Anthropology Politics Psychodrama

Elsewhere (169)

June 29, 2015 by David 53 Comments

Kevin Williamson on being the wrong kind of brown person: 

For his political conservatism, Governor [Bobby] Jindal, like Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina and conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza, also Republicans of Indian origin, is savaged as an Uncle Tamas — an Indian guilty of acting white. The charge has been led by the New Republic, the former political journal turned vanity press owned by Facebook millionaire Chris Hughes, one of the whitest white men in the history of whiteness, an argyle sock of a man… Jindal, D’Souza, and Haley stand accused of the worst sort of heresy: being members of an ethnic minority group who neither present nor understand themselves as the white man’s victims, whose stance toward the country in which they all reside and in which two of them were born — the country they love — is not one of opposition. The Left needs neediness, and these three aren’t offering up much of that.

Tim Blair explores the subtle, compassionate mind of Clementine Ford, a writer of “feminist social analyses” who tells us “abuse is not a joke.” 

And Brendan O’Neill on austerity and its champions: 

Before they developed their new-found emotional attachment to describing everything they don’t like as ‘austerity’, [leftist critics] were openly calling for austerity. George Monbiot is one of the Guardian’s chief complainers about Tory austerity — the same George Monbiot who in 2006 proudly described environmentalism as a “campaign not for abundance but for austerity” and who inspired the radical group Riot 4 Austerity. His colleague Zoe Williams likewise complains about “austerity” yet a few years ago she was dreaming of introducing Second World War-style food rationing, because “the lesson from the 40s is that to fix a public-health problem… you need big government.”

Yes, the chronically unhappy and tormented George Monbiot, who one week claims that austerity is crushing the poor and is “an assault on public life,” and then another week calls for his readers to “riot for austerity. Riot for less.” Because, says he, economic growth is “a political sedative,” a tool of false consciousness, “snuffing out protest” in our dulled, befuddled minds. And so Mr Monbiot denounces “the blackened waste of consumer frenzy,” by which he means shopping, and instead wants “a campaign not for more freedom but for less… a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.” “Unpleasant as it will be,” says George, and while “some people [will] lose their jobs and homes,” austerity and recession will avert “ecological collapse,” while saving us from those jet skis and diamond saucepans that we’re all intent on buying, and the mere existence of which robs him of sleep.

For more of Mr Monbiot’s strange mental adventures, see here, here and here. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 




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