Quotulatiousness

June 9, 2020

How we are supposed to view the rioting protests in major US cities

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Thompson shares the essential parts of a Vice article, telling us insufficiently woke dullards how to think about the ongoing civil unrest in many American cities after the death of a man at the hands (well, technically the knees) of Minneapolis police:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

In the pages of Vice, a moral lecture, delivered from on high:

    How to Talk to Relatives Who Care More About Looting Than Black Lives.

As an exercise in question-begging and dense, self-satisfied presumption, it’s quite a thing, that headline. It’s very now.

Among those of us deemed insufficiently woke and therefore suspect, questions may arise. For instance, in what way will those “black lives” be improved by the destruction of local infrastructure, local businesses, and the subsequent, perhaps dramatic, reduction in trust and goodwill? And what if the stores and homes in question — the ones being smashed, stripped of their contents and set ablaze — are owned by people who happen to be black, as has often been the case? What if the places being looted and vandalised with abandon, indeed exultation, are depended on by people who also happen to be black, whether as customers or employees? Given the levels of material, social and economic destruction, should these people be content, indeed pleased, to be former employees? Unemployed people who now have no local grocer, or garage, or pharmacy?

Alas, such considerations appear to have eluded the keen mental processes of the article’s author, Ms Rachel Miller, a young woman who dutifully declares her pronouns and boasts of being a “Buzzfeed alum.”

    If you’re not Black but want to support BLM, having fraught conversations with your kinda (or definitely) racist loved ones will likely not be fun, but it’s a very worthy undertaking.

Right from the off we’re informed, firmly, that any perceptible reservations about looting and rioting, or reservations about the Black Lives Matter movement — say, regarding its demented far-left agenda, its racial tribalism, and the stated goal of abolishing capitalism, prisons and the police — must be taken as an indicator of being “kinda (or definitely) racist.” Wokeness is not, it seems, a recipe for cognitive subtlety. “Some people,” we’re told, “appear to be far more worried about the fate of a Nordstrom or Target store than that of the actual human lives of protesters.” Again, one might deduce that only those protesting with, shall we say, physical enthusiasm have “actual human lives,” unlike their victims, whose hopes and livelihoods can be gleefully destroyed as an act of righteous liberation. From local amenities.

May 26, 2020

“No more pencils, no more books…”

Filed under: Britain, Education, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb considers the demands from the British government to quickly re-open the schools over the concerns of the educational unions and administrations:

The latest turn in an increasingly dull coverage of the Coronavirus panic is a proposed reopening of the schools. The Government wants them open as soon as possible for at least some of their students. The teaching unions are bleating that no one should go back until their members can be sure of not catching anything. The headmasters are worried about compliance with the social distancing rules. As a conservative of sorts, I think I am supposed to side with the Government and the pro-Conservative journalists — denouncing the teachers as a pack of idlers where not cowards, and insisting that those factories of essential skills must be set back in full production before the summer holidays. Of course, my settled view as a libertarian is that the teaching unions deserve all the support I have never so far given them. The schools must remain closed until no one is in any danger of so much as an attack of hay fever. The schools have been largely closed since the end of March. The longer they stay largely closed, the better. Best of all if they never reopen — or never reopen as they have been since attendance was made compulsory at the end of the nineteenth century.

I quote John Stuart Mill on compulsory schooling:

    A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.
    (On Liberty, 1859, Chapter 5, “Applications.”)

This has always been the case in some degree. The spread of state schooling in England after 1870, and particularly after it was made compulsory in 1880, and then extended in 1902, is probably inseparable from the nationalist hysteria that drove our participation in the Great War. It also may explain the perverse belief, general until the 1970s, in the unique goodness and honesty of our ruling class. This being said, reasonable patriotism is to be encouraged; and, compared with others, our ruling class was not until recently so bad. A further point is that compulsory state schooling used to be reasonably effective at giving the mass of people a basic education. By 1960, most people were literate and numerate. They could spell and write grammatical prose. They had some exposure to the English classics, and the means of exploring these to greater depth if they wished. They had some understanding of history and the sciences. You can tell much about the quality of a people by examining what is read and watched. Looking at the popular arts in England during much of the twentieth century explains why this passage in On Liberty was less often discussed than his arguments for freedom of speech. Mill was right in the abstract. He could be shown to be right in certain particulars. But the evils of compulsory state schooling were mostly potential.

All this, however, is in the past. Since about 1980, schooling of all kinds has been made into a concerted means of indoctrination. The cultural leftists have captured both the classrooms and the curriculum. I will not elaborate on this claim. Some will argue over terminology, some over the merits of the capture, but hardly anyone denies the broad fact. One of the main functions of modern schooling is to bring about and to protect a radical departure from the old intellectual culture of this country.

Much of this departure has been achieved by preaching in the classroom. But it is supplemented by a growing bureaucracy of surveillance. The teachers themselves are watched, and they can be punished for dissenting from the established discourse. There is, for example, the Government’s Prevent strategy, which applies to the whole state machinery. Its purpose is to identify and root out anyone defined as a “political extremist.” Anyone identified as such is effectively banned from working with children and young people, and probably in the state sector as a whole.

May 24, 2020

Zuby on why Joe Biden’s “you ain’t black” comment is one of the most racist things said by any US politician recently

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’d embed all the tweets here, but the page loading speed would be monumentally slow, so here’s the initial tweet and I’ve scraped the text from the rest and put it in blockquotes:

Every black person is aware of the power and pain of being considered an ‘outsider’ within one’s own ‘race’.

This happens everywhere, but it is a common phenomenon particularly amongst Black Americans, due to history and culture. (2/14)

—

You are probably familiar with terms like ‘Uncle Tom’, ‘coon’, ‘house n*gga’, ‘coconut’, ‘Bounty’ and ‘race traitor’.

These slurs are used to demean black people by stripping them of their ‘Blackness’. (3/14)

—

ALL black conservatives, libertarians, centrists, or even moderate liberals have been on the receiving end of at least one of these slurs.

Usually levied by another black person, but occasionally by a particularly bold ‘woke white progressive’ type. (4/14)

—

This form of ostracisation is particularly painful for Black Americans. Who are largely disconnected from their African roots due to the horrors of slavery.

As a substitute, many cling to a fuzzy concept of ‘Blackness’. For the sake of identity and community. (5/14)

—

So, to be considered ‘not black’ is like being an outcast of a community that often already feels alienated… (6/14)

—

I am not American and I do not speak on behalf of anybody but myself. These are my own thoughts.

My name is Nzubechukwu and my heritage is of the Igbo tribe in Anambra state in Nigeria 🇳🇬

So NOBODY can take my ‘Blackness’ from me! They will look foolish trying! (7/14)

—

Most Black Americans don’t have this SOLID sense of heritage.

People (of all colours) know this and weaponise it against them to prevent individuals from stepping out of the ‘groupthink’.

Anyone who is perceived to go ‘against’ ‘The Black Community’ must be punished. (8/14)

—

Left-wing politicians, activists and professional race hustlers have used this psychological warfare to keep black people ‘in check’ and voting for them for many decades.

It’s demeaning, discriminatory, and it strips black people of our agency. (9/14)

—

So, when Biden suggested that ‘you ain’t Black’ if you consider voting for Trump instead of him, he exposed a much deeper form of racism.

The sense of ‘ownership’ of Black people. Unearned allegiance and entitlement.

It was a vile statement… (10/14)

—

But it was also honest. Because that’s how a lot of these politicians and ‘progressives’ really feel about black people.

Like they own us. (11/14)

—

If you were born black, then you will die black. There is no such thing as being ‘politically black’. This is nonsense designed to CONTROL you and keep you needy.

NOBODY can take away your ‘Blackness’. Your ‘Black Card’ is your birthright. Regardless of who you vote for. (12/14)

—

I would never dream of telling anyone who they must vote for, based on their skin colour nor genitalia.

That would be extremely arrogant, condescending and discriminatory.

Be VERY suspicious of anybody who talks like that. They want to control your mind. (13/14)

—

That is all. I hope you enjoyed my TED talk.

Much love. 👊🏾

Zuby
#ImStillBlack

H/T to Darleen for posting the link to David Thompson’s blog.

May 19, 2020

The Karenist coup

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on our current self-inflicted plight:

We find ourselves here, in this particular time and this particular place in the history of our republic, because of a 239-year-old oversight made by the Founding Fathers, in that the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights (the name itself is a mistake), contain no penalty clause for those — politicians, bureaucrats, policemen — who violate them. I’m not entirely sure it was accidental, but, as a result, they are violated daily, hourly, as a matter of course, and this Corona Virus farce — many others come to mind — is simply the most recent and most preposterous example.

(The name itself is an error because this document is not a mere list of privileges that the government generously lets the people exercise. Quite the opposite, it is a list of things that the government is absolutely forbidden to do It should have been called the “Bill of Limits”. And if the Founders, who had just fought and won a desperate, bloody war against the world’s most brutal and rapacious super-power, hadn’t meant them to be absolute, then why — for all you “living document” idiots out there — would they have even bothered to write them down?)

All over this bruised and battered country, a flock of mean, moronic, petty tyrants have issued illegal orders to those they clearly regard as the peasantry: stay home, avoid your fellow human beings, and above all, shut down the Machinery of Freedom which we know as capitalism. If it’s ever allowed to start up again, it must strictly be on terms that are essentially Marxist in character. No mere individual can ever again scratch his ass without written government approval and permission. In effect, the left has the revolution — as usual, achieved by somebody else — it has wanted for 180 years, since the days of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

What’s more, many otherwise decent and intelligent folks are out there begging for their rulers to let them be free again. I find that repulsive and unAmerican. And to those boobies (including Sean Hannity and Joy Behar) blubbering about patriots bring their weapons to demonstrations, listen up: the Founders meant the government to be intimidated by the people, you hapless buffoons.

My bottom line, here, is that, in the short run, we must free ourselves — now — from what we have to call Faucism. Scientific pleaders like the dictatorial doctor must be made painfully aware that when their pronouncements have clear political and economic consequences, their protests of innocence sound a bit too much like “I was just following orders”.

May 17, 2020

QotD: The egalitarian model of bias

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

According to the equalitarian model, progressives are dedicated egalitarians. They think that all individuals, all groups, all sexualities, and all sexes should be treated fairly. They are also especially sensitive to potential threats to egalitarianism, so they adhere to the belief that all demographic groups are roughly equal on all socially valued traits, a belief we call cosmic egalitarianism. Perhaps the most common form of cosmic egalitarianism is blank slate-ism, or the belief that humans are nearly infinitely malleable, and that all important differences among them are caused by the environment, not genes. Cosmic egalitarianism serves as a protective buffer to egalitarianism because it contends two things: 1) Group disparities are caused by prejudice and discrimination (unfairness), not group differences; and 2) We absolutely should treat all groups the same because they are basically the same. Equalitarians fear that if we accept that some demographic differences are genetically caused, we might start treating groups differently from each other. For example, maybe we would encourage men to pursue STEM careers more often than women. (It is worth noting that most people who believe that there are genetically-caused demographic differences would not forward such a bad argument and are committed to treating people as individuals. However, equalitarians, as noted, are very sensitive to potential threats to egalitarianism, and they view this as a potential threat.)

Bo Winegard, “‘Equalitarianism’ and Progressive Bias”, Quillette, 2018-02-07.

May 4, 2020

QotD: The eternal “now” of Progressive stasis

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The best practical definition of conservatism I’ve heard is “planting trees you won’t live to sit under.” I’ll die, and though nothing of me will remain, my home, my community, my nation, my civilization, my people will remain … and I did my part, however small, to ensure it, by living my life well. My honor is my loyalty, as someone or other once said.

None of that matters to the cultural marxist, though. How could it? As I wrote yesterday, to the fanatic, the past is one long catalog of freely chosen error. Nor is there any meaningful future to a fanatic. That seems wrong, I realize, but consider that time passes through contrast. People will be born and die in the Communist Utopia, but since everyone will always have everything, human activity will be exquisitely pointless …

Ignore what Leftists say. Watch what they do, and it’ll soon be obvious that what they long for above all things is stasis. They want everyone and everything to be one way, and one way only, forever. Homosexuals are the most flamboyant example. Imagine that — having your entire life defined by your sexual attraction. I like blondes, but you know, if the right brunette came along I’d go for her. Heck, I’d even go for a ginger (I know, I know, I’m a monster). But according to the Left, that’s not allowed. I like blondes, and therefore I’m only allowed to like blondes. Oh, and I can only vote for Bernie Sanders, because he’s the attracted-to-blondes candidate, and I must support abortion, and use the word “cisgendered,” and …

Thus, to the Leftist there’s no past, and no future either. There’s only now, and the only thing that matters now is power. How could it be otherwise?

Severian, “The Endless Now”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-23.

May 2, 2020

Gabriel Over the White House – “the most unapologetic celebration of fascism ever put on film”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jack Cashill found this “gem” while watching Turner Classic Movies during the Wuhan Coronavirus lockdown and was amazed:

By now, I have seen most of TCM’s movies, but one aired this past week I had not even heard of. On a whim, I DVR’ed it. Good move. Called Gabriel Over the White House, this 1933 liberal wet dream proved to be the most unapologetic celebration of fascism ever put on film.

I watched it wide-eyed. The movie opens with the inauguration of Jud Hammond. A laissez-faire back-slapper, Hammond sees the White House as a way to enrich himself and reward his cronies, Depression be damned. The audience assumes Hammond is a Republican.

Out joyriding one day, Hammond crashes his car and lapses into coma. While still comatose, the Angel Gabriel visits Hammond and turns him into a committed and caring progressive. Is there another kind?

Upon waking, Hammond convenes his cabinet of corrupt self-servers and rejects their plea that the party must come first. Instead, Hammond insists their first priority be the American people. He refuses to use the U.S. Army against a marching mass of the unemployed and fires the secretary of state when he objects.

“I suggest you read the Constitution of the United States. You’ll find the President has some power,” Hammond warns his cabinet members. Some power? Fully indifferent to the Constitution, Hammond grabs all the power that can possibly be grabbed.

When the cabinet objects to his usurpation of power, Hammond fires the cabinet. When Congress threatens to impeach Hammond, he declares martial law and dispenses with Congress. When accused of being a dictator, Hammond argues that his is a dictatorship based on some imagined Jeffersonian principle of Democracy, namely the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Now with total power, Hammond enacts a national banking law, stops foreclosures, provides direct aid to some 55 million farmers, circumvents private industry and launches his own “Army of Construction.”

A young aide, Hartley Beekman, and his female counterpart, Pendie Molloy, serve as something of a progressive chorus. “The way he thinks is so simple and honest that it sounds a little crazy,” says Beekman of Hammond.

“He’s doing the things you wanted,” Molloy answers. “And If he’s mad, it’s a divine madness. Look at the chaos and catastrophe sane men have brought about.”

The divine madness includes the creation of a Federal Police force, a subset of the Army, with young Beekman at its head. When the nation’s chief racketeer refuses to go back to his unnamed home country, Hammond warns him that the government is about to “muscle in on his racket” and federalize the sale of alcohol.

The racketeer fights back, and Beekman employs a legion of tanks Waco-style against the racketeers. When captured, the racketeers are all hauled before a three-man court martial headed by Beekman, promptly declared guilty, and executed en masse by a firing squad.

Several years ago, the movie was brought to my attention and I found this clip on YouTube that I suspect captures the essence of the film:

James Lileks describes it as “a remarkable movie. And I don’t mean ‘astonishingly good, technically superb, visually ingenious.’ I mean utterly insane.”

April 25, 2020

QotD: The entitlement mindset of intellectuals

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school’s hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.

Robert Nozick, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?”, Cato Policy Report, 1998-01-01.

April 23, 2020

QotD: Idiotarianism

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Way back when the term “idiotarian” was coined, it was quite explicitly aimed at the idiots of the Left and Right equally. The idiots of the Right have been somewhat quieter lately, but they’re no less idiots for that.

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, 2005-01-31.

April 18, 2020

QotD: Distorting the history of science

Filed under: Education, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The most frequently assigned book on science in universities (aside from a popular biology textbook) is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That 1962 classic is commonly interpreted as showing that science does not converge on the truth but merely busies itself with solving puzzles before lurching to some new paradigm that renders its previous theories obsolete; indeed, unintelligible. Though Kuhn himself disavowed that nihilist interpretation, it has become the conventional wisdom among many intellectuals. A critic from a major magazine once explained to me that the art world no longer considers whether works of art are “beautiful” for the same reason that scientists no longer consider whether theories are “true.” He seemed genuinely surprised when I corrected him.

The historian of science David Wootton has remarked on the mores of his own field: “In the years since Snow’s lecture the two-cultures problem has deepened; history of science, far from serving as a bridge between the arts and sciences, nowadays offers the scientists a picture of themselves that most of them cannot recognize.” That is because many historians of science consider it naïve to treat science as the pursuit of true explanations of the world. The result is like a report of a basketball game by a dance critic who is not allowed to say that the players are trying to throw the ball through the hoop.

Many scholars in “science studies” devote their careers to recondite analyses of how the whole institution is just a pretext for oppression. An example is a 2016 article on the world’s most pressing challenge, titled “Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research,” which sought to generate a “robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.”

More insidious than the ferreting out of ever more cryptic forms of racism and sexism is a demonization campaign that impugns science (together with the rest of the Enlightenment) for crimes that are as old as civilization, including racism, slavery, conquest, and genocide.

This was a major theme of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, the quasi-Marxist movement originated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who proclaimed that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” It also figures in the works of postmodernist theorists such as Michel Foucault, who argued that the Holocaust was the inevitable culmination of a “bio-politics” that began with the Enlightenment, when science and rational governance exerted increasing power over people’s lives. In a similar vein, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman blamed the Holocaust on the Enlightenment ideal to “remake the society, force it to conform to an overall, scientifically conceived plan.”

In this twisted narrative, the Nazis themselves are somehow let off the hook (“It’s modernity’s fault!”). Though Critical Theory and postmodernism avoid “scientistic” methods such as quantification and systematic chronology, the facts suggest that they have the history backwards. Genocide and autocracy were ubiquitous in premodern times, and they decreased, not increased, as science and liberal Enlightenment values became increasingly influential after World War II.

Steven Pinker, “The Intellectual War on Science”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018-02-13.

April 12, 2020

Self-interest in the clothing of idealism

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Esteban wrote at the Continental Telegraph:

Much has been made over the past year of the fact that young people in America approve of Socialism in rather large numbers, and quite a lot more than their elders. Some explain that this is because they are more idealistic than the older crowd, who have become corrupted and “sold out” now that they have a mortgage and expensive lifestyle. Others argue that this supposed idealism is actually naivete.

It seems fair to point out that if you are 24 with negative net worth, a modest paying job and no reasonable expectation on the horizon to make serious cash, it isn’t idealistic to support redistribution, it’s self-interest. And you don’t change this fact by saying “Well, if I made that much money, I’d be happy to pay a lot in taxes”. If you ever get to that point we’ll see, until then this statement doesn’t fly.

Likewise, if you’re 55 with a couple of million dollars in your 401(k), a big home and an income well into six figures your view may be biased against “sharing the wealth” based on your wallet, not principles.

QotD: The Gini coefficient

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At least for now, most progressives acknowledge that markets and economic growth are necessary. But progressives in academia contend that growth has proved itself secondary to equality efforts — something to be exploited, rather than appreciated. Not just nationally, but worldwide, policymakers and the press regard the subordination of growth to equality to be a benign practice, as in the recent line in the Indian periodical Mint: a policy aimed at “reducing inequality need not hurt growth.”

The redistributionist impulse has brought to the fore metrics such as the Gini coefficient, named after the ur-redistributor, Corrado Gini, an Italian social scientist who developed an early statistical measure of income distribution a century ago. A society where a single plutocrat earns all the income ranks a pure “1” on the Gini scale; one in which all earnings are perfectly equally distributed, the old Scandinavian ideal, scores a “0” by the Gini test. The Gini Index has been renamed or updated numerous times, but the principle remains the same. Income distribution and redistribution seem so crucial to progressives that French economist Thomas Piketty built an international bestseller around it, the wildly lauded Capital.

Through Gini’s lens, we now rank past eras. Decades in which policy endeavored or managed to even out and equalize earnings — the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt, the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson — score high. Decades where policymakers focused on growth before equality, such as the 1920s, fare poorly. Decades about which social-justice advocates aren’t sure what to say — the 1970s, say — simply drop from the discussion. In the same hierarchy, federal debt moves down as a concern because austerity to reduce debt could hinder redistribution. Lately, advocates of economically progressive history have made taking any position other than theirs a dangerous practice. Academic culture longs to topple the idols of markets, just as it longs to topple statutes of Robert E. Lee.

But progressives have their metrics wrong and their story backward. The geeky Gini metric fails to capture the American economic dynamic: in our country, innovative bursts lead to great wealth, which then moves to the rest of the population. Equality campaigns don’t lead automatically to prosperity; instead, prosperity leads to a higher standard of living and, eventually, in democracies, to greater equality. The late Simon Kuznets, who posited that societies that grow economically eventually become more equal, was right: growth cannot be assumed. Prioritizing equality over markets and growth hurts markets and growth and, most important, the low earners for whom social-justice advocates claim to fight. Government debt matters as well. Those who ring the equality theme so loudly deprive their own constituents, whose goals are usually much more concrete: educational opportunity, homes, better electronics, and, most of all, jobs. Translated into policy, the equality impulse takes our future hostage.

Amity Shlaes, “Growth, Not Equality”, City Journal, 2018-01-21.

April 10, 2020

QotD: Ketman

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I got into the higher ed biz fully intending to practice what Milosz calls “aesthetic ketman.” [“paying lip service to official ideology while secretly subverting it”] I loved my subject, but my subject was recondite enough, I figured, that I could keep the SJW bullshit to a bare minimum. I don’t remember what they called “intersectionality” back then, but whatever it was, I’d just make a few brief nods to it, then get on with my work in relative peace. Throw a few quotes from Foucault, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, and the like in my dissertation intro, and that was that.

The problem, though, is that the sour pleasure of ketman is addictive, and like any addiction, you need to keep upping the dose to feel the same effect.

My first few years in grad school, anyone who cared to look could’ve easily spotted me as a secret shitlord. For one thing, I was the only guy in the whole damn town who actually looked happy. For one thing, professing is a 24/7 job — that’s “24 hours a week, 7 months a year,” and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. All that free time is lovely, especially in a college town with 24-hour everything and scads of scantily clad undergraduate eye candy.

But more importantly, there’s the pleasure of ketman. So long as I make a few radical noises, I can get you sheep to believe anything I say. I used to tell people I studied transgendered potato farmers in the Kenyan uplands. I told this obnoxious girl from the Gender Studies department my dissertation was on resistance strategies of Eskimos in the Waffen-SS. I cited Alan Sokal’s hoax paper on the social construction of gravity in every seminar taught by a radical feminist, and no one ever called me on it. Anyone who thinks I’m kidding obviously hasn’t been on campus in the last 20 years or so. It was fucking hilarious …

… for a time. And then it got sad, then nauseating, because I eventually realized I was no different from the fools who swallowed my bullshit. It doesn’t matter if you’re being exquisitely ironic when you tell a room full of freshmen that “gender is a social construction.” They can’t recognize irony anyway, and even if they could, parroting the phrase “gender is a social construction” is still required to pass the class. More importantly, what if they did recognize it? I’m up there thinking I’m a shitlord, speaking truth to power to anyone smart enough to figure it out, but all they see is another fat, middle-aged sellout parroting nonsense. If I were serious about my shitlordery, they think, then I’d quit. But I don’t quit, which must mean my so-called “principles” are worth … what? We’ve already established you’re a whore, madam; now we’re just haggling over the price.

Severian, “The Pleasures of Ketman”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-09.

April 5, 2020

QotD: The fear of “becoming” your job

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In fact, “losing ourselves in the part” used to be our big worry. Maybe I am just a customer service rep …? The office, the commute, my neckties all laid out for me at the start of each week … is that really all there is to life? What happens when the long nights start taking their toll — as they must — and I have to give up the bar band? What happens when the kids grow up?

You could see this worry everywhere in our culture, our art. Watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Judge Reinhold’s character is wrestling with this type of question, and he’s in high school, fer chrissakes. See what I mean about that movie being made on Mars? Remember that; it’ll be on the final.

There’s a certain type of person, though, who just couldn’t grok those worries, because the very notion of social roles was incomprehensible. We didn’t know about the autism spectrum back then, but that’s what that type of person effectively is: A high-functioning autistic. For the autistic, what’s now is forever. Bob’s nametag says “customer service representative.” Therefore, Bob is a customer service representative, and only a customer service representative, now and forever. Bob the family man, Bob the stamp collector, Bob the bar-band strummer … all those fry the autistic’s circuits. It says “customer service representative,” damn it! The train is fine.

Two sides of the same coin. Normal people were worried that they were becoming their jobs. The autistics couldn’t grasp that anyone could be anything else.

The autistics all went into the ivory tower, which gave us identity politics. “Identity politics” only makes sense to the autistic — that is, to people who can’t process change. Normal people have such a hard time with it because we can’t see the logical connection between, say, being gay and being pro-abortion. I mean, if you’re gay it’s a moot point, right? Nor is there any logical connection between being gay and favoring redistributive economics, or worrying about global warming, or whatever. Maybe you do believe in redistributive economics and are worried about global warming, but those are just individual opinions, right? I’m not obliged to vote Republican because I dig blondes. It’s a non sequitur.

Not to the autistic, it isn’t. They’re told that this — pro-abortion, being “green,” the whole Liberal schmear — just is gayness, and they go with it, because that’s the only way the world makes sense to them. Just how “gay” came to mean all that is above my pay grade, but we all know it’s true. More importantly, we all know they believe it, with all their hearts and souls.

That’s the situation in which we find ourselves, my young friends, here in the Current Year. Most of us would like to be team players, but we have no role models. Because the autistics control the culture, we’ve internalized their worries. If I’m a member of the team, we instinctively feel, then somehow I am the team, and only the team, now and forever. It’s a stark choice: Either I give up my individuality completely to advance the team’s goals, or I take my ball and go home.

But it’s a false choice, kameraden, one that could only be beaten into us by very long, very expensive training — i.e. the American “education” system, K-thru-PhD.

Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.

April 3, 2020

“And what are your personal pronouns?”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Amy Alkon considered the demands of “pronoun authoritarians”:

Personally, I’m disturbed by the whole notion that we “include” people through calling them the right pronoun, which requires all this “homework” about a person before you say one word to them.

This new requirement for doing this seems to be a sort of religion that allows people to have power over others — to push them around and deem them thought and speech criminals, even if they simply forget to use somebody’s requested “pronoun.”

This also seems to be a way for people to feel special without earning it — to require people to find out all sorts of information about them, on penalty of being accused of a thought or speech crime and then cancelled.

It seems outrageous to me that some stranger would be required to prep for conversation by investigating my history — that my family are Eastern European Jews, that old friends call me “Flamey” or “Flame-o,” that I eat keto, that I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah — and that they would be seen as disrespectful and even bigoted for failing to find out all the ways I’m (heh) unique and special.

But that’s what we’re requiring people to do with this notion that we have to ask “what is your preferred pronoun?”

And again, this is done now with threats embedded — with the threat that you will lose your job and be deemed a bigot if you don’t make this “What’s your pronoun?” business a priority.

Oh, and I will be very clear on this again: If you want me to call you “zhe” or “they” or “lemon pie with a slight dusting of confectioner’s sugar on top,” I will do my best to remember that and do it, because it’s kind.

But I think the considerations above are important, and I think it’s too easy to just accept the demand to ask people for their “pronouns” as a requirement for being considered decent — with the possible penalty of losing everything as the penalty for failing in some way, even by forgetting.

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