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.
This Middlebury thing I find disturbing. I have/had a good friend back in my old neighborhood growing up who went there, met her husband there, and her oldest daughter is supposed to graduate from there once they figure out the COVID-19 logistics. I always thought of it as a benign little lib-arts ski country school. Never thought the place was some sort of hotbed of radicalism. I am FB friends with my friend’s mom as my friend herself is a tad more introverted. Every time I see her mom post something about Middlebury I just shake my head, though it’s never anything radical. But what does grandma really know? And now my friend’s son is heading to college to…wait for it…Oberlin. These were normal, middle class people. Granted, normal people whose grandparents left them a good bit of money…I think. A good bit but not a fortune. I think the son is going on a music scholarship but still, it’s creepy to me. These are people I spent a great deal of time with. That I (thought I) knew real well. We spent hours riding around town together, swimming, tennis, beach, church. Nearly dated. Her twin brother and I were best friends as youngsters, though after high school he got animal-lover weird and failed to launch. If I see her at the reunion we are still expecting to have later in the year, I think it’s going to be really, really weird.
WTP:
Weird, then? No hauf sae muckle as ma stroke. Couldna move doon ane side. An whaes wi the sudden rule aboot trews inna bar, Davie?
An whaes wi the sudden rule aboot trews inna bar, Davie?
Ehn, lower half in general, I think, so the kilt will be fine . . .
That was non-apocryphal Benjamin Jowett, “if it’s knowledge, I know it,” Master of bally old Balliol College
Via Wikiquote, apparently it’s from the opening verse of “The Masque of B-ll–l” https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/masque-b-ll-l :
First come I. My name is J-W-TT.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.
Fascinating.
And yet it needs to be said.
so the kilt will be fine . . .
Perhaps in preference to the more modern Scottish attire- the jobbie catcher?
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/pub-accused-snobbery-after-banning-21390893
Today’s word is premium.
Perhaps in preference to the more modern Scottish attire- the jobbie catcher?
—Or definitely also the society of sunburnt and frozen ankles, which was rather more likely the main target given that the pub is clearly not being the least bit “snobbish” . . . .
Totally in parallel, in the greater SF bay area and nearby Nevada, the exact same has occurred for the exact same reasons.
—The background is:
A) Yea back awhile, local actual artists do transient art pieces on an SF beach.
B) Given lack of room, Etc, the event moves out into Nevada, and becomes Burning Man.
C) After some bit, a great majority of the Burning Man founders and artists move on to Other Stuff—whatever, by inclination—but by that point, the hipsters and other wannabees have found out about Burning Man and have crashed the party in the futile hope that they might get mistaken for resembling any actual artists, the ones not even showing up any more.
D) Oh, By The Way, the main way in and out of the Burning Man desert location is through Reno and the Lake Tahoe area, and that would be how the hipsters started congealing there as well.
D1) That area has always has a major interest in and support of tourism, come spend money in the just over the border Nevada casinos and their hotels, come see Lake Tahoe, did we mention those casinos with attached hotels, Etc.
. . . . . That area has always has a major interest in and support of tourism . . . . where hipsters and that ilk don’t go in as tourists, and have rather demonstrated zero interest in supporting the local environment/being as the locals do, Etc.
And it all boiled over in 2018.
Yes, the Reno/Tahoe area is interested in and completely supportive of Tourists . . . . . . . . . . . . Or if one wants to move in and be as a local, do that too . . . . . . . . .
If the society of mildewface, combover, and sunburnt and frozen ankles learns to grow up and be seen with the adults and other functioning people, then they too can blend in with everyone else because they will completely and unobtrusively blend in with the adults . . . .
If.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/comments/gdwde0/they_forced_us_to_learn_neopronouns_in_health/
Meanwhile, in the Prime Minstrel’s Canada.
Come here for the (incredulous) laughs, leave pondering the logistics of harvesting hamster urine…
disingenuous recreational scolding.
That.
pondering the logistics of harvesting hamster urine…
It’s an art more than a science.
[ Pause. ]
Can I freshen your drink?
That.
Well, it’s so contrived and dishonest, and gleeful, and invariably self-flattering. And they think we won’t notice.
“And they think we won’t notice”
Their allies in the “news” and media don’t seem to notice, and as we all know they are the ones who define reality. So what if it’s not a reality shared by rational people?
There’s something uniquely obnoxious about professions of concern, supposedly for others, that are, in reality, just self-exaltation and petty malice. And again, it’s the assumption that, being credulous, you won’t cotton on. Or, being complicit, you won’t give the game away.
[ Edited. ]
So what if it’s not a reality shared by rational people?
Ah, but perception IS reality.
Mebbe there are tapeworms involved and being included out of politeness.
“Perhaps in preference to the more modern Scottish attire- the jobbie catcher?“
Never heard them called that. Keech*-catchers is how I’ve always known them. It goes back to the days of plus-fours, actually.
*Pronounced with the usual Scotch “ch”, of course. Many cheap “quiche”/“keech” jokes are to be had here in Jockland. Assuming you can find anyone who eats quiche.
“Meanwhile, in the Prime Minstrel’s Canada.”
Ooh, I’d have marked that down. Zie always has blue hair.
Never heard them called that. Keech*-catchers is how I’ve always known them.
As so often, I understand barely half of what goes on here.
And they think we won’t notice.
As Theodore Dalrymple observed, the purpose of communist propaganda was not to deceive the people; it was to humiliate them.
Keech*-catchers is how I’ve always known them.
Round my way, we call them Kecks.
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.
Eleanor Penny, “writer, journalist, editor, poet, broadcaster and teacher”, has decided to weigh in on the debate, kicking off with this summary of The Bell Curve:
[T]he authors argue that blood will out, that biology always claims the day. This is the myth of meritocracy filtered through a vicious kind of social darwinism to retroactively excuse the fact that wealth and power are both hoarded in the lairs of a slim minority of people; those who have it must surely derserve [sic] it, else biology’s destiny would have conspired to fling them on the trash heap with the rest of the unfortunates. It is, of course, screamingly racist. The chronic entanglement of race and class, warped through the skull-fondling obsessions of a neo-eugenicist ends with an argument that a) Black people are genetically distinct from their white counterparts and b) that they are less intelligent. Its not hard to recognise the familiar reheated cadences of the race scientist, attempting to carve out scientific foundations for a system of social dominance.
Not really a betting man, but I think even I’d favour the odds that she’s never even seen a copy of The Bell Curve leave alone read it – and that’s to say nothing of her actually coming close to understanding it.
Hey, at least you have trousers on, which is more than I can say for…
[ Glances around room.]
Some people.
These mustard yellow Y-fronts have been in the family since 1973 I’ll have you know!
Eleanor Penny, “writer, journalist, editor, poet, broadcaster and teacher”, has decided to weigh in on the debate,
I tend to think that one should raise an eyebrow at purported book reviews, or, God help us, critiques, that don’t actually quote any of the book in question – not one sentence – thereby leaving plenty of room for straw, wild misconstrual and breathlessly perverse assertions. And more to the point, I think one should be suspicious of the person who presumes to write in such a way, while audibly applauding themselves, and clearly expecting to get away with it because they generally do.
The words bad faith are apt more often than not. Also, in this case, fatuous bint.
I tend to think that one should raise an eyebrow at purported book reviews, or, God help us, critiques, that don’t actually quote any of the book in question
A milestone in my political education was the realization that most of the book reviews in the “best” newspapers were little more than hatchet jobs that misrepresented what the books actually said.
One for the ‘alarming-yet-adorable’ file.
Hmm. I read most of The Bell Curve. Found it heavy going. Dense.
But then I was laboring under the handicap of a resume only including three years Physics and Math at Berkeley, two years computer science and software engineering, and thirty years technical product development in Silly Valley.
Stupid, really. I’m sure I’d have a better grasp of Murray’s arguments if I just trusted the words of a poet.
I left it lying around, hoping to get a reaction from my very liberal daughter. But she merely raised one eyebrow. I’ve noticed she’s handicapped in her radicalism by her Bio degree from that School Down the River in Boston.
David, it’s not necessary to understand what goes on here, as long as the patrons pay their tabs. You DO make them pay, at least eventually, don’t you?
I myself intend to honor that fistful of IOUs as soon as my investments pay off. You have a nice spot near the front of the queue, right behind my bookie, my three ex-wives, and the IRS. Oh, I almost forgot the California tax guys. They’re in there somewhere, but I tend to forget about them because they have this great trick where they just take whatever they think you owe them, right from your bank account, and make you negotiate to get some of it back.
You should look into that, I’m sure they run seminars or something. So no worries, right?
You DO make them pay, at least eventually, don’t you?
[ Slams fist into palm of hand. ]
Then they’ll pay. Then they’ll all pay.
[ Stares into middle distance. ]
I’m sorry, what was I saying…?
One for the ‘alarming-yet-adorable’ file.
From the link…
Oh please. Can there be nothing which elicits a “thank god everyone is ok, let’s laugh now and move on” from society and its government? The kid is FIVE for chrissake!
I’m sorry, what was I saying…?
Uh oh, he’s finally breaking everyone! Someone find a black market hairdresser and make a double Night Nurse STAT! Put Bosch on the TV and K-Pop on the radio – NOW! – before he looks at the Scold-O-Matic and dusty sausage in the corner and gets any ideas!
Gene Wolfe (PBUH) once remarked that it was a mistaken assumption that those who wished to be writers should invariably be encouraged, and not discouraged. That Laurie Penny is but one prominent example of a well established species weighs in favor of his argument.
We are going to credibly threaten that we will break stuff and hurt people, we will set things on fire and smash windows.
This is asymmetric | unconventional | insurgent warfare 101. It demonstrates that the government is incapable of protecting the population (or the administration cannot protect the regular students from the a$$holes). Therefore the existing government (administration) should be thrown out and you should let us run things. Otherwise, there will be additional demonstrations that the government (administration) cannot protect you – from us. The bombings will continue until morale improves.
Bosch, accompanied by K-Pop.
Now there’s a thought.
– Seinfeld + Beethoven late quartets
– The Wire + Taylor Swift
– Dr. Who (Tom Baker) + Queen
– Gov. Newsom’s covid briefings + Ravel’s Bolero
[squealing sounds of mental synchromesh failing]
I’m thinking of making a library of tweets like this titled ‘Why the left lose’. They just don’t get it.
I seem to recall architecture like this featuring in a few Friday linkfests:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/06/toilet-kitchen-sydney-studio-apartment-rent-surry-hills-australia
I tend to think that one should raise an eyebrow at purported book reviews, or, God help us, critiques, that don’t actually quote any of the book in question – not one sentence …
Just so.
And yet while such a common sense rule might seem like a sound basis for major news outlets to weed out emotionally overwrought bloggers with fringe political leanings from others who can actually lay a more credible claim to being a writer, a journalist, an editor, a poet, a broadcaster or a teacher, apparently this is not the case.
Here is Eleanor Penny reviewing the Political Week and again commenting on politics here, both for Sky News, and here on Politics Live for the BBC.
They would no doubt argue that she is both a journalist and editor – which, I suppose, is the case. Except it’s only for Novara Media. And that simply begs the question as to why they think such an obviously amateurish outfit as NM should be taken any more seriously than your average student’s union committee.
Maybe they have a MeToo / Joe Biden-like fondness for Novara Media‘s young women editors or maybe they think because they’re young they will somehow appeal to other young people.
Except even amongst a Left-leaning 18-24 year old electorate, their views aren’t even close to representative of that generation as a whole. Certainly, they do not seem to be any more representative than the editors at Good News magazine would be, and I’ve never once seen them invited to take part on BBC Newsnight, Question Time.
Still, maybe it’s the spoken word poetry on climate change that first made those producers think – Now that’s exactly the kind of fatuous bint we need to book for our politics show?
they do not seem to be any more representative than the editors at Good News magazine would be, and I’ve never once seen them invited to take part on BBC Newsnight, Question Time.
Heh. Well, quite. It’s faintly hilarious how these creatures frame themselves, and each other, as heroically marginalised and struggling to be heard, while seemingly on speed-dial at the BBC and appearing in the mainstream media with remarkable ease and frequency.
A few years ago, the Today programme, one of the BBC’s flagship institutions, gave Laurie Penny – apparently the more charismatic of the Penny sisters – half an hour of airtime to read at length from her own blog and make endless, often bewildering pronouncements, essentially unchallenged, in a broadcast pitched as a “fresh, provocative and fiery debate.” Quite how one can have a debate with no contrary point of view, and no prospect of factual correction, remains something of a mystery. (Naturally, the Guardian described this uncontested airing of far-left boilerplate and random, disjointed sentences as “the best argument for the licence fee yet put forward.”)
Laurie Penny – apparently the more charismatic of the Penny sisters
Meow. 🙂
I heard there’s some new show or movie out called ‘Penny Dreadful’. Is it about Laurie and Eleanor?
…why they think such an obviously amateurish outfit as NM should be taken any more seriously than your average student’s union committee.
Given that one of the leading lights of Novara – Ash Sarkar – is an admitted communist who is regularly given a platform on national TV to espouse her extremist views, then you might have a major clue as to the political sympathies of the said media.
I’m thinking of making a library of tweets like this titled ‘Why the left lose’. They just don’t get it.
They have been making steady progress over the last many decades in their long march through the institutions. That’s why you are seeing enough of it to make a library. And they’ve even got elements of the “true” conservative right voting with them. I really don’t think the left is the one that’s not getting it.
They have been making steady progress over the last many decades in their long march through the institutions. That’s why you are seeing enough of it to make a library.
Agreed.
At the risk of your head exploding, check Imgur lately. The “most viral” is frequently full of Wuhan Flu nonsense from the right, with a chorus of monkeys applauding their bravery in the comments.
While pursuing serious covid info, I stumbled across this headline at RCP
“Dems in Top Senate Races Duck”
Which provoked some amusing man vs. bird imagery.
Sadly there were actually more words in the title, some gibberish about Biden.
Brevity, folks. Brevity.
Sadly there were actually more words in the title, some gibberish about Biden
Gibberish and Biden go together like.. like…. two things that go together really well.
*sigh*
I got nothin’
Sadly there were actually more words in the title, some gibberish about Biden.
Brevity, folks. Brevity.
Actual Boston Globe from the waning days of the Jimmy Carter administration: “More mush from the wimp”
Eleanor Penny, “writer, journalist, editor, poet, broadcaster and teacher”, has decided to weigh in on the debate,
Note how fellow Clown World inhabitant Owen Jones repeats Francis Wheen’s notoriously inaccurate summary of the book, rather than anything that’s actually in the book. Again, it seems unlikely that Dear Wee Owen has actually read the thing that he pretends offends him so much. (And indeed, when asked directly whether he has read it, no answer is forthcoming.)
And when a construal of a book’s content and intent is so removed from reality, and ignores so many pointed and repeated qualifications in the book, and its scrupulously moderate, cautious tone, I think one has to assume, not error, but motivated dishonesty.
Eleanor Penny, “writer, journalist, editor, poet, broadcaster and teacher”, has decided to weigh in on the debate, kicking off with this summary of The Bell Curve:
Having read The Bell Curve, I can summarize its thesis in one sentence: social pathologies correlate more strongly with low intelligence than with any other single variable.