Little soap hands. 

“Actual soap, shaped like little hands.” In a bag. $12.00 

Or, slightly larger soap hands. $10.00

Busy today, but feel free to browse some short films or peruse the greatest hits, or just rummage around in the archives.

KC Johnson has begun to wind down his outstanding Durham in Wonderland blog, which details the infamous Duke “rape” case, along with the PC prejudice and general bad faith of various “activist” faculty members. Those with an interest in tenured ideologues and hokum merchants will find plenty to entertain, and it’s worth casting an eye over this table, which prompts the following comment from a DIW reader:

“Looking at the departmental affiliations of the good guys it’s hard not to conclude that the widest gulf on campus is not the one separating black and white or the one separating men and women, but the one separating the quantitative, fact-based disciplines from what the humanities have deteriorated into. Whether universities survive as useful institutions will depend on whether the anti-rationalists can be exorcised.”

I’m not exactly sure how the culprits (and the cultural environment in which they flourish) might be “exorcised”, so I guess large swathes of academia will continue to decline, in terms of both substance and reputation. Or perhaps there will come a point at which drastic measures have to be taken in order to save the institution from the accumulation of parasites on its back. Maybe parents will no longer be willing to pay $40,000 a year for their children to be misled and stupefied at the hands of, say, Wahneema Lubiano, who labels herself a “post-structuralist teacher-critic leftist” and who sees no reason to distinguish between her role in the classroom and her bizarre political “activism”.

Related. And. (H/T. The Thin Man.)

Here’s footage of British troops unwittingly testing LSD, circa 1953/54. The experiments were supposedly to determine the drug’s value as a “non-lethal incapacitating weapon.” Hilarity ensues. One soldier attempts to feed the birds by climbing a tree. “The efficiency of the rocket launcher team was also very impaired.”

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Related. And.

Today seems as good a day as any to read Daphne Patai’s article on academia and denial, Letter to a Friend: On Islamic Fundamentalism, written September 11, 2006.

“It’s true I share your distaste for all types of religious fundamentalism. But that doesn’t prevent me from noting the different demands and agendas of each type, as well as their numbers and influence in the real world today… Nor, if one tracks their actions, which is far more important than their rhetoric, does it appear that each type of fundamentalism is equally harmful, equally destructive in its influence around the world… If you are still tempted to worry as much, as you wrote, about Christian fundamentalists as about Muslim ones, just ask yourself about the agenda of each group, their numbers, their geographical presence, their past and present violent actions, the political responses to them, and the sort of press they each get in the West.”

More. Related. And.

Published in 3:AM magazine, here’s my discussion with the Muslim novelist and exile Tahir Aslam Gora. On Islam, freedom and denial.

“It seems to me that the ideas being expressed most freely are far from tolerant and those who call for a more open-minded formulation of Islam are most likely to be intimidated or suppressed. One might note the recent experience of the reformist author Taslima Nasreen, whose book launch ended in her being violently assaulted by Islamic lawmakers and members of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, whose piety entailed throwing chairs at a terrified woman. Hyderabad police even filed a case against Nasreen for allegedly ‘creating religious tensions’ and writing ‘provocative literature’ – which rather highlights the scale of the change in outlook that’s required.”

Busy today, but this made me laugh.

By. Related. And. 

Further to this and the comments following this post, I mentioned the mismatch of certain leftist moral markers with aspects of traditional working class / bourgeois morality:

“When seen in context, Thatcher’s ‘society’ quote actually chimes quite strongly with traditional working class / bourgeois morality regarding personal and familial responsibility. A similar moral aspect becomes apparent in discussions of immigration, where many working class people take the view that a person should generally pay into a benefit system before taking from it. This tends to conflict with the view, most common among middle-class leftists, that a newcomer from country X can arrive and immediately make several claims without having contributed via taxation, etc. I’ve read more than one Guardian commentator dismiss the former view as ‘typical of racist little Englanders’, which rather misses the point of contention. Wherever you stand on the issue, and whatever exceptions one might imagine, my point is that quite a few middle-class leftwing commentators have casually dismissed as ‘racist’ a moral argument based on reciprocity and a sense of community.”

There’s another illustration in today’s Observer, in John Lloyd’s review of Andrew Anthony’s book, The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence:

“Anthony uses an account of his early years as a vivid, emotively charged account of a working class-born, council house-raised and comprehensive school-educated boy who came to question his parents’ outlook. In one instance cited, his mother asked her local councillor why it was that she, a model tenant for many years, had become a much lower priority for rehousing than a newly arrived immigrant family. The councillor to whom Mrs Anthony complained was Tessa Jowell, until recently Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport; she gave her complaining constituent ‘a brusque lecture on racism’.

This vignette recalls progressive, especially London, politics of the Seventies and Eighties… with an overlay of moralising political correctness which assumed prejudice on the part of a white working class and innocence on the part of those with darker skins. In a comment which must be a painful memory, Anthony observes that at university, his ‘enlightened concern was that [his mother] didn’t do or say anything that could be construed as racist … I was now outside, like an anthropologist, looking in’.”

What’s interesting here, and illustrative of a much wider phenomenon, is Jowell’s apparent readiness to frame the issue in terms of racism, and Anthony’s own apprehension regarding how a person might seem in certain kinds of company. And, again, there’s something grimly amusing about those who most loudly profess to care for “the proletariat” showing sneery disregard for the views and moral values of that same group of people.

A form of ‘content-aware’ image manipulation has been developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir of Israel’s Efi Arazi School of Computer Science. Their prototype software allows images to be dramatically resized without scaling or cropping. By assigning levels of importance to component parts of an image, the software is able to shrink or stretch images while leaving key features intact and in proportion, and all in real time.

More. And. Related. Also. (H/T, Protein Wisdom and The Thin Man.) 

An extract from Roger Kimball’s long, amusing essay, The Perversions of Michel Foucault, in which he casts an eye over Foucault’s pretensions, and those of his biographer, James Miller:

“In some ways, The Passion of Michel Foucault is a revival of [Miller’s] earlier book [Democracy is in the Streets], done over with a French theme and plenty of black leather. Hence it is not surprising that when Mr. Miller gets around to the student riots of 1968, his prose waxes dithyrambic as gratified nostalgia fires his imagination. It is as if he were reliving his lost – or maybe not-so-lost – childhood.

‘The disorder was intoxicating. Billboards were ripped apart, sign posts uprooted, scaffolding and barbed wire pulled down, parked cars tipped over… The mood was giddy, the atmosphere festive. ‘Everyone instantly recognized the reality of their desires,’ one participant wrote shortly afterward, summing up the prevailing spirit. ‘Never had the passion for destruction been shown to be more creative.’

Foucault himself, unfortunately, had to miss out on the first wave of riots, since he was teaching at the University of Tunis. But his lover Daniel Defert was in Paris and kept him abreast of developments by holding a transistor radio up to the telephone receiver for hours on end. Later that year, Foucault was named head of the department of philosophy at the University of Vincennes outside Paris. The forty-three-year-old professor of philosophy then got a chance to abandon himself to the intoxication. In January 1969, a group of five hundred students seized the administration building and amphitheatre, ostensibly to signal solidarity with their brave colleagues who had occupied the Sorbonne earlier that day. In fact, as Mr. Miller suggests, the real point was ‘to explore, again, the creative potential of disorder.’ Mr. Miller is very big on ‘the creative potential of disorder.’ Foucault was one of the few faculty who joined the students. When the police arrived, he followed the recalcitrant core to the roof in order to ‘resist.’ Mr. Miller reports proudly that while Foucault ‘gleefully’ hurled stones at the police, he was nonetheless ‘careful not to dirty his beautiful black velour suit.’

It was shortly after this encouraging episode that Foucault shaved his skull and emerged as a ubiquitous countercultural spokesman. His ‘politics’ were consistently foolish, a combination of solemn chatter about ‘transgression,’ power, and surveillance, leavened by an extraordinary obtuseness about the responsible exercise of power in everyday life… Foucault posed as a passionate partisan of liberty. At the same time, he never met a revolutionary piety he didn’t like. He championed various extreme forms of Marxism, including Maoism; he supported the Ayatollah Khomeini, even when the Ayatollah’s fundamentalist cadres set about murdering thousands of Iranian citizens. In 1978, looking back to the postwar period, he asked: ‘What could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s America?’ It tells us a great deal that Foucault found this question difficult to answer.”

Spot the resonance. More. Related. And. Plus. Also.

As a companion piece to Vanessa Engle’s Lefties documentary, The Thin Man has created a short trailer for the three-part series, Tory! Tory! Tory!, broadcast by BBC4 in March 2006. The series traces the history and ideas behind Thatcherism – and how Britain was transformed, painfully. It’s not as outlandish as Lefties, but it’s interesting to revisit the dark days of Britain in the late Seventies, with power cuts, unburied dead and ossified state-run monopolies somehow billions in debt. Brave souls may even try to imagine exactly how wrecked and demoralised the country would have been in the care of devout Socialist Neil Kinnock, or those even more devout, who openly spoke of “the class enemy.”

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The three episodes, Outsiders, The Path to Power and The Exercise of Power, can be viewed here.

I have enemies of my own. Help me crush them underfoot.