ABTejana
1.6K posts
I’ve spent many years trying to explain to my friends to my left what it feels like to be a conservative navigating academia. It certainly would have been easier not to be one. But based on current discourse, I guess the whole time I’ve been a secret lefty doing lefty things.
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Another thing (thinking about it more): a lot of people who believe they’re realigning themselves to strength/power end up becoming really submissive to leaders/funding that control their speech/thought tightly and let no one step out of line. That’s not very strong or powerful
ABTejana@MbProfesora
Rufo is missing the point, though, that there is a bigger horizon he rejects and these folks don’t. There are certain acts that when you do them change the nature of your heart and soul and make you become the thing you are fighting. 1/
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@JacobB75646 I guess one place to start is win what? For what? How does how you fight get you that “what”? Also why do you think justice is politeness?
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@MbProfesora A lot of words to say be a polite loser and let the left win
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Rufo is missing the point, though, that there is a bigger horizon he rejects and these folks don’t. There are certain acts that when you do them change the nature of your heart and soul and make you become the thing you are fighting. 1/
Wokal Distance@wokal_distance
This is not Rufo just aimlessly trying to be a dick. he is attempting to show that the methods of the Elizabeth Corey types have failed because they don't understand that the problem is not a matter of communication or persuasion. The right is having power politics done to them by the left, and Rufo's point is that you can't fight power politics with persuasion. It is impossible to reason with power politics for the exact same reason that it is impossible to reason with a punch in the face. You cannot appeal to the better nature and intellectual honesty of a person who thinks that all intellectual engagement is merely masks for power and all justifications are merely rhetorical moves in a discursive struggle for political position. Again, academics simply refuse to engage with Rufo's theory of change, what he is trying to do intellectually and politically, or his normative and strategic justifications for doing so. If academics want understanding, perhaps they could, you know, ask him (or me! we worked and work together!) about what is being done, why it is being done, and what the normative and strategic justifications for doing so are.
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@ThomasSKidd @enzoreds It’s true but do the social inferiors or the elite whites in this account ever do anything meaningful to make racial minorities lives better? Likely neither truly does. Thats the bigger problem
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Much of prestige academia entails elite whites accusing social inferiors of being white supremacists, in order to preserve their elite status.
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To play with McLuhan, “the method is the message.” If you “fight” in terms of power with no mind to justice it doesn’t matter how just you think your ends are. What you did to get power turned you and your vision into something incapable of sustaining the good or just on earth
Wokal Distance@wokal_distance
This is not Rufo just aimlessly trying to be a dick. he is attempting to show that the methods of the Elizabeth Corey types have failed because they don't understand that the problem is not a matter of communication or persuasion. The right is having power politics done to them by the left, and Rufo's point is that you can't fight power politics with persuasion. It is impossible to reason with power politics for the exact same reason that it is impossible to reason with a punch in the face. You cannot appeal to the better nature and intellectual honesty of a person who thinks that all intellectual engagement is merely masks for power and all justifications are merely rhetorical moves in a discursive struggle for political position. Again, academics simply refuse to engage with Rufo's theory of change, what he is trying to do intellectually and politically, or his normative and strategic justifications for doing so. If academics want understanding, perhaps they could, you know, ask him (or me! we worked and work together!) about what is being done, why it is being done, and what the normative and strategic justifications for doing so are.
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Fine. But then how was it ever better that you “win” in the first place? There’s no difference between what you “fought” and you. From the outside, it looks like “new elite same as old elite”, both with no regard for the good/justice, both willing to do anything to the ruled 4/
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The only answer to that question is that you were never fighting to defend the good, you were fighting to be dominant and at the end of the day you have no justification for the preference of your dominance rather than someone else’s other than that it is yours. If that’s so, 3/
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So the question would be: why engage in a fight in a way that even when you win you have become something that was never worth fighting for? If your first thought was that you fight to defend something good, who cares if you won if what you did to win destroyed that goodness 2/
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Nailed it. He’s toxic
Kevin Vallier@kvallier
I want to clearly state where I think @christopherrufo has been harmful for American civic life. He has certainly done some good. My concern is that his tactics are a kind of civic poison. They salt the social earth, making trust hard to rebuild and polarization hard to reduce. I'm part of the Ohio civics project. I left an ordinary academic job to throw myself into the work of academic reform, building institutions that serve as a counterweight to left-wing overreach. The academy is in deep need of reform. I am not a beautiful loser asking conservatives to disarm. But this work requires being charitable to people we disagree with, and Rufo's rhetoric is not uniformly welcome among those of us doing it. Consider his own words: "We will eventually turn [critical race theory] toxic, as we put all of the 'various cultural insanities' under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something 'crazy' in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.'" This isn't arguing that a view is false. It isn't trying to remove it from a curriculum. It's category construction. It has always read to me as engineered so the public can't distinguish thoughtful people who draw on CRT from crazy ones. That's not necessary to win the argument, and it corrodes the civic ground any future reform has to be built upon. I'm not tone-policing. I'm saying what Rufo gives with one hand, he takes with the other. Many of us are doing the hard daily work of academic reform, and we do not uniformly welcome his efforts, because his tactics are too bare-knuckled and, frankly, unkind. So to be clear: the academy needs reform. I am giving my career to that project. But I will not thank Rufo for anything as long as his rhetoric salts the earth for rebuilding trust with the left.
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Hah it’s been on my mind - what esoteric meaning could this have had for the Egyptians and descendant mystery schools? It’s been driving me crazy
Edward Butler@EPButler
On the contrary, it suggests that Book 2 has a particular esoteric significance, precisely because of its tabular character.
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This is what I’ve suspected. When people say young men are becoming more religious, it isn’t the case that they’re attending church or practicing any religious discipline in a statistically significant way
Ryan Burge 📊@ryanburge
That new Gallup poll did not find that young men are going to church a lot more than young women. It found that young men were more likely to say that religion is very important to them. For Republicans, attendance and importance are NOT strongly related. Exhibit A 👇👇👇
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ABTejana retweetou
Stop skipping the Homeric textual equivalent of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial! The catalogue of ships in Book II is meant to make you feel the sheer weight of those deaths, hear a name that might be someone you knew once, make war tangible to the ear!
Tim Stanley@timothy_stanley
Incredible. An ancient Egyptian was mummified with an extract from The Iliad... and they chose Book 2? (The ships) This is the bit everyone usually skips! telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…
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Absolutely predictable I’m sure more like this has happened/is happening. It was the structure of this all along
David J. Bier@David_J_Bier
DHS and the State of Texas appear to have imprisoned a US citizen until he accepted deportation to Mexico (where his family lives). Prior cases of US citizen deportations have also involved coercive efforts to force citizens to accept deportations while imprisoned
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ABTejana retweetou
Friendly reminder that there is no such thing as a national registry of US citizens, which is why you get situations like this where it would sure seem like ICE deported a U.S. citizen because they refused to investigate his claim to citizenship.
David J. Bier@David_J_Bier
DHS and the State of Texas appear to have imprisoned a US citizen until he accepted deportation to Mexico (where his family lives). Prior cases of US citizen deportations have also involved coercive efforts to force citizens to accept deportations while imprisoned
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ABTejana retweetou
On a walk this evening & the warm scent of honeysuckle on the breeze; memory of my grandmother stooped in her garden, watering in the cool of the day; the hose leaking prisms where she’d tried to mend it; she said that, too, was God’s mercy, however singular, however small.
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ABTejana retweetou
This is heartbreaking and unconscionable. After weeks in family detention, toddler Amalia was rushed to a hospital with critically low oxygen levels. She fought for her life in intensive care—under ICE watch—only to be sent back to the very Dilley center where she nearly died, amid widespread respiratory illnesses among children.
This cruelty has no place in America.
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ABTejana retweetou
I actually announced this change after I made it. It wasn’t quiet at all. I felt it was incumbent on me to make the change public.
Helen Andrews@herandrews
@christopherrufo Patterson quietly deleted this passage from a book review he published because he decided in retrospect that it was too mean. Which it was—Patrick Deneen should not be hounded, shunned, and impoverished! He should learn to master his feelings of hatred or at least own up to them.
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@christopherrufo When they win they cannot govern without alienating people through fascistic and authoritarian means, which means in the end they cannot govern at all. If there is an art of rule they don’t know it.
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The reality is that the “beautiful losers” approach is a self-serving lie, and in most cases, these “true conservatives” do not maintain their “moral and intellectual purity,” but, in fact, have compromised it away and need to signal against those who have not in order to rationalize their own moral and intellectual cowardice.
Coddled Affluent Professional@feelsdesperate
@christopherrufo Are 60 years of continuous losses in the institutions and culture wars not enough for these people?
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