My Air Horn Proves My Righteousness
No doubt inspired by this defining moment in intellectual discourse, Milo Yiannopoulos is continuing his tour of US campuses. Last night the venue was the University of Minnesota, where Milo was joined by Christina Hoff Sommers, whose work has been mentioned here previously, to have a debate optimistically titled Calm Down: Restoring Common Sense to Feminism. Needless to say, the event was lively, with several short-lived attempts at disruption, including chants of “You’re an asshole,” raised middle fingers, and repeated brandishing of air horns, including one, clutched by a male feminist, that failed to launch and instead emitted a feeble whine, much to the amusement of both speakers and the audience.
I’d imagine full video of the event will materialise later today. Meanwhile, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that while the “social justice” protestors favoured the standard ritual of drowning out dissent with klaxons and repetitive shouted slogans that bordered on incomprehensible, those being protested against articulated a case, invited questions and had a discussion.
Photo of the three wise men by Leila Navidi.
Update: Full video of the event is available here. The Q&A starts around 45:35.
Oh, and filmed outside afterwards, Air Horn Warrior #2 (pictured above) shares his feelings with passers-by.
repeated brandishing of air horns, including one, clutched by a male feminist, that failed to launch and instead emitted a feeble whine,
Snork.
Snork.
It was an evening of inadvertent symbolism. Some of the photos are fun. I quite like the Star Tribune’s cropping of this one.
repeated brandishing of air horns, including one, clutched by a male feminist, that failed to launch and instead emitted a feeble whine, much to the amusement of both speakers and the audience.
The true face of Social Justice: Loud, Obnoxious, and Stupid. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to join a cool movement like that.
Tolerance means shouting down any viewpoints you disagree with.
These people are, of course, not well-intentioned, but instead evil totalitarians. And yes, I think we need to use words like evil to describe them.
I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to join a cool movement like that.
It is an odd thing, though, how the “social justice” claptrap has become so pervasive, so seductive, especially among idiots. I see its influence even among some young people I know, and who should know better, as if repeating the standard boilerplate were a mark of sophistication, the new cool. As a kind of youthful rebellion, it all seems terribly priggish and prim. Shouldn’t the cool kids be listening to awful music and smuggling sachets of low-grade amphetamine into class?
Or was that just me?
It is telling that the most obnoxious and intolerant people are students. They are young, of course, so that is part of the explanation. They have not yet learned that in the real, adult world shouting down someone you don’t like by yelling “You smell!” doesn’t work. If they had to do a real job, working with real people, they would soon learn that yelling and sounding air horns is a very bad idea, resulting in dismissal or maybe a punch in the face.
But as they are students, they haven’t faced any sanctions, so naturally continue to act like children.
Sadly, Ms Taylor doesn’t bother to explain what exactly was said that amounts to “hate speech.” Nor does she explain how democracy is enhanced by efforts to censor people with whom you disagree.
Did anyone bother to ask Ms. Stephanie Taylor who appointed her to police what the rest of the students desire to hear? The arrogance involved in anointing oneself the “protector” of the sensibilities of fellow adults, as if others are incapable of making an informed judgment about a speaker’s views, is absolutely stunning.
The arrogance involved in anointing oneself the “protector” of the sensibilities of fellow adults, as if others are incapable of making an informed judgment about a speaker’s views, is absolutely stunning.
But she has a placard. And one of her friends even has an air horn. Isn’t that enough?
I came across this recently, which sums up Taylor and her ilk perfectly –
Social Justice Warrior – definition –
“People who use social injustice, real or imagined, as a means to bully and feel self-important. Sometimes coupled with a victim complex that projects persecution of a party, real or imagined, on themselves; often self-electing themselves as a mouthpiece for their own subjective interpretation of that party’s views”.
It is telling that the most obnoxious and intolerant people are students.
Indeed, however it is refreshing to note that in these clips, as well as previous ones of Milo’s tour, the bulk of the crowd has not much patience for the idiocy of these ninnies.
However, the ninnies are young, and one day they will find themselves. Unfortunately they will be disappointed.
Doesn’t calling someone an “asshole” constitute ‘hate speech’? Indeed, as far as I can tell Milo Y is gay, so doesn’t this yelling at him count as ‘double hate speech’?
Also, while I am it, how does a group calling itself ‘Students for a Democratic Society’ actually make democracy better? By making more and bigger signs?
The original SDS came out of the 60s and became a vehicle for the hard left by the end of the decade. It was reborn in 2006.
Students for a totalitarian society.
Doesn’t calling someone an “asshole” constitute ‘hate speech’?
No, it is only hate speech if someone other than their tribe says it.
How dare you not obey your betters.
Shut up, little people.
Bow before the hat of absolute moral authority.
If anyone has trouble with comments getting snagged in the spam filter, email me and I’ll shake them free.
Full video of the event is available here. The Q&A starts around 45:35.
[Stephanie] Taylor, 28, a 2012 graduate of the University’s Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies programme.
Since I got my degree in mathematics, that horribly racist and heteropatriarchist field, I immediately noticed a few things.
In the US, students graduate high school at 17. Even a four-year honours program should be complete by 21-22, depending on where one’s birthday falls within the year. Generally, when one graduates one either proceeds to post-graduate studies or gets a job (or, inevitably, moves back in with one’s parents).
So Ms. Taylor has already taken half again as long as the average student to obtain her degree, and has apparently been lollygagging about campus for four years since. I assume that if she were in post-graduate studies she would have been identified as such.
I know universities need to kiss ass to all their alumni, but I think a lot of these shenanigans could be mitigated by a simple “all right, you’re done, now go home” policy.
So Ms. Taylor has already taken half again as long as the average student to obtain her degree,
Students in the Clown Quarter do tend to have some of the lowest SAT scores. You reminded me of this charmless chap, who’s spent at least seven years in academia’s bosom, immersed in leftist activism and “sexuality studies.” I can’t say the effects have been beneficial to his thinking. He seems to have been left dysfunctional, resentful and disconnected from reality – as if he were suffering from institutional syndrome.
I know universities need to kiss ass to all their alumni, but I think a lot of these shenanigans could be mitigated by a simple “all right, you’re done, now go home” policy.
That would be the case, indeed, if universities’ mission were to impart a useful education to people who are looking to graduate and do something in real life. However, the business model of universities has evolved. The primary raison d’être of a university nowadays seems to be to keep large staffs of administrators and tenured professors toiling away in useless sinecures. Since these non-jobs can’t possibly be created by filling a demand for real diplomas (since there aren’t that many students who actually have the requisite intellectual heft to master a STEM degree), this has led to a proliferation of useless products such as degrees in gender studies, hyphenated-American studies, etc., all of which are paid for by taxpayer-provided loans that are not likely to ever be repaid. In fact, the university serves as yet another instrument that allows government to separate productive members of society from their earnings in order to redistribute them to a favored class, in this case leftist teachers and administrators. The students are only window-dressing.
But she has a placard. And one of her friends even has an air horn. Isn’t that enough?
Where’s the notarized statement? Until I see a notarized statement, Ms. Taylor can bugger off.
Incidentally, the non-shouty bit of the video, the Q&A, starts around 45:35 and has some entertaining stories. There’s one shared by Christina Hoff Sommers about a visit with her sister to an academic conference, and which prompted her sister to comment on the remarkable number of “borderline personalities” sharing their grievances. Christina explained to her sister that this air of bedlam was quite normal when feminists gather with other identitarians and then compete for victimhood. As she puts it, campus feminists meet “at the intersection of paranoia, hysteria and rage.”
Is that Michael Stipe?
“They have not yet learned that in the real, adult world shouting down someone you don’t like by yelling “You smell!” doesn’t work.”
Which is what they’re supposed to be learning. Some of us never went to university and have a better idea of how to make and argue a case than thse hooligans. (‘Course, it would help if they had a case…)
“The arrogance involved in anointing oneself the “protector” of the sensibilities of fellow adults, as if others are incapable of making an informed judgment about a speaker’s views, is absolutely stunning.”
And absolutely typical of the modern political mindset. This phenomenon hasn’t sprung forth, fully formed, over the last couple of years. Nor is it, as some would have it, simply a result of over-protective parenting over the last couple of decades. It’s been brewing for over a century in the increasing politicization and regulation of daily life. When the default position of the media-political complex on any problem is that people can’t be trusted to make sensible decisions for themselves, is it any wonder that young people who’ve never known anything else think that this is an acceptable attitude to have?
Milo @ about 50:00 on the vid (paraphrased): The Left is more interested in legitimatizing speakers than interrogating arguments.
Bingo.
Delegitimising, I think.
I also liked the story about the feminist student at Berkeley who was fuming piously about “male privilege” and “manspreading” after taking a photo of a man on the subway, sleeping and occupying several seats. The man in question turned out to be homeless. And, one imagines, unable to afford the tuition at Berkeley.
Seriously, WTF is *anyone* going to actually DO with a degree in “Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies.” It’s not a scientific degree in any sense of the word. Nowhere does it appear to involve any study of biology or chemistry. One needs no background in logic, philosophy, or reason before beginning or completing this “major.” And, quite frankly, no one with a degree in this field has ever produced ANYTHING that some other human on this planet would willingly purchase. Accordingly, I conclude that NO university in its right mind has ANY legitimate educational purpose in allowing such an overtly hostile and anti-intellectual movement to operate under its auspices and with its backing.
This entire academia-wide enterprise of “ignorance and grievance studies” is nothing less than the work of several generations of liberal fascists (think Bill Ayers, Noam Chomsky, etc.) to build a “revolutionary vanguard” of weaponized ignorance they hope to manipulate into fomenting open revolution. These students’ belief in the slogans they chant is so shallow they can’t even form coherent thoughts, yet they appear willing to sacrifice their futures for this dangerous ideology they are too stupid to truly understand. That is the hallmark of indoctrination, not education.
Someone in the West is going to have to understand that these students and their masters do NOT and will NOT respond to reason or persuasion. They’ve been propagandized to understand force and force only. Until the enemies of this fascist threat (me among them) are willing to use force to stop them, we will continue to see this threat grow. These universities need to be forced by the legislatures in their respective States to shut these programs down and to fire these pseudo-intellectual charlatans who staff them. If the States aren’t capable, Congress and our next President MUST understand the threat and use any and every legal means at his disposal to evict this menace from our campuses.
That would be the case, indeed, if universities’ mission were to impart a useful education to people who are looking to graduate and do something in real life.
Well, let’s be fair: that’s not actually the mission of a university. That’s the mission of a trade school or vocational college. A university that taught nothing but the traditional humanities – Philosophy, History, Literature, Theology – would still be a university, and that describes most Ivy League schools for the bulk of their existence.
The problem is the easy availability of credit and subsidies for university programs without concern for the ability of the borrower to ever pay back what they’ve borrowed. Get the government at all levels, provincial/state and federal, out of loaning money to students and the cost of tuition would plummet to something more market appropriate. This would lead to the shuttering of departments that didn’t bring in either undergraduate tuition or alumni endowments. Schools like MIT, Cal Tech, and U(W) would continue attracting and producing top tier engineering/STEM talent, and the liberal arts would go back to being taught in small privately run colleges by dedicated professors.
It’s the ability to borrow insane amounts of money to finance a useless waste of time that’s producing these departments.
The latest video by Janice Fiamengo is somewhat relevant.
It’s the ability to borrow insane amounts of money to finance a useless waste of time that’s producing these departments.
As I’ve said before, the left has been allowed to annex the language of good intentions, to claim it as its own, as if collectivism, statism and unconditional subsidy were synonymous with virtue and beyond dispute. One result of this linguistic land grab is a generation of students who imagine they have an unassailable right to study X at someone else’s expense, regardless of whether a degree in X will ever lead to employment, to repayment of the loan, and to fairness for those left footing the bill in cases of default, i.e., the taxpayer.
Challenging this conceit and making students responsible for their choices will of course have consequences for the Clown Quarter of academia, which has long been a favoured nest for the unhinged arm of the left. It’s no coincidence that the most vehement critics of any attempt to introduce market sensibilities to degree courses in the UK have been far-left ideologues who teach worthless and intellectually disreputable courses that won’t look quite so attractive, even to idiots, in the harsh light of day.
Need to make it clear when you get their begging letters to alumni that you won’t pay until they dump those departments.
So. am I right in assuming that these protesty students get their degrees in Hanging Around and Being Shouty? Then it should be printed so on their transcripts and diplomas.
Outside the venue – looks like air horn guy#2:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/18/you-should-have-been-aborted-campus-crazies-disrupt-another-milo-event/
looks like air horn guy#2
Feel the love.
RightofGhengis,
And, quite frankly, no one with a degree in this field has ever produced ANYTHING that some other human on this planet would willingly purchase.
The key word is “willingly”, as this field seems to be the prime source of belligerent, brow-beating “sensitivity trainers” to whom vast numbers of office workers in the corporate world have been forcibly subjected.
The “hat of absolute moral authority” notwithstanding, where I come from if Waldo started yelling at me like that he’d get served a five finger sandwich. Just sayin’.
This:
I have just gone back and done some mathematics at uni and was shocked at the millennials that I shared an office with. Whatever the polar opposite of a sense of adventure and wanting to get amongst it all is, they are it. This is coupled with the sense of superiority that comes from knowing absolutely nothing and not being aware of the fact. In short, they were extremely depressingly boring.
Kate McMillan nails it with her spiel “the kids are our future, that is why I am stocking up on bottled water, batteries and ammunition.”
Tolerance means shouting down any viewpoints you disagree with.
The Herbert Marcuse influence. One of the most evil men who ever walked the earth.
Meanwhile, back at Rutgers:
I wonder what their parents make of these wretched, lying creatures. Are they proud, embarrassed, or just glad they’re not at home?
The Herbert Marcuse influence.
Absolutely. Marcuse’s essay Repressive Tolerance denounced as “oppressive” the custom of hearing out one’s opponents and engaging with their arguments. Instead, he urged leftist radicals to be “intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” Well, we’ve seen how that works out. And we’ve seen the kinds of people that this licence for intimidation tends to attract. Still, it’s interesting just how often leftist intellectuals spend their time rationalising non-reciprocal behaviour and being titillated by thuggery.
I can’t help thinking that tells us something.
A university that taught nothing but the traditional humanities – Philosophy, History, Literature, Theology – would still be a university, and that describes most Ivy League schools for the bulk of their existence.
I don’t have a problem with state funding for a handful – and I mean a handful – of incredibly bright and gifted scholars to study subjects such as these which have no commercial value, but considerable cultural value. In fact, I don’t think anyone had a problem with this, until some dingbat thought this should model should be applied to tens of thousands of spectacularly dim people who would be better employed in a field of agriculture rather than one of study.
Incidentally, I see the University of Manchester is boasting on that they have invited a former student who is now an executive director of Oxfam to come and open a new facility, where we will learn that:
Our broken economic system works for the few at the expense of the many. Such obscene levels of inequality make no moral or economic sense, especially when almost a billion people are still going to bed hungry every night.
“We can do far better. We have the talent, the technology and the imagination to build a much better world and a far more human economy where the interests of the majority are put first. It is an economy in which governments act on behalf of the majority and not in the interests of a tiny but powerful elite and business show concern for their workers, their customers and the communities. It is an economy that asks how it can work better for women, and not the other way round, how technological progress can liberate, and where the economy lives within the boundaries of our planet.
“A more human economy requires substantial new, disruptive ideas – and academia has a responsibility to help generate them. The new Global Development Institute can stand firm upon the University’s radical tradition and play a role of global leadership for the future of international development: it can be a truly intellectual force that connects with struggles and movements around the world and lays the groundwork for a more human economy.”
Boilerplate socialist bullshit, in other words. The late and much lamented Norm Geras was a Marxist at the University of Manchester, but he was thoroughly decent, was intelligent, and had some damned sense.
Norm Geras was a Marxist at the University of Manchester, but he was thoroughly decent… and had some damned sense.
In that respect, I think of him as an anomaly. And it’s perhaps significant that most of his critiques, certainly the later ones, were aimed leftwards. Though I once tried to get Norm to comment on Evan Coyne Maloney’s 2008 documentary Indoctrinate U, which illustrates many of the authoritarian indecencies covered by this blog. His reply was brief and dismissive: “I don’t see a problem.”
So Marxism is best avoided, I think. Even the sane ones are left morally damaged by it.
Our broken economic system works for the few at the expense of the many. Such obscene levels of inequality make no moral or economic sense, especially when almost a billion people are still going to bed hungry every night.
“We can do far better. We have the talent, the technology and the imagination to build a much better world and a far more human economy where the interests of the majority are put first. It is an economy in which governments act on behalf of the majority and not in the interests of a tiny but powerful elite and business show concern for their workers, their customers and the communities.
I see. So almost a billion go to bed hungry, which means somewhere in the neighborhood of 6.4 billion do not, which, last time I looked, was around 6.4 times more people, or what we call a “majority” (actually, a “huge majority”).
Therefore, one could reach the obvious conclusion that the “interests of the majority” evidently have been put first, and we see that even though they may profit from it, the “powerful elite and business” do in fact show concern for their workers, their customers, and the communities, for without them, they would not profit.
Obvious facts, of course. Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea could not be reached for comment.
I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit.
air horn guy#2:
Must be the campus Welcome Wagon.
On Marcusian oppression (via L. Sprague de Camp’s classic work, _Lest Darkness Fall_):
“You don’t like the Goths?”
“No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!”
“Persecution?”
“Religious persecution. We won’t stand for it forever.”
“I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.”
“That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t persecution, I’d like to know what is!”
Somewhat relevant:
Poor lamb. Perhaps someone should take our stressed-out little radical to one side and explain to him that his parents aren’t paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for him to piss about playing activist.
Whatever the polar opposite of a sense of adventure and wanting to get amongst it all is, they are it.
I feel the same. I fly back and forth to Austin a lot, and notwithstanding that Austin is in Texas it seems to attract more than its fair share of young people who wouldn’t be out of place in, say, Berkeley. And what amazes me when I see them on the plane is that they all act like old people. They all have roller bags. For a weekend getaway they pack as if they’re moving to a new city. Half of them carry these little hemorrhoid cushions that they use as neck braces. They’re easily confused. I lose track of the number of young people whom I’ve seen get into the wrong seat on the plane and then get flummoxed when they’re told they have to move. They can’t go through a 4-hour flight without going to the bathroom at least once, maybe twice. I’ve traveled with my mother, who is rather advanced in years, and she is more sprightly and fun-to-be-around than most of these twenty-somethings that purport to be our future.
Hedgehog, Austin is the shame of Texas. It’s got the double-whammy of being the state capitol AND home of the main campus of the University of Texas (student pop: ~50K). The (possibly unofficial) motto of the city is “Keep Austin Weird”. The place positively *revels* in trying to be Berkeley-on-the-Colorado. The rest of us look at Austin as we’d look at that weird, always-stoned, radical cousin who won’t shut up about the glories of Socialism when he’s not busy sponging off the rest of the family.
Still, the city does serve as a cautionary example and a sink for our oddballs, so it’s not entirely useless:-).
I’m fascinated to know who the protester in the middle of the first picture is.
He was caught on camera outside of the lecture hall behaving in an extraordinarily vicious manner, telling people who disagreed with him to kill themselves and making a motion of putting a gun to his mouth as he did so.
He’s likely a student. Such a student should not be expelled, but I wonder what he thinks about becoming the new poster child for left-wing fascism.
It was an evening of inadvertent symbolism.
“The Minnesota Republic, a conservative, student-run magazine at the U of M, invited Yiannopoulos to campus to debate a faculty member of the gender, women and sexuality studies department on the topic of feminism. When no professors agreed, the Minnesota Republic reached out to Hoff Sommers, whose speeches on college campuses often draw protesters.”
http://www.tommiemedia.com/news/feminism-speakers-draw-protesters-to-university-of-minnesota/
A rare sighting of the big-mouthed Bald Whiner, complete with Authority specs and Power hat!
Well done, looney watchers!