David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
Superb piece from Doug Rushkoff on Epstein as the patron of the worst worldviews of our lives.
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David Edward Storey
2.2K posts
David Edward Storey
@DavidEStorey
Philosophy Prof @ Boston College. I interview philosophers working outside the academy, let them tell their stories, and share the secrets to their success.
Boston, MA เข้าร่วม Ağustos 2012
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David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
Teachers vs Professors
This has been on my mind since I first encountered it almost 15 years ago.
When I was in high school, I had a few teachers in the humanities/social sciences who were really, really good: deep, serious thinkers, with lots of interesting views synthesized over decades of globetrotting experiences.
As teachers, even at a nice private school, they were not real “winners” in the sense of climbing a prestigious career ladder, and neither did they publish academic papers. You could call them very advanced amateurs, and as dabblers they got to toy with lots of interesting ideas, kind of randomly assembled, without outside judgment.
When I got to the University of Chicago, known for its life of the mind in the humanities, I didn't really find anybody who seemed to be as deep or as interesting a thinker as these teachers I encountered in high school.
I always wondered why.
Partially, it's because I got lucky with my teachers. They were the best we had. Maybe I didn't get so lucky with my professors.
But today I may have figured it out: I think the actual reason is that my professors at UChicago were, in a sense, winners on an academic career ladder. It’s an extremely competitive environment, and they had somehow made it to the top. By definition, this is a tremendously powerful filter.
And I think this had actually filtered against a whole group of people whom I consider interesting.
This has become especially clear over the last few years, as a lot of traditional academia has been losing prestige rapidly: people are trusting the kind of professorial expert class less and less and less. It turned out that professors of ethics and sociology are just as unethical and susceptible to groupthink as the general public. And the general conformity of ideology and thought in academia is now well-known.
These professional humanities academics may publish papers that are respected or even highly esteemed within their own niche communities, but this particular value system has long since been removed from what I consider interesting, or, in many cases, even related to the pursuit of truth.
Reflecting on it, the heart of the matter is that those teachers in high school were unconstrained by convention and had been allowed to fully lean into their interests — kind of like the platonic dream of academia — whereas the professors I encountered in university, even when very successful, had been conformed by the academia-industry pressure cooker and their work sanitized, professionalized, and ultimately made uninteresting under the constraints.
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Finally. Full court press, now and unrelentingly until MAGA and the tech right’s assault on our civilization is repelled. Destroy the Sith, we must.
gil duran@gilduran76
Peter Thiel played a key role in JD Vance's conversion to Catholicism. Now he can't stop talking about the Antichrist. In Rome, an advisor to the Pope rejected Palantir's wannabe prophet, exposing the true meaning of his florid religious delusions. thenerdreich.com/peter-thiels-a…
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@TheAnnaGat @AmandaAskell How come? Give me hope! Recommended readings/interviews?
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I have overnight become a 700x @AmandaAskell fan and I already liked her anyway.
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David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
Cal Newport:"Universities need to..portray themselves as citadels of concentration...Academic institutions need to demonstrate that the life of the mind is hard & worth it. We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness." chronicle.com/article/is-ai-…
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@Leigh_Phillips @Tyler_A_Harper Yep. Cross reference that with the conclusion of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” You could design a whole course around Andressen’s comments…
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Just happen to be reading (and contemplating and introspecting over) Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future, in which he discusses briefly Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as the scarier of the two mid-century dystopias (the other being Orwell’s 1984), and it struck me how Huxleian Marc Andreessen’s vision is:
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David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
Straight out of Greek myth — cursed by a hideously enormous skull but not a thought inside it.
More Perfect Union@MorePerfectUS
Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he has "zero" introspection, and that the idea itself is a modern invention.
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David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
This is one hell of an impression.
Saturday Night Live@nbcsnl
Tucker Carlson stops by the desk to talk Oscar nominations
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@samhaselby The research of Richard Wilkinson supports this. Counterintuitively, rich people in countries with a high gini coefficient are less happy than less rich people in countries with a lower gini coefficient
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The richest guy I know, a hedge funder in NYC, said this a lot, that rich people in the US underestimate how much social suffering and privation effects their lives, how much anxiety and unhappiness seeing it produces. Underestimated second-order effect.
New Left EViews@NewLeftEViews
"I was poor in Germany for like a decade and I had the best life on the planet. Being poor in Germany is better than being rich here on some days." They are are aware of the difference between Western Europe and America. But they see it is as a problem.
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David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
The Bush GOP never went away: The ‘realignment’ was a mirage.
Devastating essay by the great Michael Lind.
unherd.com/2026/03/the-bu…
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@MattPolProf Isn’t the TLDR that Habermas correctly grasped that some kind of Kantian posture was pragmatically sound and based and that most of pomo was morally and politically a non starter?
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Habermas' entire project was intensely influenced by 20th and 2qst century philosophy. A core claim is that breakthroughs in the philosophy of language, spearheaded by Wittgenstein-Brandon et al, mean we can finally turn away from the philosophy of the subject...
TakingHayekSeriously@FriedrichHayek
Jürgen Habermas is stuck in a 19th century German world of ideas which was detonated and replaced by Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Wright, Darwin, and Hayek — a system of German ideas which still dominated in America after migrating here in the 19th and 20th centuries. Let me explain. 1/
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@MattPolProf How’s the book? Great Books boilerplate or novel and worth reading (if one is already familiar with Mansfield/Strauss/etc)?
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Locke, Smith, and Ricardo all propounded and defended the labor theory of value. Here's Harvey Mansfield explaining how Locke probably invented it.
If you want to get rid of workmanship, fine. But then it all goes. The pro-capitalist bits and the Marxist bits
Students For Liberty@sfliberty
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@MattPolProf Per Matt’s comment here, and per Ross’s surprise at Chris Hayes’ AI skeptical humanism this week, it’s so bizarre to me when conservatives are perplexed when leftists actually care about human dignity. As though this weren’t the genuine and animating concern from Marx onward.
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A lot of today's right rejuvenates the techno-fetishism of the early 20th century; wary of modern materialism and egalitarianism but fascinated by the power of technology. Especially when wielded by "great" men and cultures. The idolization of Musk, Thiel etc echoes this.
Matt Walsh@MattWalshBlog
A weird thing is that whenever I post criticism of AI, the majority of the people agreeing with me seem to be leftists. It’s pretty much the only position I hold that seems to be more popular with the left than the right. It should be the opposite. My whole point about AI (especially AI in creative fields) is that it isn’t human, it doesn’t have a soul, and we cannot surrender our society to an unhuman soulless algorithm even if it makes our lives easier in some ways. It’s very strange that an argument predicated on the existence of the soul resonates with the left while conservatives tend to scoff at it.
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David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
@kvallier Vance’s best and, I think, only shot a being prez is Trump dying in office. Postliberalism will never go anywhere at the national level, and he doesn’t just lack Trumps humor and charisma, he’s just not likable to a broad enough constituency. GOP is careening toward an ice age.
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@kvallier I think strongest argument is that Iran will go horribly (and Venezuela go poorly), and Rubio will largely own that. Another is that, if we take Rubio to be offering a return to a normie GOP, Trump proved the demand for that doesn’t exist. Real story? GOP is screwed after Trump.
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David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
David Edward Storey รีทวีตแล้ว
I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.
I don’t wonder anymore. I think he won for that exact reason. Because he carried at least one broken shard to reflect the broken shards in millions of others.
If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy. If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy.
If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy. If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy. If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.
If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it.
It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.
Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”
And that’s the part that should chill us.
Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?
Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.
Now the mask is off. Now we know.
And knowing is a far more dangerous place to stand.
– Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.
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