Elsewhere (148)
Franklin Einspruch on art, censorship and impossibly delicate feelings:
On December 8, in response to a conversation with the artist in which he expressed contrition but not enough for her liking, [third-year doctoral student, Kayla] Wheeler cried out, “The artist triggered me again. I’m hyperventilating. I literally can’t breathe right now… I’m being verbally attacked by this man. I’m shaking and crying. Please make it stop.”
Kevin Williamson on private life versus pseudo-moral grandstanding:
The profoundly stupid “black brunch” protests, during which racial-grievance entrepreneurs disrupted meals at places that seemed to them offensively Caucasian (“white spaces”) are a different species of undertaking… The message these protests send is that there is no private space — and, therefore, no private life — so far as this particular rabble is concerned… That the people at brunch have no real direct connection to the events motivating the protesters is beside the point. They were targeted on racial grounds: These were detestable “white spaces,” and the people there were to be punished for being white — even if they were not, in fact, white, their presence in “white spaces” makes them guilty by association. That the protesters were themselves largely white goes without saying: Protests of this sort are a prestige performance for stupid white college kids, mainly.
Peter Wood on leftist academics who find violence titillating:
Eric Linsker, an adjunct professor of English composition at [the City University of New York], was arrested on December 13, after he had carried a large garbage can onto a walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge, apparently in an effort to drop it on the heads of police officers below. Linsker was ordered by the police to put it down but fled the scene, dropping his backpack, with two hammers inside, and, among others things, his CUNY ID. Cindy Gorn and Zachary Campbell were among the academics arrested for assaulting police on the Brooklyn Bridge in an effort to help Linsker escape. Gorn is a graduate student at Columbia University… Her “areas of work” are “geography from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, social movements, autonomous labour movements, health, and the environment.”
Somewhat related, Jim Treacher notes the lively goings-on at a concert for non-violence.
And further to this, Robert Tracinski on dishonest narratives and apologies not forthcoming:
But it’s clearly time to apologise — for every activist and journalist (but I repeat myself) who bought into the simplistic, self-serving “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative and broadcast it far and wide based on false testimony; who reflexively dismissed [police officer, Darren] Wilson’s side of the story as preposterous and unbelievable; who doggedly upheld a wider narrative that slanders police officers across the country as murderous racists. Don’t apologise because I shamed you into it, or because I’m trying to sell you on my advice for how to avoid debacles like this in the future. Do it because if you want to hold others accountable for their action, you need to first make sure you are accountable for your own.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
Southern California – outside the urban area being surrounded by desert, we still get a fair number of spiders.
One can get a start driving in the early morning and realizing the hopping thing at the side of the road is a tarantula annoyed at the big bad car.
(most spiders don’t bother me … beneficial in the garden. however, I cannot stand black widows and will hunt them down mercilessly)
“I’m shaking and crying. Please make it stop.”
Appropriate response:
“Does your carer have your medication?”
“Over here in Oz we have spiders with legspans that can cover your hand wandering round on our walls and ceilings”
Yeah, nice try lurker, but I’ve lived in Oz and the big spiders can’t climb walls anymore than the scorpions here in Thailand can. Luckily.
I can assure Ray that big spiders in Australia are expert at climbing walls. Fortunately, while scary, they are mostly harmless.
Incidentally, third-year doctoral student Kayla Wheeler, who finds polite disagreement a cause of panic attacks, has been busy blocking people who disagree with her and has now rendered her tweets inaccessible. Presumably to spare her deep and righteous thoughts from contamination.
The academic world is lucky to have her in its bosom.
Ray,
You’ve never seen huntsman spiders?
I have indeed seen a huntsman, trying to sneak into the bathroom for the water during the dry season, a fairly common occurrence. Looking at Google I was probably just lucky. Never saw a particularly big one, or one that went for a stroll across the lounge room wall. I saw a some bigger spiders in the yard, but the chickens kill them if they see them. Highly recommended for the Sydney garden, chickens.
In other words, my emotional reaction is all the intellectual validation any of us – meaning YOU – need. Surely.
It’s a corollary to the F word used to express other equally righteous, instinctive, and necessary political, social, urbanist, progressive outrage. If any of this is present, the discussion is over.
See, we were built this way by the great accidental creation event and we shall bear it witness.
Pay them respect, all minds, because they alone are faithful to the only cause that matters, the one mystically and transcendentally imbued upon their very souls.
…or it could just be narcissism.
@David
Giant Spiders in the Wine Cellar? I would’ve thought the Balrog kept them at bay.
“the great accidental creation event”…heh, I like that. Wondered how I ever missed it, but FWIW couldn’t find a reference to such on Google. Perhaps a Ten original? Props.
Meanwhile…An interesting proposal:
http://www.dailycal.org/2015/01/20/occupy-syllabus/
Jonathan, found this rather telling from occupy-syllabus:
What these innocent souls fail to understand is that leftist ideology only works in the fantasy world of 20/20 hindsight. Thus it is necessary for the hive of their betters to consult and reflect on the consequences of other people’s real-time actions before presenting a unified, somewhat believable perspective to the little angels in their charge. Such efforts do not happen overnight.
the class was out of touch with the majority of students’ lives.
Foolishly, I was under the impression that students of the humanities were expected to stretch their horizons to meet the work and thereby discover universal themes, along the way developing a curiosity regarding other times and places, other lives besides their own. Rather than shrinking the work to fit the identitarian dogma of teenagers. It reminds me of this: “Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart? Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of colour.”
“Furthermore, the classroom environment felt so hostile to women, people of color, queer folks and other marginalized subjects that it was difficult for us to focus on the course material. Sometimes, we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lecture.”
Some people aren’t cut out for college.
Some people aren’t cut out for college.
It’s worth bearing in mind that this kind of preciousness is encouraged and rewarded, affirmed as a credential, a measure of tribal authenticity. It’s what Heather Mac Donald described as, “a co-dependent relationship between self-engrossed students and adults whose careers consist of catering to that self-involvement.” And so in order to “get real” students are encouraged to become a cartoon, a walking parody, declaring their victimisation at the drop of a hat. Or the theoretically possible dropping of a hat, somewhere, maybe, at some point in the future.
http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/jan/28/teach-students-equality-smarties
Agnes has made a common error. Can you guess what it is?
Oh in practice likely more than one, Charlie. What should be horrifying is that such a person can attain a PhD without becoming educated enough to see the obvious flaws in her administration of this “experiment”. What should be horrifying is that someone so lacking in common sense is in charge of educating children. What should be horrifying is that such a person is in charge of educating more college students to be just like her. What should be horrifying is the lack of objection by parents of these children (though I suspect they never knew) to what their children are supposedly being taught.
This problem is perpetuating itself almost exponentially. Though I found most of the comments to be somewhat reassuring.
Reading the comments, it seems that most who are wealthy got that way by perpetuating some horrible unfairness. I suppose these types scowl at people like myself who plant to leave as much inherited wealth to my potential offspring as I can.
plan, not ‘plant’.
Is it too early to be worried about government deciding that inter-generational wealth should be heavily taxed?.
@Jimmy
It’s never too early to be worried about the government. They’re always looking for ways to thieve.
Heh…rereading my comment above and use of “horrifying” looks quite alarmist. Though my mental frame of reference when posting that was if you went back 30 years or so and presented such a scenario to most people in the context of the common sense of the generations that were alive 30 years ago, they’d be quite shocked/horrified. Or so I suspect. ymmv.
Jonathan Chait on how the language police are killing liberalism:
The whole idea that the professor committed a crime by stealing a sign and shoving away its owner turns out to be an ideological construct. “The ease with which privileged white, and particularly young white gender and sexually normative appearing women, make claims to ‘victimhood’ and ‘violation of property,’ is not a neutral move,” [The Feminist Wire website] authors argued. It concluded, “We issue a radical call for accountability to questions of history, representation, and the racialized gendering of tropes of ‘culpability’ and ‘innocence’ when considering Dr. Miller-Young’s case.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-thing-to-say.html
Jonathan Chait on how the language police are killing liberalism
I think Chait’s criticism is nowhere near sceptical enough, but the reactions from many so-called ‘progressives’ have been interesting.
Franklin, who wrote this, has been having a not dissimilar experience. In which, people – students, remember – refuse to engage with criticism, or even read it, and refer to a dull sculpture as having “terroristic impact.”
>Agnes has made a common error.
She forgot Ricardo’s Law of Rent?