Reheated (49)
For newcomers, more items from the archives:
An Intellectual Being Rides Again.
Empowered feminist Melissa Fabello explains the deep, deep trauma of being disagreed with.
Ms Fabello chastises those who ironically use the term “social justice warrior” – which, she explains, is an “invalidating behaviour,” one that can get “really oppressive really quickly.”
We Can’t Promise Not To Hit You.
The Clown Quarter is a foretaste of left’s corrected, more compassionate society. Hence all the threats and punching.
To recap, the university’s stated rationale for censorship is that it can’t protect either the speakers or their audience from disruption and thuggery by its own students, which is quite an admission, really. And as we’ve seen, the threat of physical intimidation and mob harassment – by these would-be intellectuals of the left – is quite real. What the university doesn’t admit, however, is that this problem won’t be solved by banning any speakers deemed remotely controversial – in this case, two speakers who prefer evidence and debate over threats and hysteria. The problem will only be addressed, or begin to be addressed, when leftist students no longer feel that mob censorship and physical intimidation are things they can get away with, and get away with repeatedly, without facing consequences. Say, being expelled.
Avowed “feminist killjoy” Josefin Hedlund wants to correct your erotic preferences and make them egalitarian. For “social justice.”
Love and sex are unequally “distributed,” says Ms Hedlund, with an unfair amount of both going to people who are deemed lovable and attractive by the people loving them, and not to insufferable sociopaths with horrific disfigurements. Or, one suspects, self-styled “feminist killjoys.” And this is because of capitalism. It’s “obvious,” you see.
There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat.
Empowered feminist Melissa Fabello explains the deep, deep trauma of being disagreed with.
My sister’s flatmate is a bit of an SJW. Just emailed her links to your teardowns of Melissa Fabello. Not heard back yet. 🙂
In the interest of ironic honesty, can we borrow an evergreen funny from the communist regimes of old and simply refer to such folk as hailing from “The Democratic Republic Of Critical Theory?”
Not heard back yet. 🙂
I do hope you’re not sowing discord. Tsk.
Don’t forget this one.
And this one includes one of my favourite quoted sentences.
In the interest of ironic honesty, can we borrow an evergreen funny from the communist regimes of old and simply refer to such folk as hailing from “The Democratic Republic Of Critical Theory?”
Hey, you can’t be telling communism jokes unless everybody gets them.
And this one includes one of my favourite quoted sentences.
This one? “It’s important that I situate myself within my positionality.”
In the interest of ironic honesty, can we borrow an evergreen funny from the communist regimes of old and simply refer to such folk as hailing from “The Democratic Republic Of Critical Theory?”
The Peoples Democratic Republic Of Critical Theory please.
The Peoples Democratic Republic Of Critical Theory please.
Excellent Suggestion. The People’s Democratic Republic of Critical Theory it is.
Hey, you can’t be telling communism jokes unless everybody gets them.
In PDRCT, humor is equally distributed among the proletariat. Please do not laugh unless it is your turn.
“Please do not laugh unless it is your turn.”
The Vanguard of the Proletariat will tell the proletariat when to laugh…and all must laugh until told to stop.
Don’t forget this one.
“those aren’t load-bearing arguments. They’re just for show.”
Have you found the new Laurie Penny?
Have you found the new Laurie Penny?
They do appear to have a lot in common, rhetorically, psychologically. And thanks to Twitter, I believe they’re aware of each other. Dare we live in hope of a duet?
those aren’t load-bearing arguments. They’re just for show
I suppose Ms Fabello doesn’t have much need for arguments that will bear even a moment’s scrutiny. If any factual correction, any questioning of her assumptions, can be instantly dismissed as an insult to her standing as “an intellectual being,” an affront to her “personhood,” and waved aside as the patriarchal hostility of “cis, white straight dudes,” and therefore inadmissible, and if she can get away with this because her audience is made up almost entirely of nodding converts, then why go to all the trouble and inconvenience of acknowledging reality?
Incantations will do.
Dare we live in hope of a duet?
I misread this the first time and thought you wrote “duel” instead of “duet”.
I misread this the first time and thought you wrote “duel” instead of “duet”.
It’s always foxy boxing with you, isn’t it, Ted?
The Glorious People’s Democratic Republic of Critical Theory?
You want the new Laurie Penny? How about this imbecile? Vonny Moyes – a poundshop Laurie Penny in a See-You-Jimmy hat. Enjoy:
https://mobile.twitter.com/vonny_bravo?lang=en-gb
I’m glad the apostrophe has been properly positioned at last; is that what makes it glorious?
In a vaguely related observation, isn’t it funny how populism is seen as a Bad Thing now The People(tm) are not leaning the way the people who used to push The People’s This, That & The Other approve?
Everytime I visit here it feels like the twilight zone. But the sort of twilight that keeps on getting darker and weirder but doesn’t become night.
Where does the rabbit hole (ostensibly an 8 lane highway now) lead?
Every time I visit here it feels like the twilight zone. But the sort of twilight that keeps on getting darker and weirder but doesn’t become night.
I should put that in the brochure.
Every time I visit here it feels like the twilight zone.
Contemporary feminism will tend to do that. It confounds expectations of coherence and reciprocity. For instance, despite all the guff about “critical thinking,” Ms Fabello and her readers seem all too happy to be credulous by decree, as when we’re told never to question claims of victimhood by members of Designated Victim Groups and instead to accept all such claims as unassailably true. (This, apparently, is a wonderful development with no possible downsides or troubling implications.)
Ms Fabello and her groupies also inform us that all online diet ads are offensive and should be reported as unacceptable (and if you disagree, you will be blocked), that describing a comment as “stupid” is “ableist language” and therefore needs a trigger warning, and that by definition feminists can’t ever be sexist. So. A mountain of wisdom.
At which point, it’s worth noting that Ms Fabello’s Everyday Feminism site has a readership of supposedly educated women, and retweets of its content are for the most part gushingly positive. Judging by the number of shares alongside each article, there are thousands of young women who wish to learn about feminist clairvoyance and the healing power of sea shells, the importance of political hair, and how to make ordering takeaway as convoluted and neurotic as humanly possible. Readers who agree that, “It’s not racism when people of colour are prejudiced against white people,” and that, “You can’t be sexist against men.”
feminist clairvoyance and the healing power of sea shells, the importance of political hair, and how to make ordering takeaway as convoluted and neurotic as humanly possible.
Still hard to believe Everyday Feminism isn’t a parody site.
Where does the rabbit hole (ostensibly an 8 lane highway now) lead?
Funny you should mention highways, given the likely destination of this particular rabbit hole.
Vonny Moyes’ List: Resist psychic death
WTF does that mean? It sounds like one of those auto-generated nonsense phrases. I prefer this one:
Embrace Speculative Dissonance.
Still hard to believe Everyday Feminism isn’t a parody site.
It does resemble an elaborate hoax, something a group of industrious pranksters might devise in order to discredit feminism. But it’s quite real.
Setting aside the inadvertent comedy, what’s less jolly is that there’s evidently a sizeable demographic to which these articles appeal – people whose poor choices and conceits are flattered daily in its pages. Apparently, there are tens of thousands of young women who’ve wasted years of their lives and vast amounts of money on worthless degrees and who now find themselves struggling to earn a living and utterly unprepared for the adult world. And their resentment at the fallout of their own choices, their own vanities, is being directed as far away as possible, at The Patriarchy, “toxic masculinity,” capitalism, bourgeois norms, etc.
As when self-described feminist “creative” Katherine Garcia attempted to justify her shockingly self-indulgent and irresponsible life choices – an attempt that burnt up on re-entry quite spectacularly. Or when “social justice” devotee Hannah Brooks Olsen insisted that her “millennial poverty” has nothing whatsoever to do with spending $65,000 – twice the US student average – on a degree in English literature and rhetoric, and then describing herself to potential employers as “a political troublemaker.”
And the retweets of these articles, and many others like them, are almost unanimously approving. None of those doing the retweeting remarked on anything dubious or self-flattering in the content. No questionable assumptions were noticed. Apparently, this worldview – and the immense sense of entitlement on which it’s founded – are not at all controversial among readers of Everyday Feminism.
Apparently, there are tens of thousands of young women who’ve wasted years of their lives and vast amounts of money on worthless degrees, and who now find themselves struggling to earn a living, and utterly unprepared for the adult world.
Fran Poretto has an essay on this very point. His “day in the life” scenario of an exemplar of your above description seems apposite (you’ll have to scroll down a bit to get to the relevant “Mary Smith” bit).
Fran Poretto has an essay on this very point.
Excellent stuff!
…people whose poor choices and conceits are flattered daily in its pages.
It’s hard to remember, there was time when a degree in liberal arts/literature/humanities actually meant something. It was time when students smoked cigarettes during graduate seminars, yelled at each other a lot and then repaired to various collegiate watering holes for beer followed by sundry romantic couplings–usually accomplished between/among constitutional monarchists and Bolsheviks– all without the university administration sticking its nose into our business and/or elaborate written contracts negotiated prior to unclasping a bra.
Exit question upon reviewing the immediately preceding paragraph: When did I turn into my father bitching about “long haired freaks these days?”
And thanks to Twitter, I believe they’re aware of each other.
I misread this the first time and thought you wrote “duel” instead of “duet”.
The first thought to the inner nerd in me was “Sauron & Saruman”. {o_O}
When did I turn into my father bitching about “long haired freaks these days”?
Ah, the great turning of the wheel.
Everytime I visit here it feels like the twilight zone. But the sort of twilight that keeps on getting darker and weirder but doesn’t become night.
Where does the rabbit hole (ostensibly an 8 lane highway now) lead?
Are you looking for The Nightside?
Fran Porretto has an essay on this very point
False equivalence! Francis Porretto’s essay has nothing to do with women whose worthless degrees leave them struggling to earn a living. His Mary Smith is “self-supporting, and living on her own” and owns a car. Porretto is an avowedly ultra conservative American who doesn’t seem to have realised that Sex and the City was supposed to be a comedy. Despite his beliefs, not all single women (then or now) are desperately seeking a husband. The world has moved on since his 2005 essay. Furthermore, eschewing the ‘Stepford Wife’ role does not automatically mean becoming a ‘Feminazi’. Women are not stereotypes, any more than men are!
This “self-supporting, and living on her own” female is off to hammer nails into errant floorboards to vent the Porretto-induced irritation….
Exit question upon reviewing the immediately preceding paragraph: When did I turn into my father bitching about “long haired freaks these days?”
You didn’t. People with hair, or deliberately none at all, remain the sane and competent with a preference for reason.
It’s the hipsters who now inflict on themselves shaved heads topped by the expectantly inevitable comb over that is already very carefully assembled in place—For those not yet familiar with the online comic strip Terminal Lance, highly recommended—
My immediate thought anytime I see any such an incompetently barbered debacle going by is always I’m so sorry, were you even conscious when you let someone do that to you??!?!!?!
. . . When did I turn into my father bitching about “long haired freaks these days?”
Oh, and yes, rather prolly more hopelessly and tastelessly contrived freaks these days . . . often usually with a chin covered with a bathtub ring and active fantasies that the bathtub ring might also be admired . . .
When you have to dote carefully each day preparing your “I don’t concern myself with my appearance” appearance to look just like it’s “supposed to,” you might want to reconsider why people so readily judge you on fashion. And stop getting angry when they snicker; they have a point.
False equivalence!
A nerve appears to have been trodden upon. Poretto is certainly a paleo-con, but from what I’ve read of his work, he doesn’t make the mistake of claiming that the social issues he highlights are universals. “Mary Smith”, the confused young woman who believes she can have it all, and yet seems to lack most of “it”, and doesn’t seem terribly happy about her situation, does appear to embody quite a few young women (note: not *all*) in our allegedly enlightened age. She’s a composite example, not to be confused with a definitive description of all un-married young women in the workforce.
A reminder that the Millennials genuinely are not responsible for their stupidity: they were raised by my generation—late Boomers through the next decade (~1960-1975), who, reacting to the fear-mongering in the news about ALL THE THINGS being a mortal threat to the darlings, became helicopter parents.
Millennials are the result of the “participation trophy” mentality that pervaded the schools, which their parents didn’t put a stop to. They got their papers graded with “Good Try!” in green ink; they were told endlessly that they could be anything they put their mind to (but were never given guidance on how to actually DO anything); they wore bicycle helmets, were driven to school three blocks away, played in playgrounds that had the “dangerous” things removed, never played with lawn darts or chemistry sets or any of the myriad “hazardous” toys that have been removed from the market. No free-range kids, they!
The school culture did this with the full support of the parents. We can make fun of the absurd little snowflakes they produced, but mocking the snowflakes directly has no effect on them, because they have no earthly idea what the basis of our criticism might be: We’re just a bunch of meany poopie heads.
The sad thing is that everybody with two brain cells to rub together criticized the participation-trophy culture precisely because it would produce these special, helpless, clueless snowflakes, but the gullible parents wouldn’t listen, and the schools DEFINITELY wouldn’t listen.
I am afraid that this stupidity won’t stop until something terrible happens, such as catastrophic economic collapse, where people will have to hunker down in their localities and cooperate with real people to make things work in the real world.
And boy won’t the snowflakes be angry when they finally see how badly they’ve been rooked. Expect a tremendous backlash against the current nonsense when the disillusionment sets in.
But don’t expect disillusionment until something really bad happens. I wish there were some other way to halt the rot but there’s not.
Don’t forget this one.
“those aren’t load-bearing arguments. They’re just for show.”
A nerve appears to have been trodden upon
Yup! But at least it impelled me to fix the squeaky floorboards, for which I thank you. I agree that Porretto doesn’t claim that the social issues he highlights are universals: he admits his contentions are confined to American men and American women in 2005 (which is still a very broad brush?). BTW, if anyone misquotes his name as Poretto again, I may end up taking the hammer to some perfectly-aligned and totally innocuous floorboards. Please, spare a thought for the innocent floorboards!
BTW, if anyone misquotes his name as Poretto again
Ah, my apologies on that. Double letters are the bane of my existence.
Well, one of the banes.
The sad thing is that everybody with two brain cells to rub together criticized the participation-trophy culture precisely because it would produce these special, helpless, clueless snowflakes, but the gullible parents wouldn’t listen, and the schools DEFINITELY wouldn’t listen.
That. 20-30 years of that. Though the “everybody with two brain cells to rub together” was a very, very small group. And who gave us this “participation-trophy culture”? The shrinks who were driving it through the schools. And you couldn’t argue with them, obviously.
I’m glad the apostrophe has been properly positioned at last; is that what makes it glorious?
I hesitated on the apostrophe, but decided against it. There is a long standing acceptance that formal titles don’t require them — which is why our local boys’ school is “Boys High School” without an apostrophe and isn’t wrong. It’s the modern way, and the PRDCT is nothing if not modern.
However, if there is to be one, it will be after the s. As there are many peoples in the golorious Peoples’ Democratic Republic, not just one you raycisst!
“fix the squeaky floorboards”
Did you use screws? Because guys know that you’re supposed to use screws for that.
“fix the squeaky floorboards”
The traditional means of fixing floorboards to joists (my floorboards are more than 100 years old) was nails. If guys choose to use screws, and flout the historical tradition, that’s up to them.
I’m learning so much about the securing of floorboards.
Come for the social critique, stay for the carpentry.
I’m holding out for pointers on how to rehang a door.
(chuckle) Never fear, those to whom Italian names replete with double letters are challenging. Everyone misspells my last name. I’ve done so as well — and recently.
Now my first name, you’d better get right: Francis with an i. Or I’ll dispatch The Francis Marion / Fran Tarkenton Memorial Enforcer Squad at you!
How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained, by Helen Pluckrose
Oh noes, not more Italicans!
< /i >
I am afraid that this stupidity won’t stop until something terrible happens, such as catastrophic economic collapse, where people will have to hunker down in their localities and cooperate with real people to make things work in the real world.
One of David’s co-bloggers sums this up succinctly with “We need a famine.”
“I’m holding out for pointers on how to rehang a door.”
Bigger nails and a full-sized hammer… what did it do to desreve being hung in the first place?
Cheers
David:
Using a ¼” bit, drill out the screw holes. Cut ¼” oak dowel into roughly one inch lengths, coat with wood glue, and tap into the holes until flush.
10 minutes should be enough time for the glue to set. Drill pilot holes into dowels, rehang the door.
You lost me at “using.”
Jeff Guinn,
I drill out the old screw holes a bit, tap in plastic drywall anchors, reinstall the screws. No glue, no waiting.
Okay, I’m a lazy ass, but it works.
Spiny — why didn’t I think of that?