Reheated (37)
For newcomers, more items from the archives. A flavour of what goes on here.
When there isn’t enough racism to justify her rhetoric and pre-booked outrage, what’s a girl to do?
A psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages. The professor, Kerri Dunn, protested her victimhood to faculty and police despite being seen vandalising the vehicle, thereby setting an example for youngsters everywhere. Meanwhile classes were cancelled in support of Professor Dunn and students held rallies for “tolerance and diversity.” But spare a thought for the professor, our self-imagined heroine. After all, if you’re going to tell students there’s a “crisis of hate” on your campus, as Professor Dunn did, and if the campus you’re talking about doesn’t match that rhetoric at all, then certain measures will have to be taken. And by measures I mean liberties. Like slashing your own tyres then blaming someone in your class. Or walking over to the people who’ve just watched you do this and asking if they’d seen who was responsible.
The deep socialist wisdom of Mr Owen Hatherley.
Our self-described Marxist also wants us to share a toilet and kitchen with people we may not like, and thereby “look beyond our obsession with private space.” Wanting your own living space, a little freedom from the tribe, is apparently an obsession, i.e., something bad and unhealthy. Rather than, say, a sign of not being a student or a hippie. Communes are a good thing and “increasingly sensible,” according to Mr Hatherley, while “insularity” – which is to say, privacy and individual territory– is not. “Other ways of living are possible,” says he, though he doesn’t disclose whether this morally improving arrangement is good enough for him.
Get Them While They’re Soft and Yielding.
Shaping young minds for a brighter tomorrow.
Many students of the humanities are entering a world in which adults can behave like Duke’s Wahneema Lubiano, an Associate Professor of African and American Studies who rails against the “hegemony” of “Western rationality,” and whose students learn that she’s “physically traumatised and psychologically assaulted” by global capitalism. This, remember, is a woman tenured at an elite university. For Lubiano, the classroom is a venue for her own political “activism,” i.e., the propagation of obnoxious racial theory, in which guilt depends on pigment, class and gender. Universities, we learn, are “engines of dominance” that should be “sabotaged” by people suitably radical and enlightened. People much like her, in fact. A transformation, incidentally, that one might think had already taken place and hence Lubiano’s license to take such liberties with students and the people paying her salary.
Pretentious racial guilt is so hard to wash off.
So remember, if you should be mugged in a part of town where lots of black people happen to live, whatever you do, don’t call the police. That would be proof of your ignorant racism and “white privilege.” And if your refusal to alert the police subsequently results in someone else being robbed by the same mugger, most likely someone who lives in one of those “Black and Indigenous communities,” at least you can take comfort in the fact that you won’t be accused of racism by one dogmatic bonehead.
And I’ve hidden hard liquor in the greatest hits.
pre-booked outrage
I’ve decided to be outraged tomorrow afternoon. What can I be outraged about?
What can I be outraged about?
It doesn’t seem to matter. As Steve pointed out earlier, almost anything will do.
And then of course there’s this.
Does anyone know where this concept of “white privelege” started? What great thinker at which university came up with the idea first, or did it come out of some marxist “analysis”?
Just curious if anyone has taken credit for the idea.
Do you think we could convince these types that their white-privileged blood cells were engaging in immunesystemism and unconsciously discriminating against equal but different forms of life and to take steps to remedy this?
or did it come out of some marxist “analysis”?
Google is your friend. And yes, the tendentious dynamic (and accumulation of error) is very Marxoid.
Dear lord. Has anyone else here seen this.
When the Queen of Denmark opted to commission the first royal family portrait in almost 125 years, she turned to Thomas Kluge, a largely self-taught Danish portrait painter whose inspirations are said to include Rembrandt and Caravaggio. After four years of work, Kluge’s finished painting is finally here: an inexplicably creepy portrait that reimagines the royal family as a clan of sadists, transvestites, and malevolent pigmen whose abominable ruttings have brought into the world a brood of Damien-like progeny.
Oh, my.
One more passage that made me laugh out loud:
To the right, young princes Nikolai and Felix build the metaphorical tower of blood that they must eventually climb to take the Danish throne for their own. But they will not ascend to claim their crimson thrones unchallenged. To get there, they must first defeat Prince Christian, the second heir to the throne, whom Kluge depicts as the 1,000-year-old Satanic dwarf in the center of the painting. But the prince will not easily be killed: he has splintered his soul between seven horcruxes, each of which has been hidden as a sort of Easter egg within Kluge’s masterpiece. Can you find them all?
(BTW, I know it would be better suited for the Friday Ephemera post, but that thread seems to be dead.)
Has anyone else here seen this?
I believe the term is conceptual nightmare.
There is worse to come.
Years since I tried to do one of those URL thingies. If it doesn’t work, the emergency is bad enough to give the link in full. Be afraid. Be very afraid:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/buddhist-extremist-cell-vows-to-unleash-tranquilit,34623/
[ Tag nightmare fixed, DT ]
Has anyone else here seen this?
Meh. The fellow merely had fun with Photoshop and playing with lighting directions.
The lighting effects are divergent, but that hardly denotates a gateway to some form of hell . . .
One gets the feeling that many modern realist painters are in slavery to photographic verisimilitude.
I find it tedious in the extreme.
I mean, just compare that Danish royal portrait with visual poetry of Velasquez’ Las Meninas…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Las_Meninas_%281656%29,_by_Velazquez.jpg
Jeff Wood
The Onion still brings a smile to my face!
Has anyone else here seen this?
I saw it a few days ago and (hushed tones) I kind of like it. I’m surprised the was no mention that the legs of the two boys in blue shirts seem to be sharing the same space – possibly a sign of a worm hole or they are conjoined.
Being American, I may not have an adequate appreciation of the expectations of royal portraits. The painter should try to make it interesting shouldn’t he? think iIt will stand out (in a favorable way or not) when people in the future are flipping through images of the royal family. If you can’t paint in a way that obscures the fact that you are painting from a photograph then why not embrace that and just collage the reference photos together. If a painting is too flattering then it leans towards propaganda – so I think flattery should be avoided. As an aside, I also like Feliks Topolski’s painting of QE2’s coronation.
http://colmilquetoast.blogspot.com/2010/11/feliks-topolski.html
‘I mean, just compare that Danish royal portrait with visual poetry of Velasquez’ Las Meninas…’
Or, if you are going to skewer your royal clients with a degree of subtlety, you might want to take a leaf out of Goya’s book (in this case, the Infante has the face of Manuel Godoy, the Prime Minister):
http://personalinterpretations.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/goya-charles-iv-and-his-family.jpg
“look beyond our obsession with private space.”
Collectivists do not view a man as an individual with free will, but rather as a worker ant in a colony of seven billion whose sole function is to serve the whole. It’s a disturbingly militaristic view which takes immense joy in uniformity and consensus, and sees freedom and independence only as threats. “Diversity” is a club used to enforce orthodoxy.
Or perhaps I’m just feeling pissy today.
rxc:
The concept of white privilege might have started with the seminal (not a word the author would use) article…
Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom, July/August, 1989.
I admit I’m guessing.
White privilege would be getting beaten up by a gang of non-white people while out minding your own business, and then being taken to hospital where — because of your life-threatening injuries — you are given priority treatment over a non-white person in the waiting room who may have cut his or her hand while threatening you with a knife.
This will not do!
Collectivists do not view a man as an individual with free will,
Well, Mr Hatherley seems to struggle with the idea. Like his colleague George Monbiot, he doesn’t seem to grasp why adults may not wish to share a toilet and kitchen with people they don’t know, don’t like or don’t trust. He bemoans the fact that communes and “collective living” aren’t “taken seriously” as “living arrangements for the majority of the population.” “For some reason,” he says, clearly puzzled, people on the whole prefer a space of their own or of their family’s own. One that’s, in his words, “inviolable.”
And then of course he tries to pathologise that preference by claiming, based on nothing, that having one’s own personal territory necessarily makes us – that word again – “insular.” Well, I for one am on friendly, first name terms with most of my neighbours; I’m no more “insular” than I wish to be. I’d just rather not have them cluttering up my bathroom every morning or leaving their unwashed pots in my sink. I’m funny that way.
And there can’t be too many people who’d be happy using the phrase “rightwing determinist urban planning orthodoxy.”
When there isn’t enough racism to justify her rhetoric and pre-booked outrage, what’s a girl to do?
There’s a lot of it about.
“After a gay server at a New Jersey restaurant said a customer denied her a tip and wrote her a hateful note on the receipt, a local family contacted NBC 4 New York and said their receipt shows they paid a tip and didn’t write any such note.”
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Gay-Server-Tip-Lifestyle-Receipt-Discrepancy-233040811.html
David, thank you for your trouble. I must look up this tagging business afresh in case I want to comment again: must keep up with the Joneses.
He bemoans the fact that communes and “collective living” aren’t “taken seriously” as “living arrangements for the majority of the population.”
He wants to live like common people.
He wants to do whatever common people do.
Etc.
He wants to live like common people.
He wants to do whatever common people do.
Heh. So does the Guardian’s Sophie Heawood, apparently:
Still, it’s marginally better than her article on feminism and toddler excrement.
You know, the more I think about living in a commune, the more I think I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.
Maybe she should apply to live with Comrade Bala and Comrade Chanda in their Maoist collective…
‘Maybe she should apply to live with Comrade Bala and Comrade Chanda in their Maoist collective…’
Win.
‘He bemoans the fact that communes and “collective living” aren’t “taken seriously” as “living arrangements for the majority of the population.” “For some reason,” he says, clearly puzzled, people on the whole prefer a space of their own or of their family’s own. One that’s, in his words, “inviolable.”’
Presumably, the Casa Monbiot is open-house for any squatters nearby.
When there isn’t enough racism to justify her rhetoric and pre-booked outrage, what’s a girl to do?
And another one.
‘Reports of bias incidents at Vassar College that involved hateful messages left on students’ doors were actually elaborate hoaxes — and the perpetrator is none other than the student member of the Bias Incident Response Team, The Daily Caller has learned. On Nov. 14, the college sent a mass email to students advising them that Bias Incident Response Team (BIRT) had received at least six reports in the last few months of hateful and insensitive messages being scrawled and spray painted on student residences. Messages included “Avoid Being Bitches,” “Fuck Niggers,” and most prominently, “Hey Tranny. Know Your Place.” Five days after the email was sent, Vassar President Catharine Hill sent a follow-up email announcing that the bias incidents were hoaxes perpetrated by two students. The students wrote the vile messages and then filed the reports themselves, claiming to be the victims of unknown haters.’
http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/27/exclusive-shocking-discovery-in-hoax-bias-incident-at-vassar-college/
“And another one”
I do wonder whether there are any similar hoaxes involved in the recent reports abuse and threats on Twitter. It would anyway be interesting to know if those threats were all from just a very small number of people – because much is made of how much abuse there is.
I’ve noted the Guardian’s comment deletion antics before on this blog: under some CiF pieces you see hundreds of messages saying “this comment has been deleted because it doesn’t abide by community standards” – if you watch, and are eagle-eyed enough, you’ll see just how innocuous some of the deletions are – some of them just vaguely off topic.
Nevertheless the number of such deletions may give CiF readers the impression that the forums are seething with racism/misogyny etc. Clever that.
Henry,
I do wonder whether there are any similar hoaxes involved in the recent reports abuse and threats on Twitter.
This is still one of the stranger things I’ve seen online. Watching it unfold in real time was truly bizarre.