His Creative Temperament

Another angry leftist wife-beater. Is someone keeping count?

Loud woke piety, like loud Marxoid chest-puffing, does tend to function as a flashing red light. Unless, of course, the symbolic “violence” of “cultural appropriation” actually is much, much worse than mere assault and attempted strangulation. 

Answers on a postcard, please. 

“Feels extremely fascist.”

Much tutting. You mustn’t notice things.

I think James Lileks said that when your world is a round hole, your mind becomes a lathe that shaves everything down to fit it. 

I think it’s the fact that those doing the tutting – the ones who claim that even acknowledging a fairly obvious aspect of reality is “extremely fascist in outlook and intention” – probably imagine themselves as The Good Guys. When it seems every bit as possible that the tutting they indulge in, the mannered avoidance, is why many social problems persist and are likely to get worse. 

As if observations that sound insufficiently flattering, or in some way inegalitarian, couldn’t – and mustn’t – ever be true. 

Let’s check in later when the necrosis sets in.

The cadaverine stench is what keeps a relationship going, you know.

They want to police culture but they don’t understand how it works.

Yes, that. It’s a ludicrous, philistine conceit. And as above, it’s always applied in a glaringly selective, hypocritical way. 

As I’ve said before, the dogmatic scolds who bang on about “cultural appropriation” rarely display much understanding of culture or how it comes about. Perhaps they imagine that the world would be richer and more pious without Akira Kurosawa’s vivid reworkings of Shakespeare, or his ‘appropriation’ of American band music of the 30s and 40s, and without Kurosawa’s own films inspiring Sergio Leone and George Lucas, etc. The riffs and copying, the to-and-fro, are to a very large extent what culture is.

Of course, they may just be lying, po-faced wankers who get off on scolding people. 

You can’t fix a problem if you can’t even say what’s causing it.

Well, quite. Which is why the agonising over litter inequality is so neatly illustrative of the evasion. An evasion well practised, almost to the point of reflex. 

“…tacitly proceeding from position that disorder and dysfunction are evenly distributed throughout the population”

It’s as if the leftists in question – Dr Matthews, our Urban Studies lecturer, and the authors of the report he cites – had only ever perceived human behaviour via ancient stone carvings, or at a great distance. Say, through telescopes on some distant planet. 

And so, they demand “fairer outcomes in street cleanliness,” despite the enormous existing efforts – five-fold favouritism – to do precisely that, and while carefully avoiding the single most obvious cause of the problem. The result of which is a supposedly serious report on the subject, in which the words drop and littering simply don’t appear, at all. Thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.

It’s comical, practically surreal. 

I bet Sam Coppinger doesn’t like leaving his car in certain parts of town though.

Heh. But of course. 

[ Slides bowl of ostensibly toenail-free peanuts to sk60. ]

You do have to wonder how these people reconcile their pronouncements with how they actually live, every day, and with the world in general. 

It is lucky they don’t starve up there.

Should that happen, at least we can be fairly confident that they denounced their own “whiteness” beforehand.

And isn’t that what matters?

Seeing that in its fullness is pretty much the theme of this blog.

It has cropped up from, er, time to time.

He gets quite pissy when I point out that his daughter speaks impeccable English, which means at home he knows damn well that there’s a difference and what it means for her life prospects.

Absolutely. And yet in some quarters the pretence is near ubiquitous. For instance,

Dr Strouse tells us what it is we need to do. We, he says, “need to think critically about the conventions that govern academic speech.” Well, okay. But what about the teenagers who haven’t mastered even basic standard English and who are excused from even trying, for fear that any correction will upset them? How “critically” will they be thinking – say, about their employment prospects?

While Dr Strouse is revelling in how exotic and ethnic his classroom sounds, are his students narrowing their options in the job market? Unless it turns out that in the real world every employer wants their company’s memos and public literature, and their customer interactions, to include lots of double negatives, unfinished words, mispronunciation, and mangled tenses. Oh, and aks instead of ask. That always looks professional.

If a common impression given by “African American Vernacular English” is of imprecision and parochialism, and of someone not in full possession of their own thoughts, as Dr Strouse acknowledges, then it seems an odd thing to encourage in class, at a university. Why would someone spend a small fortune on an education that leaves them sounding uneducated? (An impression, incidentally, that Dr Strouse evidently tries hard to avoid regarding his own ostentatiously educated, and therefore statusful, self.) But sounding cartoonishly ghetto is the way to get ahead, apparently. For other, browner people.

And,

In short, then, students with brown skin needn’t be articulate, verbally self-possessed, or precise in their thoughts. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. And by the time the real-world consequences of this “social justice” posturing become difficult to avoid, Dr Inoue will have been paid – and will be merrily exploiting the next batch of suckers.

I go on to use the term race-hustling parasites, which doesn’t seem unfair.