrably bad, ethically incoherent and cannot withstand scrutiny without imploding and disappearing in a puff of contradictions”.

Finally, throughout this project I have scanned for push back on the book.  There’s not much and its pretty tepid – for example:

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-new-front-in-the-culture-wars-cynical-theories-takes-unfair-aim-at-the-humanities-148524

If the authors are combatants in the culture wars – they are freedom fighters – Rambos of reason lighting up the dark, weak warriors of the tyrannical Social Justice Left. 

Appetite for Destruction

Chapter 9 of Cynical Theories (2020) is Social Justice in Action.  The most awful thing about Social Justice Theory is not just that it’s wrong and unworkable; it’s also terribly immoral and destructive.  And its proponents openly acknowledge their appetite for destruction.   Ideas have consequences.  Bad, destructive ideas have bad, destructive consequences.  The authors give many examples of people being “cancelled” for not towing the identity politics line.

As racist, sexist and homophobic discourse and attitudes continue to decline, academics are forced to dig deeper and deeper into readings of situations and texts to come up with increasingly complicated Theoretical arguments that supposedly detect them.  The absurd catastrophizing of allegedly bigoted attitudes visciously destroys careers and reputations.  The culture of victimhood is built on lies.  It is erected on a deceptive foundation of malevolent postmodern thought and the Great Untruths that we explored in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) here from 11/27/18 to 12/31/18.  Books like that and Cynical Theories are essential to understanding truth and reality. There’s a big difference between public policy preferences and the mistakes/immoral errors of Theory.

The last section of this Chapter is “Theory Always Looks Good on Paper”.  That’s the way bad theories play out – they sound like good ideas at first but, like communism, fail miserably because of human hubris and fallibility.  Social Justice Theory, like religions, is a metanarrative (an overarching, inflexible interpretation of the world).  Liberalism and science, on the other hand, are not.  They write:

Liberalism and science are systems – not just neat little theories – because they are self-skeptical rather than self-certain, by design.  This is a reasoned – not a radical – skepticism.  They put the empirical first, rather than the theoretical.  They are self-correcting.  Liberal systems like regulated capitalism, republican democracy and science resolve conflicts by subjecting human economies, societies, and knowledge production to evolutionary processes that – over time, and with persistent effort – produce reliable…true statements about the world.

The dangerous thing about Theory is that it not only fails to correspond to reality but also actively seeks destruction.  Instead of trying to explain how the world could and should work, it wants to tear it all apart, right down to the foundation.  The original post-modernists were devastated by the collapse of communism, not only the millions that suffered and died because of it, but also because of the idea’s obvious failure to stand up against history, evidence, logic and reason.   Radical skepticism seeks to dismantle, deconstruct and disrupt reality and truth.  This nasty mind virus has now infected non-academic thought and the only vaccine/antibody is to call it out for what it is, engage it directly.  More on that next week.

Rigorous criticisms of Social Justice Theory are not new and these authors are not the only ones to see what’s going on.  If you have any doubt, refer to these volumes:

Fashionable Nonsense:  Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1997)

Challenging Postmodernism Philosophy and the Politics of Truth (2003)

Understanding Postmodernism:  Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2004)

Theory’s Empire:  An Anthology of Dissent (2005)

Fear of Knowledge:  Against Relativism and Constructionism (2006)

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands:  Thinkers of the New Left (2015)

The Diversity Delusion:  How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018)

The Parasitic Mind:  How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (2020)

Conceited Coercive Collectivists

Chapter 8 of Cynical Theories (2020), Social Justice Scholarship and Thought, reveals an alien enemy consuming academia and mainstream media.  The authors deploy a Star Trek reference – The Borg as analogous to Social Justice thought – it is not subject to reason….Resistance is futile.  You will be assimilated.  Fortunately, our War Chest starship is at a safe distance from this menace.  Not so for university professors (and PhD students, like the one who wrote that “take down” of Chapter 8 article I cited last week*), woke corporate executives and journalists – they have already been assimilated.  Disagreement with Theory is not allowed.  Dissenters will be ignored or targeted for cancelation.

Reality, in their view, is profoundly problematic and must be constantly analyzed, condemned and dismantled.  Theory is obsessed with knowledge (epistemology), so a slew of new terms were simply invented.  Epistemic                    – fill in the blank:  Epistemic… injustice/violence/oppression/freedom/exploitation, etc.  The purpose of their obsession with “ways of knowing” is to circumvent the more rigorous thinking that stands in the way of their ideological aims.  That is why you cannot question it.  Science and reason are the cultural property of white, western men and are therefore unjustly privileged and cannot be used to discredit Social Justice Theory.  Legitimate disagreement is not an option.

That’s an enormous, insurmountable problem for Social Justice thought.  It cannot be engaged with other than on its own inflexible terms.  Disagreement is simply deemed a failure to engage correctly or dubbed a moral shortcoming. This close mindedness and unwillingness to accept any disagreement and authoritarian will to force a Social Justice conception and moral imperative on others is disturbing.  These thinkers are conceited in their priest like certainty of their own rightness; coercive in their attempts to re-educate and shut down anyone who disagrees; and collectivist in their evil efforts to infect other minds and subsume everyone into a Borg like hive mind collective.

Theory is completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible in its disregard for realty.  It’s like a new religion actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation or disagreement of any kind. 

Next week, we see the noxious appetite for destruction in the proponents of these bad ideas.

* Hoadley –Brill’s article tries to argue that Pluckrose and Lindsay are wrong, specifically in Chapter 8, but his article is really just interpretive quibbling with other writers they cite to make their point -> Thou Shall Not Disagree with Theory!  He accuses them of equivocating two words:  denial and disagreement.  Denial means dismissing without engaging the ideas, whereas disagreement requires engagement.  Social Justice thinkers believe those who disagrees with them “deny” Theory because they have not sufficiently engaged it.  Having defined the only legitimate form of disagreement as putting more effort into understanding it (read agree), they label dissent as denial by refusing to engage – …resistance is indeed futile.  If they’re cherry picking ideas from other scholars (look at the Wikipedia page on Cynical Theories), Chapter 8 is a truck load of cherries being dumped on the heads of Social Justice scholars.  Arrogant false certitude seems to be a recurring theme in Leftist thought.

Here’s a better article that supports the conclusions in Chapter 8 and points out the appetite for destruction that we’ll get to next week in Chapter 9:

A Theory of Everything

Intersecting Grids of Oppressive Power

Chapter 7 of Cynical Theories (2020) presents a fifth and final grievance study field and also the most ridiculous – Disability and Fat Studies.  Power is not just top-down oppression in Theory.  It’s a Foucauldian grid of intersecting forms of oppression that defines everyone’s existence. People are unfairly disempowered or empowered by being in or out of one or more of the 5 intersecting aggrieved identities.  In my case, I am supposedly unjustly all powerful because I wield them all:

1. Western moral values and reason
2. Heterosexual Male
3. White
4. Cisgender (I didn’t even know that that word meant until recently, which tells you  how out of touch I am with my privilege)
5. Healthy mind and body

It’s silly to assert that a person wields unfair oppressive power simply by being in the above categories.  And it is just as silly to define a human’s essence as their location on a grid of oppression.  Everyone has some advantages in life (good family, health, strong work ethic and moral values, luck) and some disadvantages (bad family, mental or physical impairments, poor cultural values, lazy work ethic and yes, unfair discrimination).  Making everybody either helpless victims or evil oppressors is sad worldview that helps no one.

Academics would angrily disagree with me because my non-marginalized identity does not give me the right to engage in this discourse – master’s house and tools and all.  I only have a white, masculinist way of knowing and being in the world; whereas those belonging to one or more of the 5 marginalized groups have special access to the Truth because only members in those categories can have insight into both dominance and their own oppression.

We’ve moved from analysis of discrimination of people based on immutable characteristics (race, gender, sex, sexual orientation [you cannot say sexual preference anymore]) to one that is clearly changeable by behavior (obesity).  Gay pride is one thing.  Blind pride or fat pride something entirely different.  The disability and fat studies scholarship in Chapter 7 is so out of touch with reality that there is no need to describe it here.  It’s insane; not just a fetishism of the underdog, it’s applied postmodernism gone berserk.   Of course we want the disabled and obese to have better lives.  The line of thinking that puts them on a grid of oppression is well-intentioned but dismal failure.

Throughout this project I have scanned the internet for any pushback or criticism objecting to Pluckrose and Lindsay calling out academia on all of this.  Here’s an article specifically targeting Chapter 8:

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-cynical-theorists-behind-cynical-theories/

We’ll tear into Chapter 8 next Tuesday and see why the authors’ points remain valid notwithstanding that article’s attempt to defend Social Justice nonsense.

Circular Firing Squad of “Increased Sophistication”

Chapter 6 of Cynical Theories (2020) presents the 4^th strain of the postmodern mind virus – Feminism and Gender Studies.  There has been a recent radical change in women’s studies away from the pursuit of equal rights to an “increasingly sophisticated” approach called intersectionality.  And it’s not good.  It is “grating, fractious, and incomprehensible.  It appears to operate like a kind of circular firing squad, continually undermining itself over petty differences and grievances”.  This unfortunate paradigm shift discards logic, law and economics and replaces them with the accusation that all discourse is oppressive.  Objective truth is unobtainable because knowledge is tied to power and both are tied to the discourse that is alleged to create, maintain and legitimize dominance and oppression.

By infusing LGBTQ perspectives into traditional feminism we see an intractably complicated and oppressive society.  Intersectional theory is an entirely new way to understand power dynamics and allows academics to repurpose their failing theoretical models into something that is less falsifiable.  How and why can all these smart professors be so wrong?  The authors answer:

We often observe this kind of shift to a more “sophisticated” and nebulous model when people are highly personally and ideologically committed to a theoretical approach that is clearly failing.  This phenomenon was first describe by Leon Festinger, in his study of UFO cults, and led to the development of the concept of cognitive dissonance.  Festinger observed that highly committed cultists did not abandon their belief when the prediction of the cult failed to manifest – when the UFO never came.  Instead, cultist resolved this undeniable contradiction by claiming the event had occurred, but in some unfalsifiable way. (God decided to spare them).

Gender Studies is now a sprawling field attempting to address a complex and unruly collection of identities by constantly looking for problems to complain about until they’re found. As the different letters of the LGBTQ world circle around a vilified straight, white male, they end up firing at each other.  Comedian Dave Chappelle did a funny bit on the “alphabet people”:

The authors conclude that the “increasingly sophisticated” new Theory is actually overly simplistic – everything is problematic somehow, because of power dynamics based on identity.  The attempt to make everything intersectional, to focus relentlessly on a simplistic concept of societal privilege, rooted overwhelmingly in identity results in a highly muddled, Theoretical, and abstract analysis that makes it impossible to reach any conclusion other than that straight white men are unfairly privileged and need to repent and get out of everyone else’s way.

Next week, we arrive at the fifth and final (and dumbest) strain of the mind virus that infected our universities and may be spreading – Disability and Fat Studies.