Elsewhere (229)
Rod Dreher on identity politics versus art:
Schutz’s painting has been denounced by some black artists and others, because the painter is white. Hannah Black, a British-born black artist, has written an open letter demanding that the Whitney Museum not only take the painting down, but also destroy it.
Mark Steyn on our tolerant betters:
The left doesn’t want to win the debate. They want to cancel the debate… A case in point, [this headline]: “Citing security issues, the Somalian-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls off her scheduled Australian tour.” Let’s just expand that “Somali-born activist” précis a little. She’s not a dead white male like me or Charles Murray. As someone once said, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists profess to dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. But, because she does not toe the party line on Islam, her blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly anchor-man – and so do her femaleness and godlessness and immigrant status. And in the end she is Charles Murray, or Geert Wilders – or even David Duke. A black Somali woman is, it turns out, a “white supremacist.”
And by way of timely illustration, at Villanova University, Charles Murray once again encounters the leftist welcome wagon:
Political science professor and event coordinator Colleen Sheehan offered [the disruptive students] the first question during the Q&A. Nonetheless, all offers by the hosts were rebuffed by the protesters, who continued to interrupt the lecture.
Note how these attention-seeking clowns – who grin at their own lies and then demand applause – are indulged, effetely and at length, by university staff, as if the venue were a toddlers’ day-care centre. And note that the protestors, who wish to impose themselves on others and inhibit other people’s discussion, refuse to participate in the debate without ultimate veto and Disruptor’s Privilege.
Rob Jenkins on incompetent graduates and inverted meanings:
Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticising, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole. Above all, it means “dispassionate,” recognising when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason — then prioritising the latter over the former.
And Stefan Kanfer on the University of Regina’s “masculinity confession booths”:
A video… catalogues the many ways in which males are responsible for war, violence, and sexual predation; why male undergraduates should be ashamed of themselves most if not all of the time; and what can be done about their current condition. The footage contains the quintessence of Maoism, expressed by a Regina football player. “We don’t have to continue to live in a misogynistic society,” he proclaims. The present status is nothing to quo about, and the task of alteration “falls on everyone and especially men because frankly we are the problem right now.” Other classmates earnestly fall in line.
Somewhat related, remember this?
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
That.
That.
They’ll only play if they’re guaranteed to win. Which tells us quite a bit about who they are.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has her an anti-Muslim extremist.
I have many words to describe this. Unfortunately, not one of them is even remotely acceptable here.
Worth noting, though, if you scan down to her entry, is the absolute failure of the SPLC to engage her remarks that they present. It’s almost as if they expect people to be bobble dolls, nodding their heads in agreement.
… has labeled her …
I swear that Preview button doesn’t appear until after I hit Post.
The Charles Murray video is hard to watch. It’s amazing these people have never been slapped.
I’ve got a suggestion about what the guys could do in the masculinity booth…
The Charles Murray video is hard to watch. It’s amazing these people have never been slapped.
It’s a fairly low-key disruption – in that, this time no-one gets chased off campus or ends up in hospital – but it’s still quite revealing, in terms of what kind of people the protestors are. They presume an awful lot, are remarkably ignorant of the chap they’re protesting against, and of the subject matter in general, and are utterly dismissive, indeed contemptuous, of all the people who turned up to hear him speak. And this aspect, their contempt for other students – and everyone there – warrants emphasis.
The protestors repeatedly break their own assurances – for instance, when finally agreeing to protest silently, then loudly interrupting whenever Dr Murray tries to speak. And they’re clearly happy to lie, knowingly, as illustrated by their own grinning at the absurdity of their excuses. And when finally escorted out of the lecture hall, they even demand applause from the people they’ve just insulted and frustrated, and whose time they’ve wasted with self-indulgent grandstanding.
And they evidently expect to get away with such behaviour, repeatedly, with utter impunity, presumably on the basis that no-one has ever dragged them out by their hair or threatened them with expulsion.
Disruptor’s Privilege.
I like that. 🙂
So many gems!
But one moment truly stands out for me:
Charles Murray protestor: “I don’t think that someone… of this stature …should have a platform ….for ideas that have been debunked…. by sociology…”
I did not expect him to end with ‘sociology.’ If you try to argue that anything, ever, has ever been scientifically ‘debunked’ by sociology, you are either a sociology lecturer, or busy posing with your finger-moustache tattoo and not attending your sociology lectures.
That’s it in a nutshell.
It’s intensely frustrating to see Murray, the audience, and most of all the university authorities indulging this behaviour, perhaps under the delusion that they shouldn’t interfere with the sacred right to protest. (And what could be more sacred to the aging hippies in charge of a university?) But that right doesn’t extend to protesting on university property. Such “protests” (and I hate to dignify these actions with such a term) occur entirely under the university’s sufferance, and could be stopped anytime.
They could simply say, “Stop fucking about. None of us are stupid here. We all know exactly what’s happening, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. Cut it out immediately or be expelled.” But instead we get this pathetic spectacle: Mr. Murray proclaiming himself willing to endure a “silent protest” even after he’s been kicked off the stage – and then actually asking these clowns if they’re going to be quiet!
Of course they’re not going to be quiet, Charlie! I had to stop watching at that, lest my urge to smash something became too overpowering. If only the audience had been gripped by the same overpowering urge, perhaps those protesting might have learned something. Or been horribly crippled.
– are indulged, effetely and at length, by university staff
I’m pretty sure I can explain this.
University educations have gotten ever more stupidly expensive over the past 30 years – and the trend continues to accelerate. This of course is not reflected in the excellence of the product offered; most of the take seems to have been blown-out on fancier buildings and lusher grounds. The result is, logically,
1) The more money they get, the more they want; and I suspect “SJW 101” would be a much cheaper course to present than “Minutiae of Thermonuclear Warheads 301”, if only for the fewer required lab credits; and,
2) the college milieu is now so expensive that (senior faculty know only too d@mn well) they HAVE to have lots ‘n lots of those $60,000-a-year snowflakes pouring through the door, no matter what – so therefore, they must mollycoddle them to the hilt, no matter what, lest the snowflakes take their $60,000-a-year elsewhere.
They’re trapped in a cleft stick of their own cutting; and to be honest, it looks good on them.
The thing about the Murray protests is that the vast majority of protestors really have no idea what Murray has actually said or written. I’ll wager none of them could accurately explain the thesis of The Bell Curve or refer to any specific evidence Murray cites. They are protesting a caricature, a figment of someone’s imagination, merely because someone else labeled Murray the enemy.
That’s it in a nutshell.
It’s all rather summed up by the moment around 1:39 when Colleen Sheehan, a professor of political science and a co-ordinator of the event that’s being ruined right in front of her, just smiles, tilts her head and coos, “Oh, come on, let’s give that a try.” As if pleading with a four-year-old.
It occurs to me that the culture would be better served by demolishing the humanities departments and just building a bigger car park.
“Ideology stinks,” says the leftist ideologue who can only speak in regurgitated slogans.
You see, being so terribly clever, he’s educating us.
@Y. Knott
Without Federal price supports in the form of guaranteed loans, the system would’ve collapsed some time ago given current demographics. Simply put, there are too few qualified students for too many colleges. As you point out, the suppliers increasingly cater to the consumers leading to the current atmosphere on campus. What’s perverse is that although decreased demand should cause lower prices, the student loans prop up both the demand (by attracting unqualified students who then major in SJW Studies) and the price. Truly the worst possible outcome.
@R. Sherman
You’re right, cutting off the flow of that lovely money would nip this crud in the bud, and I’d dearly love to see that, but I wonder what the other side of that rupture would look like?
For years we’ve been telling kids who really should’ve attended trade schools that they needed a university degree for ‘knowledge work’. Now we have the pipeline loaded what sort of social collapse would occur if we stopped pumping gullible idiots into it? There is, per Mike Rowe, a need for trained manual laborers but certainly not enough to absorb all those who wouldn’t be attending university when the money dries up. What do we do with all of them?
Add the increasing automation of certain functions, truck driving perhaps(?), and you only increase the number of people who need work but aren’t really able for high-end, mental labor.
I apologize for throwing out a lot of seemingly rhetorical questions but there’s a world of hurt potentially headed our way and I’m more than a little concerned that very few people are thinking about it. On the other hand, I suppose given that the people running things (government\education) seem to be complete idiots maybe it’s good thing they haven’t set their low-horsepower brains to this problem.
I lean towards replacing both Angry Studies and most of welfare with hiring people for make-work. Order some large fields in Nevada or Wyoming dug into ditches. Ban the factory-production or import of certain nonessential products and create a million jobs handcarving replacements. Repaint road stripes every week. That sort of thing.
@Microbillionaire
I know you’re kidding, you are kidding right?
While I agree with putting their anger to use digging ditches I fear that, like any program run by the government, they would eventually win the right to unionize (the TSA anyone?) be granted gold-plated pensions and wind up better than they were before – while somehow doing less work.
Y Knott,
Your suspicion about SJW101 is correct. I have it on good authority that several departments of mineral and/or petroleum engineering in the States have been confronted by university bean-counters telling them that graduating a Soc or Poly-Sci student costs the system about a tenth of what one of their students costs, and that their department’s future hinges on getting their students out the door on the cheap.
…because frankly we are the problem right now.”
He’s absolutely correct, of course, but not for the reason he thinks.
Posturing dumbass.
Tom,
I’m serious. I realize that the make-work option can run downhill fast. My position is that I don’t see anything better. Let me try to enumerate some of the more and less serious alternatives for What Could Be Done about the world of hurt you’ve said is heading our way.
1) Do nothing. While often a respectable position, hi libertarians, I don’t think it’s going to work here. Automatisation is going to drive down wages on tens of millions of jobs; automatisation combined with #FightFor15 and the gold-plated-pensions-granting sort you mention are going to wind up destroying those jobs. Tens of millions of unemployed combined with continued university subsidies to churn out Angry Studies is a recipe for civil war.
2) UBI, citizen’s dividend, or similar programs. Now you’re still funding Angry Studies sorts, only they can expand indefinitely, and their ever increasing numbers can go around fucking up shit all day. They won’t be alone – there will also be, for example, the neckbeards of /pol/ and their nazi-templar LARPing. High school cliques and overgrown bullies for ever and ever, set free from the yoke of “get a job” to engage in status-games and hate propaganda without limit. Again, seems like a recipe for civil war.
3) Luddism in some form. Create and preserve human work by banning automatisation and mechanization in certain areas. This is what I’m suggesting for make-work. Yes, it can suffer bureaucratic capture and overspending, but these can be at least tolerable with advances in technology and such to compensate.
4) Purges and rollbacks of the progressive nonsense. History strongly suggests this is not going to happen short of civilizational collapse – politics seems rather a “ratchet” that locks in progressivism after some time. Witness Donald Trump, aka the second coming of Bill Clinton, being denounced in ever more feverish terms as RIGHT WING EXTREMIIIIIIST with no sign of slacking off any time soon. And it’s not just tabloids and Leftboros, it’s people like Laurence Tribe, Harvard Professor and Generally High Muckety-Muck, pinning this:
In order for purge+rollback not to just roll forwards again to something like the present, you’d have to practically be an absolute monarch with personal security forces to purge hard enough in the first place. American conservatives do little other than entrench former progressivism; they’re not going to help much
On a lighter note, elsewhere:
People who read the news more likely to be Islamophobic, study finds
Gee, I wonder why.
I wonder, in a churlish and vulgar way, whether one might enter said booth and engage in self-stimulation, as an “act of performance art”. How much flummery in written form would it take to get away with it?
identity politics versus art
Identity politics is ‘versus’ everything.
As more absurd, wholly-invented paranoid horseshit that even our shills in the media aren’t buying emerges…
Fixed, for Lord High Muckety-Muck Clintonista Harvard Professor Lawrence Tribe.
(“Professor” Tribe was a frequent target of radio pundit Rush Limbaugh’s humorous jibes during the Bill Clinton administration 20-odd years ago.)
Incidentally, Tim Newman, an occasional commenter of this parish, has a pretty good blog. You may find it of interest.
Further along in the Mark Steyn link:
Heresy against Islam is impermissible. If not written out plainly in the law, it is clearly implied. The self-styled “anti-fascist” campus SJW brownshirts have learned that lesson well, and adopted the tactics of intimidation as their own.
Rob Jenkins on incompetent graduates and inverted meanings:
You see? As I (and many others) have been saying, Critical Theory is being understood or promoted as critical thinking. Now, I wonder who benefits from this incompetent/intentional conflation of terminology?
Masculinity confession booths? If I didn’t know better, I’d say they’re the newest version of the venerable pocket protector: non-breeder self-identification to save women time.
Do nothing …Automatisation is going to drive down wages on tens of millions of jobs
Which is why absolutely nobody works in accounting or such anymore and thus all of those who used to do accounting and such can be found on street corners with “Will actuary for food” signs. The problem isn’t that the jobs disappear, it’s that we don’t set expectations on people to make themselves useful. Buggy whip makers and horse dressers moved on to do other things. wth those things were, God only knows but they did them.
UBI – Essentially what we have today via the university systems. Professors teach no-show classes that “students” do the minimal work for and get paid to teach. Essentially this is the make-work to which you originally referred, only they’re finding something to do with that free time, bitching to get more UBI. Works the same either way.
Luddism – No. Obviously.
Purges … Laurence Tribe, Harvard Professor and Generally High Muckety-Muck – Bingo. As R. Sherman says, Without Federal price supports in the form of guaranteed loans, the system would’ve collapsed some time ago . But I have yet to find even one even slightly prominent politician with the guts to point this out. Yet this is, and has been for well over 30 years, the basis of the problem.
The great political thinker (stop sniggering at the back) Eddie Izzard naïvely tries to bring Peace ‘n’ Love to the middle east by playing Tel Aviv then running a marathon in support of the Arabs. The Arabs tell him to get stuffed because he has Jew cooties or something.
The author of that piece seems to think the experience will learn ‘im. I’d bet good money that it won’t.
The study took place in New Zealand, “the association of prejudice towards Muslims with more media exposure holds across the political spectrum”, but the Independent illustrates the piece with a big photo of the Sun, Express, and Daily Mail. Gee, I wonder why. Gotta keep that Narrative going somehow…
I doubt many would consider “dying in the Great War” an upward career move.
I doubt many would consider “dying in the Great War” an upward career move.
Interesting theory. Did Mata Hari tell the Germans which doughboys were buggy whip makers? I understand she got around. Seems like an awful workload, though.
“Buggy whip makers and horse dressers moved on to do other things.”
The moves were from the farms to the factories, then from the factories to “service” jobs in offices. Now, the office “services” jobs are being automated and/or offshored. The unique-to-human tasks (thinking, etc.) are being done by software.
Ask me how I know.
I can’t be the only one happy to see Marvel Comics taking a beating at the tills for pandering to the snowflake tendency: http://bit.ly/2nTZnJR
The unique-to-human tasks (thinking, etc.) are being done by software.
I know. I write software. I also am well aware of its limitations. Especially in the domain of machine learning. A machine will never truly understand a human being because a machine can never be a human being. Science fiction is interesting and often prescient, and yet no flying cars or hyper drive etc. Lots of jobs go unfilled/undone mostly because we pay people to not work and we undercut their desire to do so not only with the dole but with lowered expectations and fatalism about the future. I can’t find a landscaper in north Georgia (US) to show up and do simple work, yet the people living up there piss and moan about people from Florida and Atlanta taking their jobs.
Spanish flu, then?
Claiming that a massive disruption in the transport sector didn’t result in widespread unemployment in the first twenty years of the twentieth century while also ignoring the depopulation effects of the Great War and the Spanish flu is disingenuous at best.
Oh, and then there was that Depression thing.
We know *horse* jobs went away in the past. Horses were soundly outcompeted by machines like cars and tractors in most niches, getting relegated to specialty things like horse-racing where cars aren’t allowed (a luddite type of solution) and the domestic horse population decreased drastically. I don’t see how “setting expectations” is supposed to stop the same happening to humans as the machines advance. Expectations for machines can be set high too.
WTP: But the issue is quickly becoming “what do we do with all the people who are no longer needed”? What is the typical transition period from funemployment to gainful employment when entire professions/vocations are being wiped-out (although I suppose the climate change boogeymen[1] could take care of that – heh)? Add to that that now we will have ever so much more competition for even lower-level jobs.
The old, “but these unemployed will design, build and maintain the automated systems” doesn’t fly – no they won’t. Besides the skills and education issues, that notion goes against the very purpose of automation. I figure 10 lost jobs will be balanced by 3 new jobs in automation.
And automated systems are absolutely great for centralized control and terrible for diversity (diversity in problem-solving, that is).
[1] Things of unknown magnitude that may happen, in unknown places, at unknown times that are providing a handy distraction.
@Daniel Ream
No one suggests that upheavals of various sorts don’t occur. And those may affect an entire generation. But the fact remains, society and populations do adjust to such technological upheavals. Absent immigration of low/no skilled workers which hides the problem, the industrialized West approaching a birthrate which is less than replacement level. Indeed, such a birthrate has arrived in Japan.
The problem is, when governments try to cushion the effects of an upheaval, the “cushions” wind up becoming permanent disincentives to changing behavior. See, e.g. the Great Society programs which ultimately made irresponsible behavior a career path. For that matter, FDR’s New Deal–one of those attempts to cushion the effects of the upheaval–perpetuated it as many economists have argued within the last decade.
I don’t see how “setting expectations” is supposed to stop the same happening to humans as the machines advance.
Lowering them certainly wont help. Life, especially life in the 21st century, is not as f’n hard as our media/entertainment/academic BS Matrix mentality wants people to believe. The cognitive dissonance of “we need immigrant workers because Americans won’t do the jobs” and “jobs are getting automated out of existence, what are we to do” coexisting in the same whining, hopeless, defeatist mindset is absurd. People can and will find ways to make themselves useful to each other. They have since civilization began. When trade began. But expecting others, be they the government or major corporations or Mom & Pop’s Lawn Care to tell people what to do is a very recent phenomenon in the context of human history.
Claiming that a massive disruption in the transport sector didn’t result in widespread unemployment in the first twenty years of the twentieth century while also ignoring the depopulation effects of the Great War and the Spanish flu is disingenuous at best.
You’re conflating two things in a manner that isn’t clear to me. Regarding The Great War and Spanish Flu I definitely agree. Is the ” massive disruption in the transport sector” to which you refer tied to The Great War or to that nefarious bastard Henry Ford…or Big Rail…or ??? The latter most definitely spurred the booms that led to the later busts. Wealth came too quickly and easily for society to know what to do with it all and misspent that excess. But much of the pain of the Great Depression (or even the US busts that preceded it) was more due to a mismanagement of wealth.
Please forgive me if I’m speaking too definitively here. I understand there is much give and take in the degree and extent of my points, but I do believe in them much more strongly than the current narrative…I’m also pounding this out between the real work I really should be doing and lack the time and skill to properly word craft it.
What’s interesting about that whole phenomenon is that Marvel has suddenly decided sales matter. It’s an open secret that neither DC nor Marvel’s comics businesses have been profitable for decades – they exist as R&D, idea factories generating IP that can be licensed elsewhere. As long as they’re doing that, it doesn’t matter what their sales are.
I suspect what’s actually happening here is that the popularity of the movies has been driving former and new fans back to the comics, and they aren’t liking what they see. Brand contagion is souring them on seeing any more of the movies, which is where the real money is. I’m guessing Disney came down from On High and told Marvel Comics to align the comics with the movies (which have been surprisingly agenda-free) Or Else.
We have flying cars. They’re called helicopters.
As for machine learning, self-driving cars went from driving off of a dirt road after 300m to navigating a complicated off-road course and then tackling city driving in one year. Kiosks have replaced human staff in most of the fast food restaurants around here.
There’s an old sysadmin joke, “Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script.” Huge numbers of jobs from service to white-collar office require very little creativity, independent thought or initiative, and automation is going to devastate those.
…I don’t recall saying the former. I think you’re slipping into a habitual argument with someone else. IMO America does not need immigrant workers, certainly not at current rates.
…I don’t recall saying the former. I think you’re slipping into a habitual argument with someone else.
Sorry, did not mean to imply that YOU did but such is quite prevalent in the zeitgeist (do people still use that word or is it too 1990’s?)
IMO America does not need immigrant workers, certainly not at current rates.
Mostly agree. But in certain high tech/high demand fields we do. Unless you know any out-of-work data scientists wiling to work in central Florida. If so I can probably hook you up with a referral fee.
As for machine learning, self-driving cars went from driving off of a dirt road after 300m to navigating a complicated off-road course and then tackling city driving in one year.
And yet they still, with all the money, sweat, and effort put into designing them by some of the greatest technical minds of the 21st century over nearly(?) a decade, they still perform much more poorly than a moderately well disciplined 15 year old with a learner’s permit.
A 4x improvement in one year seems promising.
I’m sure those newfangled spinning jennies will never catch on.
Heh.
I’m sure those newfangled spinning jennies will never catch on.
And again, what became of all the shuttle cock (or wtf…had to look up what they did before spinning jennies) operators? At one time computer science was done only by the most ingenious of our day. Your highly trained mathematicians, your Alan Turings and such. Working at the bit/machine level. Then assembly language and higher level languages came along and moderately intelligent and educated (and many not so but good at faking it) developed software and now any idiot or child or congressman (or president) can twitter away to the world with such devices. What was it once believed, a world market for five computers? May be apocryphal but not far off the thinking of many visionaries of the day.
I realize I’m now arguing the other side of this specific luddite/non-luddite issue but that is my point. No one has any idea what use people will serve in the future. Yet there always seems to be a use for them, so long as they themselves are free to find their own place and not dictated to by government, corporation, or a mind imprisoned by imagined limitations culturally absorbed.
The intersection of- well, whatever.
the fact remains, society and populations do adjust to such technological upheavals.
Not such, some. And one they will not.
One of the three greatest existential crisis is the next, final one: Mankind shall not ward off it eradicating itself with artificial intelligence. Proof? Marry two words: Autonomous and replication.
There is no way on earth that disaster will be fended off from the quarters that spawned it already, and many rightists, in their aging Tom Swiftian fantasies, will be first to usher it in with accolades about free markets and industry and liberty they can’t begin to grasp.
In a universe apparently predicated on intelligence and in a Creation apparently likewise, we didn’t really think G-d would spare us these challenges, did we?