Via TDK, Theodore Dalrymple on rhetorical leverage and ‘progressive’ self-flattery: 

Professor Lakoff uses the term ‘progressive’ freely. Now there is a framing metaphor if ever there was one. What person of goodwill could possibly be against progress, that is to say betterment of the human condition? So if you are a person in favour of progress – in short, a progressive – only the malevolent could disagree with you.

However, there is a rather large question begged here, namely ‘What is progress?’ There is rarely gain without loss, and loss can easily exceed gain. Human action has unintended and unforeseen consequences, sometimes beneficial, often not. Progress in society is not the same as progress in internet speeds… It is possible for reasonable people to disagree… Yet Professor Lakoff seems to use the term ‘progressive’ as if those he calls progressives brought about progress ex officio, as it were, merely by virtue of their self-designation. This is a form of magical thinking.

I’m reminded of the modesty of Mr George Monbiot, a man who also deploys the word ‘progressive’ as if it were a talisman, and who dismisses his political opponents as dullards struggling with “low intelligence” and racial phobias. 

BenSix on learning to be mute and befuddled: 

These posters and drawing hardly seem to be the stuff of Voltairian pamphlets. They do not renew the liberal flames in me. What should inspire one, though, is the response to them. It is alarming that our national media feels that it cannot publish a drawing of a cartoon man for fear of violent reprisals. If people are scared to show innocuous cartoons, how might they react to a novel that may provoke controversy, or to academic research that might inspire outrage? …If, indeed, Rory Bremner is scared to joke, or Grayson Perry to make art, how many commentators, novelists and scholars have allowed their thoughts to be repressed?

And Jonah Goldberg on hammers, sickles and not saying certain things: 

In its opening video for the Olympic Games, NBC’s producers drained the thesaurus of flattering terms devoid of moral content: “The empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint; the revolution that birthed one of modern history’s pivotal experiments. But if politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it’s passion that endures.” To parse this infomercial treacle is to miss the point, for the whole idea is to luge by the truth on the frictionless skids of euphemism.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Further to the saga of the underpants statue and the subsequent swooning of Wellesley College’s liberated ladies, Fred Reed has more evidence of feminist fortitude: 

It seems that at Columbia University a rat pack of nursery feminists have got their skivvies in a knot because the library, Butler, is named for an, ugh!, man. Yes. It cannot be denied. In protest, these girls, apparently having nothing more important to do, have filmed “feminist pornography” in the library.

Indeed they have. It’s a “guerrilla action” response to “gender tension” and “male-centricity.” And “of course, it is a feminist statement.”  

Anyway, one of these drab libertines, a Sara Grace Powell, says, “Butler is an extremely charged space – the names emblazoned on the stone facade are, for me, a stimulant for resistance.” A stimulant to grow up might be more to the point. She means “stimulus,” of course, but why would a child at an Ivy university be expected to know English? To an extent I have to sympathise with Sara. I grant that seeing a horrible male name “emblazoned” would send me into a decline also. Wouldn’t it you? Never mind that if the man thus emblazoned had not made the money to donate the library, Sara wouldn’t have one in which to make pornography, presumably the purpose of libraries. 

As some readers may be intrigued by the notion of all-female feminist pornography, here’s a brief description:

It begins with a group of girls sitting around a library table taking their shirts off. As the film progresses, the girls engage in activities including kissing, rubbing eggs on their bodies and twerking around a chicken carcass.

The finished political opus, starring the aforementioned Ms Powell and titled Initiation, also features the somewhat lacklustre use of a riding crop, extended scenes of floor-wiping and what feels like an eternity of general aimlessness. It can be savoured at length here. Those hoping for red-blooded boi-oing fuel may, however, be disappointed. One of the film’s makers, Coco Young, has stressed the intent to transgress rather than titillate:

She was happy to see one commenter note that it was “hard to masturbate to this.” After all, the girls aimed to “create a repulsion”; there were naked women onscreen, but “they’re not there to make you sexually aroused.”

Despite dashed hopes and the sheer radicalness of it all, I trust readers will somehow get over it and get on with their lives. 

Via dicentra, Kevin D Williamson on the many heads of modern feminism: 

Feminism is not an idea or a collection of ideas but a collection of appetites wriggling queasily together like a bag of snakes… A useful definition is this: “Feminism is the words ‘I Want!’ in the mouths of three or more women, provided they’re the right kind of women.” Feminism must therefore accommodate wildly incompatible propositions – e.g., (1) Women unquestionably belong alongside men in Marine units fighting pitched battles in Tora Bora, but (2) really should not be expected to be able to perform three chin-ups. Or: (1) Women at Columbia are empowered by pornography, but (2) women at Wellesley are victimised by a statue of a man sleepwalking in his Shenanigans. And then there is Fluke’s Law: (1) Women are responsible moral agents with full sexual and economic autonomy who (2) must be given an allowance, like children, when it comes to contraceptives.

Walter Russell Mead on how to ruin your life: 

Enrol in a college you can’t afford. Take really easy, fun courses [e.g., Politicizing Beyoncé, or The Sociology of Hip-Hop: The Theodicy of Jay-Z]. Don’t worry about marketable skills. Blame society for the consequences (unemployment) of your attitude problem. Then demand the government (or your parents) bail you out. We guarantee you all the misery you could ever want.

Robert Stacy McCain argues with a middle-class communist: 

The extreme egoism of communist leaders is a trait displayed throughout the history of the movement since Marx’s ridiculous insistence that only his socialism was “scientific.” Yet such is Jesse Myerson’s egoism that he imagines himself superior even to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. At least they had the integrity to admit that the abolition of private property — the expropriation of the bourgeoisie — could only be accomplished by violent revolution, and that the victors of such a revolution would have to employ the methods of violent terror to establish their dictatorship.

And Daniel Hannan on the politics of spite:  

Ponder the graph above. Sixty-nine per cent of Labour supporters would want a top rate tax of 50 per cent even if it brought in no money… This is a blog about the mind-set of people who see taxation, not as an unpleasant necessity, but as a way to punish others.

As we’ve seen here many times, some Labour supporters are quite happy to parade their vindictiveness as if it were virtue. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Jim Goad on girth, grievance and the politics of rotundity: 

The results are in [according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology]: Fat people overeat because our fat-fearing society “fat-shames” them, which then causes them to overeat. This doesn’t explain how they got fat in the first place, but let’s not get picky… The “fat acceptance” movement – AKA “fat power,” “body acceptance,” “size acceptance” and “weight diversity” – provides a waistband-busting cornucopia of unintentional humour. It is identity politics for the adipose, that odd, contradictory demand that society shouldn’t define them by their designated victim category even though that’s apparently the only way that these self-designated victims are able to define themselves. The movement goes all the way back to the 1960s, when “fat activists” staged a Central Park “fat-in” and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance was founded.

Thomas Sowell on the forgetful left, parts one and two: 

Words seem to carry far more weight than facts among those liberals who argue as if rent control laws actually control rents and gun control laws actually control guns. It does no good to point out to them that the two American cities where rent control laws have existed longest and strongest – New York and San Francisco – are also the two cities with the highest average rents. Nor does it make a dent on them when you point out evidence, from both sides of the Atlantic, that tightening gun control laws does not reduce gun crimes, including murder. It is not uncommon for gun crimes to rise when gun control laws are tightened. Apparently armed criminals prefer unarmed victims.

Hans Bader on racial quotas in school discipline:  

The Education Department wrote that a school could be liable for punishing students for an offense like tardiness if more students of one race than another were tardy… Creating de facto racial quotas in school discipline will also increase violence and disorder in the schools. At a widely-read education blog, a teacher describes the violence and disorder that occurred when her school adopted racial quotas in discipline: “I was in a school that tried to implement just this criteria for discipline. One kid (scrawny 7th grader) had the crap beaten out of him by a 6-foot, fully-muscled 7th grader – two different races. The little kid was suspended before his copious blood had been cleaned up off the floor. The big kid never did have ANY punishment – that particular ethnic group had been disciplined too many times. Need I mention that it was a tough month, as word quickly spread that violence against the ‘under-disciplined’ ethnic group was treated as a freebie?”

Ah, but nothing says fairness like dishing out excuses according to how brown a student is rather than their behaviour. And attempting to reduce disruption and violence by punishing it less when racial quotas have been reached is clearly a recipe for everyone’s educational success. What could possibly go wrong? More on the same from Heather Mac Donald here and here. 

And on a lighter note, something tells me one or two of you may find this amusing. 

As usual, feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Following this piece on the self-destruction of the humanities, Heather Mac Donald responds to accusations of “neoconservative pearl-clutching” by Slate’s education columnist Rebecca Schuman:

Is Schuman content with a situation in which a Columbia student rails against having been asked merely to listen to Mozart because Mozart is a dead white male? Where might that student have picked up that attitude if not from the academy and its offshoots? Whiteness studies, black studies, feminist studies, and queer studies are not a fever dream of the “neocons.” For decades now, students have been taught to search for an echo of their own “voices” in the books they read and to reject those works that they believe “exclude” them, a remarkably narrow approach to the arts. I don’t want to hear my own “voice” in what I read; it bores me.

As noted previously, you do have to marvel at a humanities student whose decisive criteria for music appreciation – criteria affirmed by her lecturers – are the composer’s pigmentation and the configuration of his genitals. As with many articles by Ms Mac Donald, there are several quotable passages, of which the following is a taste: 

Schuman concludes by revealing the unbridgeable abyss between the academic hothouse and the outside world. Purporting to turn the tables on academia’s critics, she maintains that it is they who are playing the victim card: “Their gesture [of criticism] is itself a triumphant co-opting of the very manufactured, hyperbolic narratives of oppression they oppose.” Huh? Is Schuman admitting that academic “oppression narratives” are “manufactured” and “hyperbolic”? Who knows? Moreover, her purported gotcha is without any logical grounding: To criticise a trend is not, in itself, a claim of victimisation. Schuman then suggests the real motive for concern about the humanistic tradition: “It’s the [conservative] Manhattan Institute against a rising tide of literate poors who dare question the politics of privilege.” Schuman thus confirms the adolescent political pretensions that she claims conservatives are simply making up.

Readers who doubt the existence of self-destructive tendencies in the modern humanities may wish to consider our own Dr Nina Power, a philosophy lecturer, Guardian regular and champion of “social justice,” and whose deep thoughts have entertained us on more than one occasion. As, for instance, when our self-described Marxist railed against cuts in public funding for philosophy lecturers and what she regards as the “ideological devastation of the education system,” while claiming that she and her peers no longer need to be knowledgeable or competent in any conventional sense. 

Heather Mac Donald is interviewed about her article in this Ricochet podcast. You may want to skip the first four minutes of gushing introduction.

Via Franklin at Artblog.