For newcomers, more items from the archives.

All Pop Music Will Henceforth Be Terrible.  

The government is “waging naked class war,” says the Guardian’s Owen Hatherley. Can leftwing pop music avert catastrophe? 

Making vaguely alternative pop music is, it seems, all but impossible without indefinite subsidy, an Arts Council grant, a subsidised spell at art school and a bohemian squat to call your own. Yes, these young titans of the left need the state to make them edgy and countercultural. And there can be no better use for taxpayers’ money than indulging would-be pop stars while they become “class conscious” and find themselves, musically. However long it takes. 

Rebellion, Revisited.  

If what these educators want sounds a bit like grooming, a little predatory, that’s because it is. 

The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Furr and 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.

Which may explain the doublethink of Mr Arun Smith. 

You’ll Notice They All Wear Shoes.

San Francisco’s radical nudists are remarkably needy. Your children must, simply must, see their genitals.

Imagine you’re out shopping with the kids in tow and having to weave your way through large groups of unattractive men waving their tackle at you. One doesn’t have to have “unrealistic issues of body shame” to find the exhibitionism tiresome or inappropriate. And the denials of any sexual aspect are also unconvincing, especially given that so many of the participants are enthusiasts of fetish clubs and websites catering to people who like public sex and scandalising others, and for whom the whole point is to have an audience, whether titillated or repelled. It’s rather like how the people at last year’s ‘protest’ claimed they just wanted to be left alone – while squealing for attention on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection.

Monbiot and the Morlocks.

George Monbiot encounters the exotic underclass. Things go badly wrong.

Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended. You see, George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

There’s a world of wonder in the greatest hits. 

Time for another classic sentence from the Guardian. And so, via Julia, let’s bathe in the mental radiance of VJD Smith, a “feminist mother of two who works in publishing”:

As a teen anorexic, I found diet yoghurt ads hard enough. I don’t know how I’d defend myself from the everyday body hatred now.

And another, 

These days you don’t even have to buy a magazine to absorb the body hatred. 

Stoicism and a sense of proportion are not standard fare at the left’s national newspaper, and so we also get quite a bit of this: 

This evening, shopping at Sainsbury’s, I was greeted by the following headlines, in bold capitals and at eye level, as I entered the store: WEIGHT TORMENT (New! magazine), OUR BODY WARS (Star), BODY PANICS! (Heat)… The very existence of these things can mess with your head. You can try to avert your eyes as you head for the fruit and veg but if you look back once – sneak even the slightest glance – all this can send you straight to the cake counter for yet another miserable pre-starvation-diet binge.

Such crippling intrigue, all at eye level. In bold capitals, even. 

Ms Smith, a grown woman, has yet to embrace the incredibly radical solution of not being interested in Heat magazine, which is, I think, a little odd. For a grown woman. Such magazines, and their readers, were ridiculed 20 years ago in Absolutely Fabulous. And it is, after all, quite possible to breeze round the local supermarket without finding oneself emotionally gripped by the latest travails of Kerry Katona or the Kardashian sisters, none of whom I could reliably identify, or by the latest breathless opinion on hemlines, weight loss or pubic waxing. And yet many of the Guardian’s supposedly sophisticated and freethinking columnists – feminists, even – find not being interested inexplicably difficult. 

Chris Snowdon on the dishonesty of ‘minimum price’ lobbyists and the prohibitionist tendency: 

There is much more that could be said about this thinly veiled piece of lobbying. The inexplicable lack of a control group, for example, or the mystery of why official hospital records were not enough for the authors – instead they created their own “estimates” of how many people died. But the bottom line is that these people are lying with statistics. The result – and almost certainly the intention – of their study is to make people believe that fewer people died of alcohol-related diseases in British Columbia between 2002-09 as a result of minimum pricing. “Nearly a third” fewer in fact. 

Theodore Dalrymple on an appetite for doom: 

The apocalyptic pessimist… believes that the end of the world is nigh, and secretly is rather pleased about it. If he is of a scientific bent, he does the following: he takes an undesirable trend and projects it indefinitely into the future until whatever is the object of the trend destroys the world. For example, he might take the fact that Staphylococci reproduce exponentially on a Petri dish to mean that, within the week, the entire biosphere will consist of Staphylococci and nothing else. Man will be crushed under the weight of bacteria. Paul Ehrlich is of that ilk. His belief in the end of the world precedes his belief in any particular cause of it. 

As Fabian Tassano said,  

Thinking, it will be recalled, is the activity one performs before one has arrived at the answer. 

And Tim Worstall parses the logic of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas: 

60% higher is an interesting definition of lower, isn’t it?

Note Ms Lucas’ use of the term “demand management.” Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

More psychodrama on campus:

Only hours after students installed a “Free Speech Wall” at Carleton University to prove that campus free speech was alive and well, it was torn down by an activist who claimed the wall was an “act of violence” against the gay community. “What we wanted to promote was competition of ideas, rather than ‘if I disagree with you I’ve got to censor you,’” said Ian CoKehyeng, founder of Carleton Students for Liberty, the creators of the wall. Installed on Monday in the Unicentre Galleria, one of campus’ most high-traffic areas, the wall was really more of a 1.2 x 1.8 metre wooden plank wrapped in paper and equipped with felt markers. By Tuesday morning the wall was gone, destroyed in an act of “forceful resistance” by seventh-year human rights student Arun Smith.

Yes, I know. Forceful resistance. Against free speech. By a human rights student.

A human rights student who last year promised to ensure “every voice is empowered and every student’s voice is heard.” Well, maybe not every voice. It seems there’ll be some pre-emptive and unilateral vetting.

But wait, there’s more.

“In organising the ‘free speech wall,’ the Students for Liberty have forgotten that liberty requires liberation, and this liberation is prevented by providing space … for the expression of hate,” wrote Smith in a 600-word Facebook post in which he identified himself as an anti-homophobia campaigner. Calling the area around the wall a “war zone,” he intimated that it was “but another in a series of acts of violence” against gay rights. In a Tuesday afternoon Twitter exchange with a CBC reporter, Mr Smith dubbed free speech an “illusory concept” and declared that “not every opinion is valid, nor deserving of expression.”

The punchline cometh.

In truth, the wall’s only overt references to sexual orientation were pro-gay, such as “QUEERS ARE AWESOME,” “Gay is OK” and “I [Heart] Queers.” The only comment that verged into anti-gay territory was a scrawl reading “traditional marriage is awesome.”

Some kinds of stupid have to be educated into the kids.

Update, via the comments:

Matt Welch on Obama’s fantasy economics:

Democrats are in denial about the true cost of their ideological commitments. If we taxed Americans enough to cover the cost (or even 90 percent of the cost) of what Democrats consider the minimal level of government, the result would be recession. That should, but won’t, give big-government apologists pause.

Somewhat related: “Tax revenue has been falling despite a sharp increase in the rate.” Despite?

Jonah Goldberg on imaginary opponents:

When will [the left] accept that they aren’t all that stands between a wonderful, tolerant America and Jim Crow? I was in the room when, during the Democratic convention, civil-rights hero John Lewis suggested that Republicans wanted to “go back” to the days when black men like him could be beaten in the street by the enforcers of Jim Crow. I thought it an outrageous and disgusting bit of demagoguery. The audience of Democratic delegates cheered in a riot of self-congratulation… To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

And Victor Davis Hanson on the ‘progressive’ aristocracy:

The medieval concept of offsetting your sins through public penance is back in play: The more loudly you talk about helping the proverbial people, the more you are allowed to live quite apart from them without guilt… Hollywood still seeks hundreds of millions in tax breaks unavailable to small businesses without shame because it is so manifestly compassionate. Occupy Wall Street does not camp out in Beverly Hills or Malibu, although the likes of Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio make more per year than do most Wall Street fat cats… For the overpaid and pampered Hollywood movie star, calling for raising taxes, banning guns, ending global warming, and legalising gay marriage means never having to feel too bad about living on the beach and making, under our capitalist system, more money in a month than do many Americans in a lifetime.

For some, professions of egalitarianism and socialist belly fire are a kind of rhetorical chaff – a way to elevate oneself as More Compassionate Than Thou, while deflecting envy from below. (“Please don’t hate me for being richer than you. Look, over there – they have even more, or almost as much –  let’s all hiss at them!”) Vicarious philanthropy – giving away freely other people’s earnings – is a remarkably effective ruse, so much so it seems to encourage a certain disregard for dissonance, as demonstrated, for example, by the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger in this comical exchange with Piers Morgan. And by the Guardian’s imperious class warrior Polly Toynbee, whose rhetoric was contrasted with her actual lifestyle and was promptly reduced to indignant spluttering on national television. Similar obliviousness is also displayed by the millionaire actor Jeremy Irons, who denounces consumerism and asks, “How many clothes do people need?” All while owning no fewer than seven houses, one of which is a peach-coloured castle. No, you’re not allowed to laugh. Because his wife is also very Green and “deeply socialist.”

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