The Moron Veto
I was sent an urgent email the day before, saying they were considering moving the venue to a place with fewer plate glass windows and more means of egress. That’s not exactly reassuring.
In the latest FIRE podcast, Nico Perrino interviews Heather Mac Donald, who discusses her recent, rather lively visit to the Land Of The Mao-lings.
And here Heather Mac Donald pokes through the mental wreckage, and bewildering grammar, of the Mao-lings at Pomona College.
That’s my commute home sorted. Thanks, David.
Now conservative speakers need unmarked police cars to get on and off campus.
#ProgressivesCareMore
Now conservative speakers need unmarked police cars to get on and off campus.
#ProgressivesCareMore
What comes across is the air of unrealism, of entering Quatermass territory, where everyone is acting absurdly and no-one seems to notice. As Ms Mac Donald says, the ‘protests’ are both pretentious and ludicrous – they’re a kind of recreational activity for some of the most cossetted people on the face of the Earth.
Let them come. I see a commenter from Ace Of Spades has pushed back against this absurdity. I throughly like a good hullabulloo.
And as Heather remarks, the feeble response to these outrages only serve to define deviancy down: treating speakers with courtesy and respect used to be the minimum standard of behaviour expected, now it’s regarded as some sort of triumph if a distinguished visitor escapes uninjured.
#ProgressivesCareMore
While I voted Remain and am not overly filled with warmth at the thought of our current Prime Minister, I nevertheless get really rather irritated by the dreary conceit behind this graphic, which has proliferated like the proverbial mushrooms after rain on my social media since May’s snap election announcement.
Although he was talking about Plato, I think Popper has something interesting to say about the underlying message of things like that graphic:
In defending collectivism, [Plato] can appeal to our humanitarian feeling of unselfishness; in his attack [on individualism], he can brand all individuals as selfish, as capable of devotion to anything but themselves. This attack, although aimed by Plato against individualism in our sense, i.e. against the rights of human individuals, reaches of course only a very different target, egoism. But this difference is constantly ignored by Plato and by most Platonists.
Why did Plato try to attack individualism? I think he knew very well what he was doing when he trained his guns upon this position, for individualism, perhaps even more than equalitarianism, was a stronghold in the defences of the new humanitarian creed. The emancipation of the individual was indeed the great spiritual revolution which had to led to the breakdown of tribalism and to the rise of democracy. Plato’s uncanny sociological intuition shows itself in the way in which he invariably discerned the enemy wherever he met him.
This bears repetition. The contempt – and the attempt to dominate – aren’t just aimed at the speaker, but at everyone present, and at the institution that indulges them. And by extension, their contempt is for all of us.
“the dreary conceit behind this graphic”
How much “caring” is enough and what form must it take?
But wait, there’s more:
From the NYT, no less.
Apparently, Ms. Coulter is made of stronger stuff:
If Pres. Trump has any political instincts whatsoever — and the evidence suggests he does, indeed — Berkeley is finding itself stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.
I was sent an urgent email the day before, saying they were considering moving the venue to a place with fewer plate glass windows and more means of egress. That’s not exactly reassuring
Well, if you’re going to use violent language, sometimes the only way oppressed people can defend themselves is by smashing stuff up. You MAKE them do it. It’s definitely not fun. Oh no…
It is abundantly clear that UC-Berkeley’s pearl clutching is simply an act to censor speech based upon its content. If it and the city wished to stand up for Ms. Coulter’s rights, it would simply announce that any student found disrupting her presentation would be expelled and any person engaged in criminal activity will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. In truth, the powers that be hope and pray for disruption, mayhem and injury to justify restricting expression of views with which they disapprove, believing that the rest of us are too stupid to realize it. The whirlwind will be reaped in short order, I fear.
Specifically.
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll rattle the spam filter.
@Nikw211: The whole thing’s a neat exercise in sophistry, isn’t it? If The Collective and collectivist thinking is always good, you disallow any failures as being failures of individuals (and not The Collective, collectivist thinking, or structural failures in collectivism). Any failures that are the failures of individuals are then (quite obviously) due to their remaining individualism, of course, and thus permit the consigning of the these people (perhaps we’ll call them “kulaks”) to The Individuals as convenient. The Individuals are a group (because this approach unfailingly requires thinking of groups and collective virtue and guilt) which possesses all the guilt by virtue of not being The Collective, and The Collective holds all virtue by virtue of… well, simply being. It’s the best qualities of the best people, shepherding mankind completely organically. Destiny, don’t you know.
You’re not permitted to notice that the above is cobblers if for no other reason than being impossible to falsify by design. No True Scotsman doesn’t even begin to describe it – it’s the platonic (heh) ideal of the thing, a No True Scotsman gag which seeks to define an all-encompassing Scotlandic Theory of Man.
Of course, here in the real world, groups that are formed (and not just by accident of exclusion from the One True Group) are often to almost always formed with some aspects of malignity and absolutely *can* enjoy villainy, just as the individual can enjoy virtue. Just as freewilling (and not coerced, per se) individuals can accomplish great good in groups, any (to all) of the claimants to the title of One True Group are enabled to commit massive evil.
At least selfish individual gits can be dealt with one at a time. Infinite variety in evil and simplicity in good is a militance for favoring structures of small collectives if any, I suggest. It favors better alignment of qualities.
The whole thing’s a neat exercise in sophistry, isn’t it? If The Collective and collectivist thinking is always good, you disallow any failures as being failures of individuals…
Said individuals being further classified into “malingerers,” “wreckers” and “splitters,” counter-“right minded” people all.
San Francisco is fretting about their IMMINENT conversion into an archipelago.
Hilarity ensues.
But wait, there’s more:
The current Google News snapshot;
But wait, there’s more:
The current Google News snapshot;
Oh, of these festivities, my reaction.
As noted, the advantage of being conservative rather than mere right wing or left wing is that one can just watch the right and left fail to get anything done, as one instead can casually focus on what does actually work . . .
Further on the “unmasking” of Antifa at Auburn University:
Carrot Man.
Re the Antifa’s at Auburn….That video so much reminds me of Brother Jed and Disco Cindy (minus the f-words), who apparently are still making the rounds of the major universities…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_ZPmS_zYzA
Back in my day at University of Florida they drew much larger crowds than this somewhat recent video indicates. Much closer to the Auburn/Antifa one. Disco Cindy supposedly found God in the Krystal’s parking lot across the street from the UF library.
Ms Mac Donald’s appeal to faculty (to stand up for free speech) is at least ingenuous, since it is through that very corps of leftists that Cultural Marxism has been propagated. The lecturers themselves, by brainwashing their students, have created this monster, and will live to regret it – if some of them are not doing so already. By undercutting the very idea of the university they have made it pointless, in the long term, to attend one. Moreover, alumni are already reconsidering their financial support; and with the Republicans triumphant in Washington, I wouldn’t like to bet that funding policy will continue much longer unchanged.
The lecturers themselves, by brainwashing their students, have created this monster, and will live to regret it
I doubt many of them will ever regret it. When has the left ever taken responsibility for the destruction it has caused? Their failures will simply be blamed on capitalism. Just as today, the hell that Venezuela has become is blamed on the CIA and evil free markets. MSNBC is showing the marches in Venezuela and reporting them as reactions to $500K given by that government to Trump’s inaugural. No questions asked about the 83 million gallons of fuel given to the Kennedy clan, though.
I take your point, but what if things get so dire that faculty and admin staff have to be ‘let go’? They might then reflect on what’s been going on!
Staff gets let go, most will join the rest of the antifa crowd. Those old leopards ain’t changing spots. So long as there is severance and welfare and some means of survival, they will blame the system or trump or patriarchy. It’s not like we just let them starve. Why, that would be cruel. But at least they won’t be replicating the problem on our dime. Or so I can dream, anyway.