A recent article from Business Insider, “Pfizer CEO slams Harvard, MIT, and UPenn’s presidents: ‘One of the most despicable moments in the history of US academia,’” has a doozy for a cover photo. On the left is Albert Bourla, CEO of the most wonderful corporation in the world, which of course is Pfizer. He looks like a Space Lizard with an almost passable human disguise. (more…)
Tag: academic discourse
-
4,879 words
Part III of III (Part II here)
Punctuated history and continuous narratives of disruption
Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium should not be treated as an isolated scientific theory whose author believed it to be the most defensible assessment of existing facts. It should rather be recognized as part of a larger rhetorical effort to reform the philosophy of history which predicates the received historical notions upon which the social and political intuitions of white Westerners are contingent. (more…)
-
5,371 words
Part II of III (Part I here, Part III here)
The unavoidability of “presentism” and the foil of “triumphalism”
Despite Chesterton’s war with the evils of his day, the modern cult of the present is sustained by a particular condition, whose nature is a mutating subject with internal logics to which the Dissident Right should keep itself attentive. To this end, it is worth considering how modern academics understand their impulse to give disproportionate causal agency to the present. (more…)
-
Part I of III (Part II here)
3,104 words
My last article received some critical feedback from a rather dedicated individual commenter. From what I could tell, his key concern was that any Right-wing intellectual movement was not worth the label if it could not normatively recognize that the intellectual work of postmodernist and critical theorists is lazy, unidimensional, and degenerate. (more…)