Reheated (48)
For newcomers, more items from the archives:
Your furniture choices are informed by the “crisis in white identity,” says sociology lecturer. And Gardeners’ Question Time is all about race.
Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment. Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter. He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”
You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.
“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view.
Answers On A Postcard, Please.
Squat enthusiast invites readers to “imagine what you and your friends could do with a crowbar, a guitar,” and someone else’s property.
Says Ms Cosslett, “Communes represented a different way of being – sharing the cooking, the cleaning and the childcare was not only practical but also beneficial to the wellbeing of the members.” Readers who as students shared a house and cleaning duties, in theory at least, will no doubt testify to the practicality of this approach and the lofty hygiene standards that invariably resulted. Now imagine those high standards applied to parenting and childcare.
There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat.
Your furniture choices are informed by the “crisis in white identity,” says sociology lecturer. And Gardeners’ Question Time is all about race.
It must be great to have a job where being wrong and publicly humiliated has no effect on your prospects.
The student assessments of Prof Haiven live up to her advance billing. (To be fair, there are a few favorable ones; however, to be scrupulously fair about being fair, those few tongue baths are accompanied by a torrent of down votes.)
It must be great to have a job where being wrong and publicly humiliated has no effect on your prospects.
Oh, Dr Pitcher is still going, still being paid. According to his social media, he’s now writing about the “racial politics of rocks and stones.”
Your “Squat Post” again brought back memories of my college days, including the chemistry major roommate* who used to dry his amateur rocket fuel concoctions in the kitchen oven. His first effort was somewhat successful, I should note, inasmuch as the rocket in quo managed to travel two city blocks before it caromed off the roof of another student occupied house and then exploding in a glorious display of sparks and flame.
Did I mention, there was alcohol consumption involved?
*Now with a very serious adult job where he has to wear suits to work.
Your “Squat Post” again brought back memories of my college days,
That’s what struck me – Ms Cosslett’s assumption that we, her readers, can have no idea what communal living is like, despite the fact that most of us will have experienced some form of it as students or just starting out as adults. And it does evoke memories of those first months away from the parental home – the parties, the hilariously inedible meals, the intermittent availability of toilet paper. Jolly things like that. But despite the rose-tinted blather of Guardian columnists, I doubt you’d want to go back to that arrangement, and then stay there for all your remaining days.
the intermittent availability of toilet paper
So that’s the problem with Venezuela? They’re all still in college?
Your “Squat Post” again brought back memories of my college days,
The other thing that struck me is the conceit that squatting and “communal living” are somehow the opposite of selfishness. Rather than being – as illustrated at length in the original thread – a license for freeloading and irresponsibility. Which is to say, selfishness writ large. It’s also telling that Ms Cosslett’s professed hippie ideal, her model of selflessness and “alternative living,” is an “impossibly grand house” on Park Crescent in London. Funny how so much of this egalitarian posturing entails a grand setting and lots of someone else’s stuff.
It’s also telling that Ms Cosslett’s professed hippie ideal, her model of selflessness and “alternative living,” is an “impossibly grand house” on Park Crescent in London.
Of course. Leftism is about status and accumulation of benefits without any actual achievement, effort or risk. Thus, the constant harping about “fairness,” a concept which has no place or meaning in the Darwinian reality in which Leftists claim to operate.
I read a few of Prof Haiven’s student assessments (a wholly new thing to me, this rate-a-teacher… will wonders never cease, etc), but had to stop as the piss-poor English was more depressing than the negative feedback was reassuring.
“I cannot bare this woman.”
Erm. Eesh.
ARGH is correct. The grammar is pretty awful, to wit:
However, since she is very opinated she basically will mark you down points if you dont wright to her opinion !!!
These students would benefit from some non-fraudulent teachers.
Re: Dr. Ben Pitcher,
“His most recent book is Consuming Race (2014), which offers some new ways of thinking about the centrality of race to our lives.”
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Gardeners’ Question Time is all about race. As are pumpkins: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1099421?journalCode=rgeo20
This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States. Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness.
I keep waiting for one of the to jump online to shout “Sokal.” I may be waiting for some time.
Tip jar hit, dear boy.
It must be great to have a job where being wrong and publicly humiliated has no effect on your prospects.
I’ve worked there . . . those getting fraudulently paid to be managers and administrators were actually bewildered that those of us getting the work done were A) actually getting that work done as contrasted with them, and B) that we started leaving or looking for the way out . . .
Well alrighty then, Lawrence of Arabia is sexist. We all shall be awaiting, giddy as schoolgirls, the remake starring Elizabeth Hurley as Lawrence, Helen Mirren as Allenby, and Irina Shayk as Auda abu Tayi.
. . . the remake . . .
Hmmm? Well, we’ve already got Noel Coward and his review of Peter O’Toole and company.
If you’d been any prettier, it would have been Florence of Arabia.
Besides, a movie is supposed to have already been on the way, but being rather more of the actual early 21st century rather than T.E. Lawrence . . .
“His most recent book is Consuming Race (2014), . . .
It’s A Cookbook!!!!!!!!!
“Feminism is not for everyone!
They’re taking pictures!”
AnotherFred:
a food studies of humanities and geography…
violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins…
the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness
Nay, I think their automated drivel generator is suffering from a work-action by the gerbils enslaved to power it. Or perhaps the thing that goes “parp” failed to go “parp”. Garbled gobbledegook, and self-contradictory to boot.
No, you will never convince me that this mass of moldy goulash was produced by a collegiate-level progressive thinker. No, sir.
Well, I hate all things pumpkin. Taste, smell, color, the works. So, I’ve got that going for me, at least.
David, thanks for the very entertaining links.
The comment thread about communal / flatmate living brought more than one shudder of recollection to my aged frame. (I once spent a week during my 3rd year at Uni living in the Math Department building. Upon my return to the house (occupied by an actual employed sportswriter, a social-worker / bass guitar player, and a Japanese female grad student (who, mysteriously, was never there)) I discovered that the stacks of dishes in the kitchen sink bore a strong resemblance to the stacks present the prior week. When I moved into my own tiny flat for my 4th year I literally kissed the (clean, oak) floors.)
(Hey, the parentheses balance! I can still code LISP! Yay for me!) (Also, I gave my Yank-ness away there with the singular “Math” thing, didn’t I? Oh, well.)
ARGH: Sadly, even back in 1974, 50% of the incoming Freshman class at the world-famous University Of California At Berkeley were required to take “English-P” (as in Preparatory) before they could start their regular studies in the College of Letters and Science.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And so those genteel discussions of gardening, of squirrels, your taste in furniture… it’s all seething with racist subtext, practically fascism.
And remember,
This is not a spoof.
And so those genteel discussions of gardening, of squirrels, your taste in furniture… it’s all seething with racist subtext, practically fascism. And remember… This is not a spoof.
You can’t spoof the polytechnic left.
You can’t spoof the polytechnic left.
What’s interesting is that Dr Pitcher’s academic work – i.e., glib and tenuous associations dressed up as deep politics – has apparently flourished with little, if any, challenge. His claim that Gardeners’ Question Time is “saturated with racial meanings,” and that a reference to rhododendrons as an invasive species may betray some secret racial animus towards Asian people – all of this is aired as if self-evident, rather than a ludicrous contrivance. It’s been shielded from even the most basic objections. Hence the indignation when faced with ridicule from an unimpressed public.
This claptrap made its way past academic peers, academic publishers and onto a flagship ‘intellectual’ programme of the nation’s state broadcaster, where it was met, not with laughter and derision, or any kind of scepticism, but with nodding and chin-rubbing. A programme in which the assumptions and conceits of two race-hustling mediocrities – because you’ve got to have two of them, agreeing with each other – were spared any meaningful pushback.
This claptrap made its way past academic peers, academic publishers and onto a flagship ‘intellectual’ programme of the nation’s state broadcaster, where it was met, not with laughter and derision, or any kind of scepticism, but with nodding and chin-rubbing. A programme in which the assumptions and conceits of two race-hustling mediocrities – because you’ve got to have two of them, agreeing with each other – were spared any meaningful pushback.
To be fair, this isn’t much different in large corporations: careers are built on telling your management exactly what they want to hear, and any kind of dissent is frowned upon. It’s pathetic to watch, especially from grown men.
This claptrap made its way past academic peers, academic publishers and onto a flagship ‘intellectual’ programme of the nation’s state broadcaster…
Having been for a while on a “Peer Review” board, it became clear it is “Pal Rubber Stamp”, not really “Peer Review”. Not a single one of my corrections or criticisms ever made it into a printed draft because no one wanted to offend the authors by saying they might be wrong.
Patton’s observation that if everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking was not meant to be an operating principle.
Still, at least none of us have to be Ben Pitcher. Can you imagine?
Having been for a while on a “Peer Review” board, it became clear it is “Pal Rubber Stamp”
Oh, I had one situation where a pair of idiots tried to rattle off a series of lies as part of attempting to show that they had a clue and could be called administrators. Quite effortlessly, I caught every single lie, and supplied the documentation to confirm the lying. Next, as their idea of attempted justification, they then emailed me their own notes confirming that the lies were indeed lies, and insisted that all printed hard copies of those lies had to be signed and dated by at least one of them, to confirm that I had not printed up something fake.
As I collected those notes to add to my files, somehow I managed to do that with a poker face instead of having my jaw hit the ground.
Yes, at some point, I did consult with lawyers. The lawyers confirmed that I had a situation where A) the job of admins and managers is to keep things running correctly. B) Running things correctly does involve promoting the competent, training the untrained, and firing or handing off the hipsters. C) When useless idiots are being given the salaries of admins and managers, and no part of A) and B) are being done, then that’s not legally addressable discrimination, that is an open practice of deliberate failure and incompetence. And when the senior management is also merely being incompetent, then unfortunately, while also noting the cost and annoyance of lawsuits, one can’t really sue an incompetent idiot for intrinsically being an incompetent idiot.
—Finally, those of us doing the actual work either ran for the doors when something else turned up, or, are now hunting for the next job(s) after getting fired for excellently doing the actual work that the frauds openly refused to do, while granting they’d already proven they couldn’t do any of that work anyway . . . .
This claptrap made its way past academic peers, academic publishers and onto a flagship ‘intellectual’ programme of the nation’s state broadcaster,
This is why there’s a replication crisis in the Social Sciences. The people involved don’t really seem to know what they’re doing.
An interesting piece on the subject.
Still, at least none of us have to be Ben Pitcher. Can you imagine?
He seems to have lost a bit of weight and also changed his name, but that’s understandable.
See, the problem I have is that Ben, like so many others, writes about “race, politics, and popular culture”. but I have this smart, attractive niece who writes about “race cars, politics, and popular culture” (but mostly about the cars…) and somehow I just can’t find the time to keep up with both of them. Sigh. What’s an uncle to do?
(Plug: Kristen Lee at https://kinja.com/kristenlee214)
Hmm. that closing ) on the link messes it up. Sorry.
http://jalopnik.com/for-the-love-of-god-stop-making-cars-for-women-1787014759
I got carried away by my own cleverness with the “race” -> “race cars” thing, so I hope I have not offended by posting a link to a commercial venture.