Elsewhere (265)
Matthew Blackwell on empathy, asymmetries and “woke” hostility:
[Jonathan] Haidt and his colleagues… sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (i.e., progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse… Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives… and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.
For further illustration, see this and this. Or poke through just about anything here tagged “academia.”
S A Dance on the horrors and hokum of grad school humanities:
I had never read Althusser’s Reading Capital and I had never read Marx’s Capital, which, perhaps, guaranteed my floundering in grad school given the pervasiveness of Marxist thought in the humanities… I went to graduate school because I found studying literature exhilarating and fulfilling. In my undergraduate honours thesis I analysed the significance of Herman Melville’s allusions to the Book of Job in Moby Dick. I wanted to do more of that: studying and understanding the great works of literature. Instead I was asked to understand how “The Althusserian ‘ideological interpellation’ designates the retroactive illusion of ‘always-already;’ the reverse of the ideological recognition is the misrecognition of the performative dimension.”
And Gad Saad on “toxic masculinity”:
Think of the male archetype in romance novels, which is a literary form almost exclusively read by women. He is a tall prince and a neurosurgeon. He is a risk-taker who wrestles alligators and subdues them on his six-pack abs, and yet is sensitive enough to be tamed by the love of a good woman. This archetype is universally found in romance novels read by women in Egypt, Japan, and Bolivia… Most of the traits and behaviours that are likely found under the rubric of “toxic masculinity” are precisely those that most women find attractive in an ideal mate. This is not a manifestation of “antiquated stereotypes.” It is a reality that is as trivially obvious as the existence of gravity.
See also this short clip of Jordan Peterson discussing women’s preferences in pornography.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
. . . various romance novel covers featuring billowy dresses and shirtless pirates, my browser history is looking more damning than usual. .
And then there is Dislocating My Left Shoulder, and other book covers . . .
Another possible cause (and one that might be more timeless) for the disparity between how the Left and Right sees each other is the Idealism vs. Pragmatism divide. The Left leans more towards Idealism while the Right is more Pragmatic.
To the Pragmatist, an Idealist is a well-intentioned fool. Their good intentions are worn on their sleaves, and so it’s fairly safe to presume that most of those idealists really do believe what they say, even if they have no idea how to implement it. While it’s clear that at least some supposed idealists are just manipulating people, it’s also clear that they’d have no-one to manipulate if their ideas didn’t sound so lovely.
To the Idealist, a Pragmatist is someone willing to accept a lesser evil, when there are ways to avoid any evil. Now, this is a fine idea in and of itself, but it’s also VERY easy to see the Pragmatist as someone willing to sacrifice other people towards his own end. As pragmatism is not terribly attractive to people who are going to be the losers in the arrangement, the pragmatists will indeed be made up primarily of those who make little to none of the pragmatic sacrifices.
As such, the pragmatist sees most of his enemies as fools, while the idealist sees most of his enemies as uncaring or selfish. We generally are more forgiving to foolishness than selfishness, and so the idealists will be more inclined against his opponents than the pragmatist.
I suspect there is a strong relationship between traditionalists and pragmatists, as well as progressives and idealists, throughout history, regardless of the ideologies of the time. The traditionalist sees that “Society is fine enough as it is, let’s not gamble the good we have now on some crazy new ideas”, while the progressives see how the world could be better, because they can see ideals not being realized.
Perhaps someone could tell me what Britain thought of the Americas during the revolution, and vice-versa? The Founding Fathers so loved by the American Right today would have been the progressive idealists of their time. This is not a criticism, as the ideals have long since proven to work, and so have rightfully become the domain of traditionalists. But did the British Empire see the Americans as a bunch of idealistic fools with a government designed to fall into anarchy? And did the American revolutionaries see the British as evil oppressors refusing freedom to people who could safely handle it?
I’m curious what an educated student of history could confirm or deny in this hypothesis. Regardless of whether it’s historically consistent, it seems pretty clear to me that it’s true at least right now, and partially responsible for the way people see their political opponents today.
If I may, let me rise in defense of the study of literature, something which occupied the better part of a decade of my life. I concede that it’s difficult to perceive a utilitarian purpose for such things and further that the current state of literature studies is a far cry from when I was a grad student in the early ’80s. Still, there’s something to be said for diving deeply into the canon in an attempt to understand the author, his/her work, and the time it was written. Such study and contemplation allows us to have a better clue about Humanity as a whole. Without it, Huck Finn becomes nothing more than a travelogue about a float trip. Those insights need to be preserved.
That said, there’s no question that the current state of affairs is abysmal, primarily because literature and philosophy departments have been taken over by the SJW menace and have turned the study of literature and human thought into nothing more than Leftist Struggle Sessions where the New Progressive Orthodoxy must be disseminated constantly and all contrary views suppressed. This all started happening when it became fashionable to divorce a work of literature from its context, i.e. specifics regarding the author, world affairs at the time of its writing, and human society at the time of its writing, in order to make a work reflect the biases and political leanings of whomever happened to be reading it. At the same time came the explosion of “Angry Studies” Departments and/or “Oppressed Group Du Jour Literature Studies” classes which argued that “dead white males” had no insight into the human condition generally, and certainly none for whatever allegedly marginalized group was in the audience.
In sum, it’s not the study of literature which is the problem. It’s what’s been done to it.
And did the American revolutionaries see the British as evil oppressors refusing freedom to people who could safely handle it?
Geoffrey, I cannot speak for the British view of the colonies, but at the outset, the colonists simply wanted to have the same rights as “all free Englishmen.” The objection was that colonists were being treated as second class by a parliament away in London and exploited accordingly.
Believe me, dear Sir: there is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But, by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose; and in this, I think I speak the sentiments of America.— Thomas Jefferson, November 29, 1775
While I agree there is value in the study of literature, I’m not sure it warrants college-level studies, unless you wish to become an author yourself. It is certainly worth some of your time, in the way studying history also tells you something about the human condition and the nature of societies. It can also serve as good mental exercise. Figuring out what Melville’s favorite books are by the allusions he puts into his own works can really get you thinking and opening up new mental pathways, but the conclusions you derive are still not terribly useful.
That being said, we do still need good authors, good historians, and good exercise coaches, so that doesn’t mean I fully discredit these college courses. I’m just not sure they’re good for more than that. Though, if you don’t claim significantly more than that, then I think we have no real disagreement.
A civil society cannot last with this level of animosity between its people.
That is the means to the ends.
Romance writers are like rappers: They’re in it for the money. They love to tell the stories, but they love the chedder, too.
A family friend used to work for Harlequin (a Canadian company, btw) writing the back cover blurbs. There are apparently a large number of men writing romance novels under pseudonyms because it’s steady, fairly easy work. Harlequin keeps this under wraps because women won’t buy romance novels written by a woman.
…written by a man. Ducking autocorrect.
That being said, we do still need good authors, good historians, and good exercise coaches, so that doesn’t mean I fully discredit these college courses. I’m just not sure they’re good for more than that. Though, if you don’t claim significantly more than that, then I think we have no real disagreement.
There’s no question that a deeper understanding of the humanities is, dare I say, necessary for a life well-lived, IMHO. And for that, society needs a limited number of literature scholars. The problem since the late ’60s is that there is a surfeit of people chasing those limited billets. This leads to the lunacy our host has noted occasionally in the “publish or perish” atmosphere of modern academe. That, combined with the take-over of departments by the “Angry Studies” crowd gets us to where we are today.
(As I noted, my literature studies came at the beginning of all this and fortunately, I could see the writing on the wall. In my case, I noted that departments no longer were interested in males with an expertise in 16th-17th century German poetry, the Renaissance and/or the Reformation. Instead, the craze was for female German writers, which meant there were suddenly hundreds of specialists in post 1945 German fiction, but virtually none who knew anything about the literary influence of the Thirty Years War. Thus, shifted gears into a different career. Nonetheless, I don’t view my literature studies as a waste of time.)
“Funny how history for some always begins with their own birth.”
This evening, I caught an advert (you know, one of the ones the BBC doesn’t have) for the BBC’s 6 Music radio station, in which its presenters wax lyrical about their love for “all kinds” of music. Now, I’m not as up to speed on the Beeb as when I was on its Listeners’ Panel a few years back, but I’d be pretty surprised if 6 Music has ever, in its entire existence, played anything older than the Corporation itself. In fact, if it weren’t for the faint chance that some eclectic soul has dug up some blues records from the ’30s, I’d lay good money on nothing before 1950.
“And yes,she meant exactly what it sounded like.”
Crikey. Lucky bloke. I had quite the crush on Ms. Allie back in her Cheers days.
I mean, she was no Lynda Carter, but who is?
“I think if I were to write a novel, I’d bypass the publishing industry entirely and just put it out there on Amazon. There’s a risk that you’d miss little mistakes, but it’s offset by not having your story forced into a stupid ideological box.”
There’s probably a gap in the market for freelance editors catering to self-publishers. (Unless it’s already been filled. What do I know?)
“Fern Michaels” is a man who’s been in the romance business for 50 years or so. Fern says his wife helps him with the sex scenes so they don’t sound too masculine.
The semi-annual clock fustercluck (fusterclock?) is tonight. Does Great Britain have Daylight Savings Time? The last time I was in Canada, they did.
Indiana held out for decades, but finally caved because a lot of residents of South Bend, Indiana commute to work in Chicago, Illinois.
Other Chicagoland trivia: LaPorte, Indiana, about 11/2 hours from Chicago, has notoriously bad weather (even by U.S. standards) caused by storms sweeping down from Lake Michigan and combining with atmospheric inversions that are caused by I-forget-what; look up “LaPorte weather anomaly” for a good explanation of it all. Also, Dr. Scholl, founder of the Dr. Scholl foot empire, was from LaPorte, and probably hotfooted (ha!) it out of there to someplace with better weather as soon as he got rich.
My aunt lives in LaPorte, but she’s 91 and rarely goes out when so the foul weather
doesn’t inconvenience her as much as when she was raising 5 kids there. Which reminds me.
POGONIP PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Please do NOT try to chew up and swallow large tough raw broccoli stems. My cousin (of the LaPorte Pogonips) choked to death doing that. He lived alone and the position in which he was found suggested he had tried the self-Heimlich maneuver and failed. So boil those broccoli stems into submission before you eat them.
“Ah, slash fanfic. Kirk/Spock, Solo/Kuryakin, Harry/Draco … yep, mostly female demographic, but within that demographic majority non-heterosexual.” Another member of a group of Trekfen I hung out with (Argh!) forty years ago presented a draft of a K/S ‘slash’ story to a gay gentleman of her acquaintance, asking for his informed opinion of the ‘mechanics’ thereof. A week later he handed it back to her with the comment, “Who the hell wrote this? A teenage lesbian?” She denied it on a technicality: The authors were TWO teenage lesbians.
…who then grew up to work in some bar with thousand-year-old pickled “eggs”…
On and on and on the SJWs gibber, drone and drivel:
Via Samizdata:
https://www.samizdata.net/2018/03/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-1018/
this from The American Conservative: “Hating Whitey at Stanford”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/hating-whitey-at-stanford/
(I hope I haven’t missed someone else posting these links.)
“Maybe it’s as basic as saying that people mustn’t have meetings in private any more.”
Ha ha ha! Let’s all laugh at hopelessly out of touch conservative politician Mike Pence, and his squaresville beliefs, right?
Oh.
https://t.co/76jc8FJvLN
I have offended the spam filter *sad face*
Does Great Britain have Daylight Savings Time?
We’ve had this conversation before, I think.
I have offended the spam filter *sad face*
What the buggery have you done to upset it this time? I’ve had to make offerings.
There’s no question that a deeper understanding of the humanities is, dare I say, necessary for a life well-lived, IMHO. And for that, society needs a limited number of literature scholars.
Maybe it’s just a case of personal aptitude and finding some subjects much easier than others at school, but unlike, say, chemistry, I always found literature lessons easy and the content on offer insufficient to justify years of university study and an enormous bill. In that, while teachers of chemistry and physics seemed to have a reservoir of knowledge and expertise to tap – stuff I couldn’t just intuit or figure out autonomously, at least pre-internet – teachers of English literature seemed to have a fairly limited bag of tricks. Tricks that you could pick up quickly and repeat as necessary with little supervision. There are only so many ways to parse, say, Shakespeare before you venture into baseless conjecture, and then absurdity.
And from a lecturer’s point of view, there’s a career pressure to be unobvious, as if one had a vast reservoir of hidden knowledge. This obligation to be unobvious can lead some to make claims that are original only insofar as more realistic people would not be inclined to take them seriously, and which may explain how quickly and irretrievably the humanities have been degraded and in large part rendered ludicrous.
As Thomas Sowell put it,
And so things have to be problematised and politicised, and subject to the “woke” fashions of the day, often in laughable ways, and we get professional educators – professors of Medieval Literature – denouncing whitey and theorising about the preputial connotations of aluminium cans.
There are only so many ways to parse, say, Shakespeare before you venture into baseless conjecture, and then absurdity.
It all depends, does it not, on how rigorous the course is? Up to recently (20? 30 years ago?) an Arts degree usually required reading and absorbing much information and writing many essays.
The content might not have been as immediately useful as, say, engineering or accounting but it should have shaped a mind to absorb and distill information and think rigorously.
It all depends, does it not, on how rigorous the course is? Up to recently (20? 30 years ago?) an Arts degree usually required reading and absorbing much information and writing many essays.
Again, this may just be a function of my own aptitudes, and blind spots, and maybe there are students of engineering or chemistry who find parsing literature a deep and mysterious business. But pondering literature always struck me as something any reasonably intelligent person could do with minimal steering and supervision. I’m not questioning the potential rewards of mulling literature, so much as the need to spend a fortune, and several years, on someone telling you how to do it.
“toxic masculinity”
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/290881/
If someone asked about DST before, it was probably me. Sorry!
If someone asked about DST before, it was probably me. Sorry!
Jordan Peterson talks with Claire Lehmann, founder and editor of Quillette.
Amanda Marcotte, sort of the American version of Laurie Penny, intuits that “classical liberal” is just another term for “alt-right”, counters a valid criticism with snark about “gaslighting”.
Also, she says, if you’re not in favor of heckling, you’re not in favor of free speech after all. Checkmate, alt-right wolves in classical-liberal sheep’s clothing!
Amanda Marcotte, sort of the American version of Laurie Penny
Ms Marcotte is an imperviously stupid woman. And quite vile.
As Thomas Sowell put it
Where is that from? I’m still trying to accumulate all of his books, but haven’t seen that passage yet. It reminds me of a point Damon Linker once made:
Where is that from?
It’s from this interview.
We may have to sedate Darleen.
oh my… it’s gotten a bit warm in here …
definition of a man
[ Opens windows and flaps newspaper in attempt to disperse dense, choking clouds of oestrogen. ]
Amanda Marcotte, sort of the American version of Laurie Penny Ah Mandy Mandy Mandy …
I don’t whether it is a good or bad thing that she has blocked me from Twitter for years.
She was scribbling for the now defunct blog, Pandagon when I first started blogging. How I came to here attention, I don’t know but she wrote a snark-filled ‘review’ of my views even attacking the little stories of my first grandsons (twins) who were toddlers at the time. She especially hated when I related that my husband had surprised me on my birthday with a box of chocolates in which he had put a necklace with my birthstone pendant.
I commented asking her why my quite conventional views and experiences were such an object of ire to her.
She remarked that I was a problem, that I was happy being married and that marked me as someone who didn’t have an authentic voice because I “let men own my vagina”
I snarked back, “and you let them rent yours”
I was forever marked as being a female misogynist and generally as an Un.Person by St. Mandy of the Vagina ever since.
In 14+ years her writing has never changed … she is still a profoundly angry and unhappy person.
It’s hard to pick a favorite example of Marcotte’s boundless stupidity, but I was particularly impressed when she traced the dislike of cats back to sexism:
It’s like she heard the old saying about having a hammer and seeing everything as a nail, and took it as an inspirational slogan. She’s like an idiot savant of apophenia and pareidolia, capable of perceiving sinister patterns in the most random and innocuous phenomena.
In 14+ years her writing has never changed … she is still a profoundly angry and unhappy person.
I wonder how much of that is also due to her being out of the limelight. Early on, she was somewhat of a darling on the Left, but after crawling from the trainwreck of the Edwards campaign, her star faded quite a bit. I’m sure she still has her acolytes, but she doesn’t seem to have the exposure she had years ago.
She remarked that I… didn’t have an authentic voice because I “let men own my vagina”
I snarked back, “and you let them rent yours”.
That’s brutal. And brilliantly funny. To the point where I’ve just had someone come upstairs and ask me what I’m laughing at.
R. Sherman
I’m sure that may have something to do with it … but she has never changed her style or come up with any original thoughts since. She clings to the rad-feminist Leftism as if she could find the right combo of magic phrases and all fame would come to her.
Heh…she’s the Ray Manzarek of feminist bloggers, forever recycling her past connection to fame.
But, that’s not going to advance your academic career. You’ve got to come out with some new theory of Shakespeare. […] You’ve got to come up with something.
Interesting note: a few years ago the Globe Theatre was rebuilt and there was a brief push for staging Shakespeare as historically consistent as possible – men playing the female roles, etc. One of the things they wanted to do was present the play in the original Elizabethan English, so they scrounged some period dictionaries and began rehearsing the period pronunciation.
It turns out that every Shakespeare play is absolutely packed with puns, mostly filthy, based on similarities of pronunciation that only occur in the original Elizabethan dialect. Apparently no one had ever noticed this before and it set off a flurry of new research.
a few years ago the Globe Theatre was rebuilt and there was a brief push for staging Shakespeare as historically consistent as possible
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/
and:
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/shop/category/cds-dvds/148
Sweet.
“Imperviously stupid” is right. Amanda and another feminist, whose name I forget, were hired to work on John Edwards’s presidential campaign. One of them thought it would be a good idea to insult the Virgin Mary, the other then doubled down, and both of them were baffled when they were fired. Now, it’s not unheard of to think Mary was the town slut who pulled history’s biggest con job—but how stupid do you have to be to say so when your boss is running for president? And how stupid do you have to be to be surprised when your statement doesn’t go over well?
I am not sure how cats, nice little critters who mind their own business, became associated with feminism. I’m in the cat-lady age group so I know several, and none of them are particularly feminist. One, in fact, is a dumb-blonde type who’s always hip deep in men. She has between 8 and 10 cats—the number fluctuates as they get run over and she replaces them. The two characteristics that I observe in cat ladies are that they like to collect things, and they have higher-than-normal maternal instincts (certainly not a feminist trait) or a normal level of maternal instincts that were never fulfilled—they remained childless for some reason.
The association between collecting and cats is probably because it’s a lot easier to hoard cats than dogs—cats don’t make much noise if they’re fixed so you can collect many more cats than dogs before the neighbors finally get local authorities to do something.
Why so much art is bad.
So boil those broccoli stems into submission before you eat them.
You might try this, instead:
Or,
What?
I am not sure how cats, nice little critters who mind their own business, became associated with feminism.
There’s an interesting theory that toxoplasma gondii plays a role. Not with feminism, but with self-destructive behaviour generally.
Then again, one could argue feminism is self-destructive behaviour.
Why so much art is bad.
‘Cause it’s trying waaay too hard to challenge and disrupt worldviews? Yeah, I can see that.
Although what these wastes of oxygen fail to realize is they aren’t challenging anything any more, just reaffirming their own little worldview bubbles and preening for their peers.
Or something. Postmodernism is not my strong suit.
they aren’t challenging anything any more, just reaffirming their own little worldview bubbles and preening for their peers.
Pretty much.
If an artist or would-be artist is preoccupied with “disrupting” my “worldview” – if that’s the goal, the measure of their ambition – then there’s a very good chance that they aren’t doing their job, and may not even understand what their job is supposed to be. Making something beautiful is a much humbler ambition, compared to all this worldview disrupting, and generally much more difficult.
Throw those broccoli stems in the trash, where they belong.
Is that what you do with cucumbers?
Nobody here likes cucumbers, so they’re not here to be thrown into the trash. I only buy cucumbers if I’m lucky enough to be making the salad for a potluck (easiest role you can have next to “I’ll bring the paper plates!”)
If you get stuck with Bread and Rolls, get sick the day of the party. Nobody eats the Bread and Rolls anyway , and you save a lot of money.
Is that what you do with cucumbers?
At its best, the edible bit of broccoli is barely a foodstuff. Disintegrated in a chicken stew, perhaps. And cucumber’s typical role is as a moistening agent in sandwiches.
Why has that Tyson guy been anointed the real-life Ludwig von Drake, expert on everything? Just once I’d like to see him quoted as saying, “Gee, I’m sorry, that’s not my field, I don’t know anything about that.”
Oh, dear. Do David and Pogonip also throw away the chicken’s heart and liver?