So I stumbled across this site after doing a web search for "JW deaf masturbating video" which I like to watch every now again when I'm feeling a little down and need a good laugh. Very interested to come across this discussion as I'm a big fan of Rubin (and the many others working to resist anti-speech, SJWism, post modernism, regressive leftism etc) and have followed the various campus controversies pretty closely. I was stoked to see this issue being discussed in an ex-JW forum but disappointed that nobody seems to be connecting the two phenomena (JWs and SJWs) which as ex-JWs we’re well placed to do.
Anyway I don't know if anyone's still watching this thread but here are some of my thoughts...
I was raised a JW and left when I was around 20. I went to University as a sort of rebellion against my family for indoctrinating me with their horseshit. I studied widely and tried to soak up all the (deliciously worldly) knowledge I could... literature, languages, political science, philosophy, art history, psychology, anthropology. When I was finally forced to choose a major I reluctantly went for Archaeology. (I would have majored in everything but they don't let you do that.)
My time in university meant a lot to me but it was a mixed bag as far as what I got out of it. It introduced me to a world of knowledge with a degree of breadth and comprehensiveness I would never have achieved on my own. (Anyone who believes they can do it on their own is either a fool or a genius. But probably a fool.) And it helped me get on firmer footing with respect to creating a new belief system after having lost the one I’d been raised with and believed in strongly. However the effects of post modernism and identity politics group think were profound. With occasional exceptions the bulk of young people who go to university in North America and Western Europe (the regions from which the vast majority of scholarship is generated) are raised in more or less secular homes. They’ve never experienced deep indoctrination like we have so they don’t recognize the signs of it. When they get to university and get the impression that they can’t think or say certain things it’s the first time they’ve really experience that. They fail to see it for what it is. Not so with me. I attended uni from 2003 to 2010 (Taking years off to earn money as I had no parental support) so I sort of saw SJWism growing and growing. (The original campus political correctness movement occurred in the ‘90s, it’s resurgence in the 2010s however seems to be much more extreme.)
With that background in place I’ll weigh in on a few issues….
“Having a degree does not mean you had rich parents or even comfortable parents. I know plenty of people who have degrees that paid for school themselves.(myself included) But when you are the one footing the bill you don't fool around with nonsense like this, you literally have no time between school and working.” (italics added)
It’s hard to read this kind of analysis from an ex-JW because it reminds me so much of what the adults in JW congregations and JW literature always said. Practicality was king to them. Just find a way to make a living and that’s enough. The faith gives you everything else you need to think about the cosmos. Fuck that. As far as anyone knows we only get one crack at a conscious existence in this universe. Do you seriously want to spend that time being an accountant and never looking in a deep way at the big picture or struggling with the big questions? I paid for my own education too. Do we need to look out for the practicalities of life? Sure. I don’t want to be homeless as much as the next guy doesn’t want to be. But what’s the point of making a living if you have nothing to live for?
If you want to really get serious, to really grope and grapple and fight to understand the underlying nature of ultimate reality in any field from astrophysics to philosophy, medieval literature to evolutionary psychology, from the unity of all human myth to the unity of all organic chemistry, there is, unfortunately at the present time, only one game in town: academia. The problem is that it is slowly being taken over by the post modernists, the identity politics dogmatists, the activist sham-scholars. The people who not only don’t care about discovering truth about the world but believe that truth is a bigoted, fascistic power game and no ideal to strive for in the first place. (Don’t be put off the concept of truth just because it’s so often invoked by the JW’s. Vaclav Havel said “Keep the company of those who seek truth, run from those who have found it.”)
In 1897 French artist Paul Gauguin created a painting of some naked Tahitians called “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” To those I would add: Why is there something instead of nothing? What is the nature of consciousness? Where is other life in the universe? What is the universe? Why is the universe? Are there more universes? Etc. etc. etc. You can all think of your own to add to the list. Until incredibly recently all of the answers to those questions, ALL of them! were religion –based. I.e. – horseshit. The fact that anyone, anywhere is engaged in any kind of work that’s not directly related to the answering questions like those is utterly bizarre to me. Sometimes I just feel like screaming: “Everybody stop what you’re doing right now! We don’t even know how long homo sapiens' have been around! Nobody does anything until we have that shit figured out!!!
Many of you have probably heard podcast interviews or Youtube clips with Jordan Peterson. I love the guy, I don’t agree with everything he says but he makes me proud to be Canadian. One of the things I disagree with him about though is the idea that universities are fucked and you shouldn’t go to them. We should go to them. We should take them back from the IdPol trolls and the pomo anti-speech dogmatists. As ex-JWs we should be fighting these people on campus more than anyone else. There are few institutions in human life directly dedicated to the slow-but-sure discovery of truth. Corporations aren’t dedicated to this. Their telos is profit (as it probably should be.) Religions aren’t dedicated to this. Their telos is the reification of dogma. The institutions of political life aren’t dedicated to this. Their telos is power (and maybe also once in a while doing a little good. Though most of the time just seeking power.) Academia really stands alone in this regard. It took centuries to turn universities from dogma-blathering divinity schools into truth-seeking, cosmos discovery factories. They have within them incredible power to destroy the shitty thinking that leads to cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Social Justice Warriors. They've done it before. They can do it again. They’re too important to be abandoned.
Here’s an excellent video and article that go into some of these issues far better than I’m capable of. They're worth every second of the time it takes to check them out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8
http://quillette.com/2017/06/08/evergreen-state-battle-modernity/