I think that’s part of the issue, with our civilization at large. You see, the world is very complicated, and people are given the impression that it’s never been this complicated — which is a lie — and know for a fact that things are changing very fast. They no more find a path, than it dissolves and crumbles under them.
We’re preparing the new generation rottenly for this, too. Look, every generation is educated according to what their grandparents thought was desirable. Which is why I had the education that would have helped an upper class Portuguese Lady in the mid 19th century to make a good marriage and shine in society. For practical purposes, other than diplomacy […] the only use for my degree was academia by the time I took it. Though business desperately needed translators, we weren’t being taught office skills, or the terminology we needed to translate science or industrial stuff. (I learned those on my own, through running into them head first, as I learn practically anything.)
Kids now are being educated to the dreams of the early twentieth elites: for a communitarian world with a strong central government. They’re being told this is the future and what to expect, because when that idea made it into academia, and slowly worked itself through to curriculum and expectations, that was the future everyone EXPECTED. Even conservatives thought that the future would involve central planning. They just wanted to keep a little more individual freedom with it.
I remember blowing the world of Robert’s third grade teacher apart when we informed her that no, in the future there wouldn’t be a need for MORE group work, and that all creativity wouldn’t be communal (which frankly is funny. Creativity doesn’t work that way) but that it would be more individual, probably with people working on their piece of the project miles and miles away from the rest of the “team” and having to pull their weight alone. Dan and I explained why based on tech and trends, and all the poor woman kept saying is “that’s not what we were taught.”
Our kids were prepared not only for a world that doesn’t exist, but the world that idiot intellectuals (all intellectuals are idiots. They mostly don’t know a thing of the real world or real people) thought would come about, somehow, automagically. Think of Brave New World, but everyone is happy and doesn’t need the soma. (rolls eyes.)
And then we sneer at millenials for not finding their way, when people my age, who are self-directed and battlers, and have vocations, find ourselves caught in the grinding gears of change and get our goals and work broken over and over again, and yeah, also don’t find it easier to find our way.
Talk to the kids. Help them find something they’re “meant” to do (that’s not how it works, so make sure they know there isn’t only one goal and only one vocation, but there’s almost always something that their skills and ability are useful for RIGHT NOW. And the ability to learn more to change.) If needed, hook them on multiple streams of income. Help them see it’s possible. Dispel their illusions that life was ever easy.
Sure, in the past there were people who got “the one job” and stuck to it through thick and thin to the golden watch at the end. But I don’t think they were ever the majority. And by the time I came along, you couldn’t have any loyalty to your company, because it would have none to you.
Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.
June 23, 2022
QotD: Mis-preparing our kids for the future
June 22, 2022
Puberty, “white guilt”, and social contagion helps drive huge numbers of teen girls to think they are transgender
Until a few years ago — a blink of the eye in social terms — most individuals who wanted to transition to the other gender were born male. That is no longer the situation in North America, as vast numbers of young teens have been hammered with accusations of “privilege” for being white, while already undergoing the stresses and social disruption of puberty, seem to be deciding in groups that they must have been “assigned the wrong gender” at birth. In City Journal, Leor Sapir tells some of their stories:
Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) — that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.
I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege”, how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color”. Plagued by guilt, the children — almost all of them girls — rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.
The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.
The wages of whiteness for teenagers are, however, only half of the story. Decades of gay rights activism have taught us that being gay or lesbian is not something one chooses. The mainstream narrative of transgenderism — promoted aggressively in the context of civil rights policymaking — holds that even being transgender is something people have little control over. Gender identity, experts have argued in Title IX lawsuits, is innate, immutable, and “primarily dictated by messages from the brain”. Thus, membership in the “LGBTQ+ community” would seem to be nonvoluntary. One is either “born that way” or not.
[…]
Several of the parents I spoke to told me that their daughters’ friends all identify as non-heterosexual, despite none having ever kissed another teenager or been in a romantic relationship. LGBT identity is, for them, not related to sexual attraction or behavior. As Kate Julian has written in The Atlantic, America is going through a “sex recession”. Whereas in 1991, most teenagers would have had at least one sexual encounter by the time they graduated high school, by 2017 most had had none. The vacuum left by the hollowing out of courting and relationships has been filled, so it would seem, by a new, inward form of “sexuality” in which the sexual side of our nature is purely a private experience. The 1960s sexual-liberation movement has somehow bred asexual atomism.
June 18, 2022
Do you remember Julia from 2012?
If you don’t remember the amazing life story of Julia Faceless, here’s Chris Bray to refresh your memory:
In 2012, the Obama campaign released a cartoon depiction of the choice America was facing, boiled down to a single figure: The Life of Julia.
Julia was actually, literally faceless, and entirely alone, traveling through life without family, friends, or colleagues. But ahh, like the story about the guy who asks God about the two sets of footprints, Julia wasn’t alone alone: She was supported, at all times, by the endless beneficence of the centralized state, our one true parent and deity, the very lifesource. She was able to begin learning as a child because Barack Obama gave her a HeadStart program; she was able to start a business as an adult because Barack Obama gave her an SBA loan. The God-Patriarch Barack walked with her always, enabling her to live, giving her the substance of her life.
That’s how it works, of course: You need programs so you can do stuff. How can a human being possibly reproduce without government programs to support and subsidize reproduction? It’s a biological impossibility — as is well known, the uterus isn’t even activated until the first government check arrives. You can’t do things on your own, and you certainly can’t do things with the informal support of family, friends, or community. Life requires the empowerment that comes with formalized systems of dependency.
Chris then follows up an earlier post on the administration’s muscular deconstruction of student-led activities and organizations at Stanford with some further evidence that even at the college campus level, deliberate infantilization of adults continues at an ever-increasing pace. Adulting is hard, man!
That’s way beyond you, poor debilitated child. Why don’t you try something that’s within your range of ability, like going for a walk around campus? You know, we have a formal organization that can support you in the attempt. To take a walk. Here. On campus.
The message of stories like this, and the message of the administrative actions they describe, is a message of weakness, fearfulness, debilitation, and dependency: You can’t. Imagine telling a healthy twenty year-old that he shouldn’t try to go camping in the mountains, ’cause it’s probably just way too hard for him. See, Stanford’s student life administrators are helping.
What you’re doing in your late teens and early twenties, whether you go to college or not, is learning adulthood — acquiring habits of independence and resourcefulness that you’ll carry for the rest of your life. (Ideally your parents will already deliver you to legal adulthood with a big part of this training already in place.) The message, don’t try to take a trip to the mountains, it’s too hard for you, is a knife in the heart of that journey. It’s a disgusting and shameful thing to communicate to young adults.
June 17, 2022
Oikophobia run rampant
In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the prevalence of oikophobia in western culture:
In an article for the American Mind, Daniel Mahoney draws our attention to a recent book on the phenomenon of oikophobia, the dislike or even hatred of one’s own country or culture, which now seems so prevalent in western academic and intellectual circles as to be almost an orthodoxy or requirement for acceptance into the intellectual class. Of course, no social trend or phenomenon is entirely new or has an indisputable starting point: for example, George Orwell drew attention to English self-hatred many years ago. But the spread of oikophobia has been of epidemic proportion in late years.
It seems to me that Mr. Mahoney’s analysis can be extended. The first question to ask is why oikophobia should now be so prevalent. To this, I should tentatively reply that it is because of the mass intellectualization of society consequent upon the spread of tertiary education. Intellectuals have an inherent tendency to be oppositional to all received opinion or feeling, for there is no point in going to the trouble of being an intellectual if one ends up thinking and feeling what the great mass of the people around one think and feel. Love of country and inherited custom is so commonplace as to appear almost normal or natural, and much of it, of course, is unreflecting.
But intellectuals are supposed to reflect. That is their function, and they are inclined to reject received opinion, not because it is wrong but because it is received. It goes without saying that received opinion can be wrong and even wicked or evil, in which case the strictures of intellectuals are necessary and salutary; but intellectuals themselves may promote wrong or even wicked opinions, partly from the a priori need to distinguish themselves from the run of mankind.
The phobia in oikophobia is the fear of being taken for one of the common run of mankind.
The second question about oikophobia is the old one of cui bono? Again, one must not confuse the psychological or social origin or function of an opinion with its justification or correctness in the abstract, but once one has decided that an opinion is mistaken or deleterious in its effect, it is natural to ask where it comes from and what interests it serves.
In my opinion, oikophobia is generally bogus, that is to say insincere, as is its cognate, multiculturalism. The oikophobe and the multiculturalist are not really interested in other cultures, except as instruments with which to beat their fellow citizens. The reason for their lack of real interest in other countries is not difficult to find and is of very common application. The fact is that it is very difficult genuinely to enter into a culture, or subculture, other than one’s own, even when that culture or subculture is close to or adjacent to one’s own.
June 14, 2022
QotD: Generation snowflake
So no, no surprises here. Their collective personality makes the Millennials unusually suited for the flirtation with socialism. They are a great match; if this was Tinder, Marx would be getting super liked all the time.
Socialism is the response of a spoiled child when faced with the world that does not genuflect to its every wish the way their parents did – the world as it is must therefore be evil and has to be changed to something radically different. Gen Y, of course, did not just magically became the way they are – they were brought up like that, so we all bear the blame and the responsibility for a generation who resents not being managers in their 20s and not being recognised as special anymore by all their elders. Clearly, the capitalism has failed when I’m not showered down with money after I graduate from my double in media and gender studies.
Arthur Chrenkoff, “Socialism as a Millennial religion”, The Daily Chrenk, 2019-02-19.
June 8, 2022
With the ACLU no longer fit for purpose, FIRE steps up to protect freedom of speech on and off the campus
Matt Taibbi talks to Nico Perrino about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) moving beyond protecting free speech for university students to protecting those rights for all Americans:
After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving “beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans”.
FIRE was the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, who co-authored the 1999 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. To the modern reader the book reads like a collection of eccentric cases of students and teachers caught up in speech code issues, most (but not all) being conservative.
To take just one of countless nut-bar examples, Kors and Silverglate told the story of a professor in San Bernardino reprimanded for violating sexual harassment policies because, among other things, “he assigns provocative essays such as Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal'”, as the court case later put it. This was apparently the “cannibalism” portion of the accusation that he delved into such subjects as “obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children”.
The book triggered such an overwhelming number of responses from other faculty members and students that the pair decided to set up an organization to defend people who found themselves in tricky speech controversies on campuses. They soon found they had plenty of work and, by 2022, enough of a mandate to expand beyond colleges and universities into America at large. According to FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff, as quoted in a Politico story, the group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values”.
As noted in another story I put out today, FIRE will be doing a lot of stepping into a role semi-vacated by the American Civil Liberties Union. I spoke with Nico Perrino of FIRE, producer and co-director of the excellent documentary about former ACLU chief Ira Glasser (see review here), to ask what the expansion would entail …
June 2, 2022
QotD: The rat race of modern academia
This means there’s a lot of competition for those tenure-trace position, so these PhDs have to outdo each other in their brave and transgressive publications. That their insights make little sense outside of their narrow fields, much less have any relation to reality, is of no import. Academic and career success is the ultimate goal here, nothing else.
Killer Marmot, commenting on “Have you tried less tiresome music?”, DavidThompson.com, 2022-03-01.
May 26, 2022
Alex Tabarrok reviews The Parent Trap
At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok looks at Nate G. Hilger’s new book, The Parent Trap:
Hilger argues that the problems of poverty, pathology and inequality that bedevil the United States are not primarily due to poor schools, discrimination, or low incomes per se. The primary cause is parents: parents who are unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world. Since parents can’t teach the necessary skills, Hilger calls for the state to take their place with a dramatic expansion of not just child care but collective parenting.
Let’s unpack some details. Begin with schooling. It’s very common to bemoan the state of schools in the “inner city” or to complain about “local financing” which supposedly guarantees that poor counties will have underfunded schools. All of this, however, is decades out-of-date.
A hundred years ago there really were massive public-school resource gaps by class and race. These days, however, state and federal spending play a larger role than local property tax revenue and distribute educational resources more progressively … In fact, when we include federal aid, 42 states spent more on poor school districts than on rich school districts in 2012. The same pattern holds between schools within districts
… The highest spending districts are large urban centers such as New York City, Boston and Baltimore. These cities spend large sums to educate rich and poor children alike. p. 10-11
Hilger is correct. No matter what you saw on The Wire, Baltimore spends more than sixteen thousand dollars per student, among the highest in the nation in large school districts and above average for the nation as a whole. Public schools are quite egalitarian in funding with any bias running towards more funding for poorer districts.
Schools, Hilger writes are “actually the smallest and most equalizing part of a much larger skill-building system.” The real problem, says Hilger, are parents.
But what about discrimination? When it comes to wage discrimination, Hilger is brutally honest:
If we compare individuals with similar cognitive test scores, Black college graduates earn higher wages than white college graduates. Studies that don’t control for test score differences but examine earnings gaps within specific professions — lawyers, physicians, nurses, engineers, scientists — tend to find Black workers earn zero to 10 percent less than white workers. These gaps could reflect discrimination, unmeasured skill differences, or other factors such as geography. In any case, such gaps are small compared to the 50 percent overall Black-white earnings gap and reinforce the idea that closing skills gaps would go a long way toward closing income gaps.
Hilger argues that racism does play an important role in explaining Black-white wage differentials but it’s the historical racism that made black parents less skilled and less able to pass on skills to their children. In the twentieth century, Asians, Hilger argues, were discriminated against in the United States at least much as Black Americans. But the Asians that came to the United States had high skills while the legacy of slavery meant that Black Americans began with low skills. Asians, therefore, were better able to overcome discrimination. The success of Nigerians and Jamaican immigrants in the United States also speaks to this point. (Long time readers may recall that in 2016 I dubbed Hilger’s paper on Asian Americans and Black Americans the Politically Incorrect Paper of the Year.)
May 10, 2022
QotD: When are professors not really professors? When they’re “adjunct” or “contingent” professors
When most people think about professors, they are thinking about tenured or tenure-track (TT) professors. In the USA, generally, tenure-track professors (those who will be eligible for tenure at some time in the future) have the job title of assistant professor. Academics with tenure are typically associate professors or full professors. What all of these have in common is that the professor’s salary and workload assume that they are being paid both for their primary teaching responsibilities, but also some amount of research or public outreach. It’s a whole package. How much teaching and how much research differs substantially institution to institution.
Then you have contingent or (more commonly) adjunct professors, who are not eligible for tenure. Mostly these are early career academics still looking to land a permanent tenure-track position. Now I want to be clear here: adjuncts almost always have PhDs – the days when it was possible for people to land even these jobs without a completed dissertation and a finished PhD are long over. Most students have no idea their instructors are adjuncts which – given how poorly many institutions treat their adjuncts – is often damned heartbreaking.
Universities have realized that “adjunct” has a negative ring to it, so they call these folks (which, as you may have grasped, includes me) all sorts of job titles designed to disguise that fact (mostly from prospective students and parents). The most honest of those (and, in my opinion, the best) is “Visiting Instructor” or “Visiting Lecturer”, but you’ll see all sorts of permutations of “visiting” or “teaching” faculty. In job postings, the most substantial of these positions (with a full teaching load) are often described as “Visiting Assistant Professor” (VAP) – but note that visiting in the front essentially invalidates the two words that follow it: a VAP is an adjunct, not an assistant professor. They’re just an adjunct with a full load (and maybe benefits, but often not).
Now, the exact arrangements for these sorts of contingent positions vary wildly, but as a rule (again, there are exceptions!) as a rule, adjuncts are paid for their teaching on a class by class basis, essentially as contract workers. They often don’t get benefits (like health insurance, or even an office in some places!) or any kind of job security – the positions are frequently year-to-year or even semester-to-semester. Crucially, while adjuncts are often expected to discuss their research during the hiring process and frequently aim – as I do – to continue with it during their adjunct job, they are not paid for the research they do and generally do not receive the sort of institutional support which would enable an active research agenda (funding, sabbaticals, etc). They are paid to teach classes and pretty much only teach classes. It is not an ideal system.
(I’m intending, probably as we get closer to summer, to do a short post-series covering the entire academic life-cycle, along with what exactly an academic historian does all day. The popular image that we’re all just hanging out, smoking pipes, drinking wine and having deep thoughts is not very accurate.)
Which brings us back around to the Patreon. I am currently (as I write this) teaching as a Visiting Lecturer, which is to say, an adjunct. Now, I want to be clear that I am not beating up on my current institution here. I actually think the department I am currently in has been very good with my appointment here – it was extremely useful for me (for reasons I won’t get into). But they aren’t paying me for my research or for this blog.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 13, 2020”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-12.
May 2, 2022
QotD: Online education
And that’s just college, which now more than ever is exactly what the sententious goobers on the faculty always said it was: A professional football team with a few classrooms attached. They’re memory-holed now, no doubt, but I recall a time over the summer when a few studies on the impact of online “learning” came out. They were worse than even I expected, and I’m cynical enough to give Diogenes wood. Some huge fraction of kids never even bothered logging on. At all. And, of course, they were promoted to the next grade …
Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.
April 22, 2022
Lucy Worsely on The Jacobites & the Scottish Enlightenment
Whitehall Moll History Clips
Published 22 Jul 2018A segment on the Jacobites and the Scottish Enlightenment that blossomed in the face of Hanoverian oppression.
April 17, 2022
QotD: How jobs differ from school
When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Superficially it’s a lot like college. You pick the companies you want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun, and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college. But the similarities feel greater than the differences. John Smith is now John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such corporation.
In fact John Smith’s life has changed more than he realizes. Socially, a company looks much like college, but the deeper you go into the underlying reality, the more different it gets.
What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make money is by creating wealth. Companies can be so specialized that this similarity is concealed, but it is not only manufacturing companies that create wealth. A big component of wealth is location. […] If wealth means what people want, companies that move things also create wealth. Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don’t make anything physical. Nearly all companies exist to do something people want.
And that’s what you do, as well, when you go to work for a company. But here there is another layer that tends to obscure the underlying reality. In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people’s. You may not even be aware you’re doing something people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won’t make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.*
For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for some existing company. But it is a good idea to understand what’s happening when you do this. A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.
* Many people feel confused and depressed in their early twenties. Life seemed so much more fun in college. Well, of course it was. Don’t be fooled by the surface similarities. You’ve gone from guest to servant. It’s possible to have fun in this new world. Among other things, you now get to go behind the doors that say “authorized personnel only.” But the change is a shock at first, and all the worse if you’re not consciously aware of it.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
April 11, 2022
Ours is a fundamentally unserious culture, two examples
Chris Bray provides some examples of just how decayed western culture has become in our headlong flight toward total unseriousness:
In Europe this month to lead the diplomatic response to a war, the Vice-President of the United States responded to a question about refugees by giggling and cackling and babbling in typical form:
And then the “fact-checkers” at Reuters explained that she actually didn’t giggle and cackle and babble, because, okay, she did cackle and giggle and babble, but she didn’t cackle and giggle and babble specifically about the refugees, so it doesn’t count: “It is clear from viewing the longer video in context that Harris and Duda laughed at the awkwardness of not knowing who should speak first. There is no evidence that Harris was laughing at the refugees or the crisis in Ukraine.” The question was about refugees, and she laughed — she laughed a lot — right after the question, but Reuters apparently called no tagbacks before the play, so no points accrue.
So we have an awkward and ineffective playactor who occupies the position of a political leader, but lacks the stature or ability to go along with it, and we have journalists who labor to protect people in powerful political positions from the possibility that people will notice who they really are and what they really do. We have political leaders who aren’t political leaders, and journalists who aren’t journalists: the form without the substance.
Meanwhile, a recent debate on the topic of free speech at Yale Law School — the nation’s top-ranked law school, which produces presidents and Supreme Court justices — began with law students screaming abuse (“I’ll fight you, bitch”) at one of the panelists, before walking out as a group and continuing to shout and pound on the walls of the adjacent hallway.
Now: The students were angry at the panelist, the bitch they wanted to fight, because she’s an anti-trans social conservative, and couldn’t you just die? But the thing that law students are learning to do is be lawyers — advocates for a position in a formalized exchange of competing views, in controversies that play out in open court. They’re training at the profession of making an argument. The point of sitting through an argument made by a person whose views you despise is that you can learn about something you want to fight against; you can see what the enemy says, and how she says it, and so do a part of the work of preparing yourself to advance a different position. So we have law students, people training for a debate-and-exchange-centered profession, who don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with. It’s like a minor league baseball player saying he refuses to touch a baseball, because baseballs offend him, but anyway, when are you assholes sending me up to the major leagues? We have people who want to occupy the profession of the law without preparing for the substance of professional engagement with competing positions: the form without the substance.
(Doing what journalists do, now, the fact-checkers explain that none of this puts points on the anti-free-speech scoreboard: “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began.” It is precisely the point that 1.) law students 2.) walked out before the conversation began. In ten years, oral argument before the Supreme Court will be that Woke lawyers stand up and scream I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO THIS SHIT, YOU ASSHOLES at the justices, then storm out and descend into a long round of day-drinking while waiting for the court to rule in their favor, because oh my god they CAN’T EVEN.)
April 9, 2022
QotD: Temporary tattoos and cultural literacy
I was once at an art fair where there was a booth selling temporary tattoos. One of the tattoos was a Chinese character that was translated on the tattoo’s plastic label as “bitch”, an appealing bit of body art for the tough girls among us, I suppose. Except a far more straightforward and accurate translation of the character would be “prostitute”, or maybe “whore”.
Teaching students who fell in love with “Eastern philosophy” via our culture’s myriad Mr Miyagis is like being the one to tell someone her tattoo says “whore”. The tattooed will be better off knowing, but she won’t thank you for telling her. Pop-culture-induced orientalism usually does wash off, but the cleanup is far less alluring than wearing the myth. At least, I console myself, Kondo’s target market is the middle-aged, so maybe my young college students won’t show up with this particular “tattoo”.
Amy Olberding, “Tidying up is not joyful but another misuse of Eastern ideas”, Aeon, 2019-02-18.
March 6, 2022
QotD: The academic rat-race
Since only “scholars” who publish get tenure, and since journals only publish original “research”, the only way to publish consistently is to make shit up. Given that Shakespeare ain’t writing no more sonnets, the only way to get tenure in, say, English Literature is to argue that, properly “deconstructed”, the list of contents on a packet of beef jerky is just as valuable — indeed, more valuable — as a “cultural artifact” than anything the Bard, curse his CisHetPat White soul, ever wrote. Hence, the road to tenure takes only left turns.
Severian, “I Learned A New Word”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-23.
