Elsewhere (246)
Further to this item here, on the academic heresy of affirming bourgeois values, Aryssa Damron has more:
The National Lawyers Guild chapter at the University of Pennsylvania Law School condemned Penn professor Amy Wax’s recent op-ed, in which Wax, along with a co-author, lamented the “breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture” and declared: “All cultures are not created equal.” The members of Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote that Wax’s comments are a “textbook example of white supremacy and cultural elitism” and alleged she is a “segregationist” with “bigoted views.” “We call on the administration,” Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote, “to consider more deeply the toll that this takes on students, particularly students of colour and members of the LGBTQIA community, and to consider whether it is in the best interests of the school and its students for Professor Wax to continue to teach a required first-year class.”
When asked for evidence of Professor Wax’s supposedly “segregationist” views and her alleged endorsement of “white supremacy,” the indignant students chose not to oblige. But hey, witches must be burned.
Entirely unrelated, Pamela Paresky on things that mustn’t be thought, or at least articulated:
Today, for what seems to be an increasing proportion of the educated left, even the mere willingness to discuss certain kinds of facts is “harmful.” The data in the [Google] memo… was beside the point. Or perhaps more accurately, the fact that [James Damore] was willing to cite it was the problem… As John McWhorter has pointed out, “certain questions are not to be asked.” And when they are, they are received “with indignation that one would even ask them.” Even more pernicious, however, they inevitably lead to the implication that not only is asking these questions a symptom of the problem, but the presence of the asker is, too… Perhaps what makes the Google scenario stand out from even the most astounding campus reactions is that Google is not a college campus, but a company. And not just any company, but one responsible for much of the scientific, historical and objective facts that many, if not most of us find online.
Charles Cooke on academia’s mental agoraphobia:
If our colleges continue down this road, they are going to create a host of extremely weird, hyper-sensitive people who have no earthly idea how to converse and interact with the sane… Ideally, universities would be far more tolerant, open, and intellectually diverse than the “real world.” Ideally, they would host genuine and untrammelled free inquiry, and in a manner that is hard, if not impossible, to replicate elsewhere… The old archetype is of the student who leaves his stuffy parents and has his mind expanded by learning. “You don’t understand,” he says, when returning home. The new archetype, by unlovely contrast, is of the student who can only express himself when outside of his professors’ earshot.
And Berkeley’s fainting couch has been wheeled out once again. Because apparently Ben Shapiro endorses “white supremacy, misogyny and xenophobia,” and engages in “fascist intellectual thuggery.” Which I suppose means acknowledging facts. The trauma-inducing event featuring Mr Shapiro can be viewed online here on September 14.
Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
To be honest, it’s absolutely tragic.
I’m not that generous with my sympathies, I suspect; but insofar as it’s tragic, I tend to think of those sufficiently credulous to act on Laurie’s advice. On almost any subject.
ental issues
I see I’m going to have to use my red pen.
I see I’m going to have to use my red pen.
When I worked at a small-town newspaper, we had a (retired school teacher) proofreader and her dreaded blue pencil.
I’m not that generous with my sympathies
Oh, we know.
I see I’m going to have to use my red pen.
I recently bought a cocktail making kit and today I bought a hundred quid’s worth of ingredients. I might not be quite myself this evening. Hic!
I see I’m going to have to use my red pen.
“Ental” is a perfectly cromulent word, in medicine it is an adjective meaning towards or related to the inside of something, internal. Compare to distal, caudal, dorsal, etc.
From Tim’s descriptions, it is impossible to deny the lady in question had inner problems.
I recently bought a cocktail making kit and today I bought a hundred quid’s worth of ingredients.
I’ll book some cabs. We’re all piling round to Tim’s.
Ooh. Bring the pickled eggs.
We’re all piling round to Tim’s.
You’re all more than welcome. Just don’t go too ental with one another. Ahem.
I read Tim’s Laurie Penny article. (I’d never heard of Laurie till I came upon this site.). I would like to know on what planet she encountered teenagers who don’t care what everyone else thinks. Teenagers care about little else. Popularity is all. The ones who have it hang on to it with grim determination and the ones who don’t aren’t fooling anyone when they say they didn’t like the popular kids anyway. Most of us hang on and leave high school with a sigh of relief. Laurie is still searching for popularity–and getting paid for it! So I’m assuming her constant anger is a role played for her readers, and in real life she’s happily skipping all the way to the bank.
I would like to know on what planet she encountered teenagers who don’t care what everyone else thinks.
Heh. Laurie was never a reliable narrator.
@Adam: To promote “success” in this way smacks of desperation on the part of the administration.
Reynold’s Law rears its ugly head once again. The administration confuses the markers of success, good grades, with the drivers of success, actual knowledge and skill. Your students will not be well served by this change, but the consequences will not fall on the heads of the administration, so it’s Somebody Else’s Problem as far as they need be concerned:-(.
So I read his other Laurie article while I was in there. Those teenagers who don’t care must live on the same planet with all those guys who never do housework. I have difficulty believing all those feminists grew up in households where Dad never washed a dish or picked up a mop. I know too many old guys who clean house right along with their wives. (Mine was a neat freak but somehow managed to spend 68 years with my mom who was a casual housekeeper at best.)
Did anyone see the news story about the couple who’ve been married 75 years? Their names are Harvey and Irma. (I said 40 years ago that adding himicanes to hurricanes was a bad idea! Poor Harvey and Irma will NEVER stop being kidded about this.)
The administration confuses the markers of success…with the drivers of success…
It seems its more than confusion between the two. Rather it’s a complete denial that there is a process at all which leads to a certain result. For the Leftist, all results whether good or bad are random occurrences. (Of course, the really bad results are caused by nefarious oppression by those random beneficiaries of the Universe’s bounty.) This is the Leftist reality, and so we see the reaction to Professor Wax. She threatens their worldview with her “old veraties.”
Not normally one for long posts, so I’ll blame Irma and cabin fever for this if I must, but in regard to Laura Penny and our youth culture (including us boomers and basically anyone post-WWII) I’ve been thinking about this lately….
Consider for the majority of human history, people only had their own real-life experiences to go on. Broad literacy rates are only a 200 year or so phenomenon. Most people in human history lived their entire lives within the communities in which they were born. Some did migrate maybe to the nearest large city or such but then they would settle down and their children would remain. Very few read books by/from other cultures, etc….Bear with me, this isn’t the usual diversity rant per se and yes this is a bit of a ramble….For the most part their lives were as Hobbes’ description of solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. When they did have time for stories, the stories were legends or perhaps from a play or travelling carnival, but these things did not occupy a large percentage of their time or consume so many brain cycles. For the most part, when they experienced something new they would only have the context of their own lives, those of close friends and relatives, etc. with which to contrast their experiences. Up until the 20th century, no radio, no TV, no movies. Limited access to books, especially for those people on the frontiers or scattered small towns and villages.
Now consider the lives of ourselves and pretty much anybody with memory of WWII. Constant barrage of uncountable stories of fiction, all stories competing with each other for the attention of generations with more and more leisure time and more and more disposable income for everyone from the average joe, even the poor, putting them somewhat on par with what was formerly referred to as the leisure classes. Fiction’s greatest hook/appeal being drama. Even non-fiction has much drama inserted into it, though that does go back to Shakespeare and beyond. My point I’m trying to get to is that people today have far more brain cycles to devote to the lives and experiences of people other than themselves. Mostly consisting of people who never really existed and events that in reality could never really occur in the way they are portrayed in the alternate universes of fiction. The cycles/time people have for processing their own experiences or others’ more reality based ones pale in comparison to the cycles/time devoted to the fiction that they have been exposed to. Thus when people have new experiences, is it any wonder that they put them in the far more dramatic context of the fiction that they have encountered rather than their more reality-based personal experiences? The drama, the obtuseness in regards to reality, the starry-eyed idealism. Jerimiah Furtrapper, Rowan Potatodigger, Olag Fishmonger, Gerhart Pigfarmer didn’t have time or energy for “such foolishness”. I find it so odd when I discuss economics with people of today, how so many of them put things in the context of factory workers/bosses, yet so very few people, in the west anyway, still work in a factory. After 9/11 when arming airline pilots was being considered, so many “educated” people were convinced that a stray bullet would totally compromise an airframe. About that time I read a convincing article that this irrational fear was traced back to the James Bond film Goldfinger. Much of the hysteria I am currently dealing with here in Florida the past week over certain aspects of this hurricane seems to be driven, not just by Andrew in 1992 (which is reasonable) but by the hysteria of disaster movies, with a little catalyst from the news media. Panic buying of gasoline and water (as if it’s not piped directly into everyone’s home) has created unnecessary shortages.
Not sure that is totally flushed out. Certainly holes and such to pick. But it’s been bugging me all week. Hopefully getting it out, I can f’n sleep tonight.
This.
Mythbusters thoroughly debunked that notion. Twice, because the disaster-movie-myth-lovers were still defiantly unconvinced the first time.
WTP, if grumbling made you sleep, I wouldn’t be asking for pointers! 😄😴
I’m new, so I missed the stuff about Tim and his (ex?)-girlfriend. Can someone fill me in? At least on the juicy parts.
“Ooh. Bring the pickled eggs.”
Are they mandatory? If so, I’m staying on my side of the Atlantic.
Didn’t we learn that those are not actually eggs?
I’m new, so I missed the stuff about Tim and his (ex?)-girlfriend.
Um.
As I recall, Some assorted discussions, and so forth . . .
Thanks, Hal.
Having read this, and having been involved with an “artistic” loon myself, I have 2 comments:
1). Never, ever, ever enter into an affair with someone who’s “creative” but can’t point to what they’ve created. Or are creating; Stephen King doesn’t write those doorstops in a day, you know. They take him at least 2 weeks. The point is , “creative,” like ” spiritual-but-not-religious”, is a dead giveaway for “not emotionally capable of sustaining a marriage.
2). If there isn’t a band called the Farting Cartoon Birds, someone should form it ASAP.
I write about it partly because I am forever grateful that I had a couple of friends around me between 20-25 who made sure if I started acting the twat (as we all do) they’d pull me back in line, and I’d do the same for them.
Around here we uncouth provincials have a pithy aphorism for that: “don’t stick your d*ck in crazy”. It’s a good rule.
I believe the Uncouth Provincials are playing on adouble bill with the Farting Cartoon Birds.
What a hurricane sounds like (much like a tornado):
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/enter-the-dragon/
One time we were at the zoo, and something caught the attention of a tiger, and she made a sort of ch-ch-ch-chuff sound. To the tigers it probably meant something innocuous like “Hey! I think I hear the guy who brings the food is coming ” or “Look, a red-bellied sapsucker, we haven’t seen one of those since last year” or even “Whose turn is it to lift his head and prove we aren’t stuffed specimens?” But at that casual (to a tiger) remark, my thousands upon thousands of ancestors who’d managed to outrun the other guy shouted “It’s a TIGER!” at my soul, and I immediately stepped between my kd and the (perfectly safe, idiot-proofed) exhibit, and all the other parents did the same thing and then a moment later we all smiled sheepishly at each other.
The sound of Irma caused the exact same reaction. If I heard that in real life I’d flee, even if I had to do so in a wheelchair. I salute the courage, if not the intelligence, of those who’ve decided to ride it out, and pray for them.
Stephen King doesn’t write those doorstops in a day, you know. They take him at least 2 weeks.
It’s a good rule.
Indeed, buy alas, one occasionally finds out after the fact the the rule has been broken inadvertently.
…something caught the attention of a tiger, and she made a sort of ch-ch-ch-chuff sound…
So was the tiger chuffed, or chuffing chuffed off ?
Chuffed if I know! 😄
one occasionally finds out after the fact the the rule has been broken inadvertently.
I speak from painful experience when I say that there are none so blind as those who will not see. The signs are inevitably there for those who choose to see them.
I’ve just noticed that the posters by the ‘Refuse Fascism’ group at Berkeley, the group hoping to disrupt Ben Shapiro’s talk with authoritarian tactics, invite support for their efforts from “a diversity of perspectives.” So they can unite in shutting down a diversity of perspectives.
invite support for their efforts from “a diversity of perspectives.” So they can unite in shutting down a diversity of perspectives.
LEARN TO DOUBLETHINK, YOU HATER!
“Do you even doublethink, bro?”
More here, via Darleen.
Meanwhile, Portland police capture the Wicked Witch of the Northwest
What a world, what a world…
Query whether the Portland police are more discomfited by the thought that all those pasty, rich white kids dressed in black pajamas and assaulting random people with bike locks and pepper spray might find themselves on the “gang list?” Is it a coincidence that Portland is a hotbed of organized ANTIFA violence, which violence is tacitly supported by the political worthies of Trotskyville on the Columbia River?
Today’s word is parenting.
The institutions which are allowing this sort of censorship to occur aren’t just “bad” universities; they’ve forfeited the right to the name altogether.
Somewhat related, here’s Jonathan Haidt on free enquiry and the testing of ideas versus “social justice” and the “axis of outrage,” in a talk given last year to an audience of trustees and alumni.
I made a small adjustment to Farnsworth’s image.
I’m new, so I missed the stuff about Tim and his (ex?)-girlfriend. Can someone fill me in? At least on the juicy parts.
See here, too. Was a bit raw, that one.
Can someone fill me in? At least on the juicy parts.
We’re veering towards squalor and gossip. Excellent.
We’re veering towards squalor and gossip. Excellent.
Another decent bar blown to hell. . .
Another decent bar blown to hell. . .
It’s terrible how standards have slipped.
By the way, here’s that plus-size lingerie catalogue you were asking about.
By the way, here’s that plus-size lingerie catalogue you were asking about.
Speaking of which, “body positive activist” not so positive, at least not without a large portion of Photoshop. View at your own risk, credit note only.
From earlier this year, two words of note: “She explained.”
Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook
At this moment, getting slaughtered on Amazon . . .
View at your own risk, credit note only.
Now I need a new pair of eyes. Thanks.
That’s not fair! That’s not fair at all! There was time now – there was all the time I needed…
Now I need a new pair of eyes. Thanks.
a) You were warned.
b) Credit note only.
Seen somewhere: AntiFA = Anti First Amendment
Other possible sleep aids:
GEnote Lab https://www.genotelab.com/ I think they offer a free 2-week trial if you want to try their brain-manipulative sets.
Enable the read-aloud feature of your device (if it exists) and then have it read aloud some deadly dull prose, such as an RFC. Whether the machine reads it to you or you read it yourself, you’ll be out in a trice.
Seen somewhere: AntiFA = Anti First Amendment
I like it.
Pushed for a round of grocery shopping and other errands downtown today, regardless of the relative heat, given that Thursday—the next reasonable day for that lot—is promising to host a large noisy party on campus.
—Funniest headline noted very much in passing: LA Times Freaks Out About Ben Shapiro Event At UC Berkeley
Daniel Ream: “Rome was the original fascist state, inasmuch as they had legal provision for turning themselves into one in the event of crisis.”
and:
“Yes. The terms of a Roman dictatorship were the inspiration for Italy’s Fascist Party.”
The Roman dictatorship may have inspired the Italian fascists (I assume it did) and the fascists consciously adopted the Roman fasces as their symbol, but that is a far cry from showing that the Roman dictatorship was itself fascistic–and in fact it was not fascistic because it did not involve the totalitarian control of all aspects of life which actual fascism entails–not did it articulate an ideology for such control.
By reducing “fascist” to a mere synonym for “dictatorship” you are stripping “fascist” of its particular meaning and the reasons why it is so much more evil than generic despotism.
From Wikipedia:
The fasces lictoriae (“bundles of the lictors”) symbolised power and authority (imperium) in ancient Rome, beginning with the early Roman Kingdom and continuing through the republican and imperial periods. By republican times, use of the fasces was surrounded with tradition and protocol. A corps of apparitores (subordinate officials) called lictors each carried fasces before a magistrate, in a number corresponding to his rank. Lictors preceded consuls (and proconsuls), praetors (and propraetors), dictators, curule aediles, quaestors, and the Flamen Dialis during Roman triumphs (public celebrations held in Rome after a military conquest).
According to Livy, it is likely that the lictors were an Etruscan tradition, adopted by Rome.[6] The highest magistrate, the dictator, was entitled to twenty-four lictors and fasces, the consul to twelve, the proconsul eleven, the praetor six (two within the pomerium), the propraetor five, and the curule aediles two.
Another part of the symbolism developed in Republican Rome was the inclusion of just a single-headed axe in the fasces, with the blade projecting from the bundle. The axe indicated that the magistrate’s judicial powers (imperium) included capital punishment. Fasces carried within the Pomerium—the boundary of the sacred inner city of Rome—had their axe blades removed; within the city, the power of life and death rested with the people through their assemblies. During times of emergency, however, the Roman Republic might choose a dictator to lead for a limited time period, who was the only magistrate to be granted capital punishment authority within the Pomerium. Lictors attending the dictator kept the axes in their fasces even inside the Pomerium—a sign that the dictator had the ultimate power in his own hands. There were exceptions to this rule: in 48 BC, guards holding bladed fasces guided Vatia Isauricus to the tribunal of Marcus Caelius, and Vatia Isauricus used one to destroy Caelius’s magisterial chair (sella curulis).