 a few quick ones. You know, I don't have a lot here, but I want to say something about this English department at the University of Chicago of all places. The University of Chicago, one of the better universities in the country, both academically, but also in terms of standing up for free speech, standing up against the platforming, standing up against trigger warnings and all of that crap. The English department, and by the way, English departments generally are the worst departments in academia. They're much worse even than philosophy departments. Philosophy departments are much saner these days than English departments. This is where postmodernism has its strongest foothold and where ethnic studies of all varieties have the strongest foothold. So the English department in University of Chicago has announced that, you know, every year they take a handful of, you know, probably half a dozen PhD students every year, and they've announced that they will only be taking PhD students this coming year who want to specialize in what we call the struggle of black and indigenous people. This is an English department. And, you know, their explanation for this is, here's the explanation for this. Think about how horrific this is. Everything today, think about it in this term, everything today is politicized. Everything today is through the lens of race and politics. There's no art. There's no English. There's no literature. There's literature as politics, literature as reflection on race, literature as something political. The idea of aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics is gone. So, you know, I was listening to a podcast earlier. I'm going to do a show on this because it was so infuriating. A show about Beethoven's fifth and our Beethoven's fifth and the attitude of people towards Beethoven is exclusionary and ultimately racist and imperialistic and just evil and bad. Why? One of the reasons they give is because to go to the concert and listen to a symphony, there are norms that include things like dressing nicely, sitting quietly and things like that. Anyway, I will, I will, I'm going to do a show on it. I'm going to take that clip from this thing and we're going to analyze it. It's just unbelievable. Anyway, this is what the English Department writes. They write, quote, English is a discipline as a long history of providing aesthetic rationalization for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-blackness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why. So, the idea that you say that, I don't know, Victor Hugo is literature is better than literature that is produced in the Congo. The idea that you would say that is racist, is culturally high-optitude. The idea that Western civilization is better. The idea that Western art is better. The idea that Western art reaches down to the depth of human emotions in a way that other cultures aesthetics doesn't. The idea that, you know, Western sculpture is better than Islamic sculpture or better than Chinese sculpture. That is culture, developing hierarchies of cultural production. And if for English it studies literature in language, the idea that English literature, that these books, you know, stories about in English, that in English literature and Western literature and so on. The idea that we've spent a huge amount of time on this is bad and wrong and we need to get away from that. And the only way to compensate for all the years that we've been spending just on Western literature and thus reinforcing this idea that the West is better. The only way to do that is to focus our attention now on Black Studies now. It's not that they don't have a lot of Black Studies already, but we need to now focus it all on Black Studies so that we can overcome. It's like affirmative action, right? There was indeed, but the difference in affirmative action, it's a backlash against something real. There was racism, there was all this. And now we have to correct it by hyping more Blacks in order to correct this, right? So now we have to study more, I guess, Black literature, even if it's inferior. And just me saying Black literature that might be inferior is obviously, according to them, racist, because how could it be? How dare I even make? And this is part of the Beethoven that says, how do you know what's better and what's worse? Who's to say? By what standard? This is the postmodernism in the English departments. And they write, they continue writing, and while inroads have been made in terms of acknowledging the centrality of both individual literary works and collective histories of racialized and colonized people. So they've already put a lot of work into this. There is still much to do as a discipline and as a department to build a more inclusive and equitable field for describing, studying, and teaching the relationship between aesthetics, representation, inequality, and power. See how everything is power? What is power? What is the essential power? That's politics. What they mean by power is not economic power, though they confuse economic power with political power. What they mean by power is political power. The power of the gun. Everything for them, every experience, every human interaction, everything is politics. So this is what you get, English department only. Yeah, Andrew reminds me here that Oscars as well, the Oscars, film Oscars who celebrate excellence, excellence in cinema supposedly. Now they don't always celebrate excellence. They are often celebrate mediocrity or worse. The Oscars now will only consider a movie for best film. I think this is in 2024. If the film is appropriately diverse. And you can imagine that the themes of the movie will play a role as well. I mean, God. Now that I will boycott. I've been boycotting the Oscars anyway, because I think it's a mediocre. I hate, I hate celebrities. I dislike modern celebrities and the attitude towards everybody else. And, you know, I like the pump and circumstance of the Oscars, but I despise, despise, despise everything else. Okay. A Campbell says, going to need a show dedicated to positivity and optimism. Too much of a defeatist attitude in the chat. America has overcome much greater threats than what exists today. Cheer up all of you. I hope you're right. I hope you're right. I, you know, it's, it's going to be, it's going to be tough. It's going to be tough because I picked these articles out of the news because that's what is in the news. It was very little positive in the news. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figured at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a, a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this and, and you know, the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there, help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share and you can support the show at your unbrookshow.com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and, and show your support for all, for, for, for the work, for the value. Hopefully you're receiving from this. 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