Tom Paine has been spending time with our leftist betters at the Barbican’s alleged Battle of Ideas, “a weekend festival – shaping the future through debate.” 

His report begins, 

It got off to a bad start for me with a session on equality that was more like the deep graveyard peace of a single idea than a battle. Four leftists set out possible views of equality, all favourable, and concluded that “everyone” agreed it was good and we needed more of it for the sake of our mental health because envy apparently drives them mad. Who knew? A token non-leftist offered a slightly different view and the chairman declared (with no hint of irony) that every possible idea had been expressed.

Mr Paine concludes, 

The Battle of Ideas may continue, fitfully, but in England the War seems lost. I sat open-mouthed, for example, as a speaker from the audience said to liberal-minded panel member Alex Deane: “We don’t want freedom any more, Alex. We want regulation. We want control.” I waited for the laughter as I first assumed he was joking. Then I realised he was serious and waited for the jeers. Reaction was there none. This sentiment, in modern London, was completely uncontroversial. 

Do follow the links for much more in between.

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

No Ego Whatsoever, Just an Urge to Control. 

Ken Loach is selfless, heroic and countercultural. And so the state should force you to give him money.

Loach has said that he wants to make the British “confront their imperialist past” and in 1977 he famously rejected the offer of an OBE, supposedly on principle, denouncing the honour as “despicable… deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.” However, this principled adamance did not inhibit the director’s 2003 acceptance of the Praemium Imperiale – the World Culture Prize in Memory of His Imperial Highness Prince Takamatsu. His Imperial Highness was of course the brother of the 124th Emperor of Japan, Hirohito, whose activities and ambitions were, it seems, altogether more moral and glorious. 

Postmodernism Unpeeled. 

A discussion with Stephen Hicks.

Writing in Innovations of Antiquity, Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden dismissed “transparent prose” as merely “the approved mode of expression for the society and values of the newly empowered middle class.” In the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh denounced “unproblematic prose and clarity of presentation” as “the conceptual tools of conservatism.” The rejection of transparency as “conservative” is particularly odd, since transparency makes a claim amenable to broad critical enquiry, and thus to public correction. Presumably, if you prefer arguments that are comprehensible and open to scrutiny, this signals some reactionary tendency and deep moral failing. On the other hand, if you sneer at such bourgeois trifles, you’re radical, clever and very, very sexy.

When Scolding is the Payoff for All That Piety and Angst. 

A Guardian journalist dares to send her daughter to a private school. Socialist vindictiveness promptly ensues.

Has Ms Murray not heard the sermon of Arabella Weir, whose definition of a “good, responsible citizen” still rings in our ears and swells our hearts? And who tells us that state schools are virtuous because they teach children “who to be wary of, who to avoid” and “how to keep their heads down,” (though how these things will be learned is oddly unexplored). And what of Kevin McKenna, a man no less pious, who tells us that parents who view the comprehensive system as inadequate – perhaps because of their own first-hand experiences – are by implication wicked and that such parental waywardness is intolerable and should be banned? Has Ms Murray not been told by those who know better that children aren’t special and should be sacrificed for society and the glories of socialism? Perhaps she’s been reading those surveys of state school teaching staff in which respondents report “a climate of violence,” “malicious disruption” and damage to personal property as “part of the routine working environment.”

Now stock up on canned goods and liquor and explore the greatest hits. 

“The Town Hall men’s restroom was ‘out-of-order’ after a high-pressure toilet exploded during routine use.” And other toilet-related news from around the world. // Shoes and teeth, together at last. // Fetch! // Hitchcock. // Cynical tea bags. // Titanium mouse. // Quantum mechanics calculations. // Because physics is hard. // Tour the pyramids of Giza. // Google’s data centres. // Play with animated gifs. // Search the world of comic books. // Solved: mystery of washed-up monster eyeball. // Big mouth zombie makeover. Did I mention that it moves? // Ring ruler. // Why parents rarely want their children to be artists, parts 4 and 5. 

Suddenly, the bar for being offended has gone way down. We’ve all seen the feigned outrage as something that pervades our entire society and if it works as a trump card to shut down discussion, people are going to be attracted to using it. And what people fail to recognise is that feigned outrage is something that was first weaponised and perfected on college campuses.

Greg Lukianoff, FIRE. 

Oh, for a world without consequences.

“Dr Julius Neubronner’s miniature pigeon camera.” 1908. // Putty eats magnets. (h/t, MeFi) // BMX and fireworks. // “Bacon that cooks in your toaster.” 1964. // A chart of Bond kills, in the style of Dr No. // Tai
Chi. // Unfortunate toys. It’s always the crotch. // The frozen faithful. // High-speed photography of exploding things. // Chocolate dice. // Wooden cake. // Giant cardboard ghetto blaster. // Hair barrels. // Couples. // This lady likes to shoot. // Someone is waging total war on the World of Warcraft. // Irregular floorboards. // Bicymple. // Brain candles. // Paintings by Lindsey Kustusch. // Are you ready for some staggering beauty? 

Zombie roams the mental rubble of Occupy LA, where a kind of Slacker Marxism threatens to shake the world. Or it would do, I’m sure, if anyone could be arsed:

Yesterday the motley remnants of Occupy Los Angeles finally got around to celebrating Occupy Wall Street’s one-year anniversary (more than two weeks after all the other OWS groups did so.) In fact, this lackadaisical attitude about their own rally perfectly reflected the newly emergent operational philosophy of Occupy LA, which one might deem Anarcho-Laziness: the right to avoid employment… A major theme of the day seemed to be an active antipathy to the notion of work. “Capitalism,” you see, “has robbed us all of our free time.” If it wasn’t for that mean ol’ capitalism we could just slack off all day. But not everybody is clear on the concept. Quoting Karl Marx directly conflicts with the principles of Anarcho-Laziness: the whole point of communism is to ensure that everybody has a job. Just try telling Che that you just don’t feel like working in a socialist utopia. 

Ace ponders bra-straps and fretful feminism:

There’s a woman I admire for her smarts. I won’t say who. I find her to be a lively and interesting thinker, and funny. But I frequently hear this woman ask, “What do my very minor, trivial fashion choices say about me As A Woman (capitalisation implicit)?” and, “Are my occasional attempts to appear attractive a capitulation to the Male Gaze?” and other such absurdities. In this particular woman’s case, she asks these questions archly, with a bit of ironic distance, so that she is parodying herself at the same time she asks these questions. Nevertheless, these questions occur with such frequency I am reasonably confident that, while she is sort of goofing on herself for thinking about such things, she does think about such things, and not just occasionally, but rather a lot. 

It does strike me that a bright, insightful woman is inflicting something akin to intellectual lobotomisation on herself, filling her head with constant trivialities… A not-inconsequential portion of her mind is constantly being used to chew over absurdities of a quasi-religious nature. Is the fact that I have chosen to leave my bra-strap visible beneath my t-shirt a betrayal of the feminist ideal? What does my exposed bra-strap say about me as a person? What messages am I sending to the world? What philosophical implications flow from this casually exposed bra-strap? …When I see a woman I rather like and respect filling her head with such nonsense – thinking about Gender Issues, as it were, once every seven seconds – I feel bad that she’s been conned, and that her brain is simply not firing on all cylinders, clogged, as it is, with bubble-gum and silly-string.

And there’s this, mentioned in passing by Dan at Monday Books: 

I did read law, haltingly, at university. I can’t remember much of it, apart from… how obvious it was that none of the Criminology module lecturers had ever been burgled or mugged.

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

In 1989 Theodore Dalrymple paid a visit to North Korea’s Pyongyang Department Store Number 1: 

It didn’t take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways – yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the ‘customers’. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking. 

Eventually, they grew uncomfortably aware that they were under my observation. They began to shuffle their feet and wriggle, as if my regard pinned them like live insects to a board. The assistants too became restless and began to wonder what to do in these unforeseen circumstances. They decided that there was nothing for it but to distribute something under the eyes of this inquisitive foreigner. And so, all of a sudden, they started to hand out plastic wash bowls to the twenty ‘customers’, who took them (without any pretence of payment). Was it their good luck, then? Had they received something for nothing? No, their problems had just begun. What were they to do with their plastic wash bowls? (All of them were brown incidentally, for the assistants did not have sufficient initiative to distribute a variety of goods to give verisimilitude to the performance, not even to the extent of giving out differently coloured bowls.) 

They milled around the counter in a bewildered fashion, clutching their bowls in one hand as if they were hats they had just doffed in the presence of a master. Some took them to the counter opposite to hand them in; some just waited until I had gone away. I would have taken a photograph, but I remembered just in time that these people were not participating in this charade from choice, that they were victims, and that – despite their expressionless faces and lack of animation – they were men with chajusong, that is to say creativity and consciousness, and to have photographed them would only have added to their degradation. I left the hardware counter, but returned briefly a little later: the same people were standing at it, sans brown plastic bowls, which were neatly re-piled on the shelf. 

And then things started to get strange.  

From The Wilder Shores of Marx, 1991. 

The Heresiarch on abortion and assumptions: 

The Guardian’s feminist-in-chief Suzanne Moore tweeted that… “the Tories will not win their war on women.” Two incredibly lazy but widespread assumptions combine in the notion of a “Tory war on women.” Firstly, that the divide on abortion is primarily political (and left-right) rather than moral, and that the pro-choice position is progressive, and the pro-life one reactionary. Secondly, that the pro-choice case is the pro-women, feminist one, and its opponents are motivated by hatred of women, or at the very least by an inherently misogynistic desire to control women’s lives… 

There is indeed a gender divide on the abortion debate in Britain, and it is especially stark in relation to the question of term limits. A YouGov poll in January found that of the 37% of Britons who favoured a lowering of the 24 week limit (34% supported the status quo) the majority were women. In total, twice as many women as men (49% as opposed to 24%) wanted to see a lower limit. There was also an interesting age difference: among the younger age group (18-24) support for a lower limit stood at 43%, whereas in the two older age groups it was 35%. Strikingly, support for a reduction to 20 weeks or below was highest among people who expressed a preference for Labour rather than the two other main parties – which again fits ill with the concept of a “Tory war on women.” 

For a snapshot of some more, rather instructive, feminist thinking on the subject, see also this. 

And Theodore Dalrymple on the late historian and Stalinist Eric Hobsbawm: 

A writer of my acquaintance once turned down an invitation to dinner with Hobsbawm (who rarely refused any honour or privilege that the unjust capitalist state could offer him) on the grounds that if Hobsbawm’s political wishes had come to fruition, he would have had his proposed guest shot in short order. A man who could think until late in his life, as Hobsbawn did, that the murder of 20 million people would be justified if it brought about a socialist utopia, would hardly balk at the death of a single bourgeois guest.

In my experience, Marxists prefer to be judged, if judged at all, by their theories and rather fanciful abstractions, and by their pretensions of moral elevation – all conveniently bleached of realism and messy human detail. And so, when not simply lying, their conversation turns to the potential of communism – communism in theory – never actual communism, i.e., communism in power. But the practical and psychological implications of egalitarian utopias aren’t exactly hard to fathom. Unless, that is, one takes care not to notice certain things or think in certain ways, and then goes on not noticing with growing sophistication. And I suspect that sophistication – a practiced unrealism – is driven by something very nasty indeed.

There are of course those who read Marx and Engels while somehow ignoring the salacious references to “revolutionary terror,” the “murderous death agonies of the old society” and the “complete extirpation” of “reactionary peoples” – i.e., thee and me – as if the horrors that followed had nothing at all to do with the urges to which they give intellectual license. An abstracted, sanitised belief in Marxism – detached from its consequences – isn’t just an oversight. It requires colossal bad faith, especially among the intelligent.

To read Marx and Engels – to say nothing of Trotsky and his enthusiasm for guillotines and the prospect of beheading people who didn’t wish to be communists – to read such material and somehow not grasp where that thinking goes isn’t just a failure of critical wherewithal. It’s a contrivance. Just as some contrive an indifference when faced with Engels’ eagerness to see “the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples.” A global class genocide that would be, in his words, “a step forward.” Hobsbawm, like many others, traded his probity for vanity. He chose to be seduced. And if people still want to play at Angry Marxist™ – and it seems some youngsters do – they might at least be honest about it.

Related, this and this. 

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

The self-explanatory Food On My Dog. // Underwater firearm not hugely effective. // Photographic hoaxes. // Giant robot battle fists. // Jill Greenberg’s Horses. // Hating Breitbart. // “This home-made Marmite admittedly tastes different.” (h/t, MeFi) // The politics of peanut butter sandwiches. // Ice cream cakes. // Don’t kiss kitty’s paw. // Transparent soil. // These things are wrong. // Fire devils. // How many famous robots can you name? // Know your mushrooms. // Teaching while high. // Giant slugs attack French towns. // How to illuminate the Moon with an awful lot of lasers (and then go too far with terrible consequences).