Supermonkey

Oh boy oh boy when have we looked so poor. Aston villa last day of last season? West Bromley loss I suppose

I was just thinking that lol. When the excuses are as long as we nick a draw it's a good result, you have a good hint about how poorly you are playing

Put a fiver on them to win 2 minutes before they scored. 🤑

No this is comfortably our worst performance against them under Tuchel. Before you could see the danger we posed but that was toothless. On the ball and off it.

No more two strikers standing in the middle so the ball gets effortlessly passed to their fullbacks. Werner lukaku havertz front 3. Werner jorginho kante havertz without the ball

Chilwell and kai on

Don't like the midfield 3 against city

I think it will. I'm confident if kova and James can put their passing boots on from deep

Should be given chances in the big games. Play him against City I say, to keep their back line busy from pushing high. He fucked them up in the FA semi final and CL with his movement. I bet he gives Lukaku space too.

Play werner and their press will stutter. Or spaces in the midfield will open. Perfect game to try the combo with Lukaku

I miss pulisic and think Werner needs a chance with Lukaku

Haha its only when I've got messi, Neymar and mbappe upfront

CHO should be given the chance to replace mount at inside left forward

Pulisic would have been good this match

They are following my tactics with PSG on fifa. Back 5 with max depth and very narrow. 2 holding midfielders that stay back when attacking and cover the centre lol. Even when they break they keep 7 players back

Metadehumanization erodes democratic norms during the 2020 presidential election https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/asap.12253 Abstract The present research directly replicates past work suggesting that metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, erodes Americans’ support for democratic norms. In the days surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more than was actually the case. Partisans’ exaggerated metadehumanization inspired reciprocal dehumanization of the other side, which in turn predicted their support for subverting democratic norms to hurt the opposing party. Along with replicating past work demonstrating metadehumanization's corrosive effect on democratic integrity, we also contribute novel insights into this process. We found the most politically engaged partisans held the most exaggerated, and therefore most inaccurate, levels of metadehumanization. Moreover, despite the socially progressive and egalitarian outlook traditionally associated with liberalism, the most liberal Democrats actually expressed the greatest dehumanization of Republicans. This suggests that political ideology can at times be as much an expression of social identity as a reflection of deliberative policy considerations, and demonstrates the need to develop more constructive outlets for social identity maintenance.

https://unherd.com/2021/07/the-fightback-against-critical-race-theory/ The fightback against Critical Race Theory Its creators thought America was on their side — they were wrong Douglas Murray is an author and journalist. July 2, 2021 One of the most irritating terms of our time must be “gaslighting”. It sounds so serious, but is just another of those pseudo-criminal charges that people fling around online, as though it has a well-known application in the real world. Loose in definition, assumed by the user to be understood by all, it is merely a form of elite jargon, known and understood only by a few. But when a word gets used so relentlessly, it begins to take on a certain legitimacy — and even begins to crop up in the minds of people who loathe it. Indeed, it even happened to me recently after I read a number of pieces in the American press claiming that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) was a bogeyman of the Right. Now here, I thought, is something that is definitely gaslighting. Surely these people must be trying to drive readers mad by making assertions that are so clearly untrue; presenting one vision of the world and then denying that it even exists. If this is not “gaslighting”, then what is? In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg claimed that the current wave of concern across America about CRT had simply been whipped up by a clever propagandist — and that, as a consequence, CRT had become a maddening debate. In particular, she said, “the phrase itself had become unmoored from any fixed meaning”. Elsewhere she criticised people of being guilty of a “moral panic” and said that she was “highly sceptical” of the idea that CRT is being taught in schools, before going on to explain that “antiracist education” isn’t “radically leftist” but just “elementary”. This slew of claims demonstrates the problem at hand. For in CRT we are not talking about some hidden theory; we are talking about a school of thought which was openly heralded within American academia and has now been forced upon the wider world. Yet just at the point that it has infiltrated the public sphere, Goldberg and others claim that our understanding of CRT has become confused — as if an ideology that is wilfully obscurantist ought, in fact, to be straightforward and agreed upon. In the Washington Post and elsewhere, this debate has come to define American politics in recent weeks. Most prominently, Joy Reid of MSNBC has taken to claiming that CRT is not being taught in schools, is not what its critics say that it is and is both too complex for people to understand and also an exceptionally obvious demand for social justice. What prompted such a desperate defence? Well, American parents have finally woken up to what is being taught to their children. At one prestigious Manhattan school, the headmaster even resigned after a group of parents complained about a number of school initiatives, ranging from “racist cop” re-enactments in science lessons to classes about “decentering whiteness” and “white supremacy”. But now, just at the moment that the American public are starting to push back, supporters of CRT are stepping away from their creation, pretending that concerned citizens have misunderstood it, or are railing at a mirage. The aforementioned Reid, for instance, recently interviewed a leading CRT scholar — indeed the person who reportedly coined the term — Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has described the backlash against CRT as an effort “to reverse the racial reckoning unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime”. There is, to put it simply, a lot going on here; clearly, today’s discussions about CRT are unclear and disingenuous. But if there is a reason for this, it is that CRT’s decades-long advocates are no longer being honest. In their 2001 work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic described CRT as a “movement” consisting of: So this is not a hidden campaign. Its thought leaders did not try to hide the revolutionary, activist nature of their “discipline”. They boasted about it; the activism was the point. The purpose of CRT was never simply to throw around ideas — it was to change America, and by extension the wider world, by applying these new racial rules in the widest possible way. So why the sudden reversal? Why the sudden retreat into contradictory forms of self-defence? The reason, I suspect, is clear: the ugly little game that has been playing out in American academia is — like many a theory before it — not surviving its first encounters with the public. In that sense, at least, it faces a similar problem to that experienced by Marxists. On paper, Marxist academics were able to make grand claims about how to make an equitable society. But try it out on the public and they soon learned that what worked on paper did not work in practice A similar, if so far less bloody, discovery is being made with CRT. Yes, its advocates may believe that they have come up with a system to create universal justice. But applied in American schools, for instance, all they come up with is a system which causes untold pain and ugliness. Earlier this year when Grace Church School in Manhattan was in the headlines, people could see this for themselves. In private the headmaster conceded that there was a problem with the racial games he was forcing on all of his students. “Problematising whiteness” may seem fine in theory, but in practice it creates discord. As its headmaster reluctantly conceded, there are a lot of white children at his school; and if you “problematise” whiteness then you problematise them. Crenshaw, Reid and their fellow CRT supporters failed to account for that — and now this failing of theirs has plunged America into chaos. In the meantime, their response has been to run for cover, camouflaging themselves with every technique possible. They say we don’t understand them. They say that CRT doesn’t really exist — or that it is all too complex to explain to ordinary people. But the simple fact is that CRT does exist, as a very large number of Americans have discovered. As for CRT’s bad reception, there is only one group to blame: its creators. It is their fault, not ours, that their ideology’s first mass encounter with the general public is proving such a failure.

Reflections on the Upheaval in France What warnings of national disintegration say about our shared era of turmoil I’ve been keeping an eye on Europe lately, and on France in particular. As I’ve tried to articulate here previously, the era of general upheaval underway is hardly a phenomenon limited to the United States. Instead, propelled everywhere by the same fundamental forces, it appears to be playing out in a more or less similar fashion all across the Western world, and perhaps beyond. In this regard France serves as an especially instructive example, as recent events have served to highlight in striking fashion. In short, recent national controversy over a pair of open letters directed to the government by a collection of retired and active-duty military officers has not only spawned a month of political controversy in France, but revealed deeper dynamics at work in the country that may help provide a clearer picture of what’s happening everywhere. On April 21, twenty retired French generals published an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron and the French government in the right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles (Today’s Values) denouncing “the disintegration that is affecting our country,” and explaining they were speaking out because “the hour is late, France is in peril, and many mortal dangers threaten her.” This disintegration, they said, was proceeding as “the Islamist hordes of the banlieue [immigrant heavy city suburbs]” were succeeding in “detaching large parts of the nation and turning them into territory subject to dogmas contrary to our constitution.” For there to “exist any city, any district where the laws of the Republic do not apply,” would soon be fatal, they warned, citing rising crime and the swath of Islamist terror attacks that have struck the country, including the October 2020 beheading of middle-school teacher Samuel Paty by a Chechen refugee that many French viewed as a direct assault on the secular Republic’s deepest values. However the problem is not only Islamism, the letter writers argued, but “a certain anti-racism” that in reality has “only one goal: to create on our soil a malaise, even a hatred between communities.” The “hateful and fanatical supporters” of this ideology, who “despise our country, its traditions, its culture, and want to see it dissolve by tearing away its past and its history,” might speak in terms of “indigenism and decolonial theories” and make a show of “analyzing centuries old words,” but what they really want is “racial war.” Meanwhile Macron’s government had used the “forces of order” [the police and military] as “scapegoats” and “auxiliary agents [of state power]” to suppress “French people in yellow vests expressing their despair” – a reference to the huge populist “Yellow Vest” protests against Macron’s economic policies, including higher fuel taxes, that exploded in late 2018. “Those who lead our country must imperatively find the necessary courage to eradicate these dangers,” they urge, noting that “like us, a great majority of our fellow citizens are fed up with your wavering and guilty silence.” Fortunately, for the most part it would be sufficient a solution to “apply without weakness the laws that already exist.” But, they grimly conclude, “If nothing is done, laxism will continue to spread inexorably in society, provoking in the end an explosion and the intervention of our active comrades for a dangerous mission to protect our civilizational values… Civil war will break upon this growing chaos, and the deaths, for which you will be responsible, will number among the thousands.” Initially, the letter was dismissed as mere “eccentric nationalist nostalgia by octogenarian retirees,” as the British Financial Times put it, and the government appeared content to ignore it. The then head of France’s General Directorate for Internal Security, Patrick Calvar, had already warned that France was “on the edge of a civil war” as early as 2016, so this kind of thing was old news. But that changed as soon as Marine Le Pen – the leader of the right-wing Rassemblement National (National Rally) party who polls show is likely to again be Macron’s top rival in presidential elections next year – endorsed the letter, saying “it was the duty of all French patriots, wherever they are from, to rise up to restore – and indeed save – the country.” Public conversation in France turned to politicization of the armed forces and whether the letter’s final lines were a call for a military coup d'état (the fact that the letter was published on the 60th anniversary of a failed generals’ putsch against President Charles de Gaulle in 1961 providing evidence for this in the view of many). General François Lecointre, armed forces chief of staff, stated that while “at first I said to myself that it wasn’t very significant,” at least 18 active military personnel had been found to have been among the more than 1,500 people who also signed the letter. “That I cannot accept,” he said, because “the neutrality of the armed forces is essential.” They would all be punished, while any of the generals still in the reserves would be forced into full retirement as part of “an exceptional measure, that we will launch immediately at the request of the defense minister.” Still, the government’s ministers emphasized that the signatories were nothing more than an isolated and irrelevant minority in the military. But soon enough, on May 10, a second letter appeared, again published in Valeurs Actuelles, this time by more than 2,000 serving soldiers writing in support of the first letter’s retired generals, accusing the government of having sullied their reputations when “their only fault is to love their country and to mourn its visible decline.” They described themselves as being part of the generation that had served abroad in France’s fight against Islamist forces in Mali, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, where they said they have lost comrades who “offered their lives to destroy the Islamism to which you have made concessions on our soil.” “Almost all of us,” the letter notes, also participated in “Operation Sentinel,” in which troops were deployed throughout Paris following the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre (many armed soldiers still protect sensitive sites, like subways, schools, and synagogues across France), and therefore “have seen with our own eyes the abandoned banlieues... where France means nothing but an object of sarcasm, contempt or even hatred.” France, they argue, is fast becoming “a failed state”: “We see violence in our towns and villages. We see communitarianism [identity politics, as the French refer to it] taking hold in the public space, in public debate. We see hatred of France and its history becoming the norm.” Their letter, they say, is thus “a professional assessment we are giving, because we have seen this decline in many countries in crisis. It precedes collapse, chaos and violence. And contrary to what [others] say, chaos and violence will not come from military rebellion but from a civil insurrection.” “We are talking about the survival of our country, the survival of your country,” the letter concludes, addressing Macron. “A civil war is brewing in France and you know it perfectly well.” For if an “insurrection” breaks out “the military will maintain order on its own soil, because it will be asked to. That is the definition of civil war.” The second letter, this time open to the public to sign, attracted (as of the end of last week) more than 287,000 signatures. Again came exasperated reactions from many ministers and observers. But what is most remarkable, in my view, is how little enthusiasm most seemed to have for challenging the basic premises of the letters: that France is in a state of growing fracture and even dissolution. Instead, the focus of controversy was once again on the military taking a political position. Lecointre, the army chief of staff, said those who signed the second letter should quit the armed forces if they wanted to freely express their political opinions, but dropped his previous threats of punishment in a letter to military personnel discussing the controversy. Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said the letter was “a waste of time and offers no solution,” before adding “yes, there is a political Islamism that is trying to break up the country, and we are fighting it.” Rachida Dati, Mayor of Paris' 7th arrondissement and another likely future center-right challenger to Macron flatly agreed that “What is written in this letter is a reality… When you have a country plagued by urban guerrilla warfare, when you have a constant and high terrorist threat, when you have increasingly glaring and flagrant inequalities... we cannot say that the country is doing well.” But perhaps my favorite example was that of (retired) General Jérôme Pellistrandi, chief editor at the magazine Revue Défense Nationale, who prefaced his otherwise sharp criticism of the outspoken soldiers with: “Everyone agrees that society is breaking up, it’s a known fact, but…” What was going on here? Since when do government officials reflexively agree that their country is falling apart? Well, it turns out that a rather shockingly high proportion of the French public seems to agree with the sentiments the letters expressed. The following chart, created from the results of a Harris Interactive opinion poll taken April 29, after the first letter, is in my view one of the most striking statements about the political mood in a Western country that you’re likely to see for some time: Copyright: Financial Times So, to break this down, not only do 58% of the French public agree with the first letter’s sentiments about the country facing disintegration, but so do nearly half of Macron’s own governing party, the centrist En Marche. Awkward. Nor are those sentiments limited to any one part of the political spectrum, even if the right is more sympathetic overall. Far-left party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon may have quickly declared that the “mutinous and cowardly” soldiers who signed the letter would all be purged from the army if he were elected, but 43% of his party seem to share their concerns. But that’s not even the whole of it – an amazing 74% of poll respondents said they thought French society was collapsing, while no less than 45% agreed that France “will soon have a civil war.” Qui vivra verra… Share Several aspects of this whole affair are especially fascinating, from my point of view – and not the talk of a coup, which everyone seems to agree is highly unlikely. Rather, the situation in France says some important things about the nature of the Upheaval that I’m trying to explore here. The first is simply to demonstrate how the phenomenon is not at all limited to the United States, or even to the “Anglo-Saxon world.” Overall, despite many differences between America and France (e.g. in terms of size, geography, political structures, history, including racial history, language, culture, etc.) the set of simultaneous crises besetting both countries is remarkably similar. Both countries are home to liberal democracies produced by the European Enlightenment, the values of which are now being challenged. Both countries were once largely Christian in moral character – if not in law – but have since been secularized (France earlier), with unpredictable consequences. Both are in the process of coming to terms with a loss of international power and prestige (though this is much more advanced in the French case). Both are obviously influenced by the same technological forces, and by the tide of economic globalization. Both are experiencing growing income inequality, urban vs. rural divides, and distrust of the ruling elites. Both are facing growing social divisions, often along ethnic lines, as well as rising lawlessness. Finally, both are facing major political turmoil over uncontrolled immigration – though the issue lacks the hugely contentious religious aspect in the United States that it does in France. And, in short, both countries are clearly facing at least one of the defining characteristics of the Upheaval: the collapse of any agreed upon and consistently accepted authority. It is notable that, in both countries (at least until recently) there is only one institution that still garners relatively widespread respect: the military. (And French generals aren’t the only ones trying to capitalize on this with controversial open letters.) Second, there is the key detail – almost entirely skipped over in the English-language press in favor of focusing on the anti-immigration angle, as far as I’ve seen – of the “anti-racism,” “decolonialism,” and “communitarianism” decried in the two letters as contributing to national dissolution. This is rather unmistakably a reference to the amalgamated, zealously anti-traditional and anti-liberal ideology of the “New Faith” – alternately referred to as Anti-Racism, the Social Justice movement, Critical Theory, identity politics, neo-Marxism, or Wokeness, among other synonymous infamies – that I’ve previously identified as one of the key revolutionary dynamics of our present era. Let me repeat this proposition again: no revolution has ever remained contained by national borders. The New Faith is a trans-national ideological movement, which can no more remain confined to the United States than it remained confined within the American academy where it matured (it was arguably born in, well… France). And it is more than capable of rapidly adapting itself to and flourishing within whatever national context it penetrates. But, wherever it goes, it’s just as disruptive to the foundations of social and political order. What’s ironic in this case, however, is that France’s Macron has in fact been one of the only leaders in the West that has clearly recognized this fact and pushed back hard against the New Faith, saying in a 2020 speech for example that “certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ were prompting ethnic groups to revisit “their identity through a post-colonial or anticolonial discourse.” This, he warned, was aiding and abetting the “conscious, theorized, political-religious project” of “Islamist separatism” in France. The “ethnicization of the social question’’ by American-influenced universities, he claimed in another speech, was in effect “breaking the republic in two.” Similarly, Marcon’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, has blamed “an intellectual matrix from American universities” for complicity in excusing and exacerbating Islamist terrorism, and in February the French government announced a commission to investigate the influence within higher education of “Islamo-leftist’’ tendencies that “corrupt society’’ – including by “always looking at everything through the prism of their will to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy.’’ Meanwhile this has all occurred amid the context of an explosive debate within the French academic world, where (totally unlike in the U.S. and U.K.) the New Faith has faced significant pushback from the establishment elite, with more than 100 prominent scholars banding together to support the government’s inquiry in an open letter decrying theories “transferred from North American campuses,” including the “cancel culture” of radical student activists. They have popular support: the Harris Interactive poll finds that 74% of the French public think “anti-racist” ideology has only “the opposite effect.” To conceptualize this, one must understand that the French take great pride in their system’s theoretical ability to unite a multitude of diverse ethnic and religious groups under the flag of a single nation. The French state very purposely does not collect or compile racial statistics (doing so is literally illegal) as a function of its liberal commitment to universal rights and treating all citizens equally under the law. It is probably for this reason that Macron has felt emboldened to speak out against America’s ideological invasive species – along with the realization, perhaps, of how absolutely incendiary U.S.-style identity politics was likely to prove in a France already riven with its own social conflicts. Finally, what’s striking about the situation in France is that every driving factor appears set to only get worse. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the divide between rich and poor; Europe’s economic recovery has been shaky; the ideology of the New Faith is likely to prove more difficult for the French to combat than they expect (the foundation of the established order having been hollowed out over a very long period of time); and the identitarian culture war is likely to only heat up, especially with elections approaching in which Le Pen appears to have a decent chance of actually winning (an outcome that could accelerate political and cultural fracturing, as Donald Trump’s election did in the United States). In particular, the migration issue is almost guaranteed to only get worse for France. Europe’s declining demographics have created a vacuum that quickly growing populations from impoverished and strife-ridden part of the Middle East and Africa have understandably rushed to fill, and none of these factors have changed. Meanwhile, climate change is likely to rapidly accelerate migration as environmental stressors are expected to hit these regions particularly hard – leading to predictions of a “climate refugee” crisis. Very similar circumstances face the United States, but with Latin America substituting for Africa. It is notable that every one of these trends, including climate-induced migration, is featured in the U.S. Intelligence Community’s rather ominous recent report evaluating where the world is headed over the next five years, which I’ve written on previously. (Several readers have written to me to criticize my lack of discussion of climate change as a factor in both that post and my essay introducing the Upheaval – well fair enough, though I am uncertain about how much the climate issue has actually driven the turmoil we’re already seeing so far today, as opposed to what we may see in the future.) France thus seems set to function as an ahead-of-the-curve epicenter for the Upheaval in Europe. No wonder the French are so pessimistic… In the end, however, I live on the other side of the Atlantic, and have a limited view of what’s going on. If any of you do in fact happen to live in France, or elsewhere in Europe, I’d be particularly interested to hear your thoughts on what’s happening and where you think things are headed – especially if you think I’ve got it all wrong. Go ahead and comment below. Or, if you’d rather not comment publicly here, please feel free to email me at [email protected] with your thoughts. And as always, if you’ve found this interesting, I’d appreciate it if you could share it with others who might as well, and of course remember to subscribe below:

The sexual counterrevolution is coming America’s young elite is turning against free love https://spectatorworld.com/topic/sexual-counterrevolution-liberation/ Charlotte is a 23-year-old Harvard graduate. Beautiful and willowy, she grew up in — her words — ‘a super-liberal environment’. You might expect to find her Instagram full of sexy, pouting pictures. But Charlotte has deleted all the bikini photos from her online life. And six months ago, she embraced ‘modest dress’: nothing that exposes her collarbones or shoulders and nothing that reveals her legs above the knee. Narayan is seven years older than Charlotte. He is what matchmaking 18th-century matrons might have described as ‘very eligible’: a clean-living, highly educated and charismatic single guy with a well-paid job in tech. He’s the embodiment of Jane Austen’s famous observation that ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’. And contra all the modern laments about single men preferring to play the field, Narayan actually wants to get married. Narayan and his close male friends are all around the same age. They’re all elite guys working in tech and finance — and all either dating to marry, or already married. In what amounts to an informal 21st-century marriage brokerage, they and the wives of already-married members of their friend group collude to track down potential partners. But they’re picky — and Narayan is blunt about the criteria. It’s not just about being educated, ambitious or pretty. ‘Guys who say they don’t care about their wife’s sexual history are straight-up lying,’ he tells me. All the men in his group, he says, would strongly prefer their future wives to be virgins on marriage. Some categorically rule out women who aren’t: ‘No hymen, no diamond’. Charlotte and Narayan are not the uptight fundamentalists or ugly, embittered feminists of stereotype: they’re members of the Ivy-educated jeunesse dorée. They’re pushing back against a culture of sexual freedom they see as toxic not just to individual wellbeing, but even to the long-term health of American society. They’re the forefront of what ‘Default Friend’, a Bay Area writer on sex and relationships, terms ‘the coming wave of sex-negativity’. Welcome to the sexual counterrevolution. The current they’re swimming against is strong. Charlotte reports that, when she got engaged in her senior year at Harvard, her peers looked at her ‘like I was crazy’ for expressing a preference for children over a high-flying career. Narayan tells me that his views on the importance of marriage and the qualities he seeks in a potential spouse have left him facing accusations of woman-hating. ‘Voicing any of this stuff openly is just social suicide,’ he says. So much so, in fact, that ‘Narayan’ is a pseudonym: there’s simply no way he can afford to be quoted about this under his real name without risking social censure or even repercussions at work. Consider that for a moment. A 30-year-old American man holds the (until recently entirely conventional) opinion that men and women should refrain from promiscuity and that marriage, monogamy and family life are general social goods. And he will say so only under a pseudonym, for fear of destroying his career. How did we get here? There have been multiple attempts at sexual revolution in America but, prior to the availability of reliable birth control, all failed to gain widespread traction. It’s not as though an unplanned pregnancy can be shared equally by both parties; historically the parent left holding the baby was most often the woman. Under those conditions, Americans developed elaborate social codes to manage contact between horny young people — and to channel sexual desire toward commitment and child-rearing. In 17th-century New England, unmarried couples were strictly chaperoned, but the promenading Puritans were given a ‘courting stick’: a long, hollow tube they could use to whisper sweet nothings to one another. When a couple was close enough that marriage was expected, they were permitted to spend the night together – but with the woman clothed in a tight nightdress that rendered her (as it were) inaccessibly mermaid-like below the waist. Less eccentrically, in A Young Lady’s Friend (1837), Mrs John Farrar advises young ladies to preserve ‘delicacy and refinement’ by never squeezing into tight spaces with a man, taking an unaccompanied carriage ride with one, or even holding a man’s hand. Such proscriptions aimed at foreclosing the possibility of physical contact, let alone anything more intimate. In 1960 the FDA approved the first birth control pill. Abruptly, women’s most compelling motivation for not accepting an unchaperoned carriage ride fell away — and women rejoiced. Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s influential Sex and the Single Girl (1962) argued that women have as much right to sexual pleasure as men and offered women advice on developing an active sex life before marriage. In her radical feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Shulamith Firestone responded to new developments in reproductive technology by imagining ‘the freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible’ so that ‘humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality’ in which ‘all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged’. Firestone envisaged a utopia in which all forms of sexuality could flourish in freedom. Since her heyday, the progressive world has near-unanimously championed sexual liberation and openness as a crucial emancipatory cause. That ‘Narayan’ is only willing to criticize this consensus under a pseudonym attests to how decisively that battle has been won. But what kind of victory has it been? Firestone dreamed of unmooring desire from reproduction in the interests of a joyfully sensuous new world. In practice, though, desire was no sooner emancipated than it found itself pressed into service again: first to sell entertainment or consumer goods and, increasingly, as the product itself. In the process, the idea of female empowerment has gradually fused with the demands of the market. Helen Gurley Brown celebrated liberation from the risk of pregnancy by advising women to ‘get to a man by dealing with him on his professional level, then stay around to charm and sexually zonk him’. But the dividends of America’s burgeoning sexual freedom didn’t go only to women who embraced this blend of professional and sexual aggression. In 1960, the year the FDA approved the Pill, Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy club in Chicago. By the end of 1961, Hefner’s Chicago club was the busiest nightclub in the world — with the role of ‘Playboy bunny’ marketed to young women as a glamorous and high-earning occupation. By 1998, this convergence of sex, commerce and feminism had its own smash-hit TV drama, Sex and the City. Its high-achieving, sexually voracious thirty-something female characters glamorized the ideal that leveraging your sex appeal for power and pleasure was feminism. In its first episode, Carrie, the lead protagonist, uses a man for sex and reports ‘feeling powerful, potent and incredibly alive’. To the victor, the spoils. Since 1998, pop-feminism has largely been concerned with setting acceptable boundaries for male responses to women’s sexual self-expression and rendering any holdout bastions of prudishness unacceptable in polite society. The ‘Slutwalk’ and #MeToo movements entrenched as orthodoxy the view that women can and should dress and behave as they please, without any fear of unwanted sexual attention. And the ‘sex-positivity’ movement painted tolerance of diverse sexual practices and preferences as a key social-justice issue. ‘Don’t yuck my yum,’ advises ‘sex educator’ Pamela Madsen in Huffpost. Over the same half century, the pornographic empire that made Hugh Hefner a multimillionaire mushroomed into a $3 billion internet industry in America alone and accounts for some $97 billion worldwide. Pornhub alone is valued at over $1 billion. And OnlyFans, a website which allows ‘creators’ to sell their own pornographic images to ‘fans’, now boasts one million (mostly female) creators worldwide and over 30 million (mostly male) users. Pornography is now a key plank of feminist empowerment, championed by ‘sex-positive’ activists under the slogan ‘Sex work is work’. This year, Ohio State University’s ‘Sex Week’ included classes for undergraduates interested in starting an OnlyFans. At the Grammy Awards in March, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s performance of their smash hit ‘WAP’ rejoiced in the artist’s power to make men ‘pay my tuition just to kiss me on this wet-ass pussy’. What began with the Pill, Cosmopolitan and Playboy has ended with feminism, desire and commerce indistinguishable from one another. This fusion of sex and business has performed a reverse takeover of relationship formation in what is now called the ‘sexual marketplace’ — a term unheard before 1960 but now commonplace. And with sex thus subject to market logic, the main consideration in arranging it — as in any other transaction — is that both parties agree to the deal. But the relationship between sex and ‘consent’ has long been ambiguous. One veteran of the sexual revolution, the British journalist Virginia Ironside, wrote of life as a young woman in the 1960s: ‘With every man knowing you were armed with the pill, pregnancy was no longer a reason to say ‘no’ to sex… I mainly remember the 60s as an endless round of miserable promiscuity, a time when often it seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat.‘ Half a century after Ironside ‘consented’ out of politeness to sexual encounters that she neither wanted nor enjoyed, women consent to considerably more. One outcome of the ‘sex-positive’ drive that reframes shame as oppression has been to render taboo the expression of any disapproval of another person’s erotic preferences. In progressive online youth cultures this is known as ‘kink-shaming’ and is a serious faux pas. At the same time, though, growing numbers of young women are taking to social media to recount experiences of abuse perpetrated under the guise of ‘kink’. ‘Smokinfeds’, a young Twitter user, describes how, when she was a teenager, the 38-year-old man with whom she had a ‘consensual’ BDSM relationship introduced ‘breath play’: ‘he was piss drunk & put me in a rear naked choke & I passed out.’ On another occasion, she recounts, ‘I’d woken up to him shoving crushed up Adderall in my vagina.’ Louise Perry, 29, is a co-founder of ‘We Can’t Consent To This’, a British campaign against sexual violence. The campaign’s #WeCantConsentToThis hashtag has gained traction internationally as an online focal point for women with shocking stories of sexual violence, often experienced at a startlingly young age. Perry lists more than 60 cases of women killed since 1972, supposedly during ‘rough sex gone wrong’: victims who, before they died, had experienced violence including waterboarding, wounding, strangulation, beating and asphyxiation — acts to which they had, supposedly, consented. In her forthcoming book on the sexual revolution, Perry argues that pornography is normalizing such abuse. Studies support this. A 2018 study of American youth identifies exposure to violent pornography as a key risk factor for engaging in real-life sexual aggression. Similarly, a British survey from 2020 finds that 71 percent of men under 40 have slapped, choked, gagged or spat on a partner during sex, with 51 percent indicating that pornography had influenced their desire to do so. Pornography, Perry claims, is also degrading young people’s capacity for mutual pleasure. One young woman posts on Reddit’s relationships board about how her boyfriend can only reach climax by watching ‘blueberry porn’, a niche subgenre inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which women turn purple and become grotesquely inflated. Another poster complains that her relationship is faltering because her partner has desensitized himself through repeated masturbation to the point where he cannot orgasm at all — a phenomenon known among young men as ‘death grip syndrome’. Aaron Sibarium, a 25-year-old American writer, describes this mercenary, violent and atomized libidinal landscape as ‘sexual disenchantment’ in which ‘free love’ becomes ‘a sterile spin-off of the market’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this collective erotic ennui has coincided with what the Atlantic has called a ‘sex recession’. Between 1991 and 2017, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 percent to 40 percent. Today, people in their early 20s are twice as likely to be sexually abstinent as Gen Xers were at the same age. The effects reverberate. According to the Institute of Family Studies, 26 percent of millennials aged 30-34 have not yet formed a family. This failure rate is double the 13 percent failure rate of the boomers at the same age. CDC data show that the American birth rate has been consistently below replacement since 2007 — something even the most liberal commentators acknowledge will have profound long-term economic and political consequences. ‘Default Friend’, the California writer, reports that marriage now seems so out of reach for the young men who write to her for advice it’s no longer perceived as stuffy and conventional but ‘a status thing’. In pursuit of that elusive goal, some are taking matters into — or rather, out of — their own hands. Unlike the 19th-century drive for ‘continence’, the anti-masturbation move- ment known as ‘#NoFap’ is driven not by doctors and parents but by young men. The 800,000-strong, 99 percent-male member- ship of the r/NoFap subreddit continually express their longing for real-life intimacy. They describe their chances of finding and forming relationships as profoundly damaged by habitually high levels of porn consumption. Success posts often cite finding a girlfriend as evidence of the transformative power of quitting. On the other side of the looking glass are the young women who produce the images in question. They are encouraged by a nakedly commercial understanding of ‘sex-positivity’, and to view themselves as empowered entrepreneurs, not entry-level pornographers. Charlotte sees this as a toxic lie, as likely to undermine the prospect of real intimacy for the women who embrace it as compulsive masturbation is for men. ‘We have to ask ourselves: would I be the guy who’d marry the OnlyFans girl?’ For her, modesty offers a more lasting path to empowerment. ‘Being sexy is a huge dopamine rush,’ she explains, ‘but real feminism is about being able to develop an identity that’s bigger than just biology.’ Out there in the sexual marketplace, anything still goes. ‘Everybody’s relationship with sexuality, gender and romance is simply their own,’ Pamela Madsen asserts. Narayan disagrees. It’s not just about whether it’s OK to ‘yuck’ someone’s ‘yum’, he argues, when sexual disenchantment is ‘killing the West’. He sees the stakes as existential: ‘Civilization is going to fall apart if people can’t have families.’ No culture is monolithic. Feminism produced Helen Gurley Brown and Sex and the City; it also produced Phyllis Schlafly and Andrea Dworkin, two women from opposing ends of the political spectrum but both early critics of America’s burgeoning culture of sexual freedom. Are ‘sex-negative’ voices like Charlotte and Narayan just a contrarian minority? ‘Default Friend’ thinks not. ‘People are burned out,’ she says. As one male TikTok user recently put it: ‘I used to love ass gazing,’ but ‘y’all have shown me so much ass I’m numb to it.’ His advice? ‘Just keep it in your pants, man.’ ‘Default Friend’ points out that by the time a cultural shift becomes visible in online discourse, it’s already well-established: ‘The sex-negativity thing has been simmering for a long time,’ she says, ‘but now the house is burning down.’ She’s speaking figuratively. But on April 25 this year Feras Antoon, one of the founders of Pornhub, saw his $20-million Montreal mansion burned to the ground in what appears to be an arson attack. Commentators were quick to insinuate a link between this event and the ‘Exodus Cry’ anti-porn campaign, from a group the Daily Beast called ‘a shady Evangelical group with Trump ties’. Despite what this might imply about the religious and political affiliations of those hostile to the porn industry, American faith has been in freefall for a long time. In the last decade alone, Pew reports, the proportion of self-identifying American Christians has fallen by 12 percent — yet the campaign against Pornhub has mushroomed. Online supporters can be found not just on the religious right but among a broader coalition that includes radical feminists, former porn stars and growing numbers of young ‘kink’ survivors, #NoFap alumni and the sexually disenchanted. When it comes to sexuality, the question is less how we can have it all than ‘what are we willing to trade?’ The sexual revolution sought to ease the burden of shame and social constraint — especially for women. Yet if we listen to its inheritors, the outcome has not been polymorphous pleasure but escalating degradation; not female erotic emancipation but violence masquerading as desire; not a garden of earthly delights but desensitization, loneliness and a collapsing birth rate. The price of fusing empowerment and freedom with desire and commerce turned out to be human intimacy. The winners turn out not to be women, but porn barons like Feras Antoon. Now the counterrevolutionaries want intimacy back. If their numbers continue to grow, we may find that the price of victory is the death of sexual freedom. We may also discover that this proves as much a mixed blessing as its birth.

How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me Dr. Michael Robillard Jun 15 30 25 “Universities are madrassas for woke stupidity.” -James Delingpole When I first encountered the discipline of Philosophy as an undergraduate at West Point some twenty years ago, I was put into a state of awe. Encountering the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hume, Berkeley and Russell for the very first time felt like I was being let in on some ancient and esoteric form of knowledge, some sort of secret language invisible to the uninitiated. Leaving the classroom each day, debating and conversing with other students over these new and earth-shattering concepts and questions felt like a kind of drug trip; like I was Neo being shown the code for the Matrix. For those years and for who I was at the time, it was truly a mind-altering and life-changing experience. And while the questions shook my sense of certainty to the core, filling my head with all sorts of doubts, I nonetheless remained certain of one thing; that Socrates was ultimately right and that the unexamined life was indeed not worth living. I was compelled so much so by these philosophical questions and ideas that I would later be moved to terminate what was, at the time, a fruitful career as a U.S. Army officer, to turn down several lucrative white-collar jobs thereafter, and to shove all my chips into the center of the playing table, in hopes of one day becoming a professional analytic philosopher. Now, after a decade of being within the ivory tower, of seeing how the sausage is made and witnessing first-hand the business that academia really is, I’ve determined, quite sadly, that the discipline of academic Philosophy, and the university system more generally, has become little more than an indoctrination center for ‘woke’ leftist ideology and the antithesis of its original aim and purpose. That being said, this essay is my explanation of how and why I’m leaving academia, or, more appropriately, how academia ended up leaving me. My cynicism towards academia was not always this way, however. Coming away jaded from the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war in my mid-twenties, believing that we as American citizens had some basic duties to look out for animals, the environment, and for the poor, and thinking that African Americans still had some reasonable and justified grievances because of slavery, I found myself entering into graduate school at the beginning of the Obama years as a self-described ‘center left’ liberal. The beginning few years of my time in grad school were a combination of exhilaration, possibility, and most of all, vindication. Unlike my time in the stifling, hyper-conformist atmosphere of the military, now I was finally home, around my people; people who were thoughtful, open-minded, knowledgeable, worldly, lovers of ideas and appreciators of the life of mind. No longer the odd-duck soldier who thought too much, I felt, for the very first time in my adult life, like I was finally accepted. For the most part, many of my professors and my graduate peers found me to be somewhat of a refreshing anomaly. I was the thoughtful, philosophical soldier, critical of our country’s recent wars. During that time period, I could also sleep easily at night with a clear conscience knowing I was now one of ‘the good people’ on the left, a proud ‘bleeding heart’, no longer immersed among the religious nut-jobs, the money obsessed corporate shills, the war-hawks, and the racists who comprised the ranks of the right. I was none of these things. Rather, I was the open-minded, compassionate, slightly left-leaning, ‘nuanced centrist’, who could just as easily have a chat with the frontline infantryman from Nebraska as I could with the Ivory tower academic from Oxford and serve as a kind of bridge between these two worlds, synthesizing a dialogue between left and right, mind and body, theory and practice. At least this was the story that I told myself. In retrospect, the cracks in the liberal dam were always there from the very beginning, but I was either too distracted, too busy, too intimidated, too career obsessed, or just too willfully ignorant to truly see let alone acknowledge them or their ultimate ideological direction of travel. At first, such fissures were easy to dismiss or handwave away. Certainly, the more fringe versions of the left, what Richard Rorty referred to as the ‘cultural left’, I could openly critique with the tolerance or even support of my professors or graduate peers. “We do analytic philosophy here, arguments from arm-chair first principles,” I was re-assured, “not that postmodern nonsense you find on the edges of some anthropology or lit crit department. That’s the far left. We’re on the moderate, sensible left. Have you ever read Rawls?” For a certain moment in time, I could arguably get on board with such thinking. What barbarian didn’t believe that we had some duty to animals and to the environment? To future generations? To fellow citizens who were most vulnerable? To soldiers and civilians alike? Somewhere around spring of 2017, however, amidst the cultural backlash against Trumpism, coupled with the mainstream explosion of transgenderism, intersectionality, critical race theory, and mass campus protests against perceived ‘far right extremist’ speakers, the academy I once knew and loved seemed to go completely off the rails. The mask of the ‘tolerant’, ‘open-minded’ left suddenly fell off and, for the very first time, I came to realize that the ivory tower and so-called ‘free market of ideas’ was not above and beyond or as immune to the present social zeitgeist as I once had thought. With few exceptions, present-day analytic philosophy and academia more generally exhibit hardly any of the values and virtues that they explicitly profess to care so much about: tolerance, open-mindedness, regard for different perspectives, epistemic charity, a willingness to entertain pluralistic viewpoints, rational and dispassionate assessment of arguments, lack of ad hoc justifications, lack of ad hominem attacks, operating from arm-chair first principles, and a willingness to follow the entailments of premises to their logical conclusions come hell or highwater. Nearly all of these epistemic virtues are markedly and demonstrably absent in present-day academia and present-day academics save for a Hillsdale or a Claremont, a Peterson, Boghossian, Lindsay, or Sowell. Rather, academics on the left now make their arguments primarily by means of social pressure and stigmatization, intimidation, group struggle sessions, virtue signaling, and online reputational assassination in the form of labelling their opponents as ‘extremists’, ‘racists’, ‘phobes’, ‘bigots’ or worse, rather than engaging with their opponents’ arguments on their own merits. More perplexing still, such folks often do so having fully convinced themselves that they are somehow oppressed victims, scrappy underdogs ‘speaking truth to power’ against impossible odds as part of some revolutionary underground resistance movement while garnering support from nearly every major western institution imaginable from Hollywood, to big business, to the Queen of England, to Oreo cookies. Mark Bray, for instance, author of the Antifascist Handbook, nearly openly calls for overt violence against anyone who disagrees with his group’s political vision while promoting his work on Amazon’s bestseller list and enjoying the safety of a professorship at Rutgers. Feminist journalist, Laurie Penny, promotes her ‘radical’ viewpoints, too disruptive and controversial for everyday consumption, at the “Festival of Dangerous Ideas” officially sponsored by the Sydney Opera House and the city of Sydney. And LGBTQ philosopher, Rebecca Kukla, is able to tell her opponents on Twitter to ‘suck her queer cock’ while maintaining a comfortable tenureship as Senior Research Scholar of Ethics at (nominally Catholic) Georgetown while suffering zero professional backlash. Meanwhile veteran suicide rates in this country get shoved behind a superficial veil of ‘Thank you for your service’, but please someone stop the presses, because ‘trans people are dying’, whatever the hell that even means. Still these folks are somehow ‘the marginalized.’ If not actively taking part in ceaseless woke attacks as part of the small but highly vocal far left vanguard, the majority of academics, I’d wager even a super-majority of academics, have now been completely cowed into silence and complicity by the intersectional ideologues, burying their heads deeper in the sand, promising themselves that on some far-off future day, once the professional and social climate somehow improves, once someone else has stuck their neck out and cleared a safer path, once they achieve tenure, department head, emeritus status, enough grant money, etc. then the gloves will suddenly come off, then they will magically turn into a fire-breathing lion, then they will finally speak their minds. If human psychology and human history are any guide, then the trend suggests that such a day will never come for such persons, since feeding that muscle of complicity and inaction only serves to strengthen it, and ‘tenure’ will most likely become swapped out with some new placeholder excuse to put off standing up and speaking the truth for just one more day. Maybe the cannibalization will somehow miss them if they just stay silent, just bend the knee, and just disavow long enough. The writings of Arendt, Niemoller, and Solzhenitsyn to name just a few, suggest the supreme folly and ultimate end-state of such a strategy of never-ending appeasement. This however, is the new normal within the ‘free market of ideas.’ Stay within the safe lanes of extremely clever, overly technical, and ultimately inconsequential intellectual discourse, and you will likely be able to make tenure and have a long and prosperous academic career. Say something the least bit critical of the current intersectional orthodoxy or conversely, say something the least bit positive about Christianity, men, the free market, liberty, merit, America, or the values of Western civilization and you are instantly relegated to persona non grata. Here is the blueprint for anyone seeking success within academia in 2021. Spine not included. All this being said, it isn’t even as if these folks somehow possess arguments that are clearly and decisively better, more coherent, or sound. Indeed, some of the more blatant contradictions and hypocrisies found on the left warrant our explicit acknowledgement. Western science is an oppressive structure of the white male patriarchy that we are dutybound to oppose and deconstruct, but we must trust the latest Covid biomedical data. We must trust the latest Covid biomedical data, but the biomedical categories of male and female are just social constructs. The categories of male and female are just social constructs which can be chosen at will, but the category of race cannot be similarly chosen at will because race is ostensibly an objective natural kind. But race is also just a social construct. But neither of these previous claims are true since race doesn’t refer to anything at all because there is only one race, the human race. But whites oppress blacks. Objective evolutionary data discredits God and objective morality, but that same evolutionary data as it relates to heritable features due to race is suddenly just a social construct again. We are in a radically relativistic, post-truth world, but we must guard against conservative fake news. There is no historical meta-narrative, but the events of slavery and colonialism are undeniable objective facts. The patriarchy of Christianity is bad, but the patriarchy of Islam, of the very same Abrahamic tradition, is to be lauded and venerated. Obesity is a social construct but also a marker of objective health at any weight. Atheist materialist science proves that life is fundamentally meaningless and worthless, but for heaven’s sake, will someone please think of the rights, dignity, and intrinsic value of animals and future generations threatened by climate change. A priori Mathematics and Logic are just socially constructed systems of oppression. There is no such thing as objective truth, but CNN reports just the facts. And what do we even mean by ‘truth’ anyway? And so on. The amount of mental gymnastics required for these folks to simultaneously hold such blatant and obvious contradictions all while walking, talking, and even sometimes operating heavy machinery is truly a sight to behold, impressive as it is horrifying. What’s more, such arguments are often deployed from such folks with a self-satisfied air of condescension and a near total lack of gratitude for anything and everything their fellow countrymen or forebears have sacrificed on their behalf, making the luxury of sustaining such superfluous and nonsensical arguments even possible in the first place. I can honestly say now, having seen both sides, that during my time in the military I met folks who were markedly less conformist, far more open-minded, and far less vindictive towards peers and colleagues who dared to entertain or voice alternative viewpoints. My academic peers should reflect upon that last sentence carefully. To quote H.L. Menken, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” This essay constitutes my best and most earnest attempt at communicating such understanding to my now former colleagues. Some may call me an alarmist, a bigot, an extremist, etc. So be it. Such ad hominem attacks do not constitute a counter-argument nor do they do anything to take away from the one-way intersectional steamroller and one’s own fixed position within the victim hierarchy. Those overly quick to dismiss what I’ve said here simply because I’m a straight, white, male should pause and take a moment to seriously reconsider their own presumed immunity from similar cancelling, silencing, and cannibalization later on down the line. That being said, I sincerely apologize to my fellow American citizens, family, friends, comrades at arms, and former colleagues for my complicity and silence on such matters for this long. No longer. It is my hope that this essay will inspire others in academia, students and professors alike, to also begin speaking up loudly and vocally and to continue to speak up against this pernicious woke ideology until we bat it out the door of academia and society at large. Until then, I will continue to sound the alarm for any of those with minds and hearts open enough to hear. Listen to or dismiss these words at your own peril. However, when the woke mob comes to cancel you, when the HR department calls you into their office for mandatory remedial pronoun training, or when the agents of the pink police state come to knock at your door in the middle of the night, don’t say I didn’t warn you. So farewell academia, I disavow you.

I'm not happy with the wage structure fuck. Look at the problems Barcelona, Madrid and United have got themselves into because they fucked around with the squads wage structure. Let's spend wisely. Aguero or lewa would be good

I'm saying I think we can create even more with a back four against lower sides which should help even with fishy finishers. But more importantly our young stars will be a year older AND more familiar with how each other thinks

If we switch between a back 4 and a back 3 we should improve drastically with the same players. Werner/Havertz/Mount/Pulisic can all play in a 4231/433. Ziyech can rotate in. We haven't seen us play with 4 attackers under tuchel (unless you count CHO as rwb and we are very well against Crystal Palace). Against the top 6 we can play with a 343. The bigger teams leave more spaces and we did create good chances against them. I think changing the formation against lower teams that sit deep and having a second season for young players that are getting more familiar with each other may help more than people realise. I'm excited to get Harland but not desperate

Peps gone mad scientist

Pulisic on 60 minutes please I like that line up