Reheated (53)
For newcomers, some items from the archives:
“Social justice” howler monkeys prove difficult to please.
So, to recap. Forty or so “social justice” activists disrupt a keynote address at DePauw University, holding signs that scold the audience for being insufficiently deferential to the protestors’ racial fixations and delusions of being oppressed. Being schooled in “privilege and identity,” and therefore suitably cowed and pretentious, the audience starts applauding the disruption, and applauding the scolding being aimed at them. And then those applauding are promptly scolded for doing so.
Salon’s Silpa Kovvali insists that gendered pronouns must be abolished. Everyone, she says, is a “they.”
Ms Kovvali believes that gendered pronouns and honorifics are an “outdated linguistic tic.” And not a useful, rather concise source of information, a signal of respect, and a way of clarifying who it is we’re talking about. Despite her claims, almost all of us seem quite happy to be referred to as either male or female, as if it were in fact “relevant,” and the demand for gender-neutral pronouns remains, to say the least, a niche concern. I’d even venture to suggest that some of us might feel slighted by the wilful omission of – diminishing of – our respective maleness or femaleness. However, Ms Kovvali feels a need to inform those less enlightened, i.e., the rest of us, that, “The goal is greater inclusion… to be respectful to those we write about, and to be clear to our readers.” By risking affront on a daily basis and introducing a clumsy and needless ambiguity. Because vagueness is the new clarity.
Leftist students indulge in thuggery. Laurie Penny lies about it.
In Laurie’s mind, presumably, nothing you see in this video actually happened. Nobody laid siege to someone else’s property, terrorising staff and trapping them in their offices. Nobody barricaded fire escapes and used mob force repeatedly, while denouncing any kind of physical retaliation or attempt to enforce the law. No, the thuggery and shoving, the attempts to intimidate and impose on others… that somehow didn’t happen. It was, in Laurie’s mind, “a peaceful occupation.” Like so many of her comrades, Laurie relies on a kind of faux naiveté – according to which, laying siege to a building and trapping staff for hours while chanting “Fuck the police” is in no way provocative or an invitation for scuffles and violence.
I Don’t Deserve This Shabby Treatment.
The signature vainglory of the academic left.
Professor Surber’s self-regard continues to tumesce. He has fathomed all of history and it validates him: “It is because we liberal-arts professors… have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals.” In short, if you haven’t reached a similarly leftwing conclusion, you haven’t achieved sufficient complexity and nuance in your thinking, you peasant.
There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits.
Quite frankly, it’s a bit scary.
I have been doing this for over a decade. In this tiny, marginal arena, I have some small expertise.
And you’ll notice I can only do it with my comments.
And you’ll notice I can only do it with my comments.
Well, sure. For now.
Use your power for good and not evil, my son.
Well, sure. For now.
As a superpower, it’s right up there with sock pairing. I doubt a film franchise awaits.
This stuff is just so wearying.
bewildering ignorance and outright moral perversity.
Wow. That whole comment. There’s a couple of people I want to send that to.
That Minnow guy(?) is a bit slippery.
a bit slippery.
A phrase that comes to mind is rhetorical mucous.
the general idea is to interrupt one’s normal life with a reminder of higher matters, immortal souls and such.
Most Jewish dietary laws are there to keep you from eating things that are likely to kill you, like salmonella and trichinosis, if one happens to be part of an early iron age tribe with no understanding of microbiology.
I laughed until I cried.
If you ever want the laughter without the tears, there’s always No Men Beyond This Point (2015). It’s the radfem moist dream dressed as comedy. A new utopia where parthenogenesis has sent males to the edge of extinction.
But of course a university would fund such an event. Mind you, I would be curious to find out what ‘classic queer cinema’ entails. Would Brokeback Mountain qualify, or does masculine homosexuality discount it?
https://blogs.deakin.edu.au/deakinlife/2018/04/09/come-along-to-the-geelong-queer-film-festival/
… bewildering ignorance and outright moral perversity.
Gah! Hal and Minnow posting at length in the same thread. “Rhetorical mucous” indeed.
Daniel, “most”? You are, I hope, aware that Jewish dietary laws go far beyond prohibiting pigs and shellfish. Rabbits, camels and horses are no less unkosher than pork, even though they don’t carry trichinosis; dolphins and swordfish are just as much off-limits as oysters.
Nor do the requirements for kosher slaughter, the prohibition of certain abdominal fats (while others are perfectly okay) and of the sciatic nerve, or the prohibition on mixing milk and meat – to name just a few of the other Jewish dietary laws – have anything to do with microbiology or with ancient health regulations. David’s and PQ’s comments above (especially David’s) are rather closer to the mark.
Welcome to the land of self righteous vegans
Well then. Out of the helicopters they must go lest they confound the great conservative revival.
Ancient dietary restriction weren’t just there to head off salmonella or whatever. They also, and likely morseso, solved incentive traps in societies that had no full time inspectors or regulators
E.G. Pigs were an extremely ecologically bad fit in ancient Israel, being an animal of littoral preferences in a dusty environment. Raising them might have satisfied some wealthy person’s taste for bacon, but at a cost of insufficient food overall. So a taboo, as with most taboos, arose for a reason, later codified into scripture.
The anthropologist Marvin Harris covered such topics nicely, back in the day, in his books such as “Cows, pigs, wars and witches” and “Cannibals and kings.”
Been a few decades since I read them, but I do remember both as being well worth one’s time.
And as I think about it, maybe it’s better to stick to books from earlier eras, before the Great Stupidizing Of The Humanities had laid such waste to the land.
Sorry, are there non-self-righteous vegans? I try not to psychoanalyse people from a distance.
Occasionally succeeding, one insists.
There is a particular noted issue with a diet that is absolutely only vegan or vegetarian and nothing else.
Handily, there is also a particular noted issue with a diet that is absolutely only not vegan or vegetarian and nothing else.
Speaking of balance, as rigorous as a rosary of anti-vegan disavowals in the name of cultural-political holiness generally is, there is an equally handy raft of data supporting the practice. Health, impact, even a type of just the oddest humane morality you can imagine.
Anyway, bacon is so the salt of the earth and who invited you into my kitchen you Orwellian toadie and like that. Toodles.
Ten,
avowing anti-vegan rosaries means speaking out in support of veganism.
But you’re angry, right?
Oh dear, that first word should have been “dis”avowing. Mom, the HTML ate my homework again.
“Rhetorical mucous” indeed.
In much the same way that hagfish can exude vast quantities of slime to escape predators, it’s the tool of someone practised in evasion, a way to not be pinned down. And no-one did rhetorical mucous quite like Minnow.
Oh Lord, I fell down my own rabbit hole of links to old threads.
Though it wasn’t entirely devoid of entertainment. For instance, “Personally, when something looks too good to be true, I tend to think it is.” Said the tireless apologist for communism.
I thought mine more of a faint logical blip in the strict classical structuralism of anti-vegan principle, Sing, but just as axiomatically, you’d know better than I its attendant umbrage. I try not to psychoanalyse people from a distance, if that’s not already taken.
But you’re angry, right?
No, just a troll. Note the great gobs of gobbledygook. (Similar to slime.)
Easy, Geez. They’ll never take your triple bacon cheese Fatburgr.