Elsewhere (296)
Robert Murphy on the pathologies of the leftist campus:
This is not a matter of “Oh, gee, there’s a bunch of people who have different views about whether health insurance should be provided by the government.” That’s not what I’m talking about. [These are people whose reaction is,] “Oh, there’s a speaker coming to campus and we don’t like that person’s views. We are going to credibly threaten that we will break stuff and hurt people, we will set things on fire and smash windows.” And so, then the school has to cancel because of security concerns. And then that gets spun as “Oh yeah, the reason that speaker couldn’t come here is because he would incite violence.” The kind of mindset that would do that and would see nothing weird about that. “Yeah, the reason the speaker can’t come here is because he promotes violence – by us, his enemies.”
Which rather calls to mind the tenderly whispered wife-beater’s lament: “Don’t make me hurt you, baby.”
Needless to say, examples abound. And do note the role of their academic enablers.
Cathy Young on Lenin and his admirers:
Many leftists in places like Jacobin magazine see Lenin as the “good communist” to Joseph Stalin’s “bad communist” — the revolutionary wrongly maligned as an authoritarian. Indeed, Lenin’s birthday this year was marked on Twitter by New York State Senator Julia Salazar, a member of the new crop of young progressive politicians. The “Lenin good, Stalin bad” formula was also popular among Soviet reformers, both in the late 1950s-early 1960s and in the late 1980s. It was wrong then; it is wrong now… As independent Russian historian Nikita Sokolov recently told Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, Lenin’s only consistent position throughout his political career was that “he was a fundamental believer in violence as the solution to any problem.”
Based on history, and their own writings, it seems entirely possible that devotees of Marxoid fantasy typically start with the ideal of violence and coercion, the titillating rewards of having power over others, and then work backwards in search of a pretext.
Oh, and Dr Jennifer Cassidy is an Oxford University politics lecturer who has thoughts on what kind of books you’re allowed to have on your shelves.
Ownership of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve is, it turns out, a basis for scolding, like so much else. Readers may recall that the mob that physically menaced Charles Murray at Middlebury College included students, would-be intellectuals, who boasted of never having read his books and who consequently knew almost nothing about their victim’s actual views and actual research. None of which inhibited their self-satisfied enthusiasm for assaulting people and making polite elderly scholars fear for their safety.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
Dr Jennifer Cassidy is an Oxford University politics lecturer who has thoughts on what kind of books you’re allowed to have on your shelves.
Now she’s back pedalling – ‘taken out of context’ LOL.
Now she’s back pedalling – ‘taken out of context’ LOL.
Ah, so now we’re allowed to own books that our politics lecturer disagrees with (though without explaining why she disagrees with them). However, we must ensure that they’re hidden away somewhere. To prevent them being seen by people such as Ms Cassidy. And presumably, those she teaches.
Dr Jennifer Cassidy is an Oxford University politics lecturer who has thoughts on what kind of books you’re allowed to have on your shelves.
She compares Charles Murray to David Icke. Classy.
*David Irving.
Classy.
As illustrated repeatedly in the Turf War thread, the people who most vehemently denounce Murray’s research, and who aggressively sabotage his attempts to speak to an audience, are usually – almost always – people who haven’t actually read anything he’s written. To the extent that, at Middlebury, some dolt was even holding a sign implying that Murray is somehow in favour of eugenics, which, given his actual writing, his actual concerns, is about as perverse as you can get.
“Based on history, and their own writings, it seems entirely possible that devotees of Marxoid fantasy typically start with the ideal of violence and coercion, the titillating rewards of having power over others, and then work backwards in search of a pretext.”
Possible? I’d say the weight of evidence points to it being highly probable.
“She compares Charles Murray to David Irving. Classy.”
That line of thinking is what makes this kind of thing so terrifying:
So you’re running a library with a copy of Mein Kampf. Presumably you have to restrict borrowing on it. Well, okay. 10-1 you were doing that already. Also maybe Irving’s stuff. Inconvenient, but whatever. But if Charles Murray is the same as Irving, then his work has to go into quarantine as well. And if he’s that bad, then what about…
The SNP is always at pains to point out that any similarity to other nationalist parties professing socialism which happened to be prominent at the time of its founding in the 1930s are purely coincidental and absolutely nothing to worry about. It’s all rather embarrassing, really, ha-ha.
But it keeps pulling stunts like this.
Oh, and Dr Jennifer Cassidy is an Oxford University politics lecturer who has thoughts on what kind of books you’re allowed to have on your shelves.
What’s the betting she hasn’t read The Bell Curve?
Kudos to Sir David Evans, who has done more than anyone to expose David Irving, standing up for the right to own Irving’s books in that Twitter thread. “Freedom of inquiry” means exactly what it says. Some very few academics still understand that.
What’s the betting she hasn’t read The Bell Curve?
Hard to say. But Ms Cassidy’s attitude, and the implied equivalence with Holocaust denial, casts some doubt.
As leftism is in large part a neurotic status game, it’s par for the course to find players who prioritise in-group status-seeking over facts and reality. Say, for instance, what a book is actually about and what its authors take great care to explain. (Given the contortions required by the game, someone with a preference for realism and factual accuracy would find it hard to play successfully. Posturing on Twitter, though, and then waiting for applause from other players, is much, much easier.)
See also the James Damore / Google memo saga, which brought to light the remarkably widespread dishonesty of self-styled ‘activists’ and left-leaning journalists – two fingers of the same hand – and whose lies and lack of probity were eerily uniform, quite blatant, and seemingly without cost. To them, at least.
Sam:
So I take it that showing up at Ibrox with a placard denouncing ‘Gers fans as a lot of Prod shite wha couldnae find their ane ba’s would be legally (as well as physically) hazardous?
G’aun Hibs.
Many leftists in places like Jacobin magazine—
‘k, got the whole idea in just five words.
I did have to look things up to confirm the general memory, and yes, the Jacobins were a part of the French Revolution who most insistently announced that we don’t like particular people, so we must have them thrown from a helicopter.—except, of course the helicopter hadn’t been invented yet, so they had to make do with the guillotine instead. In time, the Jacobin leaders were quite naturally thrown from their own helicopter—errr, executed by their own guillotine.
From what I can see, a difference between Robespierre and Lenin is that even when ill and dying, Lenin didn’t get sloppy and get outmaneuvered. But rather a few others around him did.
So yes, around a century later, and a bit over two, when a NPC does the chant that I don’t like particular people, so we must have them thrown from a helicopter., the rather obvious thought is to note that once anyone would be stupid enough to do something that pointlessly stupid, any such NPC is guaranteed to also go into a guillotine—err, helicopter—because, well, as the Jacobins and the communists and the helicopter chanting NPCs rather demonstrate, being the same thing and getting shot with their own Tokarev is what they do . . . .
I feel you’re being unnecessarily harsh on the idea of helicopters, here.
I feel you’re being unnecessarily harsh on the idea of helicopters, here.
Well, noting economy, Tokarevs are cheaper and just as traditional.
Cassidy reminds me of the apocryphal Oxbridge Don who announced that “I am the Master of this College. What I know not is not knowledge!”
I will wager that Cassidy also does not have any books on statistics on her shelf. She is probably incapable of understanding the data and arguments of Murray and Herrnstein in The Bell Curve. I’ll go a step farther and venture that Cassidy has not read 1/10 of the books on her shelf.
When in doubt, the fall-back is “Figgers lie, and liars figger.”
The Jacobins and the communists are the NPC’s. That’s how they found themselves being executed by their own guillotines. The threats of violence and such against those who think differently have an origin and that origin is overwhelmingly on the political left. Specifically in the context we are discussing here today. It is the left that wants to organize people’s lives against their will. People resist. Out come the guillotines. If everyone would just leave everyone else alone, no need for guillotines. It’s all in the history books and such. If only the left wasn’t so eager to burn them.
Regarding the Lenin good / Stalin bad school, this article from The New Criterion is a good starting point for re-examining that bit of dogma.
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me, top left, and I’ll rattle the spam filter.
People resist. Out come the guillotines.
“No man, no problem.”—some guy in Soviet Russia.
You have to admit, there is a certain expediency to it. Especially for those in a rush.
I’ll go a step farther and venture that Cassidy has not read 1/10 of the books on her shelf
Well, TBF I myself haven’t read 1/10 of the books on my shelf. The other 9/10, yes. But then again, considering what I have come to learn over the years about the quality of the academics and similar who wrote most of these books I wonder if that’s necessarily a good thing.
If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me, top left, and I’ll rattle the spam filter.
Oh, my comments are appearing. No problem there. But in triplicate?
[ Quietly deletes teetering pile of duplicates, resumes wiping bar. ]
I will wager that Cassidy also does not have any books on statistics on her shelf.
Don’t oppress me with your white supremacist phallocentric math!
You have to admit, there is a certain expediency to it. Especially for those in a rush.
And liberals have a longstanding tendency to excuse communists as merely “liberals in a hurry”.
My apologies. I lurk here frequently, but comment very rarely… and the first comment I’ve made in quite some time contains an embarrassing error. I said Sir David Evans was instrumental in exposing David Irving’s lies about the Holocaust. I meant, of course, the eminent historian Richard Evans, the author of Lying about Hitler. As I think Sir Walter Raleigh once said, it’s better to remain silent and let them think you’re a fool, than etc. I’ll go back to my dark corner now.
apocryphal Oxbridge Don
That was non-apocryphal Benjamin Jowett, “if it’s knowledge, I know it,” Master of bally old Balliol College, and the rest of the verse as you quoted. Waggish license, I shouldn’t have to say, but do, to warn off literalists who will think he really said it, or that I said he said it.
On the bet that she hasn’t read all those books: not particularly in defense of Cassidy whom I never heard of before and will soon forget — but in general, the point of having a personal library is not that you’ve read all those books, but that you need all those books for your work.
I will wager that Cassidy also does not have any books on statistics on her shelf.
Others have already pointed out obvious objections to Ms Cassidy’s pissy, juvenile attitude – say, that people sometimes read books by authors they don’t agree with. I have a few tomes by morally deranged communists, for instance. There’s also her implied and rather casual conceit that bookshelves are not merely for storage, but for signalling political conformity.
[ Added: ]
And then there’s the conceit that a man shouldn’t own a book by a Holocaust denier, even to be familiar with their conspiracies and thereby rebut them, and even if he sat on a commission for educating the public about the Holocaust, part of which entailed dealing with said denial and conspiracies. And further, the conceit that a man working from home should rearrange his bookshelves, vetting them carefully, with precognition, lest his wife share a photo in which said bookshelves appear and which subsequently presents a dogmatic prodnose with an opportunity for some disingenuous recreational scolding.
My apologies. I lurk here frequently, but comment very rarely… and the first comment I’ve made in quite some time contains an embarrassing error.
Hey, at least you have trousers on, which is more than I can say for…
[ Glances around room.]
Some people.
…but for signalling political conformity.
Too many people think being taught and learning are the same thing. When one is being taught there is no need for reading; political conformity results.
Others have already pointed out obvious objections to Ms Cassidy’s pissy, juvenile attitude – say, that people sometimes read books by authors they don’t agree with.
And then there is the converse: As I understand it, Lenin made a practice of not reading the books he criticized. Hence his book-length evisceration of Ernst Mach which completely misrepresented what Mach had said.
I’ll go back to my dark corner now.
I have a high regard for people who make a point of correcting their errors. I wish more “thinkers” would do that.
“So I take it that showing up at Ibrox with a placard denouncing ‘Gers fans as a lot of Prod shite wha couldnae find their ane ba’s would be legally (as well as physically) hazardous?”
Presumably so. They tried jailing people for singing songs at or near football matches a few years back. Sadly, they were persuaded to repeal that nonsense on the grounds of unworkability rather than principle.
“I feel you’re being unnecessarily harsh on the idea of helicopters, here.”
I’ve always liked James May’s take on helicopters: planes work with the air, gliding elegantly through it, while ‘copters just thrash around wildly until gravity gets sick of the noise and gives up.
Pst314,
Your description of Lenin’s critical technique brought to my mind the climate scientist infamous for saying (paraphrased)
Why should I give [other scientist] my data? He’s just going to try to poke holes in it.
Anybody know the guy? A quick Google does not turn up anybody.
I’ll go back to my dark corner now.
Barman, a drink for the new guy.
ping
Lenin’s only consistent position throughout his political career was that “he was a fundamental believer in violence as the solution to any problem.”
A buddy I used to work with is married to a lovely Russian girl. The only time I’ve ever even heard of her getting into a serious* political discussion was when, at a dinner gathering, mention of Lenin brought out from her a lengthy and impassioned speech on what an absolutely evil bastard he was.
…. a general crime of doing anything, or communicating any material, which is threatening or abusive and is intended or likely to engender hatred based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender or intersex identity.
So the Koran is right out, along with the Life of Muhammad and collections of Hadith. Right?
…Dr Jennifer Cassidy is an Oxford University politics lecturer who has thoughts on what kind of books you’re allowed to have on your shelves.
I can speak from experience on how easy it can be to pass off as Ghandi quotes things that were uttered by Adolf Hitler.
* – Not counting her curious views on American missions to the moon. Said buddy has accepted that, as part of his marriage, he may only watch Apollo 13 without interruption when his bride is out of town.
Barman, a drink for the new guy.
[ Slides large glass of Night Nurse along bar. ]
ping
Bless you, sir. May keys never wear a small hole in the pocket of your second-favourite trousers.
OT, but the laughter is too good not to share.
Anybody know the guy?
I think it was Dr. Phil Jones from East Anglia University. He was talking about Stephen McIntyre of ClimateAudit to science writer Fred Pearce, he said:
Why should I give [other scientist] my data? He’s just going to try to poke holes in it.
Anybody know the guy? A quick Google does not turn up anybody.
That may have been the Mr. Hockey Stick, Michael Mann.
I’ll try to remember to return here later when I have more time.
[…] the laughter is too good not to share.
She’s sporting a lovely pearl necklace. I wonder if he gave it to her?
[ Bad Steve E, Bad ]
Ah, East Anglia. The release of their emails, to me, was a torpedo below the waterline to my belief about global
coolingwarmingclimate change.In particular, they had tasked a computer geek with compiling the temperature data they had collected into one grand array of numbers, recorded through the years; data that would surely prove their case.
In email after email, said geek kept asking for better data, because the ones he were given simply could not be correlated. As I recall, they seemed to take on a more desperate tone as he realized just how much of a dog’s dinner the data were.
[ Bad Steve E, Bad ]
[ Reaches under bar for spray-bottle of hamster urine. ]
There is a “shoot the Gestapo agent to prove you’re not one” paradigm that has been used endlessly to establish credibility on the left. The argument runs “See, I condemn the evil of this evil evil-doer within my particular world view over here, thus establishing that I’m an objective, thoughtful observer and not a mindless ideologue. Now when I defend this other atrocious excuse for a human being, you are obligated to believe me”.
So I take it that showing up at Ibrox with a placard denouncing ‘Gers fans as a lot of Prod shite wha couldnae find their ane ba’s would be legally (as well as physically) hazardous?
G’aun Hibs.
Um, are you having a stroke?
The ammount of resources needed to support various academics range from physicists, who require the whole world down to mathematicians who only need paper, pencils, erasers and a wastebasket.
Then there are philosphers who dispense with the eraser and the wastebasket.
Lastly the Whiny Studies folk who need only a bad attitude and a chip for their shoulder, both of which are self installed.
I have a long-standing interest in the Russian Civil War, focusing on the war part of it. But politics necessarily intrudes from time to time. I’ve never had much time for Communism, but the brutality of all the core Bosheviks (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky etc) was uniform.
What gets me is how many modern Anarchists have a love of Nestor Makhno. A man who managed to combine the utter brutality of Lenin without even the superficial charm or intelligence. A man who happily murdered people based on race (especially Germans), wealth and birth. A man whose concept of economics — which was literally to plunder and murder those who had more, with no concept of what the end game of that would be — makes Lenin’s look positively sensible. He would rank with Pol Pot as one of the worst humans to ever live.
And yet quite educated people will happily admit to Makhno being one of their heroes. Well, “educated”.
What’s the betting she hasn’t read The Bell Curve?
I’ve read it. I have it on my bookshelf, too. It is one of the three treatises on sociology I’ve read for which I have any regard whatsoever. (The other two were written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and E. Franklin Frazier.)
Maybe I’ll reread now with the motivation supplied by this “politics” lecturer.
I denounce myself, of course.
. . .’Gers fans as a lot of Prod shite wha couldnae find their ane ba’s . . . G’aun Hibs.
. . .
Um, are you having a stroke?
Well, given the ranGERS and the HIBernianS, the local accents do get just a bit involved.
. . .three treatises on sociology . . . The other two were written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and E. Franklin Frazier.
. . . . . . . Well, Do give the titles, so we can go find ’em too . . .
Unfortunately this is nothing new. 40 years ago I tried to attend a lecture by Hans Eysenck at Melbourne Uni. Wilson hall was filled with shouting screeching agitators who blew whistles and yelled as soon as he stood up. The irony (and shame) of this in front of the “Search for Truth” https://www.flickr.com/photos/adonline/2262842563 behind the stage was extreme. These people are presumably the teachers and university academics of today. It’s very satisfying to see them complaining now as university funds dry up.
. . . . . . . Well, Do give the titles, so we can go find ’em too . . .
You got it.
Moynihan’s Report can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/y7qax43e
Frazier wrote a number of books, but I think the best was his doctoral thesis, “The Negro Family in the United States.” available free at Archive.org: https://tinyurl.com/yaw4cnvg
I recommend using Calibre, an ebook management application, with which you can download the latter directly.
HTH!