--snup--You could think of the gathering as a board meeting of sorts for the “intellectual dark web,” or IDW, a loose cadre of academics, journalists and tech entrepreneurs who view themselves as standing up to the knee-jerk left-leaning politics of academia and the media. Over the past year, the IDW has arisen as a puzzling political force, made up of thinkers who support “Enlightenment values” and accuse the left of setting dangerously illiberal limits on acceptable thought. The IDW has defined itself mainly by diving into third-rail topics like the genetics of gender and racial difference—territory that seems even more fraught in the era of #MeToo and the Trump resistance. But part of the attraction of the IDW is the sense that many more people agree with its principles than can come forward publicly: The dinner host on this night, Lehmann says, was a famous person she would prefer not to name.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... ann-221917For those in attendance, it was a ringing confirmation of just how politicized academia had become, and how blindly devoted to fashionable moralities.
Now, look. Some folks will be put off by what they read at Quillette. "Shine your shoes, light the fuse. Can you use them ol' US Blues?" It happens. Be warned.
https://quillette.com/2018/10/31/nazis- ... eld-guide/But now, more than 70 years after the fall of Berlin and the death of Adolf Hitler, it might be time for a new kind of Nazi field guide. On one hand, we are plagued by men such as Robert Bowers, who allegedly committed mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue after posting explicitly anti-Semitic messages on a web site known to be a haven for self-described neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. On the other hand, the Internet is now so full of spurious allusions to Nazi ideology that the term is in danger of losing all meaning. On social media, especially, “Nazi” has become a sort of four-letter synonym for “alt-right,” which itself now fills in lazily for “conservative” or “right-wing.” So even a politician or pundit who is mildly right-of-centre is in danger of being libelled as a “Nazi” by people who couldn’t find Germany on a map or name a single major Second World War battle.
https://quillette.com/
CDFingers