Elsewhere (124)
Kevin D Williamson on where Big Government goes:
In the run-up to the 2012 election, senior IRS executives including Lois Lerner, then the head of the IRS branch that oversees the activities of tax-exempt non-profit groups, began singling out conservative-leaning organisations for extra attention, invasive investigations and legal harassment. The IRS did not target groups that they believed might be violating the rules governing tax-exempt organisations; rather, as e-mails from the agency document, the IRS targeted these conservative groups categorically, regardless of whether there was any evidence that they were not in compliance with the relevant regulations… Also targeted were groups dedicated to issues such as taxes, spending, debt, and, perhaps most worrisome, those that were simply “critical of the how the country is being run.”
An exhaustive archive of IRS-related items can be found here.
Stephen Carter on the narrowness and hubris of student ‘radicals’:
In my day, the college campus was a place that celebrated the diversity of ideas. Pure argument was our guide. Staking out an unpopular position was admired – and the admiration, in turn, provided excellent training in the virtues of tolerance on the one hand and, on the other, integrity. Your generation, I am pleased to say, seems to be doing away with all that. There’s no need for the ritual give and take of serious argument when, in your early 20s, you already know the answers to all questions. How marvellous it must be to realise at so tender an age that you will never, ever change your mind.
And Luke James steers us to the following round-table discussion about the suppression of free speech by self-styled student ‘activists’. If you’ve 30 minutes to spare, the video below is well worth watching, though not exactly encouraging. The participants are Professor of English Janice Fiamengo, whose encounters with such ‘activists’ have been mentioned here previously, Justin Trottier of the Centre for Inquiry, Huffington Post blogger and “community organiser” Rachel Décoste, and Alice McLachlan, Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto. The views of Ms Décoste and Ms McLachlan may be of particular interest, though possibly for reasons the ladies didn’t intend.
“I don’t think you get to decide what counts as debate.”
Remember, two of the speakers above are arguing for the righteousness of “debating” like this. And like this. And like these magnificent intellectuals. Because feelings. That such behaviour shows utter contempt not only for the targeted speaker but also for their audience and anyone not protesting is somehow waved aside.
Over the years, readers will have noticed quite a few leftist academics conjuring titillated excuses for intimidation and thuggery – provided of course the intimidation and thuggery are being aimed at someone else. It is, I think, instructive that so many voices of the left should profess great empathy with the mob dynamic, in which personal responsibility can be dispersed and obscured, allowing participants to indulge more freely in emotional crescendos and some physical emphasis. Mob psychology tends to energise participants precisely because of the sense of physical power and promise of moral anonymity, and the implicit threat that violence may ensue should their wishes be frustrated. And while these “collective protests” may be effective in rousing emotion and inflating egos, they aren’t an ideal forum for mental clarity. Perhaps that’s the appeal for the rote radical.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.
I’m sure the usual ‘cultured’ suspects will roll their eyes…
But it’s these same disgusting people with their ‘style’ of ‘debate’ that also want to totally disarm people.
Carry that to its logical conclusion.
Have no Eastern European students tried complaining that they find aggressive assertions of leftist dogma and demands for political conformity ‘triggering’?
I would give it a year at most before they decide that the word ‘trigger’ is ‘triggering’ because of its association with firearms.
You can in Ms Décoste’s pretentious opening gambit (“drivel” etc.) she just waves off the findings and statistics cited by Prof Fiamengo as wrong and worthy of nothing but contempt.
That really got me: their cocksure belief that they are reliable, objective arbiters of what is contemptible, false, or beyond the pale. Not only that, they begin by classifying decked-out strawmen as contemptible and justify their mob mentality from there.
Whatzzerface said that Ann Coulter’s schtick is to blame everything on minorities and therefore stopping her could only be right.
What the what? Since when does Coulter do that? Just reading the titles of her books you can see that she blames everything on LIBERALS and liberals only. I have never heard Coulter blame “minorities” for ANYthing, much less everything.
It was like listening to a pair of Nazis in 1930 discuss why Jews shouldn’t have the floor because they only engage in Big Lies. Nazis, they can speak at length for as long as they want, but if a Jew tries to deliver a speech, they have to accept the consequences.
They can’t even hear themselves, I reckon. This kind of thing tends to cycle around in human history regardless of whether the new crop of perps is aware of the previous iterations.
The reflection and introspection needed to use criticisms to understand why the world is different than how you perceive it and thus to change one’s ways for the better is a bridge too far for them.
That’s because their end game is not “getting it right” with respect to reality; it’s “getting power and keeping it.” Their bad notions about how the world works are a deliberate lie that flatters the intellectual with “intellectuals ought to be in charge” and strips the rest of our humanity, all the better to herd us as cattle.
The Left uses language not to say what they believe to be true but what they believe to be useful. Words, ideas, emotions — they’re all weapons to destroy their opponents. They’ll continue to use words and ideas to meet their ends, but as soon as they feel their oats (starting about now, I’d say), they’ll stop using words and avail themselves of brute force.
Been nice knowing ya.
She decided to troll 4chan with her feminist message, with predictable results.
She waded into a ‘gator farm wearing a raw-chicken jumpsuit, IOW. Hard to feel sorry for someone THAT stupid.
who’d much rather talk about how hard it is to be a university educated middle class white woman with a career in academia or the media.
Look. Those kidnapped Nigerian girls are ROOTING for their white sisters in academia to place trigger warnings on Mark Twain. Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag‘s last words will be “Please can’t victims of oppression on American campuses find a safe space to express themselves?”
does anyone imagine that Ms McLachlan will watch herself in the video and rethink her assertions, any of them, even slightly?
£20 says no. As a professor of philosophy will she appreciate the irony?
As a professor of philosophy will she appreciate the irony?
What struck me is how the debate revealed differences not just in politics but in character. Based on what I’ve seen of Janice Fiamengo being interviewed, it would, I think, be possible to argue with her in good faith. Facts could be exchanged and arguments bashed about to see which bits fall off. Coherence and realism would be in the mix as mutual values. But I’m not at all convinced the same could be said of Ms Décoste and Ms McLachlan. They don’t seem terribly interested in coherence and realism. Or honesty.
In my experience the kind of person who can invert reality to the degree Ms McLachlan does – carefully ignoring unflattering motives, projecting wildly – is unlikely to make it back to this side of the mirror. I mean, a little self-awareness would probably be quite damaging to her ego and anything built on it. Confronted with her own inversions and obstinate dishonesty, her political persona would begin to seem ridiculous. For someone like Ms McLachlan, what would there be to gain from that kind of self-awareness? What’s in it for her?
Ace on academia’s ongoing descent into farce:
If you think Ace is joking, do read the whole thing.
Nikw211 – good videos, thanks. The man makes a powerful case.
Sarkeesian, like most university educated feminists, talks a lot about “research” and “studies”. But she doesn’t seem to understand or care what research and studies are for. Rather than relying on empirical evidence and observation and then trying to construct a theory around the known facts, Anita and other feminists believe “research” means declaring your own theories first and then torturing or selectively quoting data, often shoddy data at that, to back them up. It’s why feminist “research” never results in conclusions that challenge the theories they presumably set out to test.
Now, why might this be?
According to Wikipedia, she has degrees in “communication studies” and “social and political thought”.
And here’s her problem. The poor woman has been swindled into believing that she’s educated after going through two – probably expensive – degree programmes of zero academic benefit or real-world relevance. Small wonder she’s trying to establish herself as a professional feminist, she’s literally not qualified for any real jobs in the productive sector of the economy. If she can’t make a living out of talking about feminism, her other plausible career options are waitressing or the dole.
Unlike students of the more traditional subjects, who will have had the importance of facts and logic hammered in to them before being allowed to graduate, Anita was subjected to cargo cult education. A hollow facade of knowledge where an institution is assumed to be a place of learning because it is called a “university”. Where gobbledygook is mistaken for “research” because it uses big words and footnotes. Where a scroll of parchment is mistaken for an education.
The essential difference between actual research and feminist research is integrity. Ms. Sarkeesian’s academic background left her denuded of even the intellectual vocabulary to understand that. It’s the Dunning–Kruger effect transmitted by way of lecture theatres.
Dicentra – “She waded into a ‘gator farm wearing a raw-chicken jumpsuit, IOW. Hard to feel sorry for someone THAT stupid.”
Yes, but she wasn’t being stupid. She knew exactly which buttons to press and the best forums to do it in. I wonder how much of the $160k she raked in got spent on paying off her student loans.
dicentra:They can’t even hear themselves, I reckon.
DT: For someone like Ms McLachlan, what would there be to gain from that kind of self-awareness?
I have a hard time taking such extremes by these kinds of people at face value. I suspect they know exactly what deceptions they are using. Many are not so stupid an unaware of themselves. They know exactly what they are doing. I see them as falling mostly into one of two categories, those who are jockeying for position in the new ruling class Come The Revolution and those who are afraid to be left out and jumping early onto what seems to them to be the winning team’s bandwagon.
Have you noticed how much of their arguments are usurpations (is that a word?) of conservative arguments, restated while (I would say willfully) ignoring how they’ve shifted the context? Cock sure that no one will either notice nor challenge them. Perhaps I missed it or forgot it (watched this video two nights ago) where was the challenge from the moderator, the rational leftist gentleman, or Dr. F pointing out that leftists say many hurtful lies, 9/11 truthers and such as well. Would it be right for them to be shouted down? I understand from drive-time radio this AM that Angela Davis is to speak on a college campus somewhere (too busy to look it up now).
Chris: thanks for The Daily Beast article on Boko Haram. That’s the funniest thing i’ve read in a while. Note that he never mentions the video of the leader pointedly and repeatedly claiming that Allah/the Koran commands him to take the prisoners. That pretty much makes it an Islamic issue right there, regardless of the fact it may be a twisted interpretation of Islamic teachings, Boko Haram believes it is doing God’s work. Taking them at their word is hard i guess. He gets some rote denials from some of the usual “nothing to see here” hand-wavers – something we don’t see enough of and something we see a lot less of when the victims are Jews. Some nice pushback in the comments, including some actual citations from the Koran itself.
Funny thing too that “Haram” – a Koranic injunction – is right in the group’s name.
WTP – I thought you meant the actress who played Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got To Do With It”.
So I googled her and find that’s an entirely different Angela.
Incidentally, what happened to the giant 70’s afro as a fashion statement?
I really liked The Jackson Five when I was a boy, but in my naivety I thought their haircuts were a gimmick. Because they were singers, I assumed they deliberately styled their hair to look like microphones. I thought it was called “The Microphone Head”, and all the other Microphone Head guys were copying The Jacksons, and nobody had a bloody clue what I was talking about.
Still, “Ben” is a top quality song, and I sometimes sing it to my cat, with the B-word changed to “Fluffy”. The things that cat will put up with to get freeze-dried fish treats.
Because they were singers, I assumed they deliberately styled their hair to look like microphones.
Snork. ;D
Matt – “Funny thing too that “Haram” – a Koranic injunction – is right in the group’s name.”
Or they could just really like that song “A Whiter Shade of Pale”.
I’m sure if those girls really had been kidnapped by a rogue sect of Muslims, the media would be full of prominent mainstream Muslims condemning Boko Haram and demanding the immediate release of their victims.
Right?
After reading that Ace blog about Oberlin’s trigger warning campaign, it just dawned on me.
The current social justice establishment in higher education are creating an in group out group dichotomy which is destined to expand exponentially.
As victim groups gain elevated status more categories of victim arise and more perceived oppression is detected.
As victim categories expand, new outrages are manufactured to bolster the oppression Olympics then more political power and social capital is gathered by those who have carefully cultivated a victim identity.
Victim identities are elevated at the expense of oppressor identities (white, male, heterosexual etc) as this happens the social and political pressure for “oppressive” identities to identify as something (anything) other than white, male, heterosexual, cis etc must be overwhelming.
It makes you wonder how many of these snow white people who claim to be genderqueer otherkin with native American/African roots and transsexual headmates are actually as straight and white as George W Bush.
Either way the whole thing is a kind of collective mass hysteria chewing up the scenery and spewing out deluded, dogmatic, inquisitorial, pious fools like a secular Vatican.
matt,
Funny thing too that “Haram” – a Koranic injunction – is right in the group’s name.
That’s just their “short name” in the local dialect, the full name of the group is even more Islamic:
Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad
Which roughly translates as “The Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad.” Their symbol has the black flag of Jihad (as used by Al-Qaeda and their affiliates) atop a Koran above crossed Ak-47s.
Why are we still talking about Boko Haram? They were destroyed by the #bringbackourgirls twitter campaign! Weren’t they?
They were destroyed by the #bringbackourgirls twitter campaign! Weren’t they?
Close.
http://kaching.tumblr.com/post/86338139953/happyacres-northern-nigeria-in-an-attempt-to
Steve 2: Steveageddon (I prefer the title in full as I never know when you might switch back to Steve 2: The Stevening)
I found your comments really interesting, not least because if you hadn’t reminded me that Sarkeesian was bound to be on Wikipedia I wouldn’t have found out that her MA in social and political thought is from the very same University, York University in Canada, that has made Dr Machlachlan an Associate Professor of Philosophy(!).
Glad you enjoyed the videos; they’re kind of crude and homemade but surprisingly entertaining in exactly the same way that pipe bombs aren’t even remotely.
The poor woman has been swindled into believing that she’s educated […] Unlike students of the more traditional subjects, who will have had the importance of facts and logic hammered in to them before being allowed to graduate, Anita was subjected to cargo cult education
This may not have been your intention, but I felt stung to the quick when I read these comments – though please note, I don’t consider that to be a negative and neither am into Winfrey- / Kyle- / Springer- style confessions but that said my own educational experience largely fits the description you give Sarkeesian’s, only worse.
Worse because through some personal failing – probably a mild form of autism – I put an inordinate amount of faith in something my High School English teacher told us – that we could have any opinion we liked so long as a) we could justify it and b) even after justifying we understood that other people still had a right to disagree with it. I still vividly recall when she said that, right down to where I was sitting when she said it.
Unfortunately, it took me rather longer to work out that the significance of this Volatairean-like statement amounted to absolutely F**K ALL in the context of a failing comprehensive school in Leeds. It was only through trial and more often than not error that I finally came to realise that ‘Hang on a minute, this stuff about education being democratic-meritocratic is 90%+ f****ing bulls**t’.
I really hope this isn’t coming across as a case of ‘poor-me-ism’ because that’s really not my intention – the point I’m trying to make is that I really understand what it’s like to put a naïve amount of faith into ‘educated’ people and into what Thomas Sowell has marvelously described as people with ‘the vision of the anointed’.
If I remember rightly, you’ve said before that you used to serve in HM forces (for which many thanks BTW), so I don’t want to overstate the potential snowflakery of what I’m describing, but, caveats aside, … when a professor in an HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) subject puts you down for stepping out of line it can be quite a soul-destroying experience. It takes quite a while – in my case at least the best part of 20 years – to realise that most of their criticisms are based on ad hominem attacks – or more often, weirdly, ad hominem passive-aggressive defence, false dichotomies, straw men and, not infrequently, the many flavours of bulls**t that is PoMo- and PoCo-speak. Oh, and of course the brute force of the caste system – i.e. I am a professor, you are a student, therefore you know nothing (Jon Snow).
I’m not suggesting here that students should willie-nillie disregard anything that their professors of 20+ years experience say … but what if your professor is professional bulls*****er like Homi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek or Benita Parry? I mean they’re all nigh on total f***ing arses whose only sensible comments (when or if they make them) are so obvious as to be barely worth making in the first place.
Anyway in short, there’s a part of me feels sorry for Sarkeesian that she genuinely believes, as Thunderf00t points out in one of his clips, that it is ‘of course’ a patriarchal conspiracy that dares to suggest that men (on average) are likely to be stronger than men. Even the most intelligent people can be come to believe in all manner of b******s of they are surrounded by enough weighty intellectuals all singing from the same hymn sheet.
Bloody hell! I’ve written more than I meant to – excuse: got up at 2.30 am to meet a deadline, didn’t finish work till 7 pm and am writing this from a pub. End message.
a patriarchal conspiracy that dares to suggest that men (on average) are likely to be stronger than men
Bollocks, Clearly, that’s supposed to read “a patriarchal conspiracy that dares to suggest that men (on average) are likely to be stronger than women” otherwise .. ah fuck it.
Bollocks
Perhaps more beer would help.
Perhaps more beer would help.
Ah, oops. Apologies – please feel free to delete the previous two messages of mine *red face*
Chris
Worst of all, I’m finding it very difficult to ignore just how neatly this development has correlated with the presence and leadership of women in the media. I don’t want to be that guy, not at 28. , but the censorious scolding, brittle indignation, and argument from authority (‘of course I value free speech, I teach John Stuart Mill’) that characterizes the new frontier of new media is too obvious to ignore.
It’s awkward, isn’t it? When I was a lad, I believed that women helping to run everything would be good for the world. I still do, really.
But look at where it’s taken us… I think it’s partly a result of what feminism has done to women – persuading them to see men as the enemy, to conduct a war against men by “winning” every debate (even using whistles, blowing horns, shouting, anything, just to get the last word)
..and then to deny that they’re doing any such thing… I can’t remember who said to me that feminism had done even more harm to women than it has to men. I wonder.
Letting women run things is worse only because the typical male-type screw-ups are now compounded with female-type screw-ups.
I was going to suggest that if Teh Matriarchy were the only game in town, that would be 50% less screwed-up than what we have now, but somehow that sounds wrong.
the typical male-type screw-ups are now compounded with female-type screw-ups
It’s true. We all know men screw up. But nobody is afraid that they’ll be accused of “misandry” for pointing it out. No moderators will be worried about whether it’s “hate-speech”
But try posing as a man and saying “actually women can be a little bit touchy and over-emotional, sometimes” on CiF or on any other mainstream newspaper forum (UK, I don’t know the US ones)…and see what happens.
Is this important? I don’t know. Seems so to me. What did Voltaire say? “To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise”
Here is what the rape statistics in the U.S. have been doing.
Hint: plunging.
Just as a slight change of pace, and no intent to offend… but a stark reality is not just distant from our supposed betters with all those letters behind their names.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vjlpg9i2Bg&feature=player_embedded
Though yes, a nice voice.
Trending topics today in social justice interweb land.
BREAKING NEWS.
BONG!
1.Marissa Alexander convicted to 20 years for firing warning shots (and harming no one) in the same state which acquitted notorious white racist murderer Zimmerman. Racist oppression see!
BONG!
2.Rapper Mos Def refused entry to his own country (America) because he is black and criticizes Guantanamo Bay. Racism, imperialism and torture see!
BONG!
3. UKip are evil, stupid Nazi stock brokers who eat babies, hate brown people, foreign white people and women. Racism, fascism, Nazism, sexism and white privilege see!
The privilege and oppression is everywhere, if you know where to look with an uncritical eye
Lars, great video. I always wondered when that sort of thing was going to happen, not surprised that Denmark was the first.
Pfft. Once again, Australia was ahead of the curve:
I remember back circa-2005 there was a controversy involving the then-Health Minister Tony Abbott, and some students “protested” a speech of his. You can probably guess at the nature of the protest; the speech had to be abandoned.
The next day, I was listening to Triple J – Australia’s #1 youth-oriented government-funded hipster douchebag radio station – and one of their reporters, Steve Cannane, was interviewing one of the students. I imagine that their politics are probably quite similar, but that day Steve Cannane was on the side of the angels, making all the arguments outlined upthread and asking this fellow where he got off inhibiting someone’s free speech.
Said the student, “You’re talking about this in the abstract, and I want to focus on the concrete. Tony Abbott hates women’s bodies, blah blah blah…”
…at which point you couldn’t hear him anymore, because Steve Cannane had turned the fader down.
Said Steve: “Mate, just stop for a second – I’ve just turned your volume down, and now I’m the only one who can hear you. You’re not going out over the radio. How does that make you feel?”
[silence]
—
I really wish I could find the audio, it was absolutely magical
Nikw211 – I knew what you meant fella 🙂
And no, thank *you*! Nobody’s ever thanked me for having been in the Army before. (I didn’t do any heroic stuff or win medals or anything. But it’s not my fault there isn’t a Victoria Cross for having a big mouth that gets you into trouble.) You do get the odd NCO/comedian who’ll thank you to do guard duty while everybody else is down the pub, but that’s about it.
Being shouted at is definitely a thing in HM Forces, but it’s not that bad. I got worse stick from teachers when I was playing rugby at school. The thing is, if you get a bollocking from a sergeant or a corporal it’s usually for your own good, delivered by a plain-speaking man who just wants to make you better at your job, and rarely with any lasting hard feelings. Unlike in civilian life where quite often it’s because your boss/lecturer/what-have-you is an egotistical twat who enjoys that sort of thing.
So I know exactly where you’re coming from. I think academia attracts more than its fair share of predatory personalities. There’s probably more cruelty being inflicted in a typical day at the average university campus than in the average regiment.
Glad you enjoyed the videos; they’re kind of crude and homemade but surprisingly entertaining in exactly the same way that pipe bombs aren’t even remotely.
I liked them so much out of curiosity I googlised the guy who made them. Unlike Anita, with her woeful grasp of “research”, Thunderfoot’s a real researcher with a PhD in Chemistry. No wonder he’s so prone to sexist badthink!
Maybe those new feminist biologists can branch out into chemistry after they prove that women are just as strong as men and discover the Rape Gene.
That would make me happier than a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster served by Eccentrica Gallumbits.
“Piketty appears to have added random numbers to certain formula to bend the data toward his hypothesis.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ft-accusation-against-piketty-2014-5