New Discourses

We have to talk about 2+2. Unfortunately. Most unfortunately. This is because what looks like a simple and profoundly stupid Twitter fight must be understood in the full context in which it is playing out. This context is, in fact, the most important and least reported part of the origin story of the Great 2+2 War of 2020, and few realize that this ridiculous discourse didn't come out of a vacuum....

I want to explain Critical Race Theory to you. I just want to help you understand it, so I sat down with my microphone and no real plan except to talk through the claims, history, and thought of Critical Race Theory, highlighting where it came from and why it's a terrible way to think about race and racism, in its own ideas. So, this episode of the New Discourses podcast is a little different. It'...

Helen Pluckrose develops the definition of "Social Justice" as it is used in the academic literature in this tradition, explains its connections to identity politics and the political correctness movement, and then shows the relevance of the original postmodernists to this Theory in some detail. She does this to elegantly describe the progression of these ideas from Theory to activism to the stree...

Join Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast for a little over an hour of common sense in his liberal defense of the so-called "status quo." Support New Discourses: https://patreon.com/newdiscourses Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: https://facebook.com/newdiscourses https://twitter.com/NewDiscourses https://instagram.com/newdiscourses https://pinterest.com/newdiscourses/ ht...

In my line of work taking on Critical Social Justice and other forms of increasingly dominant societal insanity, I get asked a lot of questions. If there's one question I'm asked more often than any other, it's how don't I go crazy looking at this stuff every day? To be fair, I've flown pretty close to that sun, but I didn't fall in, and so I've reflected quite a bit on it. I thought it might help...

There is a rhetorical strategy called the “motte and bailey” that is getting increasingly famous lately. This is because it is one of the central tools of the Critical Social Justice movement. In that strategy, named after a kind of castle, a highly defensible “motte” position, like “we just want to treat people more fairly,” is maintained while also pushing a more radical “bailey” position, like...

On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, your host James Lindsay explores the concept of political regimes through American history. From Washington, to Lincoln, to Roosevelt, right up through W and Obama, the “US of A” has seen a broad spectrum of political ideals displayed under the common framework known as “Modernity.” But where are we now? Considering the rise of Trump, the media's expl...

Critical Social Justice operates like a virus. I’ve said it about them; they say it about themselves; we’re all in agreement. It infects liberal institutions and liberal-minded people (philosophically speaking, whether on the left, right, or center), perverts “critical” as in “critical thinking” into “critical” as in “critical theory,” which means something completely different. It then turns thos...

James lindsay takes a few minutes to dig deeply into the mindset of Critical Social Justice to explain exactly why its proponents are so reluctant to be seen applying their work in administrative and educational spheres. Support New Discourses: patreon.com/newdiscourses Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses linke...

“Life will never be the same again.” We hear this over and over again with regard to the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic is having on us, even though we’re only weeks into the pandemic. Is that true, though? Won’t most of us “regress to the mean,” as it’s sometimes phrased, as we move forward and get this crisis in our rearview mirror? I think we will, more or less, and I think we need to rememb...

New Discourses convened in October of 2019 in the National Liberal Club of London for a day-long conference titled Speaking Truth to Social Justice. There, Portland State University philosophy professor Peter Boghossian gave a rousing talk about the need to “speak truth in the face of danger,” parrhesia, as the Ancient Greeks called it, as this applies to Critical Social Justice. Follow Peter Bogh...

Dr. James Lindsay in his talk, “The Truth About Critical Methods,” makes very clear that Critical Social Justice is not the same thing as social justice. He argues that the branding of social justice, which is how Critical Social Justice promotes itself, misleads people about the nature of that movement. Support New Discourses: https://patreon.com/newdiscourses Website: https://newdiscourses.com F...

In February, I discovered an article on Twitter about “decolonizing graphic design,” published in the summer of last year. These sorts of articles are incredibly useful for showing exactly what’s going on in the Critical Social Justice mindset once you know how to read them, and this one doesn’t disappoint. After quickly threading about the article on Twitter to show it and explain it to my follow...

In October of 2019, a small group of genuinely liberal-minded people gathered together for a day of speeches, panels, and community in the Gladstone Library in the National Liberal Club of London. The conference had a title that succinctly described its purpose: Speaking Truth to Social Justice. Over the course of the day, even as the Extinction Rebellion protest raged outside just a block away, w...

Peter speaks with Conor about if there's anything he believes but doesn't say because people will think he's a bad person. Then the conversation shifts into whether or not we should stand up for what we believe. https://newdiscourses.com Purchase 'How to Have Impossible Conversations' here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/peter-boghossian/how-to-have-impossible-conversations/9780738285344...