Heather Mac Donald on opportunist victimhood and the inability to process satire:
That script [of campus political correctness] requires that the massive campus-diversity bureaucracy treat the delusional claims of hyperventilating students with utter seriousness. Students in the ever-expanding roster of official campus victim groups flatter themselves that by attending what is in fact the most caring, protective, and opportunity-rich institution in the history of the world, they are braving unspeakable threats to their ego and even to their physical safety.
Heresy Corner on the rather selective hand-wringing of Madeleine Bunting:
Notice how, for Maddy, the fact that the treatment of women under the Taliban was used by the US and British governments as part – if only part – of the justification for war is of greater consequence than the condition of women itself.
Ms Bunting’s appetite for sorrow will be known to regular readers.
And Jeff Goldstein distills the, er, logic of “diversity”:
You can’t end racial discrimination by ending racial discrimination. In fact, racial discrimination is the only way to prevent racial discrimination – the upshot of which is that, thanks to racial discrimination, racial discrimination is no longer a problem, provided you learn to view certain racial discrimination as non-discriminatory, and provided you learn to couch any questions about such racial discrimination as racist and discriminatory.
Because, as we’ve been told, the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology.
Update, via Anna & SDA:
As Grace Jones once said, “New graffiti, old revolutions.”
Don’t laugh. They’re “educating the world.”
Feel free to add your own.
The BBC Loves Left-wing Protests.
If Governor Brown signs SB 185 into law… the diversity bureaucracy and its political supporters in Sacramento will have scored another victory and ensured the diversocracy’s future growth — as students admitted for their race, not their academic qualifications, provide the pretext for yet more vice chancellors for equity and diversity.
I’m now a hardcore Heather MacDonald fan.
Madeleine Bunting makes me sick.
How does Berkeley get by with only 18 diversocrats? With all that oppression they have to fight on campus it can’t be enough!
the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology
Tim Blair on the Andrew Bolt Verdict:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/between_the_lines/
We’ve now witnessed a legal procedure about race involving racial differences nobody could see and words nobody could read.
“How does Berkeley get by with only 18 diversocrats?”
And UC San Diego has to scrape by, no doubt heroically, with only a handful more. But turning people into walking caricatures is a serious business. Being an identity politics cartoon is now a viable career path. As John Rosenberg noted:
And once you’ve reduced students to a racial or sexual caricature, a parody of themselves, then you can pit them against each other and try to make them paranoid.
It’s “social justice.” How could you possibly object?
Bunting should emigrate to Helmand.
Kathleen McCaffrey over at Legal Insurrection posted a link to this suberb response to a threatening legal letter from one Meghan McCain’s lawyer.
One of the highlights:
Of course, the subject matter of your letter is a fairly obvious parody to any
person of even barely functional literacy. Thus – and your client probably didn’t tell you
this – even she recognized that the posts were parodies (or “parody’s,” as she put it). At
approximately 8:25 p.m. EDT on September 17th, your client posted to her Twitter feed,
“I don’t care about parody’s(sic) or fake names – but falsely putting my name on
someone else’s writing is illegal.”
1960s redux.
“1960s redux.”
I’m sure we’d all be much happier and more prosperous with those people in charge. What? What could possibly go wrong?
1960s redux.
It’s hard to believe these people haven’t been more successful in their lives.
1960s redux
I see stupid people.
“I see stupid people.”
There’s a certain… learned unrealism.
Inanities aside, the line that stood out for me was, “If you have a ton of student debt, you should be here.” It seems quite likely that a number of the protestors are miffed because they chose a degree course that’s proved worthless in the jobs market – possibly one riddled with the same leftist bloviating. Which is to say, they wasted a great deal of time and lots of (someone else’s) money. Though perhaps they wouldn’t care to put it quite so frankly.
If you don’t want to pay back your student loan then march with us and demand more freebies!
(Paraphrasing, natch.)
More coherence from the Wall Street occupation
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/youre-a-bum-jew-jewish-man-berated-by-wall-st-protester-told-to-go-back-to-israel/
“If you don’t want to pay back your student loan then march with us and demand more freebies!”
Several protestors have announced, somewhat indignantly, that they have a Masters degree but can’t find a suitable job. Curiously, those complaining have been a little reticent regarding what their degrees are in and how useful their skills are, which may have some bearing on their employability. (Are we talking about a degree in engineering, medicine or “critical gender theory”?) And student debt crops up repeatedly in interviews and in the protestors’ demands – the spontaneous “forgiving” of “all debt,” etc. So again, I can’t help wondering whether a large number of these people are displacing their own responsibility onto others. Sort of, “I spent tens of thousands of your dollars which I promised to pay back on a course that wasn’t worth anything but which I took anyway, and now that my choices haven’t panned out, I shouldn’t ever have to pay you back. Because… well, because it’s all so unfair.”
It’s also interesting how much they seem to despise the Tea Party movement. Which is odd in a way, as the Tea Partiers aren’t keen on unaccountability and cronyism either. But then the Tea Party solution is to make the government spend within its (and taxpayers’) means; not to make it more powerful and spend even more, creating more debt, with even more control over people’s lives.
Talking of small differences in physiology, our friend Mr Harker is at it again…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/04/mixed-race-britain?commentpage=4#start-of-comments
Apparently everyone now loves ‘mixed race people’ – but the ever-vigilant Mr H has spotted a ‘subtler kind of racism’.
Thank goodness he’s keeping an eye on this sort of thing. We’d never have known otherwise.
David
They sure educated me:
I learned having a clearly set out goal doesn’t help the cause
4:54 “Demands are problematic and disempowering actually”
Then I learned there was a secret conservative at the rally!
5:00 “… because it’s about about people making things happen rather than expecting someone else to take care”
Taking personal responsibility, now there’s an idea. Presumably she would want students to pay off their own loans rather than expecting someone else to take care. Or maybe that’s not what she had in mind.
TDK,
“They sure educated me.”
Yes, it’s almost as if it hadn’t been thought through. Fancy that.
Luckily, there’s always a pretentious far-left academic ready to excuse pseudo-radical flummery. In this case, anthropology lecturer David Graeber, who thinks that the protestors’ incoherence and near-total ignorance of basic economics isn’t a problem. Because they’re “juxtaposing themselves” and being “pre-figurative.” If Graeber’s name sounds familiar, he’s the chappy mentioned here, the one who said he was “very proud” of the Milbank rioters because they were “representing civilisation” – by smashing other people’s property, setting fire to buildings and assaulting the police. Mr Graeber’s areas of study include “the relation (real and potential) of anthropology and anarchism” and “magic as a tool of politics.”
Vital work, I know.
My favourite quote I heard from this lot (and the recent rioters and student demos) was self-professed anti-capitalists saying that they weren’t against corner/small shops, simply big businesses and banks.
Talk about not getting the point of Capitalism.
A corner shop is the very epitome of Capitalism. Tens of thousands of self-selecting items from tens of thousands of producers through tens of thousands of middle-men, buyers, transport agents, financiers, speculators all taking their ‘cut’. All that unearned capitalist profit. All guided by the invisible hand of the market. (God. Imagine the central planning involved for my local pound shop or all night Turkish grocers!)
To a communist, banks must seem quite ‘clean’ in plain sight of all that ghastly trade.
it’s almost as if it hadn’t been thought through.
Don’t forget the guy who wants to ‘smash’ Wall Street. Because then we’d all be rich!
“If you have a ton of student debt you should be here”….. No, you should be looking for a job you unbelievable moron. What’s that? You majored in afro-centric transgendered women’s studies and they aren’t hiring in that market right now? Looks like YOU made a big mistake and should have to suffer the consequences.
Don’t forget the guy who wants to ‘smash’ Wall Street. Because then we’d all be rich!
And the woman (at 5:10) who says “this isn’t a protest, it’s a model for a new society”.
Yes, we should all stop working and start banging drums, sleeping on the pavement and getting in people’s way.
It’s the future!
Not seen many tramps banging drums (thank gaia)
Ooh, you’re an unsympathetic lot. Can’t you feel how much they care? As one young lady points out, they’re “making us conscious.”
Which is nice of them. They must be the smart ones.
Oh God, Carruthers! The drums!
“You can’t end racial discrimination by ending racial discrimination etcetc”
…is a quote that could go head-to-head with Donald Rumsfeld’s helpful explanation of “known unknowns”. The sheer expressiveness of someone who has no idea what they are talking about, trying to express what is in their muddled mind before it’s been cleared up. Love it 🙂
1960s redux.
Actually, I think the first speaker has it: “.. I see Corporate Fascism, I see Crony Capitalism, I don’t see a Free Market. I see a welfare/ warfare state…” Sadly he doesn’t carry that to it’s logical conclusion – that these problems are caused by Government, not the private sector. Apart from that, the usual delusional leftist claptrap.
“Several protestors have announced, somewhat indignantly, that they have a Masters degree but can’t find a suitable job.”
Clearly more diversity czars and gauleiter jobs needed, then. More people on a zillion a year monitoring what other people are doing, with bonuses for correcting stray thinking.
More from the Wall Street brains trust…
“Maybe if we don’t use currency any more, like, that’d be really awesome. Maybe if there’s no currency a lot of products that don’t need to exist wouldn’t exist.”
http://youtu.be/SaZF4FJ2eUA
“More from the Wall Street brains trust…”
YouTube continues to show us just how many morons are walking the streets. What’s striking is the mix of stupidity and megalomania. Shouty Radical Guy presumes to tell the rest of us which products “don’t need to exist.” Which, given the context, is a euphemism for products that we should not be allowed to have.
Then there’s the belief that employees of Evil Corporations – say, Coca-Cola and Pepsi – will be “liberated” by losing their jobs – along with their homes and their freedom from the state. As so often, the idea that freedom from the state might be a good thing, a vital thing, simply isn’t entertained. Presumably, losing what freedom one has won’t matter because the state will assume a parental role and be the focus of our lives. Though in such a scenario, I doubt a person’s life would still be regarded as their own.
And while it’s hard not to laugh at these contemptible tits, it’s worth remembering that what they want – and what they would insist on, given the chance – isn’t funny at all.
Yeah, I love the beardo – “I’ve got a lot of student loans”. No doubt studying “Social Justice” and hamburger flipping.
Yeah, pal – eight years of college down the drain, huh?
>Maybe if we don’t use currency any more, like, that’d be really awesome.
He wants to go back to Bartering???
Currency is only temporal barter, and aids both seller and buyer as both are able to “store” their surplus until they have a need for it. Also the classic Monty Python scene with the eggs where he says “Keep the change” over 4 1/2 eggs.
These people are noisy, stupid, and most important of all feel entitled. I suspect Dunning Kruger.
“…because the state will assume a parental role and be the focus of our lives”.
Yes, and all those highly skilled and deeply caring state employees will help us through our lives, and we’ll show how much we value them by granting generous salaries paid for from the surplus wealth generated by … erm. Oh hold on. Will that work? There must be a way to make that work … erm … yes it *will* work. Smash capitalism. Liberate the workers etc etc etc.