Ugh. Am felled by Man Flu, the deadliest flu of all. However, further to this discussion, I feel compelled to share this.
If I don’t make it through the day, tell them I died heroically and handsomely. In an ocean of snot.
Update:
Ugh. Am felled by Man Flu, the deadliest flu of all. However, further to this discussion, I feel compelled to share this.
If I don’t make it through the day, tell them I died heroically and handsomely. In an ocean of snot.
Update:
Many moons ago, in a post on classroom radicalism and the grooming of students, I wrote,
The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Grover Furr and Rhonda Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. As mainstream society becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc., so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out – or invent – something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.
This last point was illustrated with the ‘scholarship’ of Barbara Barnett, a graduate of Duke’s infamous humanities department, who claimed that college campuses have a rate of rape and violent sexual assault almost 1000 times higher than any credible calculation. Other, equally bizarre examples of activist ‘scholarship’ can be found in the archives, starting with this gem. You can imagine my dismay on discovering that my thoughts were not at all original, as Jeff Goldstein had demonstrated three years earlier:
An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics. And in an era of academic specialisation wherein just about every individual identity group has its own set of researchers and theoretical champions – as well as a widely accepted generic narrative of grievance – the observation that continued relevance (which translates into political power) is contingent upon the nursing and care of the grievance is something that too often goes unexamined by a society that, at base, really does wish to understand and fix the problems and frustrations expressed by individual identity groups.
That nursing of grievance – from hoax hate crimes to hallucinated racism - is a subject that’s cropped up here many times since. It’s a trend that’s becoming increasingly surreal. As, for instance, when Kerri Dunn, a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College, slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages, before walking over to puzzled onlookers and asking if they’d seen who was responsible. Despite being witnessed vandalising her own vehicle, Dunn protested her victimhood to faculty and police, citing a “crisis of hate” on campus, while students held rallies for “tolerance and diversity.”
With an eye to the latest such fabrication, involving an imaginative lesbian waitress named Dayna Morales, Daniel Greenfield takes it from there:
A “craftivist” is apparently someone who “uses traditional craft techniques for a political or social activism purpose.” Say, when taking a “brave” stand against the patriarchy and our “very gendered” society. As the Australian performance artist Ms Casey Jenkins demonstrates:
“When I’m menstruating it makes knitting a hell of a lot harder.” Thank goodness the world’s artists are showing us the way.
For newcomers, more items from the archives. A flavour of what goes on here.
When there isn’t enough racism to justify her rhetoric and pre-booked outrage, what’s a girl to do?
A psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages. The professor, Kerri Dunn, protested her victimhood to faculty and police despite being seen vandalising the vehicle, thereby setting an example for youngsters everywhere. Meanwhile classes were cancelled in support of Professor Dunn and students held rallies for “tolerance and diversity.” But spare a thought for the professor, our self-imagined heroine. After all, if you’re going to tell students there’s a “crisis of hate” on your campus, as Professor Dunn did, and if the campus you’re talking about doesn’t match that rhetoric at all, then certain measures will have to be taken. And by measures I mean liberties. Like slashing your own tyres then blaming someone in your class. Or walking over to the people who’ve just watched you do this and asking if they’d seen who was responsible.
The deep socialist wisdom of Mr Owen Hatherley.
Our self-described Marxist also wants us to share a toilet and kitchen with people we may not like, and thereby “look beyond our obsession with private space.” Wanting your own living space, a little freedom from the tribe, is apparently an obsession, i.e., something bad and unhealthy. Rather than, say, a sign of not being a student or a hippie. Communes are a good thing and “increasingly sensible,” according to Mr Hatherley, while “insularity” – which is to say, privacy and individual territory– is not. “Other ways of living are possible,” says he, though he doesn’t disclose whether this morally improving arrangement is good enough for him.
Get Them While They’re Soft and Yielding.
Shaping young minds for a brighter tomorrow.
Many students of the humanities are entering a world in which adults can behave like Duke’s Wahneema Lubiano, an Associate Professor of African and American Studies who rails against the “hegemony” of “Western rationality,” and whose students learn that she’s “physically traumatised and psychologically assaulted” by global capitalism. This, remember, is a woman tenured at an elite university. For Lubiano, the classroom is a venue for her own political “activism,” i.e., the propagation of obnoxious racial theory, in which guilt depends on pigment, class and gender. Universities, we learn, are “engines of dominance” that should be “sabotaged” by people suitably radical and enlightened. People much like her, in fact. A transformation, incidentally, that one might think had already taken place and hence Lubiano’s license to take such liberties with students and the people paying her salary.
Pretentious racial guilt is so hard to wash off.
So remember, if you should be mugged in a part of town where lots of black people happen to live, whatever you do, don’t call the police. That would be proof of your ignorant racism and “white privilege.” And if your refusal to alert the police subsequently results in someone else being robbed by the same mugger, most likely someone who lives in one of those “Black and Indigenous communities,” at least you can take comfort in the fact that you won’t be accused of racism by one dogmatic bonehead.
And I’ve hidden hard liquor in the greatest hits.
More crushing injustice on campus, this time at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies:
In a letter sent to colleagues in the department after the sit-in, [Professor] Rust said students in the demonstration described grammar and spelling corrections he made on their dissertation proposals as a form of “micro-aggression.” “I have attempted to be rather thorough on the papers and am particularly concerned that they do a good job with their bibliographies and citations, and these students apparently don’t feel that is appropriate,” Rust said in the letter.
You see, by highlighting spelling and punctuation errors, the professor is contributing to an “unsafe climate for students of colour.” Reminding students of the basic rules of English apparently helps to create “a hostile and toxic environment” in Professor Rust’s classroom. Such are the mental and emotional traumas of the modern grad school intellectual. These, remember, are people studying for master’s degrees and doctorates. Advanced learning. For those of you interested in the policing of tiny tragedies, “micro-aggressions” are defined by an official UCLA report as,
Subtle verbal and nonverbal insults directed toward non-whites, often done automatically and unconsciously. They are layered insults based on one’s race, gender, class, sexuality, language, immigration status, phenotype, accent, or surname.
However,
It is not clear whether any workable definition of discriminatory conduct is capable of capturing every such microaggression.
The indefinite and strangely unilateral nature of the term does raise one or two problems. As Ricochet’s Tim Groseclose notes,
I’m pretty sure that by writing this blog post I have engaged in a microaggression.
And by drawing further attention to this story and its comedic possibilities, it’s very likely that your mild-mannered host is also oppressing somebody, somewhere, in ways that aren’t quite clear. And don’t you get all high and mighty either. By reading this you’re almost certainly complicit too. I denounce your wickedness. Now report to the correction booth. Three hours, maximum setting.
Update:
BenSix ponders the moral compass of Russell Brand and Laurie Penny:
I do not know what Ms Penny’s memories of the riots are but mine are not of “righteous rage,” as Mr Brand phrased it. I think of Haroon Jahan, Shahzad Ali and Abdul Musavir, who were killed in a hit-and-run attack while defending their community from rioters; Richard Mannington Bowles, who was beaten to death while trying to extinguish a fire and Ashraf Rossli, who was attacked and then robbed by people who had pretended to help him. I think of the hundred private homes that were burned; the shops that were torched and the thuggishness that was so dramatically irresponsible that fire engines had their windows smashed when they arrived to fight the flames.
Penny can believe that such acts were inspired by “anger,” though the fact that so many of the participants had faced multiple prior convictions suggests that a good many of them required no such excuse to vandalise and steal. What I find disgusting, though, is the idea that they provide a model for future protests. It is evidence of a bizarre ethical and intellectual failure that one can romanticise this cause of death and destruction in a piece that is devoted to the horrors of casual sexism. It is interesting that a journal of left wing opinion is so receptive to calls for violent upheaval. One can only speculate as to their response should a Spectator columnist demand attacks on wind farms, speed cameras or publishing houses.
As regular readers will be aware, Ms Penny is inclined to hyperbolical nihilism and has some intriguing views on the subject of violence and on whom it may be inflicted. In August 2011 on the BBC’s World Tonight, Laurie offered her “intelligent analysis” of the aforementioned criminal spree. What frightens her, she said, isn’t the beating and murder of pensioners, the mugging of children or the gleeful attempts to burn people in their homes, but the use of the word “feral” to describe the people doing so. By Laurie’s lofty moral calculus, we, not the rioters, are the ignorant ones. “Violence,” she insisted, “is rarely ever mindless.” “Nicking trainers,” we were told, is “a political statement.”
Mark Steyn notes there’s nothing funny about Obama:
There’s a designation for countries where mocking the leader gets you sent to re-education camp, and it isn’t “self-governing republic of freeborn citizens.”
Chris Snowdon does some basic arithmetic:
Anyone who says that they want a tax on fizzy drinks because they are concerned about the cost to the public is either disingenuous or ignorant. It will place a further tax burden on the public that far outweighs any plausible savings. Also remember that we already have a 20 per cent tax on fizzy drinks. It’s called VAT and it isn’t levied on fruit juice, milk or water.
And Tim Worstall tries to endure an economics lecture by the Guardian’s foremost social commentator Polly Toynbee. As you can imagine, it tests his patience a little.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets below.
Update, via the comments:
Once again it’s time to poke a stick in the mental bog of performance art. And so readers are invited to sample the aesthetic wares of Rocío Boliver, an “underground cultural icon” whose career spans musical performance, video, raves and “porno-erotic texts.” Ms Boliver describes herself as “a 56 year old woman living in the 21st century,” a “devotee of transgression” who “aims to demystify the horror of old age in an ironical way,” while “questioning the capitalist system that’s imposed on women in this stage of life.” Her Artistic Statement (NSFW) tells us, “Doing performance art is the only way I can get my own back on life… I feel blessed when I leave those who watch what I do flabbergasted. Happy to wipe their stupid Hollywood smiles off their faces.” She describes her performances as “electroshocks… applied to listless, alienated minds… speechless idiots.” No sell-out flattering of the audience, then.
Highlights from Ms Boliver’s recent triumph Between Menopause and Old Age can be seen in the video below. Its transgressive anti-capitalist electroshocking will,
I’m sure, shake your world. Readers are advised there is nudity throughout, along with barbed wire, self-harm, a bicycle pump and large amounts of Sellotape.
Lifted from the comments following this, here’s an item that may have been missed. Roger Kimball takes a look at the “thriving cottage industry” of staged “hate crimes” and pantomime victimhood:
Last month the Daily Caller reported on an incident at the ostentatiously “progressive” Oberlin College in Ohio. This time the anti-black messages circulating around campus were joined by anti-Jewish and anti-homosexual messages. It turns out that one of the two principle culprits was a vociferous supporter of Obama who belonged to such groups as “White Allies Against Structural Racism” and who describes himself on Twitter as an “atheist/pacifist/environmentalist/libertarian socialist/consequentialist.” As William A. Jacobson reports on his website Legal Insurrection, “School officials and local police knew the identity of the culprits, who were responsible for most if not all of such incidents on campus, yet remained silent as the campus reacted as if the incidents were real. National media attention focused on campus racism at Oberlin for weeks without knowing it was a hoax.”
Jacobson’s timeline of the Oberlin saga makes for interesting reading, not least for the credulity and rush to judgement in the supposedly progressive media and the obfuscation – one might say complicity – of Oberlin’s President. Other fabricated “hate crimes” are mentioned in Kimball’s piece, including a sixteen-year-old student sending himself racist and threatening text messages warning him to drop out of running for presidency of the Student Council, and leading to the involvement of parents, school officials and the police.
As regular readers will know, feigning racial abuse, whether to justify more “diversity” measures or simply to indulge in some personal psychodrama, has, for some, become a fashionable strategy. As when a 19-year-old freshman ransacked her own room and scrawled racial slurs across its walls before curling into a foetal ball, supposedly “traumatised and mute.” When the invented nature of the incident eventually came to light, Otis Smith of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People showed a remarkable indifference to what had actually happened: “It doesn’t matter to me whether she did it or not because of all the pressure these black students are under at these predominantly white schools. If this will highlight it, if it will bring it to the attention of the public, I have no problem with that.” Despite Mr Smith’s nonchalance, it isn’t clear to me how activist theatrics of this kind – ranging from email sock-puppetry to hanging nooses in campus libraries – will help any students feel welcome and at ease.
Update, via the comments:
Mr Smith’s willingness to excuse malicious disinformation is shared by other activists. Among them, black law student Johnathan Perkins, who in 2011 told the University of Virginia’s student newspaper that while walking home he’d been taunted and intimidated by two white police officers. Perkins’ letter to the paper claimed that “most Americans are raised in racially sterilised environments,” and that “black people are accused of… playing the victim.” The student’s stated hope was that, “sharing this experience will provide this community with some much needed awareness of the lives that many of their black classmates are forced to lead.”
A subsequent investigation involving dispatch records, police tapes and surveillance video from nearby businesses revealed the student’s story to be entirely untrue. In a written statement Perkins later admitted, “I wrote the article to bring attention to the topic of police misconduct… The events in the article did not occur.”
Archives of similar hoaxes can be found here, here and here. The latter includes a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College who slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages. The professor, Kerri Dunn, protested her victimhood to faculty and police despite being seen vandalising the vehicle, thereby setting an example for youngsters everywhere. Meanwhile classes were cancelled in support of Professor Dunn and students held rallies for “tolerance and diversity.”
But spare a thought for the professor, our self-imagined heroine. After all, if you’re going to tell students there’s a “crisis of hate” on your campus, as Professor Dunn did, and if the campus you’re talking about doesn’t match that rhetoric at all, then certain measures will have to be taken. And by measures I mean liberties. Like slashing your own tyres then blaming someone in your class. Or walking over to the people who’ve just watched you do this and asking if they’d seen who was responsible.
Writing bravely in the Guardian, Icess Fernandez Rojas unearths a new realm of suffering, one hitherto ignored by the unthinking masses:
All I really wanted was a venti, white chocolate mocha without the whip cream.
No, don’t worry, it isn’t that. Ms Fernandez Rojas does get her beverage. The horror comes before that.
I gave the barista, a lovely older woman, my name and she shot me the typical confused look.
It begins.
I spelled it for her like a first-grader would recite her home phone number. “I-c-e-s-s. You know, like the goddess, but spelled like ice,” I explained. “What?” she asked again.
Yes, our latest Declarer of Ostentatious Grievance was trying to order a personalised coffee – or rather, coffee in a disposable cup that has her name scrawled on it before being thrown away – a baffling concept in itself, one made more complicated by the author’s uncommon and phonetically unobvious name. And the confused barista, despite being a lovely older woman, was, albeit unwittingly, grinding our Guardianista’s face beneath her heel.
In fairness to Starbucks, it’s not just baristas who are at fault but any restaurant or eatery requiring a name to add a personal touch to its service.
You see, Ms Fernandez Rojas has endured this poignant political struggle before – “a lifetime of having my name misspelled and mispronounced.” And those tears won’t dry themselves, you know. Which is why you, the public, must be told. What with your dull and obvious names, like Jessica and Angela:
Angela could get coffee at Starbucks with ease while Icess was still spelling her name out. Jessica was a staple at my local Chinese place even though Icess paid. And even Microsoft Word recognised Jenny as a proper pronoun, a proper person, over me; the red squiggle line was a constant reminder.
Spellcheck too? Will this oppression never end? One for our collection of classic sentences. And doubtless Ms Fernandez Rojas is intimately familiar with the spelling and pronunciation of every name of every employee at her local Chinese restaurant.
Sometimes the endless quest for name validation, even in my own Word document, was exhausting.
Poor lamb. Perhaps a coffee would help. Oh wait.
It’s all very tragic. Our Guardian columnist just wants to “celebrate [her] uniqueness” in an “inclusive society” and her spellchecking software, the subtleties of which apparently elude her, is dashing those hopes. She isn’t being “validated” by Microsoft Word. It’s how utopias die. No, you black-hearted scoundrels, stop that smirking at once. Why won’t you feel her pain? Doesn’t its immensity weigh upon your breast? Well, at least Ms Fernandez Rojas isn’t suffering alone.
Update:
Sniggering at the spelling errors of Starbucks baristas is now a thing among Guardian readers, who seem to imagine a ten-second interaction with someone whose own name they don’t know, and don’t care to know, is equivalent to a relationship with a long-standing colleague or close family member. (Next week in the Guardian: laughing at dyslexics and people for whom English is a second language.) Though I did quite like this dissenting comment: “This is a bit of a pot-and-kettle situation. A few weeks ago this newspaper ran, on its front page, the headline marquee ‘Plane carrying Bolivian president, Eva Morales, rerouted to Austria.’ There was no mention of when Bolivian president Evo Morales had announced a sex change.”
While we cower in the shadow of Laurie Penny’s mind, here’s another bite-size agony for our ongoing series:
The article Laurie finds so inspiring – Racism is to White People as Wind is to the Sky – can be found here. Its profundities include,
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