I just discovered a unique commentator on youtube under the title of ContraPoints. The commentator is one Natalie Wynn, a trans woman, former philosophy graduate student and instructor at Northwestern University and someone who combines incisive analysis, intellectual expertise and an ironic wit with an absolute disregard for existing social norms, manners and the sacred cows of the Left, Right and Center. So be forewarned. If you have a low tolerance for verbal vulgarity, scatology, gender bending outrageousness and cultural/political heresy in general, go no further.
On the other hand, if that sounds like your cup of tea, please proceed.
Here’s a taste where Natalie explains why she quit her academic career.
I must confess that I find Wynn’s take excruciatingly spot on. This, unsurprisingly, because it largely corresponds with my own.
Many moons ago I considered a career in academia, only to conclude that rather than being an oasis for the disinterested pursuit of scholarly inquiry, academe had become an Industry. Like most industries, primarily an arena for careerism and self advancement, intellectual rigor and facts be damned. This even before the absurd and humiliating fad for “Post Modernism” seemingly overwhelmed it during the hind end of the last century.
Needless to say, a school of “thought” that essentially claims that in academic theory “nothing is wrong, everything is permitted” would be perfectly suited to the academic careerist desperate for publication.
What happens when such thinking escapes the groves of the Academic Industry(TM) into the larger world is illustrated in part by the Sokal Affair.
Imo.
If the above doesn’t put you off, you might be interested in this analysis, composed in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election in 2016, prior to Wynn beginning her transition.
Accolades and brick bats can be submitted below. Meanwhile, evidence that past is prologue.