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June 19, 2024 93 Comments

For newcomers, some items from the archives. Further to this recent item, readers may detect a theme of sorts.

Don’t Oppress My People With The Way You Walk.

Whitey’s hegemonic walking must be disrupted. Along with everything else.

Having been mocked for his unargued assertions and casual racism, Mr Allen is now complaining that people, presumably white ones, “don’t want to engage” with his unargued assertions and casual racism. The truth of his claims is, he says, “obvious.” An attitude that would, I suppose, explain the lack of evidence or any reciprocal standard, and the apparent disregard for any expectation of such.

However, perhaps a few atoms of sympathy are in order. It occurs to me that if your immediate environment is one in which race-based claims aren’t subject to challenge or scepticism, even when sweeping and rather dubious, it must be quite unnerving to encounter these things for the first time. 

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Public Libraries.

Librarian Sofia Leung rails against the White Devil and his books.

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history – while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently.

Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended – something close to enraged – by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.” 

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Acceptance And Compliments.

The Guardian’s Natalie Morris juggles humblebragging with contrived downtroddenness.

We are informed, firmly, that, “It’s impossible to see the rise of mixed beauty ideals as a positive thing, because at its heart sits an unsettling insistence on white superiority.” It’s impossible, you see. Though how Ms Morris arrived at this assertion is less than clear. This being the Guardian, however, it does have an air of inevitability, of predestination.

Ms Morris tells us that in her youth not being white and not looking like the women seen most often in media and advertising made her feel “insecure.” And yet now, when women who resemble her, racially, are all but ubiquitous in media and advertising – way out of proportion to actual demographics, and even added anachronistically to historical dramas – this is also a cause of unhappiness and resentment, and an excuse for convoluted theories of racial victimhood.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings.

Not just earrings, mind. Lip-liner, too.

If you want to see evidence of maturity and self-possession, the Pitzer College Media Studies department, where Ms Alegria Martinez spends her time and some poor sucker’s money, probably isn’t the first place to look. And I think that, for many, that’s the tacit appeal of identitarian wokeness – it’s a chance to defer adult norms, and an excuse to act out pretentious, inchoate tantrums.

But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them. It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort. 

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Norms Of Punctuality.

Being expected to arrive for work on time is “systemic white supremacy.”

Says student Shahamat Uddin, “The reason ‘coloured people time’ exists is because non-Western cultures tend to have more polychronic work environments, and there is a different prioritisation of family and relationships over capitalist productivity and work demands.” Which is obviously what every employer wants to hear. And pay for. Every month.

A “polychronic” culture, since you ask, is one in which chatting and distractions are both commonplace and encouraged, and in which “issues such as promptness” – and reliability and productivity – are not prioritised. As favoured in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, that engine of civilisational blossoming and human betterment. 

Oh, and we mustn’t forget this one:

Don’t Oppress My People With Your White Devil Science.

On the hurling of lightning. And the smearing of human faeces.

In the video below, filmed at the University of Cape Town, members of the science faculty meet with student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university – and not pay their bills. During the meeting, one of the staff, one of the “science people,” points out that, contrary to claims being made by a student protestor, witchcraft doesn’t in fact allow Africans to throw lightning at their enemies. He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave. 

Other allegedly oppressive phenomena, including departmental acronyms and branded headphones, can be found in the archives.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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Reading time: 4 min
Written by: David
Anthropology The Thrill Of Endless Noise

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Expectations Of Politeness And Basic Consideration

June 17, 2024 156 Comments

Lifted from the comments – which you’re reading, of course – an item deserving of a little more attention.

The Atlantic is currently promoting an article from its archive, one selected by the editors as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. A choice that is perhaps more telling than intended.

The chosen article, by novelist Xochitl Gonzalez, poses the question, “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” It is sub-headed, “The sound of gentrification is silence.” A racially judgemental tone prevails. Such that the term rich people can be read as meaning white people. Followed by implied tutting.

It begins with an account of life at university – Brown, since you ask – and the merits of Brooklyn hip hop combos:

I first arrived on campus for the minority-student orientation. The welcome event had the feel of a block party, Blahzay Blahzay blasting on a boom box. (It was the ’90s.) We spent those first few nights convening in one another’s rooms, gossiping and dancing until late. We were learning to find some comfort in this new place, and with one another. 

Ah, those downtrodden minority students, huddled together for mutual safety. Lest the roaming tigers find them.

Then the other students arrived — the white students.

As I said, the tutting is implied.

And then, belatedly, the realisation that attempts at intellectual activity – say, at an upscale university – tend to require a certain restraint, noise-wise:

I just hadn’t counted on everything that followed being so quiet. The hush crept up on me at first. I would be hanging out with my friends from orientation when one of our new roommates would start ostentatiously readying themselves for bed at a surprisingly early hour. Hints would be taken, eyes would be rolled, and we’d call it a night. 

Morning lectures being an inconceivable thing, it seems.

Ms Gonzalez, who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is, also tells us how she, “just wanted to be around people in places where nobody told us to shush.” Say, when being a late-night annoyance to roommates and neighbours, a thing that by her own account happens repeatedly, or when playing music in a library. Where other people are trying to study:

One day, when I accidentally sat down to study in the library’s Absolutely Quiet Room, fellow students Shhh-ed me into shame for putting on my Discman… I soon realised that silence was more than the absence of noise; it was an aesthetic to be revered. Yet it was an aesthetic at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were. 

A bold admission. One, I suspect, that reveals more than intended. Also, the claim that one can sit down in a library accidentally.

Ms Gonzalez’ tale of woe continues:

Within a few weeks, the comfort that I and many of my fellow minority students had felt during those early cacophonous days had been eroded, one chastisement at a time. The passive-aggressive signals to wind our gatherings down were replaced by point-blank requests to make less noise, have less fun, do our living somewhere else, even though these rooms belonged to us, too. 

Ms Gonzalez, it seems, was being oppressed. Just for being thoughtless and noisy when people are trying to study. Her comfort was being impacted by requests for civility. How very dare they.

As dicentra notes in the comments,

Quiet means you’re studying, and boisterousness means you’re not, and given you’re at a university, which aesthetic ought to win out? 

Well, indeed. One of the many things to have somehow not crossed our author’s mind.

A boisterous conversation would lead to a classmate knocking on the door with a “Please quiet down.” 

Feel her pain. The outrageousness of it all.

I felt hot with shame and anger, yet unable to articulate why. It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy. 

Well, yes, It does. You selfish, classless bint.

And note the sly downgrading of an ability to do some actual work as mere comfort. Or an ability to sleep without hearing hip hop once again booming through the wall.

And the Atlantic publishes this – this ode to antisocial selfishness – as if it might leave the reader morally improved. And feeling sympathetic towards the author.

Inevitably, Ms Gonzalez blames her own moral shortcomings on other people’s race and class, as if, by expecting politeness, they were imposing on her in cruel and unusual ways. Because – magic words – “of colour.” But the common variable, the one that’s hard to miss, is the author’s own rudeness and self-absorption. And so, she blunders into the library’s “Absolutely Quiet Room,” and fires up her music.

Oh, and for those of you curious about the author’s precise level of brownness, and thereby magical qualities, and all those rather handy exemptions from reciprocal proprieties, I’ll just leave this here:

Ms Gonzalez tells us that the “absence of noise” – by which she means, consideration for others – is “at odds with who I was. Who a lot of us were.” And yet she wonders why other people – less selfish people – might want to get away from her. Away from all the noise. And to live somewhere nicer, somewhere she doesn’t.

Readers may wish to ponder the possibility that noise may often be a pretty good measure of other issues. People who don’t care about stopping their neighbours from studying or sleeping may not care about other things too. Other boundaries. Which in turn may go some way to explaining the existence of those quiet, gentrified neighbourhoods, the ones that so offend Ms Gonzalez.

The expectation of consideration is soon, predictably, via contrivance, framed as a form of racial oppression. A way to torment “Black and brown communities,” in which the ethos is “loud and proud.” Because if residents of respectable neighbourhoods object to their nights being disrupted by endless overdriven sound systems, then this is merely “an elite sonic aesthetic: the systemic elevation of quiet over noise.” And almost certainly racist.

“One person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy,” we’re told. “I take pride in saying that we are a loud people.”

An expression of joy by loud people can be found embedded below:

What’s the point? 🤦‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/oIcSwQH82f

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) June 11, 2024

Note the self-satisfied quip, “They’ll be fine. They can buy a house somewhere else.” Today’s words, by the way, are recreational spite.

At which point, readers may wonder how Ms Gonzalez, a novelist, manages to write her books amid the fashionably vibrant racket that she recommends to others. All that shouting and shrieking and “ceaseless music” that she finds so liberating and authentic. Wouldn’t those extended and rather complicated trains of thought be disrupted, and likely made impossible, by all the shouting and laughing, all the whumping and thumping, all those jolly sirens?

Happily, an answer is provided in the pages of Elle Décor, in which Ms Gonzalez opined some two months earlier:

Writing novels is intrinsically solitary. Which is no small part of why I switched professions in the first place. Despite wearing the coat of an extrovert, I am pure Greta Garbo. I want to be alone.

This point is expanded upon:

The early pandemic found me without a permanent residence and on a deadline. In March, while getting my MFA in Iowa, I’d come home to New York City for a quick visit to celebrate having just sold my first novel. Three months and one case of COVID-19 later, I was quarantining with my best friend, her husband, and their toddler in their Brooklyn apartment. Before long, the close quarters and endless sounds of sirens made revising my novel there untenable. I decided to head upstate. 

And so, our silence-needing novelist sought out “a gorgeous historic house in downtown Kingston, New York.” Ah, yes. An “upstate vacation rental.”

Perhaps Ms Gonzalez was hoping that readers of her Atlantic article – the one about noise being so vibrant and racially affirming – would not stumble across her Elle Décor piece, published weeks earlier, which rather calls into question her own later claims. And which, it has to be said, suggests a certain pretence, a certain hypocrisy.

In short, then, your desire for peace and quiet is terribly problematic, and probably racist. While hers, not so much. Which is enormously convenient. If not entirely convincing.

 

Previously in the Atlantic:

A woman oppressed by crumbs.

And another expensively educated Brooklynite who insists that crossword puzzles are “one of the systemic forces that threaten women.”

And then there was the attempt to convince us that chronic thievery is totally fine and nothing to complain about, provided it’s being done to someone else. Someone who isn’t an Atlantic contributor, presumably.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the Atlantic referred to Elon Musk as, and I quote, “a far-right activist.”

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Reading time: 7 min
Written by: David
Ephemera

Friday Ephemera (725)

June 14, 2024 179 Comments

My first thought was coffee maker. || A manhole cover protrudes, a tiny beep is heard. || Big bunker bared. || A somewhat ungardenly garden. || Gruesome shoe death. || Oh, the glamour of Hollywood. || I hear tiny hooves. || Bag of soup transportation tip. || Ectoplasmic happenings. I did this one at school. || At last, how to cook a kitten. || There was smoke, some shouting. || Shoulders and hair, girls. Shoulders and hair. || Unwelcome guest. || Unwelcome guest 2. || A downloadable compendium of Weird Tales, 1923-1954. || Competence under trying circumstances. || A situation has arisen. || For the larger gentleman. || They’re always in the last place you look. || And frankly, who here hasn’t? || Fiddling with focal length. || Don’t tell your mother about the bath-time fort.

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Written by: David
Politics Problematic Ownership Travel

Our Betters Make Plans (2)

June 13, 2024 88 Comments

The World Economic Forum’s Ida Auken wants to correct your primitive lifestyle:

You don’t even need to know the neighbour to get into his car… It’s much more fun to share.

Embrace the upgrade, you filthy savages:

This is Ida Auken (WEF Young Global Leader) who wrote:

“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

Here she is wanging on about using your neighbour’s car. pic.twitter.com/tbKT5MJzTR

— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) July 20, 2024

Because having neighbours and strangers, people you don’t know, taking your car, apparently at random, would be terribly progressive and super-convenient, and “fun,” and “not annoying.”

More on Ms Auken’s vision of tomorrow can be found here:

I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes. 

All these things, these beastly capitalist products, would be “free.”

And not yours.

Update, via the comments:

If the above sounds like an evasive, rather coy way of saying, “Everything will belong to the state,” or, “Surrender all territory,” then hold that thought.

Update 2:

In the comments, Brother John quips, rather pithily,

Anybody ever wash a rented car? No? 

Indeed. We might also pause to consider the endless glamour of so-called “social” housing projects, where decidedly anti-social behaviour is not exactly uncommon, or public transport, or any number of other areas in which responsibility is dispersed and nebulous. Take away the territorial aspect, the ownership – the concept that Ms Auken finds so bothersome and passé – and things are generally much more likely to tend towards degradation.

Sometimes quite rapidly and to an eye-widening extent.

The human urge to have some territory over which other people – and the state – do not have total dominion is not a trivial thing.

Or, as Mr Muldoon puts it,

“Sorry about your wife going into labour, I needed some cigarettes. By the way, you need some new tyres.”

But hey, progress.

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Written by: David
Anthropology Art Free-For-All Politics

Our Betters Make Plans

June 11, 2024 160 Comments

Attention, comrades. My fellow heroes, titans, thinkers of deep thoughts. It is time to map out the world of tomorrow:

There are no post revolution theatre troops, only post revolution mine troops, comrade. pic.twitter.com/ACIref7r9r

— Hegel Borg™️ (@xxclusionary) June 10, 2024

Because after the revolution, we will need accessible theatre.

Presumably, to take our minds off all the riots and ruin and burning cars. Earlier revolutionary rumblings can be found here and here. Topics covered include the pivotal importance of “artists and visionaries,” and the righteous washing of other people’s bin contents. Thereby enabling us to “eat from a revolutionary and resistance standpoint.”

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.