Nathan Cofnas, Lipton Matthews Discuss Jews (3-24-23)

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Trump Indictment Tomorrow? (3-21-23)

01:00 I bought her silence with your superchats
06:30 Rise of the Neo-Prudes! — Amy Wax, https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/not-without-a-fight-amy-wax
10:00 The art of forgetting, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/03/09/the-dream-of-forgetfulness-primer-for-forgetting-lewis-hyde/
14:30 Tucker on the prospects of an indictment of Donald Trump
18:30 The Silicon Valley Bank Attack?
26:00 Lefties on MSNBC salivate at prospect of arresting Trump supporters
41:00 The Long Shadow of German Colonialism, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/03/09/the-long-shadow-of-german-colonialism-thomas-rogers/
47:00 RH: Amazon customers give white package delivery men higher ratings than non-whites
1:08:00 Amy Wax had three kids, she started at age 37, had two kids in her forties

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Will A Trump Indictment Spark Riots? (3-20-23)

01:30 Tucker Carlson on Trump’s looming indictment
24:00 Heterodox Academy: A good idea gone awry?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTTsnozDF20
25:00 Why it took years for Cofnas to publish his critque of Heterodox Academy
26:00 Four Reasons Why Heterodox Academy Failed,
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/35/4/four-reasons-why-heterodox-academy-failed
42:00 Bethany Mandel can’t define woke
56:00 The people who fought the Nazis took race differences for granted
57:00 The Nazis denied the validity of IQ, they rejected Darwinism
1:06:30 Helmet Nyborg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Nyborg
1:07:30 American Renaissance is not a hate group
1:13:00 Nathan Cofnas was initially excited to join Heterodox Academy
1:14:00 Heterodox Academy won’t defend academics such as Bo Winegard, Amy Wax

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NYR: Adherents to Maria Montessori’s radical methods have extended from progressive parents to Benito Mussolini

From the New York Review:

* From her earliest days at the university Montessori identified as a feminist and a socialist. She became secretary of the Association for Women, a group that lobbied for community education, female suffrage, a law for the determination of paternity, and equal pay for men and women, all issues that would come to impinge dramatically on her own life. When she began a relationship with a young psychiatrist named Giuseppe Montesano in 1895, Montessori laid down some nonnegotiable ground rules: her medical career came first, she would never marry, and their attachment must be kept private. It was the type of unsanctioned and voluntary arrangement that the pioneering “new women” of the 1890s were trying out around the world, from Moscow to New York.

Motherhood, however, has a way of disrupting even the most high-minded and equitable arrangements. In the summer of 1897 Montessori became pregnant. In an extraordinary inversion of the usual script, Montesano was happy to offer marriage, while Renilde insisted that her twenty-eight-year-old daughter consider no such thing. A family story repeated as late as the 1990s by Maria’s granddaughter has Renilde declaring, “You have done what no other woman has ever done in Italy. You are a scientist, a doctor, you are everything, now because of a baby you could lose everything.” At her mother’s insistence, Montessori gave birth in great secrecy, with the paperwork stating that both the mother and father of her baby son were “unknown.” In time-honored fashion, the infant, named Mario, was put into the care of a country wet nurse. Montessori, the antithesis of a modern madonna, contented herself with visits to her child whenever her busy working schedule allowed.

* Rita Kramer, who was able to interview Mario for her 1976 biography of Maria:

“Mario Montessori’s memory is of a spring day in 1913 when he was about fifteen, seeing on a school outing the lady whose visits have punctuated his childhood and been explained in his fantasies. A car stopped where he was resting; she got out and he went up to her and said simply, “I know you are my mother,” and told her he wanted to go with her. She made no objection, he got into the car with her.”

* One former elementary school teacher who had always been impressed by the Montessori method, which he had encountered as a member of the Humanitarian Society, was Benito Mussolini. In 1924 he donated 10,000 lire of his own money to help found the Opera Montessori, an agency with public and private funding to promote the system. Il Duce saw the advantage of Montessori’s method for producing industrious, disciplined, and literate future citizens. The Dottoressa was naturally delighted—here at last was the official support that she had long wanted. There would be training courses, a journal, a whole Montessori ecosystem that, with any luck, would provide a living for her beloved Mario, who by now had joined her in the family business.

De Stefano is scrupulous about not underplaying Montessori’s dalliance with Mussolini. In 1931 she wrote to him:

“In sum, my method can collaborate with fascism so that it will realize the possibilities to construct great spiritual energies; create a real mental hygiene that, when applied to our race, can enhance its enormous powers that—I am certain—outstrip the powers of all the other races.”

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Having the Last Word

From the New York Review:

* Janet Malcolm made her reputation writing about people who didn’t know when to shut up. Most of us like to talk about ourselves, and given the faintest encouragement will say enough to wind up looking like fools when our words appear on the page. The psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson told her about his many achievements, his sex life included, and then sued her for defamation when he discovered what her New Yorker reporting (republished in 1984 as In the Freud Archives) had made of him, claiming he’d been misquoted. He trusted her; he thought he’d found a sympathetic listener. He hadn’t. Nor had he been misquoted, but it took a decade and two trials to see the case off. A few years later the murderer Jeffrey MacDonald thought that he too had found such a listener in the journalist Joe McGinniss, whose contract for Fatal Vision (1983) was predicated on the access he gained by pretending to believe that MacDonald was innocent. When the killer learned what the writer really thought of him, he sued as well, and Malcolm then turned the case into her The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).

That book’s first sentence once made other writers angry. Now it merely seems true, or true at least of the kind of immersive reporting she practiced herself: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” The writer needs to keep the subject talking, but at the same time that subject “is worriedly striving to keep the writer listening…. He lives in fear of being found uninteresting” and offers a “childish trust” to any remotely willing ear. Which the journalist then promptly betrays. Malcolm knew that, and did that, even though it troubled her; at times she wrote as though writing itself made her uneasy, as though McGinnis’s practice were but an extreme version of her own. Yet that moral calculus also made her angry, first at those fellow practitioners who refused to recognize their predatory relation to their sources, and then at the credulity of those sources themselves. Don’t these people know that writers are always selling someone out?

* Malcolm’s most characteristic material lies in the fight between members of a tightly linked group for control of the narrative that binds them, a fight between people who have come to know each other too well.

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