Apparently, museum visitors must be warned that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts that may be disconcerting or very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.
Today’s word, since you ask, is juxtaposition.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Lifted from the comments, here’s an interview with Professor Amy Wax. Topics touched on include academia’s practised unrealism, declining competence, and the seeming irrelevance of whether a thing is true:
I did read John McWhorter’s piece [on me] – John and I were friends for a very long time… I’m surprised at some of the things he says in that piece. I’m grateful for the fact he says I shouldn’t be punished… But for him to call what I say “demeaning,” or that it somehow undermines trust, a lot of that is puzzling.
You know, the word truth never appears in his op-ed… Usually, it was falsehoods that undermine trust, back in the good old days, and truth that supported trust. Now they’ve turned that completely on its head. Whether what I said is true or not seems completely irrelevant.
The discussion, at 24:45, of who gets to define extremism – and, very much related, The Party Of Shoplifting – is, I think, entertaining and rather on-the-money.
Update, via the comments:
The complaints against Professor Wax were compiled, with some enthusiasm, by the law school’s Dean, Theodore Ruger, who claims to have experienced “lasting trauma” after hearing Wax speak. This, remember, is a supposedly grown man. An intellectual.
Ruger’s improbable assertion echoed those of several students who would have us believe that Wax’s mere presence on campus is “physically and emotionally harming all of us.” And whose list of grievances included one student who resented the expectation that in order to win a debate, she “had to prove herself” – i.e., make a compelling argument – and another who was crushed by the suggestion that affirmative action policies can leave their supposed beneficiaries academically unprepared.
At which point, the word irony springs to mind.
This, then, is the standard at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. Where tuition is a mere $76,000 a year.
Apparently, among our betters, it is now scandalous to suggest that a way to minimise the risk of poverty and imprisonment is to be diligent and hardworking, charitable and civic minded, and to “eschew substance abuse and crime.”
Again, $76,000 a year.
At which point, it’s perhaps worth repeating this, from an earlier post on those supposedly traumatised by Professor Wax and the fact that she exists:
If a person’s worldview and piety, and social standing, are based on a series of fairly obvious lies, they will tend to be touchy. This can, of course, be extrapolated to describe an institution, many institutions, an entire elite culture.
Hence the bizarrely narrow range of permissible opinions, the unmentionable statistics, and the zeal with which transgressions are punished.
Update 2:
In the comments, ccscientist adds,
AA students are being sacrificed for the sake of appearances (a point Wax makes of course).
And the result is very often disaffection and resentment, which is eagerly redirected, not least by many of Wax’s critics, towards “whiteness,” or “white supremacy,” or “structural racism,” or some other self-flattering conspiracy theory. The resentment may be misdirected, or entirely unearned, but it is exploitable.
It’s also worth remembering that Wax’s comments about performance disparities and drop-out rates among her own students were prompted by Glenn Loury, who had noted, correctly, that such disparities must necessarily result from racial favouritism and wildly varying standards in admissions. A point he explains more fully in the short, and very much recommended, video embedded here.
Wax was essentially confirming Loury’s own reasoning, and stating clearly what Loury had cautiously tip-toed towards. And yet she, unlike he, is demonised and punished for articulating a statistical necessity, an observable fact. As Wax puts it, common knowledge, albeit of a kind studiously ignored by those doing the punishing and puffing out their chests.
As Wax says in the video linked above,
On the one hand, all good people are for affirmative action. That’s a sign of virtue. On the other hand, to talk about the predicate, the reason that affirmative action is needed, which is that there are these gaps in educational achievement and proficiency, is verboten. So, we kind of twisted ourselves in knots that we have to embrace something but deny the factual underpinning of it.
And noticing the knot, the mental contortion, is very much forbidden.
A Raleigh, North Carolina, chef who rose to prominence after attempting to have a white woman “cancelled” for “culturally appropriating” Japanese cuisine is now facing charges of domestic violence. Eric Rivera, who waged a digital war against an Aussie sushi restauranteur he labelled a “coloniser,” has been arrested for misdemeanour domestic violence, assault on a female, and assault by strangulation.
Setting aside the small matter of, er, assault and strangulation, readers may wish to ponder the notion, advanced by Mr Rivera and his numerous supporters, that white people, especially white people with blonde hair, shouldn’t be allowed to serve Japanese food.
At which point, I suppose I should mention this:
it was learned that [Rivera] was preparing Japanese food as a Puerto Rican man at his Japanese-inspired bar.
A shocking twist, I know. I do hope you were sitting down.
When not harassing people for having the wrong colour skin, and when not strangling women, Mr Rivera spends quite a lot of time blocking those who dare to quote his own social media statements.
I expect Liberal MPs to march in the pride parade in Ottawa, even if they do it without party approval. I will take note of who does not. https://t.co/IPxXmgGH9b
Mr Landau, since you ask, is a “left wing, progressive Liberal organiser” – pronouns “he/him” – who spends a lot of his time being “exhausted and sad.” Oh, and he doesn’t like people who “suppress… dissenting voices.”
Mr Landau has not yet specified what he will do to those reluctant to march on demand. Something progressive, no doubt. Sadly, Mr Landau, our champion of radical dissent, is not permitting questions or replies from those insufficiently like-minded.
Compelled speech isn’t enough. Now it’s compelled marching.
Ah, but, you see, they’re “dissenting,” albeit in a very conformist way. And any failure to “dissent” – on demand, as instructed – will be punished. Compliance under duress being the way of the dissenter.
The rhetorical inversions may, I grant you, take some getting used to. But you will start celebrating now, comrade, spontaneously, and with great joy.
BREAKING: DNC Protesters BLOCK CARS demanding they say “Free Palestine”, angry driver drives through, gets out of the car to CONFRONT protesters when his window was dented pic.twitter.com/HuSWTyJ43Q
The amount of money and resources wasted on this abomination could have changed uncountable lives across the globe for the better.
Readers will note that the word wasted is doing some heavy lifting there. That the building of said cruise ship paid the wages of thousands of people, in several cities, for years, and that the crewing and maintenance of said ship pays the wages of thousands more, and that the thousands of passengers aboard it at any given time will be spending large sums of money in any number of tourist destinations, making lives better across the globe, seems to have escaped our indignant chappie’s attention.
But still, he has “he/they” pronouns in his bio. So some markers of status are totally okay, apparently. Chappie tells us that he’s a “Black communicator,” whose podcast “paints a multi-faceted picture of the Black, brown, and Native American experience through story-telling.”
Lifted from the comments, which you’re reading, of course.
Update:
In the comments, EmC quotes this,
The fact that people have to work to eat is an inherent problem.
And adds,
So the socialist wants to be an aristocrat?
Or an owner of slaves, perhaps. Some arrangement in which he, Our Obvious Better, doesn’t have to do things that others find of value. Something non-reciprocal.
So, for some, the very idea that a grown-up person should pay their debts – or keep their word, or honour their promises – is something to be “defeated.”
Or, adulthood is such a drag.
Update 2:
It’s curious how often such complaints boil down to, “Other people, less fabulous people, should labour for free, for my benefit, until I say otherwise.” Which, it has to be said, is an odd construal of righteousness.
We’ve been here before, of course. As when an unhappy young madam realised, belatedly and with some annoyance, that bills have to be paid, and livings have to be earned. A seemingly overlooked detail that prompted much umbrage and baffled indignation, on grounds that cars and food and houses are things “which we should just be able to have.”
As I said in reply,
The emotional assumption that Things Should Just Be There For Me, Forever, In Unlimited Quantities is, I think, something best addressed before one’s children venture out into the world.
Children who, as adults, may then make TikTok videos of themselves bemoaning the fact that they aren’t simply being given a free house, and free food, and a free car, and free petrol for the free car. Children who, as adults, may then seem genuinely bewildered by the prospect of being responsible for the feeding and clothing of any children that they, in turn, might have.
Another thing occurs to me. If pretty much everything you need, or want, should just somehow be there anyway, on an indefinite basis, via some oddly unarticulated rearrangement of the universe, then it’s not obvious how gratitude might fit into such a mindset.
Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.
Update, via the comments:
The above, it seems to me, is not so much a declaration of values as a psychological profile.
As Rafi says in reply,
I’d buy my own laser cutter.
Not having to deal with such people does have a cash value. If in order to use a communal laser cutter, you first have to “strive to uphold” the notion that sex differences are unrelated to biology, that “meritocracy is a joke,” and that, despite all available evidence, “nonbinary people” somehow aren’t aggravating poseurs… Then, well, buying your own laser cutter seems a much better option.
After all, this life is finite and best not wasted on proximity to wankers.
The speed of change has been mesmerising. Indeed, lacking any real sense of overarching identity, the need to impose a sense of community has become paramount. Whether locally or, as we see, nationally, never have we heard the word community so bandied about. But it’s all pretend, really. Community was never talked about before, simply because it didn’t have to be.
The trouble with well-educated, international people like [Kristian] Niemetz is they fall into the trap of meeting foreigners who are much like them except for the accent and assume cultural differences stop there. Of course, if you hang out with academics and white-collar professionals it doesn’t matter if you’re in Berlin, London, Singapore, or Rio de Janeiro, it’s all the same.
But if you live beside someone who has no reason to get up in the morning and decides to play music at full blast until 5am, or deals drugs in the stairwell of your apartment block, or uses it as a toilet, or keys your car on a regular basis, all of a sudden you realise the character of your neighbour becomes central to your quality of life. The only reason Niemetz doesn’t know his neighbour is because the latter is culturally conditioned to be considerate, and to get up at 7am each morning to go to work. If he wasn’t, I suspect Niemetz would know him intimately.
If you start dispensing with old-fashioned ideas like sovereignty and believe a neighbour is no different from a Brussels bureaucrat, you’re going to be in a for a rude awakening when diversity and vibrancy moves in next door. Of course, those who advocate such policies rarely have to live with the consequences.
Given the self-satisfied ignorance on display – or malign perversity – I’m guessing Dr Kotsko doesn’t live in a neighbourhood rapidly being enlivened with Congolese and Somali borra gangs, whose social skills, and machetes, are so much in the news here.
The phenomena that Dr Kotsko is unlikely to experience personally, but which he is keen to see inflicted on others, are helpfully illustrated.
Schama showed something a lot of us had suspected – which is that for a certain type of globe-trotting international celebrity, any concern for borders, national identity and cultural continuity are not just beneath them, but actively ‘common’.
Of course, like so many other advocates of mass immigration, Simon Schama can live pretty much where he wants. And if the area around him goes somewhat downhill because the neighbours all start to come from the rougher corners of Eritrea, then Simon Schama can move. And he will probably move to a very nice area. But not everybody has that choice.
And one thing we can all be certain of is that Simon Schama will never choose to live in Bradford, Malmo or any of the (dare I say it) ‘suburbs’ outside Paris. Yet all the time he will urge other peoples’ neighbourhoods to more closely resemble those great success stories, and look down at people from an ever-loftier height when they dare to object.
The “I can just will myself to have high trust” thing amongst urban liberals sounds almost exactly like when people try polyamory and obviously fucking hate it, but have philosophical commitments that force them to work through it anyway.
It does rather call to mind numerous polyamory ‘cope’ videos, in which clearly neurotic and unhappy people try to convince themselves that they’re totally cool with their chosen lifestyle miseries. Often while on the verge on tears.
You can say you have high trust, but I know that you got screamed at by a crazy person one night when you were leaving the bar and now you’re scared to walk home alone, and I know that your bicycle was stolen last year and now you feel a low level of panic about securing your new bike every night.
If you want to wake up every morning and repeat into the mirror that you don’t actually mind that there are strangers fucking your girlfriend, then that’s your own private business. But the world exists independently of your framing of it.
That cat will start behaving like a dog any day now.
The idea that there may be very real physical constraints on some favoured policy – that reality may not comply with half-baked theory – seems entirely alien to Mr Snow. An attitude not uncommon among his progressive peers, and which may help explain the lively events currently underway in several British cities.
Mr Snow, since you ask, is married to the philanthropist Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor, daughter of the sixth Duke of Westminster, one of the country’s richest landowners, with an estimated fortune north of £7 billion. Needless to say, Mr Snow does not live in, or anywhere near, the kinds of “diverse” neighbourhoods now being trashed and terrorised by competing tribes.
This is bonkers. She ignores the fact that people are not going to use their neighbour’s car or indeed, a neighbour is not going to let anyone else use their car. That’s the problem with bollocks like this – it doesn’t take into account human nature. pic.twitter.com/n6n7BrBOxq
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.”
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.
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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