Friday Ephemeraren’t

O/T, (probably more suited to an Elsewhere than Friday Ephemera), the writer Douglas Murray gives a talk on free speech, touching on some of the recent plagues of irrationality which have recently swept through university campuses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXJm2Y7TUpg

Cultural Appropriation.

The Pronominal War

Now, sex is the first thing we notice about someone, and the last thing we forget. It’s easy to see why this should be so. It cannot possibly be to any living thing’s advantage to be confused about male and female. [snip]
To pretend, therefore, that we do not know what we immediately and urgently perceive is to do violence at once to human nature, language, the possibility of a shared life, and the intellect’s capacity to apprehend reality. If I cannot say, “There is a man walking down the street,” then it is hard to see how I can make any reliable judgment about anything at all that bears on human existence. If I cannot say, “Joey is going to grow up to be a fine man someday,” then what in life is left to talk about? Everything else is less certain than sex. We may disagree about whether President Eisenhower was a good leader of men, a loyal husband and father, or a pious Christian; but if we cannot agree that President Eisenhower was a man, then speech itself is but sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or, rather, speech collapses into action, and reason lies prone before appetite. Speech delivers the bribes and threats of people who want what they want and do not care overmuch how they get it.

That bread video. I just can’t. Plus what the hell is what must be an employee doing videoing it happening instead of doing something?
Its situations like this that the Russia memes come in.
“In Soviet Russia, bread eat you!”

The Pronominal War
Also this bit:

And here I return to what the second madman is doing. Or madwoman: it is more commonly she who is demanding that people undergo pronominal lobotomies. She says that she wants all people to feel “safe” and comfortable, regardless of their sexual identity. That is not true. What she wants is that ordinary people should feel uncomfortable. She wants to rob them of their ordinary perceptions. She sows the field of conversation with mines, glad if ordinary people learn to tiptoe around them, but much gladder still when they fail and blow themselves up, because that provides her with the opportunity for more “education,” which means a more aggressive campaign against our common grasp of objective reality and our ability to communicate with ease what we see.

It’s been my experience that when people announce their compassion and virtuous intent as loudly and often as the pronoun police do – and as needily as they do – there’s usually something else at work, something unedifying. It reeks of camouflage, misdirection. Something fishy.

The Pronominal War
How to ruin a hitherto fine, sober and rational analysis:

The moral law as regards sex is meant to protect that family from threats without and within: from the pseudo-marriage that is fornication, from the betrayal of marriage that is adultery, from the rickets and scurvy of impure habits, and from the mockery of the marital act that is sodomy.

the hothouse of a lesbian relationship

the pale horse

Regarding the “Pronominal War,” I’m reminded of Theodore Dalrymple’s remarks on the purpose of propaganda:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

I think I saw Hothouse of a Lesbian Relationship on Showtime, it wasn’t bad, don’t buy new hand cream for it or anything.
So is Gab just an echo chamber for Trumpery or am I seeing the wrong people? After two weeks’ wait I was hoping for more than “it’s like Tumblr but for people I agree with.”

Always sniff before you swallow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5W6PWqzyKI

🙂

The caring left, part 3,042.

I thought calling people ‘retarded’ was verboten?
I don’t think the rules were ever meant to be applied even-handedly. But the clip works as a snapshot of a certain, quite common type. First, there’s the apparent need to react, and react aggressively, to any evidence of a non-leftist position – in this case by tearing down someone else’s posters – for, I think, a talk by Christina Hoff Sommers. (Walking by and getting on with life was apparently not an option. Their days must be exhausting.) Then there’s the language, which sounds terribly un-PC. And finally, as the ladies strut away, most likely swollen with their own righteousness, there’s the utter disregard for whoever has to clear up the litter they’ve left behind.

Coming soon to a decolonising institution near you: #sciencemustfall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14
The circular logic, hatred for the scientific method, and praise of “different ways of knowing” could have come from our friends at EF.
There’s a good take down here: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/science/182962-a-quick-science-lesson-for-the-sciencemustfall-idiots.html
No word yet on how indigenous magic will levitate aircraft, suspend bridges, or power cell phones, but questioning said magic is a clear sign of colonialist brainwashing.

Regarding Joan’s link, is that what is known as “elevating the tone?”
I think that rather depends on one’s starting point.
[ Sniffs haughtily. ]

More from the Department of Cultural Authenticity:
Check your entitlement. No matter how open-minded/friendly/rich you are, another’s culture, food, spirituality, and stories do not belong to you, regardless of who you may have given you permission. I know of more than a few Native writers, for instance, who won’t publish something, fictional or otherwise, without the consent of tribal leaders, and even then refuse to publish in order to preserve the story’s cultural authenticity and value.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/10/history-of-magic-is-anti-native/

Thank you, Joan: very amusing. Friday Ephemera apart, the dear boy’s dry and subtle humour can require a stiff drink – when you can get by the hench lesbians.

A quandary: Does the “history of magic is anti-native” title mean that somehow no fiction of magic is without roots in “native culture” (absurd) or that somehow “magic” as a fictional idea is “colonized”, dating back to whatever evil colonialism overrode the Druids, et al? It’d be interesting if some of these lumps would recognize that every culture in the world has some history of a colonizing push/pull interaction, even *gasp* “white” ones, but to find out if it’s any flummery more imaginative than the usual flummery I’d have to read the article.
Which, I don’t want to. I don’t want to catch leprosy of the brain.

Presented without comment :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoR6l_PZOFQ

From Taté Walker’s JK Rowling’s Anti-Native ‘Magic’ Racism…

More than one grad school paper utilized a central Harry Potter theme;

Miss Walker got her Masters of Science in Administration from the University of South Dakota, somehow I get the impression that USD is not an entirely serious school.
From the comments at A quick science lesson for the #ScienceMustFall idiots

I teach yoga and Tantra and even just from an Eastern perspective, western science has proven to be limiting, restrictive and actually a little bit behind in comparison to ancient yogic knowledge.

Oh those ancient yogi with their electricity, nuclear reactors, neurosurgery, aircraft, antibiotics, central heat and air, GMOs, and general population dying at 35. They could stretch, though.

The guy who said that the ability to send a bolt of lightning out of thin air to a place far from where you are is not possible, it’s restrictive and I agree with her on that point. These things do happen…

Someone needs to put the bong and ‘shrooms down, I think.

For Joan,
Please sit down before playing lest you have a touch of the vapours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtS2Ikk7A9I

Coming soon to a decolonising institution near you: #sciencemustfall: “>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14
. . . Siiiiggggghhhh . . .
—Granting not watching the video, data transmission is what text is for—
Given A quick science lesson for the #ScienceMustFall idiots and JK Rowling’s Anti-Native ‘Magic’ Racism – And How Authors Can Do Diversity Better, the overall message I receive is, basically, All that is completely wrong,because the only thing that is correct is that everything is All About MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeahright.
Taking a more handy example for me, i.e., Me, my DNA is Scottish, Scottish, Scottish, British Isles mutt. And y’know, when one does a very careful scan through the history of Scotland, the traces of me that one will find are: none. Now, to find traces of MEetc, one will have to come find me, get to actual face to face proximity, and then I turn up rather well . . . and then at that point, what one finds when looking back at Scotland from this distance is Scotch, lots of plaid, lots of people screaming at each other, with much of the screaming being about killing each other, except for the bits of Let’s all head south and kill all the English.
In the bit that claims to speak for all American Indians—which rather begs the question right there—the complaint is that J.K. Rowling observes the North American continent from the distance of Scotland . . . And, y’know, since Scotland does tend to be where Rowling apparently rather often is, then well, yes, what’s yer point, dearie? So her message is that Rowling’s story doesn’t specifically mention her specifically? Well, yes, what’s yer point, dearie?
In the bit commenting on Africans and science . . .

A student leader said “science as a whole is a product of Western modernity, and the whole thing should be scratched off”.
She said “we have to restart science from an African perspective, from our perspective, of how we experienced science”.
She went on to describe how people in KwaZulu-Natal believe that black magic can be used to “send lightning” to strike someone. “Can you explain that science?” she asked.

We?
Well then, we, I invite the consideration of a rather bog standard Google search: systemic constellation representative. I rather expect a likely narcissist response to that search would be to demand that Google filter out all such searches, etc, for being insufficiently narcissistic.
Too bad.
Out here in reality: Yes, what really did happen is that a fellow named Hellinger—German, Jesuit at the time—wound up among the Zulu for a good couple of decades and rather observed first hand. What he observed in detail is that very particular Zulu practices rather apply across humanity, which is why many years later there is indeed so much information floating about regarding constellations other than the starry kind.
Now here’s where the fun . . . continues, really.
I know of what occurs in constellations ’cause I’ve been in a whole bunch.
By the way, the closest I’ve been to Africa, so far, is short stops in India and then Israel and then bits of Europe while on the way to landing in Canada. And, while repeatedly taking part as a representative in constellations, I’ve observed all sorts of rather interesting occurrences.
Of some of the occurrences of constellations, could telepathy be an applicable description of the transmission of constellation data? Well, yes, that certainly is a very interesting easy choice of description. And, very much and, to the best of my knowledge, to date there is utterly zero information regarding how a constellation works.
What happens in a constellation is rather emphatically documented. In fact, even getting more documentation is easy, find a local practitioner and state that you’d like to sit in. When you do, there is rather a likelihood that you’ll be taking part—One’s mileage will vary, and different facilitators are likely to have differences, but, just the same—, and at that point, as you take part, you too will be observing what goes on in a constellation.
Now, as for that horrible, distasteful, despised thing called science . . . What I think would be awfully interesting is to take a long time, regular constellation representative and toss whomever into an MRI for a full scan, get a baseline set. Next, with the representative in the MRI, start a constellation. The circumstances will be definitely odd, but I can state from my experience and observation, that the combination should be rather doable, and I’d be quite intrigued at seeing what information comes out . . . .

Pussy Galore

Farnsworth,
“I teach yoga and Tantra and even just from an Eastern perspective, western science has proven to be limiting, restrictive and actually a little bit behind in comparison to ancient yogic knowledge.”
Oh those ancient yogi with their electricity, nuclear reactors, neurosurgery, aircraft, antibiotics, central heat and air, GMOs, and general population dying at 35. They could stretch, though.
Yogis don’t need “aircraft”, they levitate. Anyone familiar with yogic knowledge is aware of this…
[screeee-BANG-rattle-rattle-crash]
[thud]
Damn, I do believe one of those lightning-throwing guys took a shot at me!

cultural appropriation
Heh. That was probably the reason for the lightning bolt.