Place your bets: Maoist-period Harvard Crimson staff was dominated by New England Puritans or Jews?

The moldbug-owned autistic nydwracu compiles "every article that the Harvard Crimson ran between 1973 and 1976 that mentions the Khmer Rouge", inspired by an assertion from Ross Douthat that:
@yeselson @jneeley78 @dylanmatt There was a period in the late '60s/early '70s when pretty much everyone at Harvard was a Maoist.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 26, 2013

I think Douthat may be engaging in slight hyperbole as concerns the Harvard student body as a whole. But the comment appears to fairly characterize the Harvard Crimson staff of the era.

Presumably nydwracu thinks he's piling up evidence in favor of moldbuggism.

But it takes effort not to notice that the more egregious pro-Khmer Rouge articles are signed by and/or published during the leadership of Daniel Swanson or Nicholas Lemann. Lemann is confirmed Jewish and Swanson is almost certainly Jewish.

Lemann helpfully recounts the ethnic tenor of the Swanson and Lemann-era Crimson in a 1998 article:

Minority Voices

In 1973, The Crimson was supporting demonstrations against Harvard's investment in African colonies and fighting internally over whether to capitalize the words "black" and "Chicano" in stories.

At the same time, the staff was, by its own estimation, woefully lacking in minority voices.

"We were disturbed by the under representation of blacks and Latinos on staff," says Daniel A. Swanson '74, Crimson president in 1973.

The homogeneity of the staff would continue to be addressed by Crimson presidents throughout the seventies and eighties and is still one of the challenges facing today's Crimson executives.

Nicholas B. Lemann '76, Crimson president two years after Swanson, says a reporter once came to him with a list of campus ethnic organizations, having listed The Crimson as a group for Jewish students.

"The tenor of The Crimson was suburban, upper-middle-class northeastern Jewish," Lemann says. "There was a little bit of everybody, but that was the dominant group."

Executives from the '70s say this stereo-type of a predominantly white and Jewish Crimson continued to be fairly accurate, despite minority recruitment efforts.

nydwracu is also the character who attempted to chasten to one of the Jewish radicals who purged moldbug from Strangeloop that moldbuggists are the true ideological heirs of Jewish radicals like Emma Goldman, while today's no platform communist Jews are engaged in "crypto-calvinist" "Comstockery".

5 comments:

  1. You presume wrongly. Do I look like a CPUSA vogon assigned the task of slapping down Maltz and his counterrevolutionary idea of not beating everyone over the head with the Message forever? Those articles are facts, not 'evidence'. When you try to convince someone of something, you don't lead by letting him know what you're trying to convince him of. That's an elementary mistake. If you start bringing out evidence, you force him into a courtroom -- and our courts run on the adversarial model.

    Another elementary mistake is coming off like a goddamned obsessive. Frankly, the best evidence for Moldbuggism is the tendency of its opponents to be unable to keep themselves from frothing at the mouth.

    By the way, I'm not surprised by that Lemann quote at all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Those articles are facts, not 'evidence'."

    Why didn't you copy and paste the entire Harvard Crimson archives, then, while you were at it? And why Harvard? Obviously you have some rhetorical end in mind (which you directly acknowledge immediately after this statement). Saying you're presenting "facts" and not "evidence" doesn't change this.

    According to moldbuggist dogma, Harvard is leftist because it was founded by Puritans three and a half centuries ago. According to standard history and Jewish radicals themselves, the Jewish origins of Vietnam-era Jewish radicals had greater salience to their radicalism than the theology of 17th-century New England settlers. In failing to point out relevant facts that are obvious to me but will not be obvious to most of your readers and the significance of which moldbuggism was specifically created to deny, you certainly appeared to be behaving like a doctrinaire moldbuggist.


    "Another elementary mistake is coming off like a goddamned obsessive."

    I don't recall moldbug cultists ever being concerned about appearing "obsessive" when blaming New England Puritans -- or when discussing any group whatsoever besides Jews. Socially and intellectually aspirational nerds are hilariously easy to manipulate.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ''Socially and intellectually aspirational nerds are hilariously easy to manipulate.''

    https://scontent-gru1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtp1/v/t1.0-9/11880332_810573779056394_8297150796590660169_n.jpg?oh=d7ed7fa153d1a4f137b22354df91eb89&oe=567AA767

    ReplyDelete
  4. When I see a blogger like heartits talk about it '' can increase human intelligence ** '' I wonder

    '' Where we went wrong ** ''

    The train derailed;(

    ReplyDelete
  5. Do I have to spell it out in monosyllables? If the best evidence in favor of Moldbuggism is the behavior of its opponents, what does that say about the strength of the evidence for Moldbuggism?

    ReplyDelete