Japan’s leading toilet manufacturer says electric bidets “may catch fire.” Appliance in question features “pulsating massage spray, power dryer, deodorizing filter and Tornado Wash flush.” Burn treatment upgrade forthcoming, presumably. (H/T, Protein Wisdom) // North Korean Socialist Realist Art. Proletariat glorified, tractors worshipped. Realism aspect somewhat doubtful. // Unhinged race activist Dr Kamau Kambon proposes a final solution. Exterminating white folk will save the world, apparently. // Luggage labels. Lots of them. // Hotdoll. “The sex doll for dogs.” I kid you not. (H/T, Ace) // Via Mr Eugenides, an alternative to the previous item… Neuticles! “Allow your pet to retain his natural look and self esteem. With Neuticles, it’s like nothing ever changed!” Choose your preferred size and firmness. // Via Cox & Forkum, the 1940s political cartoons of Dr Seuss. // The Hollywood Animation Archive. From Uncle Remus to Playboy. // Rapatronic images of early atomic tests. First ten millionth of a second. Eerie and compelling. // Dave Pressler’s Toy Explosion. The Endorphins are fun, as is Tummy, the Brave Little Stomach. // Japanese Hyper Rescue Robot. Lifts cars, clears snow. // The Ragtime Ephemeralist. Cut a rug to the Honolulu Cake Walk and other bygone ditties. // Repeat after me, “All cultures are equal.” // When post-it notes attack. // Apollo Mission multimedia archive. Sights and sounds, Buzz and Neil. Onboard recordings, mishaps, Nixon calls long distance. // Earth and Moon, to scale. // William “The Shat” Shatner sings Common People. A post-ironic triumph, methinks. // And finally, to class the joint up a little… Mr Dean Martin. 

Oh my. According to DaimlerChrysler, the Smart ForFun2 “awakens the inner child in everyone who sees it.”

Yes, I’m getting that. The feeling, I mean. Not the car. More here.

Thanks to everyone who emailed links and comments in response to the Peddling Stupidity article about Carolyn Guertin and her postmodern ‘scholarship’. One item in particular, posted at Carnal Reason, caught my attention. I’m going to have to quote myself to provide a little context. It’s shameful, I know, but bear with me. Regarding PoMo prose, I wrote:

“The intention behind such wilfully unintelligible text is, it seems, not to invite thought or reward it, but to repel and discourage it. This is done by exhausting the reader’s efforts to comprehend and reducing him to a state of demoralised dishonesty, whereby absurd and vacuous statements are repeated and endorsed, regardless of incomprehension and for fear of appearing stupid. By publicly endorsing vacuity, and making great claims in its name, the unsuspecting student is thus painted into a corner and any subsequent rethinking entails an intolerable loss of face and credibility.”

Carnal Reason highlights this passage, then teases out its implications:

“To corrupt a man, get him to tell lies in public. Make him espouse what he does not believe. To make sure he does not believe what he espouses, make what he espouses unintelligible.”

This point is illustrated with an extract from an interview with Theodore Dalrymple. Dalrymple is talking about PC censorship and learned dishonesty, but the parallels with Guertin, and with politicised PoMo generally, shouldn’t be too hard to fathom:

“Political correctness is Communist propaganda writ small. In my study of Communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of Communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect, and is intended to.”

Dalrymple gives good interview and the piece is worth reading in full.

In response to this article, some readers have been discussing PoMo politics and its various “trickle-down” effects. Readers who’ve been following that discussion may be interested in some points made by Fabian Tassano over at his blog. Tassano addresses the broader subject of leftist bias in academia and the creeping censorship that follows:

“The larger part of academia has become obsessed with jargon and formalism, at the expense of meaningful content. An academic’s principal options in fields such as economics, psychology or sociology are now (1) become a number-cruncher (do tedious empirical research with plenty of highly technical statistical analysis, much of which is likely to be questionable), or (2) generate pseudo-theory of a kind which reproduces the currently fashionable terminology. In either case, taking care to say nothing that conflicts with received wisdom. In fields such as literature or philosophy, there is only option (2). The high level of technicality and referencing typically masks the triviality — or absence — of genuine content.

The purpose of academia has changed from producing real insights to generating reinforcement for the preferred world view… It should be obvious by now, to anyone who cares, that the principle of free speech is being gradually eroded in the West. Either by straightforward ditching, or — more subtly — by redefining it in ways designed to legitimise the prohibition of ideologically incorrect viewpoints. For example, not long ago an editor at the Index on Censorship admonished us for being too literalist about the issue: ‘People shouldn’t think that the Index is against censorship on principle. It may have been so in its radical youth, but it is now as concerned with fighting hate speech as protecting free speech.’ (Rohan Jayasekera, commenting about the murder of Theo van Gogh.)

…Where we get dissident research being done at all, it is — inevitably — funded by bodies with links to commerce and/or right wing politics, since those are the only organisations with an incentive to challenge the il-liberal consensus. This is used by the mainstream both (a) to prove that there isn’t a restriction on what research gets done, and (b) to discredit that research.”

The article can be read in full here. Tassano’s book, Mediocracy, may also be of interest.

The recent article on Carolyn Guertin and her postmodern ‘scholarship’ continues to attract some interesting comments, and the broader subject may be worth revisiting. Thanks to all those who’ve made contributions towards the upkeep of this site. Much appreciated. With luck, I’ll soon be penning this from a bejewelled armchair, in a castle made of gold. Meanwhile, a little more grim absurdity seems in order. Via Jawa, I stumbled across this clip of Jeff Dunham and Achmed. It made me laugh, quite a lot. I think it’s the eyebrows that did it. I do hope finding this funny doesn’t make me a bad person. Answers on a postcard, please.

And, for not dissimilar reasons, this may also amuse.