Two Chaps, One Dog
An open thread, in which to share links and bicker. Oh, and here’s Dennis Prager talking to Douglas Murray about the rot of academia, the cultivation of resentment, the importance of gratitude, and the rise of childish worldviews:
Have at it, me hearties.
A while back I binge watched a British show about expensive homebuilding called Grand Designs. A very common theme was the Council telling the homebuilder that their modernist design needed to be more traditional or that their traditional design needs to be more modernist. My impression is that it is a Council of sadists. Another surprisingly common theme was someone spending a humongous sum of money on a plot of land and then calmly explaining that it took 5-7 years for the Council to give them permission to build.
I’m surprised the Council being exposed as busybody sadists hasn’t resulted in a violent revolution.
Douglas Murray is serious, brave, important and very, very bright. Intellectually, he’s operating on an entirely different level from Dennis Prager and, as a result, there are a few somewhat embarrassing moments in this conversation. But it’s still worth watching.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Said this very same sort of thing, not openly nor in some attention seeking manner, but privately to my ‘conservative’ Presbyterian doctor 25 years ago. I was told to laugh at it and if I thought it was a real problem I probably needed to speak to a psychiatrist.
Also find it rather odd that Prager hadn’t heard of 4’33” until just recently but, whatever. Y’all getting what you’ve closed your eyes to for decades.
Another surprisingly common theme was someone spending a humongous sum of money on a plot of land and then calmly explaining that it took 5-7 years for the Council to give them permission to build.
Ah, Blighty. I remember quite enjoying Grand Designs, though I haven’t seen it in years, assuming it’s still around.
Douglas Murray is… brave…
I did like his answer to that assessment when Prager said the same. I.e., that it isn’t bravery, more a dislike of lies. Being expected to lie, and lie repeatedly, as if one had no probity, no capacity to demur, is insulting. It therefore offers some, as it were, fuel for outspokenness.
@WTP
In fairness to Prager (my comment just before yours notwithstanding), I don’t think he had just heard of 4’33”. Rather, he had recently come across it on a CD, which struck him as even more ludicrous than the idea of public performance. For what it’s worth (and I think DM was gently suggesting something along the same lines), I see 4’33” as the musical equivalent of Duchamp’s Fontaine; it’s making a point about what music is (and possibly isn’t). And while countless mediocre hacks have simply repeated Duchamp’s point (and continue to do so to this day), Cage has been spared that to a great extent because the sheer gall that would be required to present 6’27” or 3’51” or whatever of silence would be probably too much for even the most shameless charlatan.
@David
He’s a gentleman so of course he will demur if someone tells him that he’s courageous (or brave, whatever). But in reality he isn’t animated by a dislike of lies as opposed to being brave; it’s his dislike of lies that makes him brave.
It’s his dislike of lies that makes him brave.
That’s sort of the point I was hoping to make. Albeit ineptly. 🙂
@George
While that’s not how I recall what DP said coming across (and too lazy to wade through the dialogue again to find it), that certainly would make more sense to me. It’s a fairly well-known…uh…piece…and I find the in-passing discussion of it interesting. I’ve never dug too deeply into Cage, partly because I would prefer not to have my illusions about 4’33” shattered. I like to think of it as a form of commentary on the ultimate absurdity of minimalism and something of an Emperor’s Clothes itself. Similar with Duchamp’s…whatever…though that was more Dada-ism…or whatever. I simultaneously find it interesting and yet I really don’t care. Which I see as the point. I’m a bit of a silly optimistic idealist that way. Probably the only way.
Mr Prager’s attempt at a 1960s Leeds accent made me chuckle.
Mr Prager’s attempt at a 1960s Leeds accent made me chuckle
Actually reminded me of a short conversation I had with a gentleman while getting my dog out of the truck at a filling station outside of Gainesville, GA a few years back…
Gentleman: Wakinnadohzat?
Me (quickly translating to something resembling American English): Him? Oh, he’s a Manchester Terrier.
G: Canneecheeaskirl?
Me: Tree one? Sure, but he hasn’t caught one yet.
I like the bit about Sainsbury’s around 29:00, though I feel that DM missed an opportunity to drive home a basic truth revealed by the “racists should buy their chocolates elsewhere” campaign. To wit: if racists existed in any real numbers, it would be expensive to chase them off in such a way. It’s only because this group is so vanishingly small that retailers feel free to make such grand gestures. They can score cheap social credit points with tens of thousands, while losing a few dozen customers at most.
It’s only because this group is so vanishingly small that retailers feel free to make such grand gestures.
Quite. The preening reveals the lie.
::::snort:::
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8851599/Emirati-minister-tolerance-accused-sexual-assault-Hay-literary-festival-organiser.html
Whatever organic connection the Hay Festival might originally have had with books and the people who read them, for years now it’s been a cultural NGO or a Davos for the StephenFry-tellegensia. When this NGO and its successful brand concept of Intellectual Openness is bought by oil sheiks, nobody can be deluded that it’s because the sheiks are book lovers or intellectually open or any of that. How surprising to find the Minister for Tolerance treating the NGO manager and her principles as bought and paid for and available to use as he sees fit.
Election simulation. Dumb bastard misunderstood the meeting agenda. It can happen, I suppose.
How surprising…
Every time a story like this comes up I’m reminded of the tale of one particular German apostate from Islam. The short version is that she met an incredibly charming Arab, moved in with him, became alienated from everyone she knew who questioned the relationship, converted, married, bore him a child, and eventually (several years later,IIRC) followed him back to the Gulf state he came from… which is where he ceased bothering with the charade. Fast forward to her finally managing to secret herself away to the nearest German embassy, and spilling her guts about everything that had happened to the older woman who received her. The older woman looked at her and said, “Why don’t you girls ever listen!”
I can’t decide whether Prager is thick, getting bad advice, or controlled opposition. He’s the one primarily responsible for this meme that Big Social Media has to decide whether they’re publishers or platforms because they can’t be both, when the governing legislation is clear, has been around for 25 years, and means they can do exactly what they’re doing. He wasted heaven knows how much money on a frivolous lawsuit against Facebook/YouTube that any competent lawyer should have told him was going to get dismissed at initial motions.
In the mean time, people all over are crying “Publishers XOR platforms! Public commons! Repeal S.230!” with no idea whatsoever of the legal reasoning behind s.230 or why it’s absolutely necessary.
Prager does good work in his little US civics videos but he’s doing incalculable damage with this one issue.
Daniel,
When a person can’t use the internet withOUT Google and Google is free to quash your ass for not being woke, they have a monopoly that needs to be broken up.
“The New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating on a Zoom video chat between members of the New Yorker and WNYC radio last week. Toobin says he did not realize his video was on.”
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/407825/
‘Our betters’.
Less dramatic than some of the other news cuttings posted up between the salted peanuts and the old dartboard behind the bar there, but possibly more significant in the long run (for those at the British end of the bar, near the greyish ‘sausage’ rolls / fly mattress).
Joanna Williams in the The Spectator ‘Where have all the male teachers gone?’:
[T]the ‘exodus of male teachers’ from secondary schools that is raising concern. The proportion of men in secondary schools has fallen year on year since 2010 and now stands at just 35.5 per cent.
And:
White boys who have free school meals achieve an average point score of 28.5 at GCSE, compared with a national average of 46.5. The gender imbalance in the teaching profession may offer one clue as to why boys are falling so far behind girls. [ … ] The achievements of famous women are showcased in school poster displays, inspirational women speakers are brought in to speak at assemblies, and girls-only science projects are standard fare. Schools treat girls like an oppressed minority when, in reality, it is boys who are underachieving.
The Times Education Supplement‘s take on the same issue ‘Pay freezes blamed for huge drop in male teachers’:
The decline of male teachers has been fuelled by a significant fall in the proportion of white male teachers in schools, with the number in secondary schools falling by more than 12,800 since 2010 – a decline of 17 per cent, according to an analysis by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) thinktank.
Overall, this means the proportion of men teaching in secondary schools has fallen year-on-year since 2010, hitting its lowest level last year when 35.5 per cent of teachers were male, the analysis shows. But figures in primary schools have stagnated over the last five years to 14.1 per cent.
However, the proportion of black and minority ethnic (BME) male teachers has risen to 17 per cent – which, for the first time, is broadly representative of the wider population at 16 per cent.
I may have missed it, but, surprisingly?, The Guardian appears not to have considered it worth reporting on at all.
When a person can’t use the internet withOUT Google and Google is free to quash your ass for not being woke
I’m sorry, but neither of those things is true. And therein lies the problem; the people most affected by Big Tech’s ideological biases are also the most ignorant of how the Internet works. The result is a populist mob demanding that the government step in and institute changes by force that will be much, much worse than the current state of affairs, all because the mob simply has no idea what it’s shouting about.
It’s really a very strange phenomenon. It’s the equivalent of a mob shouting about how evil Ford is and how Ford is restricting consumer choice by only selling Ford vehicles, and demanding that government step in and Do Something about Ford’s evil monopoly. And they’re doing it while standing in the middle of an auto mall.
Peter Whittle and Philip Kiszely discuss the predictable trajectories of woke drama.
If there are historical dramas, they’re not really about the past… It’s the present in fancy dress.
I shall watch the interview later as I am not in a position to do so at the moment. But it’s interesting how that snippet you’ve quoted mirrors the following, which I wrote on this blog about a year ago:
“I have thought for some time the only history that we are allowed to experience is the one a narrow clique of writers, directors, and casting editors wishes we had, as opposed to the one we actually had. Modern words and ideas in the mouths of people who would have found such views anathema.
Modern words and ideas in the mouths of people who would have found such views anathema.
I suppose it’s a result of culture being produced largely, in some areas almost exclusively, by left-of-centre people, with the same left-of-centre conceits and assumptions, and all of the vanities and blind spots that go with them. And as we’ve seen many times, people on the left seem much more inclined to signal their political subscriptions, regardless of incongruity. Hence the ham-fisted shoehorning and bizarre anachronisms.
It’s the present in fancy dress.
Puts me in mind of a production of the Scottish Play in a post-nuclear-war setting, because (its director averred) audiences couldn’t relate to medieval Scotland.
Whereas just everybody knows exactly what their world will be like after an exchange of ICBMs.
On John Cage, let me be the first wiseass at this establishment to quote Igor Stravinsky’s review, “I look forward to more works, of major length.” (A smackdown worthy of W.S. Gilbert or James Whistler.)
On Toobin, this is a treat for minds of a certain cast:
https://mobile.twitter.com/rysimmons/status/1318275865978036225
Re: … the predictable trajectories of woke drama.
We Wuz Peter Pan ‘n Alice in Wonderland Too!
We Wuz Peter Pan ‘n Alice in Wonderland Too!
Ooh, it’s time to play Literary Racial Mashups™.
Next up Huckleberry Finn and Of Mice and Men wherein a young recalcitrant black boy travels the Mississippi River on a raft with a mentally challenged, naive giant.
You’re perfectly entitled to think that mashing up Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan is a stupid idea and if that’s your problem with the film, then fine. But that clearly isn’t the problem of a lot of the people posting comments under that trailer. It’s a good thing that people of non-European racial background should nonetheless feel that they belong to this culture and that they have a stake in it. Would you be happier if they all pissed away the rest of their lives keepin’ it real? And if encouraging that sense of belonging involves a bit of imaginative casting, then I for one think it’s well worth it.
Cultural appropriation a one-way street as usual.
I hope they cast real Indians.
I’m sorry, but neither of those things is true.
Google now resembles the vertical monopoly of Ma Bell. Banning a person from YouTube is like old AT&T cutting your long distance and removing your leased-phone. Good luck using the “competition.”
Someone should think twice before having grandma look after the grandkids.
Would you be happier if they all pissed away the rest of their lives keepin’ it real? And if encouraging that sense of belonging involves a bit of imaginative casting, then I for one think it’s well worth it.
How condescending of you.
How condescending of you.
What a stupid, glib reply. First of all, my comment was provoked by the literal Nazis (note the references to the ‘Austrian painter’) in the comments under the trailer. Secondly, there’s nothing condescending about wanting to encourage genuine integration. Thirdly, I’m all for the casting of anybody in any role; the moment we start watching any film or play we suspend our disbelief, so a blonde Othello is fine by me because it’s just one more irrelevant detail. It’s a civilisation that we should be in the business of preserving, not some perverse ideal of racial appropriateness. And yes, it has to work both ways. All identitarians, of the left-wing or right-wing persuasion, are dicks.
What a stupid, glib reply.
Not as stupid as your belief that a movie is going to save “them” from “pissing away the rest of their lives keepin’ it real?” “They” are real adult people who don’t need your sanctimonious posturing on “genuine integration.”
Funny how “keepin’ it real” becomes so important to those very people when accusations of “Acting White” arise… A lot of the Oppression is coming from right in that crab bucket with them, and no amount of identarian pandering from Hollywood or anywhere else is gonna stop that.
Next up Huckleberry Finn and Of Mice and Men wherein a young recalcitrant black boy travels the Mississippi River on a raft with a mentally challenged, naive giant.
That actually sounds like a really good mashup.
Also,
George, Steve: Hush! You’ll wake the barkeep.
Hush! You’ll wake the barkeep.
[ Bangs on wall. ]
Lousy kids, with their jeans and their rap music.
I’m not so thick as to think that one movie is going to save anyone from anything. What I do think is that, over time, a culture that doesn’t insist on sticking people in racially appropriate boxes (something which the ‘woke’ are just as guilty of as ‘traditional’ racists) will reap the benefits in terms of social cohesion and of just plain happiness. A black English kid is no less ‘appropriate’ in the role of Peter Pan than a white American kid voicing Christopher Robin. Both are just fine. And a black American kid would be fine too. You know what annoys the hell out of me in the ‘debate’ about casting Cleopatra? It’s that people think it even matters what colour she was. We know that the idea that she was a black African is ahistorical nonsense but even if she had been black that shouldn’t mean that she has to be played by a black actress.
George, Steve: Hush! You’ll wake the barkeep.
Good advice. I think I’ll follow it. Apologies to the barkeep.
Apologies to the barkeep too. And for my first, intemperate words to Steve (and they were my first; my initial comment wasn’t directed at him at all.)
And for my first, intemperate words to Steve (and they were my first; my initial comment wasn’t directed at him at all.)
My apologies to you too George for misunderstanding your comment.
[ Air hugs and handshakes all around ]
We know that the idea that she was a black African is ahistorical
What “we” are you talking about? While everyone with even a passing acquaintance with American history knows George Washington was white, so Hamilton is just a novelty, relatively few people know that the Cleopatra of plays and movies was both the 7th to carry that name and was Greek. Not Egyptian nor sub-Saharan African.
Personally, I have no issue with going with the best actor acting the role – with caveats. For example, what with 40% of young people having no clue what the Holocaust was, to remake Schnidler’s List and casting black and Korean actors into the roles of the Jews would severely cripple the audience and be a slap in the face to the Jewish community.
[ Air hugs and handshakes all around ]
[ Looks up from game, wipes tear from eye. ]
@Darleen (note my return to deliberately and explicitly making it clear who I’m replying to…)
The ‘we’ I’m talking about is the ‘we’ that encompasses anybody who has ever made any sort of honest effort to learn anything about the historical period in question. I know that it’s a ‘we’ that probably excludes the overwhelming majority of people.
And I agree with you on the caveats: if the racial/ethnic dynamics are actually key to the story being told, then casting should take account of that. For that reason, Steve’s example of Huckleberry Finn is a valid one. That doesn’t have to mean slavishly (excuse the term 😊) colour matching actors to roles but at least being aware that the coherence of the story itself could be affected by an insensitive choice.
Golf clap. Well played!
Election simulation. Dumb bastard misunderstood the meeting agenda. It can happen, I suppose.
Or the dumb bastard is really, really perverted.
I don’t think that a blond actor playing Othello would work, given all the references to his cclour throughout the play (‘An old black ram is tupping your white ewe’, etc). And while colour-blind casting can work perfectly well, there can also be pitfalls. I once saw a production of Lear by the RSC in which Lear, Goneril and Regan were all white, and Cordelia was black. I spent an awful lot of the play devising scenarios where that would have been possible (for instance, Cordelia being the daughter of a second wife) rather than being caught up in the action.
Facebook demonetizes Babylon Bee cuz riffing on an old Monty Python skit may “incite violence.”
No joking in Wokeistan allowed.
Regarding Cage and his 3’44.
I would certainly agree that Cage put out a lot of music where the “idea” behind the music is to some degree interesting, challenging or stimulating but the music, in execution, seems rather pointless. It simply doesn’t work. I would, however, make a case for 3’44.
I once attended an orchestral rendition of the piece (and just by making that statement, one is highlighting one of its pleasing absurdities). It was included in a concert with rather more mainstream pieces. As an experience it was odd, unsettling and, I have to say, amusing. Cage was a joker. He wasn’t being po-faced when presenting the world with 3’44. An audience is required to go through all the usual rituals (applaud when the orchestra leader comes in, applaud the conductor etc) and then sit while nothing happens. At the end the conductor bows and the end-of-perfomance rutuals are adhered to, applause, orchestra stands and is applauded etc. And during the piece you realise that silence is impossible (this was one of the aspects that Cage himself talked about). You start hearing things going on outside the hall. The audience gets increasingly fidgety as minute follows minute. Everybody feels a little bit self-concious. It’s certainly an experience that I’m glad I had.
By the way, Prager’s curt dismissal of all atonal music shows him to be something of a philistine. I understand why much of it isn’t to everyone’s taste, but there is some fine, inventive and sometimes even beautiful music to be heard that would fall under the rubric “atonal”.