Thursday, June 04, 2015

P.C. B.S.

I keep hearing from conservatives that political correctness is ruining everything. For example, at National Review, which runs stories about PC at about the rate The Federalist runs stories about Caitlin Jenner, Ian Tuttle extrapolates from an advice column at a site you never heard of that the peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys" and supplant their brilliance with "the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience," har har; also,
No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.
If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of National Review's many other shitty writers. (For perspective: previously Tuttle told his readers "If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you" because the school refused to take money from the Koch brothers.)

Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:
As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)
Instead Taranto complains that liberals like Schlosser are only upset because they're getting it in the neck, and are fundamentally incapable of understanding the pain of censored "outgroup" conservative academics like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Harvey Mansfield, William A. Jacobson, et alia. Taranto explains:
Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.
Time for a Poor Wingnuts' Campaign! Back at National Review Charles C.W. Cooke says
Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.
Cooke's essay is called "Is the Tide Turning against PC?" but it's not clear that he wants it turned if it means linking arms with those people. So I guess PC must not be such a big deal after all.

Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.

UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:
It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.
Ain't even kidding.
The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.
Everybody Joseph Bottum talks to at the Club, anyway. But wait, Bottum allows that the roots of PC do go deeper:
The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.
Everything Democrat causes everything bad, and the same goes for the Soviet Union! In fact the title of Bottum's column is "I Still Blame the Communists." I expect if you swapped out "political correctness" for "riots in Baltimore," "Ebola," "potrzebie," etc., it wouldn't have to be changed much. Sometimes I think they work from Mad Libs.

313 comments:

  1. AGoodQuestion11:33 PM

    I used to be into the Afro-Cuban Lesbian Experience, but then because of affirmative action laws they had to replace their old claves player with a white guy.

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  2. susanoftexas11:34 PM

    Why is Schlosser so upset with liberals when his examples include students who were against communism and the works of Edward Said, Mark Twain, and Upton Sinclair--almost certainly conservatives?
    Although it's no surprise to see him quote Freddie DeBoer, as they both appear to feel stifled by a society that does not understand them.

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  3. If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of their many other shitty writers.



    Nah. He'd never do a thing like that. His attitude, if you read lower down, is that there are far too many novelists and other literary riffraff around already, and why bother with anyone living if you already have certified geniuses like Homer? Let them scribble wingnut welfare tracts like everybody else!

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  4. AGoodQuestion11:38 PM

    As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)
    Which goes toward proving that James Taranto is a vampire, because he can't see his own reflection and he sucks.

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  5. montag211:54 PM

    It's always funny listening to the wingers complain about PC, since to overhear them talking among themselves, they're about as purity-conscious as any group ever. It's just that their ideals are dredged up from the sludge at the bottom of the social mores bucket.


    And, it's been that way ever since probably the first Committee on the Present Danger in 1950. It was so bad in the `50s that if you said, "hmmph, Communism," you were insufficiently zealous and immediately suspect yourself. And, whoa, if you weren't sure that Eisenhower was a Commie symp, why, that was, like, double secret treason.


    These fucking twits have been PC (Pretty Crackpot) for a long, long, long time.

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  6. Tallmutha11:57 PM

    I think that--Huh? I'm gonna say provisionally that all these people are wrong. Until I can get a better bead on what my tribe thinks.

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  7. this is what you get when you dedicate a century stomping out anything resembling a vibrant, diverse working-class national left-wing.

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  8. Gabriel Ratchet12:12 AM

    No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.
    Is this something that is at all likely to happen? Admittedly I don't know anything about book clubs and had the impression they were mostly made up of well-meaning suburbanites who feel that discussing the latest middlebrow bestseller is a socially acceptable cover for afternoon drinking. I'm fully aware that this may be a cartoonishly overstated notion, but even so, it doesn't I was under the impression that in any case book clubs arecompletely private endeavors that read whatever their members decided they're interested in and not subject to the whim of some sinister liberal cultural commissariat

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  9. susanoftexas12:31 AM

    Why Homer et al when you can just read the Bible every day for 60 years?
    Tuttle doesn't understand readers. You spend your childhood reading everything you could get your hands on, you read through your school library, you read most of the classics by 21. What are you supposed to do for the rest of your life, read the same 20-100 books?

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  10. AGoodQuestion12:35 AM

    I've been part of a book club--one specializing in literary horror, which probably isn't what Tuttle was picturing. But anyway, you're right. You're usually talking about half a dozen people with common interests among themselves, not a cabal of socialists looking to subjugate the world.

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  11. hence the complaint.

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  12. Yeah, that jumped out at me, too. So far, the only formal complaint he's gotten is from a conservative student -- in 2009, and which was quickly dismissed by the administration as bullshit -- and he's worried about liberal students?

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  13. Gromet12:56 AM

    Ooh! Make us a literary horror recommendation!

    I will suggest Laird Barron -- if you have not read him, please pick up The Imago Sequence immediately. You will regret nothing.

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  14. TGuerrant12:57 AM

    Surely the next Shakespeare is Theodore Beale!

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  15. TGuerrant12:59 AM

    If Theodore Beale isn't the next Shakespeare, everybody's going to suffer. Like, a lot.

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  16. Gromet1:00 AM

    Shakespeare was not actually a great writer. He was just the best at manipulating the social media of his day in order to get votes for awards. That's all you need to last 500 years and counting.

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  17. TGuerrant1:01 AM

    "By 1968 you can’t say ‘Nigger.’ That hurts you. It backfires," said Lee Atwater, and then his brain exploded.

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  18. Gabriel Ratchet1:12 AM

    And if he is, they're going to suffer even more.

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  19. Gabriel Ratchet1:23 AM

    Seconding the request for literary horror recommendations.

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  20. Gabriel Ratchet1:46 AM

    Also, you know damn well these chuckleheads aren't reading Homer or Dante themselves. Assuming they read anything at all, it's either Tom Clancy (wait, is he still a thing?) or whatever Regnery's bulk offloading this month. That Tuttle feels the need to invoke the Western canon's Usual Subjects in this context is telling, presupposing as it does that the people he purports to express concern for aren't already familiar with them, and that in all likelihood that he doesn't really think of Shakespeare or Milton or whoever as actual literature but rather only as cudgels to beat lesser claimants to literary status with.

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  21. coozledad1:48 AM

    think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.



    Pro tip for wingnut writers: don't remind people where your coffinload of native earth is.

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  22. HKatz1:49 AM

    I've re-read classics with a better understanding of them as an adult :) Anyway, it isn't an either/or proposition. People read a variety of books and can read more than one type of book. Also, some of the better books or better authors have been banned over the years (and who tends to push for book bans…?) Highly offended sensibilities and a need to impose one's will on other people is not simply a problem among the rabidly PC.

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  23. "Is the Tide Turning against PC?"

    The dick shall rise again!!!

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  24. As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than
    sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler:
    Nah.)



    I'll see your Schlosser and raise you a Duggar.

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  25. in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles

    It's funny that he recognizes that comity and generosity are liberal principles

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  26. sharculese2:24 AM

    I would like to know where these book clubs are that are poring over Dante and Milton. No really, I'd like to know, so that I can make sure to be anywhere else at all.

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  27. sharculese2:26 AM

    What's funny is that I've seen maybe 1 out of 25 people call the Schlosser piece anything other than pure thumbsuck. I haven't read it because I make a point of avoiding anything at Vox that doesn't involve Todd van der Weff, because horseshit clickbait like the Schlosser piece seems to be central to Vox's mission statement.

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  28. Is that what that was supposed to mean? All I could make of it was some kind of "slaveowning elites were the liberals of their time" thing, or something about how sitting around on your ass drinking mint juleps all day was typical Democrat behavior.

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  29. My take on it is that there were "two sets of books", in-group behavior was characterized by gentility, but woe to any "others".

    Perhaps I'm giving him way too much credit.

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  30. Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims


    While I understand that this is supposed to be a clever attempt to associate the word "liberal" with "racist," it sure seems like this feller has an inkling that liberal principles are a good thing to be governed by.


    I, for one, wholeheartedly welcome our lost sheep back into the liberal fold. No longer do they need suffer the oppressive rules and cruel whims of the Outgroup.

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  31. Didn't they turn out that concept album based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe's Law?

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  32. You beat me to it, but I agree that's what he's saying...he just don't know it.


    Typical dumbass trying to make a "gotcha"


    "You gotta match?"
    "Yeah, my face and your ass! Huh-huh-huh...what a second..."

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  33. Sure, but SusanofTexas is right--even frequent flyers with Proust and Shakespeare, among whom I count myself, don't need to re-read only those texts. Its not the bible--its not the quran.These are books and plays and poems that are not the only thing an educated person needs to read. We don't read them because we are forbidden other things.

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  34. This is about ethics in Elizabethan playwriting, guys! We are just trying to correct the record.

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  35. Rod Dreher's living room, obvs.

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  36. coozledad6:39 AM

    Also: often cruel whims
    Not an intrinsically evil system of labor extortion that is the foundation of American Capitalism, just some guys who could get pissy when they got a stray hair up their ass.

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  37. coozledad6:44 AM

    I like how they mention Faulkner as part of their canon. That's the giveaway that the motherfuckers don't read, they skim until they get to "nigger" and wander off confidently asserting he's one of theirs.

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  38. coozledad6:51 AM

    He was a favorite with American theatergoers in New York back in the early 19th century. I guess because you can even play Hamlet broad, or more importantly, get liquored up after work and throw things at the actors who aren't playing it sufficiently broad.


    It was like Cats.

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  39. coozledad6:52 AM

    He always quits before the devil gets really good.

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  40. coozledad7:05 AM

    in-group behavior was characterized by gentility

    Even that's a stretch, given the family histories I've been exposed to. Old tight-lipped Scots-Irish bastards weren't any gentler to their immediate family than they were to the poor whites at the periphery of their "ingroup". Community standards just hadn't evolved to the point where they could have their wives or daughters beaten publicly at a post, but they could deny them any meaningful agency.


    Plus, they were morbid drinkards and gamblers. The Civil War was one of those longshots.

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  41. javamanphil7:19 AM

    I have lived long enough to see anti-PC Hipster-ism. Cooke would like you to know he was into anti-PC long before they signed to that major label. He even still has his ticket stub from that basement show in Harvard Square where it opened for Scruffy the Cat. Good times before the (m)asses got in on it.

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  42. The conservative angst about "PC" always comes down to the same things: They can't call Black people n****rs and they can't call women cunts without having normal folks look at them aghast.

    So their joy over liberals eating their own with this one outbreak of "PC" aimed at someone nominally on the Left will be as short lived as every other instance of this.

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  43. Lurking Canadian7:33 AM

    The Confederates believed themselves to be freer than anyone: free of Federal tyranny, free to say whatever they wanted, and so on. They viewed themselves as the true heirs of 1776.

    This was bullshit, even limited to rich white slaveholders, but that's what they thought.

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  44. Shorter Charles C.W. Cooke: How dare those liberals act like liberals and mount a healthy intellectual challenge to the excesses of the lefty fringe, especially if it means we conservatives will have a harder time finding liberal strawmen to argue against?

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  45. smut clyde7:48 AM

    I don't know about book-clubs, but I am willing to get shitfaced down at the pub and trashtalk about non-Sayers translations of Dante, it's just that no-one is listening.

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  46. redoubtagain7:56 AM

    think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.
    100% polyunsaturated bullshit. Nothing is more conservative than committing treason to defend slavery, then fighting a war to try to keep it, then another 150-year rear-guard action to try to recreate the conditions for which the original treason was committed.

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  47. mgmonklewis7:58 AM

    Coincidence: He said that very thing at a liberal dinner party to which he was invited.

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  48. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!)

    That "Losing Sparta" essay was just lacerating - well worth the time. I find the thesis, that "offshoring" has become a corporate reflex, or perhaps a ritual to show toughness, to be frighteningly believable. Thanks for sharing it.

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  49. My english major Mom tried to get me to read the Inferno when I was a wee tyke. Scarred me for life, it did.

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  50. "Hatred of favorites is merely love of favor"
    Conservatives don't hate PC, they hate not being in control of it.

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  51. To me some of his concerns seem credible. Some "Social Justice Warriors" really do have nihilistic tendencies. He's right that identity politics is unavoidable, but can also become a dangerously unhinged force.

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  52. Without the need to pay out royalties.

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  53. Hostile178:55 AM

    Re: literary horror- I'll second the recommendation for Laird Barron, his latest is The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All and it's his best yet. Also Brian Evenson (Altmann's Tongue, The Wavering Knife, Windeye), Michael Cisco (The Divinity Student, The Narrator), and Thomas Ligotti (Songs of a Dead Dreamer). Old school: anything by Robert Aickman.

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  54. Helmut Monotreme9:00 AM

    Not to be all pedantic, but the labor extortion was the least objectionable part of the system. I'd lead off with "Legalized kidnapping, imprisonment, torture, rape, and occasional murder " before finishing up with "labor extortion."

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  55. BigHank539:02 AM

    Confederates believed themselves to be freer

    Well, if you owned enough slaves, you were free of being drafted. They believed themselves aristocrats, is what they believed, and you'll note what the hard-core right gets most irate is whenever they're denied the opportunity to act like a shit towards someone of lower social rank. The impulses behind the Confederacy are alive and well, sadly.

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  56. susanoftexas9:02 AM

    This might be too small of a sample, but the social justice warriors I know are just young kids who are indignant about the ills of the world and want it to change now, which happens in every generation. They are flexing their power, which they still need to learn to use. Like everyone else, they get push-back when they go too far and eventually they will get older and more tired and more wise, and calm down a little.

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  57. DocAmazing9:13 AM

    It is true: political correctness is stifling free speech. Just yesterday, people were critical of my use of the phrases "kiddy-diddling Jesus freak" and "toothless sister molester". Repression!

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  58. BigHank539:14 AM

    They can't call Black people n****rs and they can't call women cunts...

    No, that's just what they complain about. What they really want (and I'll go back to the Greek Classics they're always muttering about) are helots: enslaved servants that they can beat, torment, fuck, and murder with impunity.

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  59. Typical Republican lockstep thinking includes


    1. Abortion rights
    2. Affordable Care Act
    3. Tax policy
    4. Right-to-work


    I'm sure there are other examples (let's just check the ALEC legislative calendar, shall we?). But these three are policies whose party-line stances Republican congresspersons and state legislators deviate from at their peril--although "peril" might not be the right word here since the recent election of hundreds of right-wing reactionaries pretty much guarantees support for a broad reactionary agenda.

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  60. BigHank539:19 AM

    Well, I'll be critical of "toothless sister molester" right here and now, buster. Look at that phrase! I have no idea whether it's the sister or the molester that's toothless! Clarity, Doc!

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  61. M. Krebs9:22 AM

    Use of the editorial "we" is not always an indication of dickitude, but in Taranto's case it definitely is.

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  62. That, too. But I'm sure they're willing to meet us 3/5 of the way.

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  63. Was that the same one at which he left the disheveled, bearded, elbow-patched, pipe-smoking liberal professor positively dumbstruck at his overwhelming command of the facts, impeccable logic and dazzling rhetorical flourishes?

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  64. Agreed that most of the SJW's are well meaning and young. But perhaps more important, I really consider the SJW ethos of demanding that society have complete sensitivity to their personal pain points is a counterproductive ethos. Counterproductive if the aim is to make social change, that is. SJW-ism seems to ultimately be a conservative conception of society, where, rather than having the 99% band together against the 1%, the 99% instead splits into factions and tribes. It's pointless.

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  65. tigrismus9:32 AM

    I get the sense his knowledge of southern history begins at "Gone With" and ends at "the Wind."

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  66. susanoftexas9:40 AM

    They can demand whatever they want but they won't get it and eventually that will sink in. These are the same kids that helped make the sudden switch to a society that accepts gay marriage. They spend half their lives working two or three crummy jobs and the rest of their lives looking for more crummy jobs so they can pay the rent when the current jobs end. They've been told all their lives that they won't be able to earn a good living, that their planet is dying, that they have no future. But they keep plugging away anyway, they work and study and try to make life better for everyone.
    Yes, some of them are obnoxious and most try to go too far and they all try to reinvent the wheel, but the kids I know are no different than my generation, except maybe braver.

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  67. To be fair, the professor in Schlosser's piece was a total jerk for writing anonymously and then outing that twitter commenter. She got a huge backlash from that.

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  68. I just did a quick scan of the requirements for an English degree at my alma mater (Florida State; how 'bout them 'Noles!) and, without going into detail, trust me when I say the kids are still reading the classics of American and British literature (not to mention that the London Program is still viable). These people are just pissed that the range of what counts as literature is being expanded to include Afro-Cuban lesbians when that's warranted by the quality of the writing.

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  69. tigrismus9:43 AM

    You just want to show off your Doré collection.

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  70. I'm with you. I think that's when I decided to be good.

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  71. digitusmedius9:46 AM

    'Scuze me, but aren't these the same pees-oh-ess who rejoice and do a victory clomp every time some liberal teacher (at any level) gets pilloried for daring to utter something that offends the rightwing groupthink?

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  72. John Ciardi would like a word. Oh, wait . . .

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  73. Er, CCW, you know I like you, but you may want to consider an alternative pejorative to "neo-McCarthyism" when supporting the political faction that (1) gave rise to the original McCarthyism, and in certain quarters defends it even today; and (2) currently advocates for the same behavior with "communist" replaced by "Muslim."



    The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own
    interests are being hurt?"Hey! They're stealing our bit!"


    The Kipnis thing does seem ready-made for the PC crusaders, doesn't it? On the one hand, she seems sometimes to have a bit of a "I'm a feminist, but ..." shtick going on, which makes her a brave truth-teller unafraid to take the battle to those out-of-control third-wave feminists (many of whom are nevertheless defending her right now. Sssh!). On the other hand, she's certainly not a full-throated advocate for straight white patriarchy or reading nothing but the Western Canon, so she's one of ours. So liberals (also known as "university administrators" for some reason) are simultaneously suppressing contrary views and eating their own. Just continue to gloss over how much this whole thing underscores the value of the tenure system, and you're good to go.

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  74. "Political correctness" only goes one way, apparently.

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  75. Liberalism + aristocracy → null set.

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  76. I overhear them talking among themselves quite a bit, and you're absolutely right. The typical conservative lives in fear of saying the wrong thing, of stepping out of line. Breaking conformity is terrifying.

    There's nobody as "politically correct" as they are.

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  77. even frequent flyers with Proust and ShakespeareI keep trying to re-read Proust, but it takes me so long just to get comfortable in my reading chair.

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  78. susanoftexas10:05 AM

    I still haven't read Proust but I read As You Like It and Midsummer's Night Dream almost every year. And Jane Eyre, all of Austen's major works, Little Women. I just reread Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy because I found them on the net. I plan to reread The Stars My Destination next, as soon as I dig it out of the attic.

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  79. I started a re-reading Proust kick a few years ago--god how time crawls!--after the Adam Lanza killings IIRC. I plowed through about three hundred pages, really annotating them and really seeing them again for the first time, but then my copy literally fell apart and I was carrying it around with a rubber band around it and looking more and morelike a a crazy person. And I was also reading other things. So I stopped for a while--I should have made my annotations in another color because I'm having trouble figuring out how far I got and what is really "new" on this reading. I ordered a new (used) copy so it wouldn't fall apart but now I can't get myself to underline and annotate it because its a hardcover. So I know just how hard it is to re-read Proust as a project. This would technically be my third or fourth time through though.

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  80. I have a great, great, book for you coozledad, I think. Its called Shylock http://www.amazon.com/Shylock-A-Legend-Its-Legacy/dp/0671883860and its a history of all the Shylocks on the stage, and their meaning and the style of the acting.

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  81. Perhaps he's confusing liberal with libertine?

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  82. Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family is pretty interesting on this point.His wealthiest, slave owning, ancestors were an awful bunch: tightfisted, cheap, mean, uneducated (and ineducable), indifferent to style and aesthetics or philosophy and education. Just jumped up, greedy, grabsters without even the pretension to gentility.

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  83. Is Todd van der Weff a real name? Because its adorable. I would totally name a kitten or a small bulldog that.

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  84. Ellis_Weiner10:12 AM

    Try settling in with a nice cup of tea and a cookie.

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  85. Dear Enemy? I wonder if that is what Cordelia gets that line from when she says that someone (I can't remember who) is her "second dearest enemy?"

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  86. Halloween_Jack10:13 AM

    Cannot favorite this enough.

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  87. montag210:13 AM

    And the perennial: dissing the rich by saying they don't work hard. You might as well have said, "fuck yo mama."

    Anthropogenic climate warming. Express even the mildest suggestion of consideration for the science, and the flying monkeys surge out of Limpballs's ass. And, speaking of ol' Rush, isn't he most PC guy ever? Or O'Really? Confronted with something he doesn't approve of, especially someone who doesn't buy into his phony patriotism, and his only retort is, "Shut Up! Shut Up! Shut Up!"

    Question the military budget, express disgust at torture? There's a hailstorm of protest. "They're disrespecting our warriors!"

    And, my favorite, disagreeing with some conservative throwback's latest unguided missive is "trampling on his/her rights to free speech."

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  88. "A hyphen! A hyphen! My kingdom for a hyphen!" (Or not.)

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  89. Conservative political correctness is far more prevalent than liberal political correctness, it's just not referred to by that name. People just call it conservatism.

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  90. Ellis_Weiner10:19 AM

    Bester's best! Meanwhile, Tuttle--lemme get this straight--is upset because "book clubs across America" won't be reading Chaucer? If that's not the very definition of a concern troll, I don't know what is.

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  91. Halloween_Jack10:20 AM

    Todd VanDerWerff--used to write and edit for the Onion's AV Club. Looks like he's sticking to the pop culture beat, although he gleaned this tidbit from the Duggar thing.

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  92. Obama had the gall to criticize the Crusades and slavery and the conservative Christian P.C. brigade went ballistic. See also, any acknowledgement of the continued existence of racism gets you called a race monger playing the race card.

    ReplyDelete
  93. RogerAiles10:22 AM

    The thing that reflects poorly on James Taranto is a mirror.

    ReplyDelete
  94. mortimer200010:23 AM

    I saw that article on the afflictions of Sparta, Tennessee (Roy's "downsized factory workers!" link -- highly recommended). Sad and depressing, and whenever I read something like this about the evisceration of the middle class -- especially in a red and getting redder state like TN -- I often wonder how these working people could be so naive and gullible as to think that voting for the conservative Corporate Rich Folks Party could possibly be in their economic interests, even as the opposite is catastrophically proved to them over and over. Not to mention how the Democratic Party has failed miserably with what should be a natural constituency, assuming the party still has something to offer them at all these days. It really is a triumph of right-wing media and Republicans' culture war gloss. I don't know which is more effective, the ability of the Gooper parasites to hide the fact that they are never going to give a shit about these people, or the willingness of those people to believe the opposite.

    ReplyDelete
  95. RogerAiles10:23 AM

    I would have guessed crawlspace.

    ReplyDelete
  96. coozledad10:27 AM

    It takes a hunger that you might see in an Abramoff or a Koch. It's incompatible with learning or culture. They named their Mcmansions after Sir Walter Scott tripe (Waverly, Burleigh) and destroyed the agricultural value of their property as heedlessly as they destroyed people.


    They planned to slash and burn their way to Tierra Del Fuego.


    We knew the heir to a local plantation house and when the patriarch died, he farmed his female offspring out to his brothers. They inherited them with the plantation as part of the whole primogeniture scheme observed by the local clans.


    When you think plantation owner, think Strom Thurmond.

    ReplyDelete
  97. montag210:29 AM

    True, but i think that was supposed to be a dig at Oprah's Book Club.

    One can't discount their obsessions.

    ReplyDelete
  98. relevant

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaPX_OavLg0

    ReplyDelete
  99. I saw a Goodreads thread a while ago where people were talking about how many times they've read The Decline and Fall. I thought, How can these people be serious? 3,000 pages of dry historical prose? More than once? Good God!


    Maybe I was wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  100. Mint julips were the chardoney of its day.

    ReplyDelete
  101. If you've read The Decline and Fall try Barbara McCoullogh--much more readable! And several thousand pages longer!

    ReplyDelete
  102. BigHank5310:40 AM

    Maybe I was wrong.

    I realized a while ago how futile it was to try and grasp others' tastes. (I remember watching an interview with a mathematician whose favorite thinking music was the Carmina Burana, a piece I can barely sit through.) Some of my comfort reads are the most awful genre dreck you can imagine.

    ReplyDelete
  103. montag210:41 AM

    Although it's perfectly acceptable to refer to Obama as the "Communist socialist atheist Kenyan."

    ReplyDelete
  104. DN Nation10:45 AM

    I mean, the fat, schlubby heads on the books change, and the one-word titles change, but "the same 20-100 books" is basically the wingnut welfare publishing model, no?

    ReplyDelete
  105. BigHank5310:46 AM

    Yeah, the only reason why the current generation of young activists has come in for special notice is that social media means everyone can see what they're doing without getting off the couch. If we were to drag through the archives of The Daily Bumpkin from every two-bit state college in the country, we'd find just as many overly-earnest youngsters trying to improve the world back in the nineties and eighties and seventies. And the same snide condescension from conservatives, too.

    ReplyDelete
  106. sharculese10:48 AM

    CW Cooke actually affects to be disheveled, bearded, and elbow patched because he imagines himself to be one of the cool ones.

    ReplyDelete
  107. DN Nation10:50 AM

    Then he threw down a vicious tomahawk dunk on him, told that cashier lady that *she* was the real racist, and ran away with his girlfriend from Canada, and no, you don't get to see her.

    ReplyDelete
  108. coozledad10:52 AM

    I tried, but never got very far. Now that I know it's at least partly about Misia Sert and her circle, I might be able to wrap my head around it.

    ReplyDelete
  109. coozledad10:55 AM

    I was startled at just how good Little Big Man is. I don't think it even starts with the pretense of being a great novel. It just is.

    ReplyDelete
  110. Lurking Canadian11:01 AM

    You left out "anti-colonialist", which as Americans remind themselves every 4th of July, is a bad thing.

    ReplyDelete
  111. dstatton11:04 AM

    According to a book called Albion's Seed, the concept of freedom differed throughout the colonies. In Virginia, it was the freedom of the planters to rule over everyone else.

    ReplyDelete
  112. dstatton11:06 AM

    Well, they do object when a department store clerk says "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas". They have their own version of PC, only stupider.

    ReplyDelete
  113. One of the few books I've read more than once. Have you tried Berger's Arthur Rex? It's a hoot, to say the least.

    ReplyDelete
  114. Randy Gibbons11:11 AM

    Todd van der Woof

    ReplyDelete
  115. coozledad11:20 AM

    I'll have to put it on my wish list.
    I think the last thing I read by Berger was about how badly Ackroyd and Belushi fucked up "Neighbors."

    ReplyDelete
  116. Agreed, but there really is something dangerous about a hyper-individualistic zeitgeist. It encourages people to create their worldview around their own feelings of alienation - rather than doing the connecting that must happen for change to occur. The right wing MRA's are totally insane in this way, but the left wing SJW's - their nemesis - are infected as well.

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  117. You spend your childhood reading everything you could get your hands on, you read through your school library, you read most of the classics by 21. What are you supposed to do for the rest of your life, read the same 20-100 books?

    Boy, I don't know about THAT. I read pretty much all the time, have all my life, and I feel like I've only ever read a minuscule percentage of "the classics," and I think the best I can ever hope for is to read a minuscule percentage more. I guess this hinges on definitions, but I don't understand a definition of "the classics" that only consists of twenty-two a hundred books, as opposed to many, many thousands.

    I mean, not that Tuttle is right or anything, obviously, and I read a good many books that would be unlikely to be considered "classics," but ANYWAY, this comment is really just an irrelevant side note.

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  118. Randy Gibbons12:10 PM

    (A new nym, but you may recognize my turgid style.)


    The Antebellum South seems to have practiced a particular, ancient form of privilege that I'll describe, one that's still a feature of the conservative movement.


    There was a group of cavemen, see. The Chief was the biggest, meanest one. One day he overheard people talking about somebody smart. This made him mad. "You not call her smart! You call ME smart!" He beat people up as needed until everyone knew what to say publicly. Everyone, including the chief, new this was a game. The smart lady realized at once that she could manipulate this guy, beginning with convincing him that he really WAS smart and good-looking. (Other dumb people came to believe this nonsense too, but influencing them was less important.)


    And that's how the South became a bastion of freedom, it's aristocratic layabouts hard-working, etc. Once someone's willing to duel you over some claim, facts are obviously of secondary importance. The war was kinda like a duel in this respect. And later, this type of privilege explains how George W. Bush was smart, humble, etc. He had to be. You were supposed to say it. If you believed it, all the better, but denying him his privilege was inexcusable (until recently).

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  119. tigrismus12:53 PM

    then his brain exploded

    I keep coming back to this and sighing.

    ReplyDelete
  120. Jay B.1:15 PM

    I prefer my Gibbons to be sullen and moody.

    ReplyDelete
  121. slavdude1:16 PM

    Yo, why all the PC hate? Don't Macs have their own problems too?

    Oh, wait, wrong discussion. Sorry. You may go about your regular snark.

    ReplyDelete
  122. BigHank531:21 PM

    For a bunch of anti-colonialists, they sure couldn't wait to remake Iraq, could they?

    ReplyDelete
  123. mgmonklewis1:32 PM

    Be fair: He might also be a "Birth of a Nation" enthusiast.

    ReplyDelete
  124. ADHDJ1:36 PM

    Many a peer of England brews/Livelier liquor than the Muse/And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man

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  125. Jay B.1:39 PM

    The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment
    in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides,
    followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000.


    What the fucking fuck are they talking about? It's the South Park Republicans who were so SHOCKED by a blowjob (well, them and Weepin' Joe Lieberman, but I repeat myself) and now,...through the transitive...carry the one, divide by Opposite Day, and add 5 utterly corrupt Republican hacks who gave the election to a fucking gibbering moron and you get political correctness? Are these thoughts supposed to make a case or even present a single interesting idea? I know they only talk to themselves, but does anyone on their side even read this shit? What the fuck are they supposed to take away from it? It's like listening to a person talk about microwaves in the air. I'm fucking embarrassed for these guys.

    Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery
    and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with
    liberal principles


    I'm serious. I have zero idea. It's a fucking pathology. Slave owners were the liberals because ingroup superiority over slaves? Does Jimbo, who is clearly in the last stages of syphilis, care about what he pukes out into the world while his dick detaches from his body?

    The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have
    shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.



    Yeah, you give those bitches just a little -- and soon they want actual equality! Power to the outraged? These fucking tools are lucky we are the least outraged people on Earth because in any active society, they would have been fed to bears or thrown off buildings. There are practically zero things they have been prevented from doing. They are moral lepers.

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  126. slavdude1:41 PM

    Yeah, I mean, come on--specialized literature is taught in advanced classes, not at the intro level. If you're going to investigate how such literature subverts the canon, you have to be at least somewhat with the canon in the first place.

    Not that most wingers would be familiar with it anyway. It's too hard to for them to read. Hell, even the bible is dumbed down; I had students (back when I still taught at the University of Phoenix--yeah, I know) who thought the King James was hard to read, and this is their book.

    ReplyDelete
  127. slavdude1:43 PM

    I did, and like Aimai with Proust I read Gibbon at different times in my life, so that I got different things out of it the second time I read it than I did the first time.

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  128. mgmonklewis1:45 PM

    Don't forget, he's the secret Muslim with the crazy Christian preacher. Not sure how he squares that circle, but he's JUST THAT DEVIOUS.

    ReplyDelete
  129. redoubtagain1:47 PM

    (Or a midfielder for Bayer Leverkusen)

    ReplyDelete
  130. Gabriel Ratchet2:00 PM

    These days, the more I read conservatroid "think" pieces, the more I'm reminded of Lionel Trilling's famous line about how

    “[i]n the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

    Mr Trilling can, I suppose, be forgiven for not anticipating a say when "irritable mental gestures" might one day supplant ideas completely.

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  131. slavdude2:00 PM

    Yeah, but even Oprah's Book Club publishes fine literature, such as Steinbeck's East of Eden.

    Of course, maybe that's QED for Tuttle, given Steinbeck's apparent social criticism.

    ReplyDelete
  132. BigHank532:01 PM

    the devil gets really good

    Hey, when a dude needs to go crust up a sock, he's gotta go, right?

    ReplyDelete
  133. Gabriel Ratchet2:02 PM

    These days, the more I read conservatroid "think" pieces, the more I'm reminded of Lionel Trilling's famous line about how

    “[i]n the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

    Mr Trilling can, I suppose, be forgiven for not anticipating a day when "irritable mental gestures" might one day supplant ideas completely.

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  134. Helmut Monotreme2:03 PM

    This kind of crap is why the NRA still says "an armed society is a polite society" when what they mean is "keep your thoughts to yourself unless you are prepared to kill or be killed".

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  135. Helmut Monotreme2:05 PM

    I pretty much stopped after "Ale man, Ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think."

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  136. Quite an indictment, coming from him.

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  137. coozledad2:09 PM

    Well, like Rubio says, it's not nation-building, it's helping them build a nation.


    Actual quote.

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  138. Gabriel Ratchet2:10 PM

    I recently reread both The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man and they're both as great as I remember them.

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  139. Gabriel Ratchet2:12 PM

    Or Waugh's Decline and Fall, which is not only shorter, but funnier as well.

    ReplyDelete
  140. slavdude2:13 PM

    Yeah, or to those folks at Disney who have to train their outsourced replacements.

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  141. Gabriel Ratchet2:13 PM

    The movie's pretty good too.

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  142. Sad to think that the Dutch are just as capable of being assholes as we are.

    ReplyDelete
  143. coozledad2:17 PM

    Richard Mulligan was brilliant.

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  144. BigHank532:18 PM

    Eh, it's all about keeping the share price up. Fund managers know less about production efficiencies than they do about leather options on Ferrari interiors. It they think moving production to Mexico is cheaper, you'd better do it or they'll sell off your stock in favor of some company who's going to screw the workers harder.

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  145. Gabriel Ratchet2:21 PM

    I've been meaning to read that. I like Berger a lot, though I'm more familiar with his -- I guess you'd call them "comedies of menace" -- like Neighbors, Meeting Evil, or The Feud.

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  146. Gabriel Ratchet2:33 PM

    Thanks for the recommendations (Nice synergy between handle and subject, btw).

    ReplyDelete
  147. The "Edward Schlosser" (not his real name) article is actually a huge clusterfuck that included the out-of-context use of material by a prominent blogger who received death threats as a result. (Of course he didn't get her permission first, what do you think he is, an academic?)


    Other people have since come forward to say he's an utter dick to his students, so his "fear" may come from the fact he's another hyper-privileged dude bro who can't understand why people refuse to recognize his superiority.



    If you were to lock him in a room with Jimmy Tarantum I'd root for injuries.

    ReplyDelete
  148. realinterrobang2:58 PM

    In regards to the slavery and Jim Crow south being "governed ... in accord with liberal principles," how exactly are systemic violence, repressive patriarchy, duelling, slaveholding (and convict-leasing, in the case of the Jim Crow era), a fundamental belief in and in the rightness of aristocracy, and the kind of caste structure that makes "one set of rules for white male landowning patriarchs and entirely other sets of rules for everyone else according to their station" liberal principles again? Funny, I thought that kind of stuff was about as reactionary as it gets.


    But I'm a dum furriner, so maybe I'm just confused.

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  149. Upvoted for syphilis.

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  150. I blame Bill Gates for all this rampant PC nonsense.

    ReplyDelete
  151. http://pages.vassar.edu/cubantransitions/files/2012/03/afro-cuban-women3.jpg

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  152. Randy Gibbons3:03 PM

    "Drinkards," you say. I like it.

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  153. I Google Imaged "Afro-Cuban lesbian experience"

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  154. They certainly do.


    Another example: remember how unforgivable it was that President Obama described the attacks on Benghazi as "an act of terror" instead of using the word "terrorist?"

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  155. By "liberal" he means "No! You're the poopy head!"

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  156. Randy Gibbons3:14 PM

    Yeah. And this relates to one of the favorite conceits of the slaveholders (and today, guys like Cliven Bundy). I'm talking about slaves supposedly being happy, well cared-for, etc. I don't doubt that slaves were heard to say such things, perhaps even many slaves, and often. It all depends on how many times they were asked and under what circumstances.

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  157. I think there are two things contributing to the idea of student demands being dangerous to professors:

    1) the commodification of higher education, where students are charged ridiculous prices and are treated by the administrators as customers rather than students;

    2) the adjunctification of the faculty, which is a direct result of #1, and has the result of increasing the profits of those at the top at the expense of the faculty, who wind up being economically, socially, and administratively disempowered.

    That said, Schlosser's article is entirely misdirected, because he had one (1) incident of a student complaint, from a conservative, while an adjunct, and it was laughed off by an administrator. Now he's on Vox bitching about lefty SJWs and trigger warnings.

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  158. Not to mention they're mad at Obama because he left too early, which is to say "at all." On the other hand, maybe there is a difference between colonialism and military occupation.


    And you gotta love a political party that blasts the president for not doing "nation building," when they themselves decided to entrust that task to the military and shit-can a multi-volume study on exactly how to rebuild post-war Iraq that was prepared by the fucking State Department.

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  159. PersonaAuGratin3:29 PM

    Nobody told him that Republicans don't go for "nuance" in their foreign policy.

    ReplyDelete
  160. The entertaining thing to Jody Bottum's observations is that it doesn't occur to him that present Western conservatism- especially its Christian Right element- might be in a slow swoon that parallels Communism's slow and then finally rather abrupt decline across the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. It's unpossible that Western conservative academics and their views could be falling out of favor with both students and their peers for pretty much the same reasons Communist academics and their views did....


    Then again, it's an article in The Weekly Lack of Standards.

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  161. What is the evidence that there is any such thing as an "SJW" who is the female or male equivalent of various crazed monty python style refuseniks and complainers? I refuse to buy into this bizarre right wing belief. Young people have always been concerned with social justice and social justice on campus can't and shouldn't be reduced to mere affectation or posturing or demands for self esteem stroking. I just don't think that this is the epidemic that right wingers and MRA's are claiming it is.

    ReplyDelete
  162. I plan to reread The Stars My Destination next, as soon as I dig it out of the attic.
    Late last year I dug many, many boxes of (mostly 50 year old) SF paperbacks
    out of the barn (where they'd been stored since I recovered them from my mother's house in Ohio after she died at the turn of this century), in order to donate them to the MIT Science Fiction Society library (in return for some borrowing credit to be cashed in sometime fairly soon, since we're moving back to Boston sometime in July after 35 years away). I reread Bester's The Demolished Man (or maybe read it for the first time; I didn't remember it, and there certainly was at least one other
    book there that I know I'd never read before, Isaac Asimov's first mystery story, which turns out actually to be a pretty good write-what-you-know coming-of-[middle]-age novel about a tenure case in the chemistry department at a very, very thinly disguised Boston University, with a murder tacked on). It was quite good. But it doesn't compare to The Stars My Destination, which I have in hardcover and re-read every five years or so.

    Mostly what I reread, however, are the works of Michael Innes and Erle Stanley Gardner.

    ReplyDelete
  163. BigHank535:01 PM

    Upvoted merely for reminding me of Scruffy the Cat.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4aumeuIbfc

    ReplyDelete
  164. BigHank535:01 PM

    That's not what she said.

    ReplyDelete
  165. montag25:01 PM

    I still recall the dumbfoundedness of the guy who was State's go-to expert on reconstruction, who'd been completely left out of the planning. When he finally asked someone in the White House when they were going to meet on the matter, his contact said, "don't worry, it's already done. The President spent an hour on it."

    If you needed a thumbnail sketch of the entirety of the Bush years, you couldn't do better than that.

    ReplyDelete
  166. Helmut Monotreme5:16 PM

    That's veering awfully close to "both-sides-do-it-ism". And while honest-to-god self-identified perpetually aggrieved SJWs do exist outside of a laboratory, I would put their numbers at less than one percent of the collection of toxic MRAs, gamer gators and outright racists that make the comment sections of YouTube a horror show. Their numbers are wildly inflated because the toxic weirdos of the internet take every criticism very personally. For the most part they aren't being called out by SJWs, they are being called out by J. Random Decent Human Being. It doesn't take an "SJW" to object to the use of ethnic-, sex- gender- slurs, but the members of the dedicated internet terrible human being coalition think that unless they get to turn any venue into a combination strip club, man cave and klavern, they are being oppressed by the brainwashed stooges of mecha Ward Churchill, and the authors of the SCUM manifesto.

    ReplyDelete
  167. montag25:16 PM

    Yeah, it's a continuing conundrum, for which there have been damned few satisfying explanations.

    I've been reduced to thinking of it as human sacrifice, of virgins willingly lining up to be thrown into the volcano to appease the gods of commerce.

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  168. Social Justice people who care about class are great people, no question. I'm also not saying that SJW's navel-gaze, exactly. More that there's something about the SJW ethos that can be too personal. To me this would be a liberal form of Social Justice, when what I think we really need is a left form of Social Justice.

    ReplyDelete
  169. Melissa Auf der Maur is my favorite RL name.

    ReplyDelete
  170. I do encounter such people from time to time, but that might just be the differences between my circles and yours.

    ReplyDelete
  171. stepped pyramids5:47 PM

    From my observations (which include some personal experiences), the current social justice movement simply suffers from the same problems that any radical movement does.


    First, minority factions that fetishize positional radicalism over effective change. I'm sure the many liberal Democrats around here are acutely familiar with this tendency. This also tends to lead to internecine warfare with other radical groups.


    Second, the conflation of an enlightened/right-on position with actual decency. An extensive political and rhetorical platform is developed, and people who do not immediately cleave to all the correct positions and use the correct language are considered not only unenlightened/ignorant but as actively malicious. I can't provide links (a lot of the people involved in these communities frequently purge their Tumblrs, adopt new personas, etc.) but I have witnessed several extremely vitriolic conflicts between online activist groups who agreed with each other on virtually everything except one or two nuances of language.


    Third, the establishment of cults, personality and otherwise. These groups frequently involve highly charismatic, intelligent people in their 20s and 30s being followed worshipfully by teenagers. Frequently, teenagers who are genuinely disadvantaged and hurting -- subject to abuse and rejection at home and at school. This opens the door for an astonishing degree of exploitation and abuse.


    None of this should be surprising to anyone who's read up on (or was there for) the New Left movements of the '60s. It is absolutely a small minority of online activism, but I have known people who were seriously hurt by it.

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  172. The October Country collection of Ray Bradbury stories in the horror mode.

    ReplyDelete
  173. ColBatGuano5:57 PM

    I found the whole Kipnis affair to be a giant amalgam of wrongheadedness on all sides.

    ReplyDelete
  174. Randy Gibbons5:57 PM

    "All the riled-up campus energy had to go somewhere, and the current generation of radicalized students discovered a channel down which it could flow: If we can’t protest war anymore, we’ll protest rape and racism. But again that gets the chronology backward. An angry radicalism was already present at American colleges, looking for its occasions and in no mood to accept any compromise."--Bottum



    Bottum's "we [students] can't protest war anymore" is his idea of what follows from his observing that students don't protest Obama's foreign policy nearly as vigorously as they [and the world -ed.] protested Bush's neocon wet dream fulfillment. Anyway, all these things: war, rape, racism: are just excuses, you see, to mill about angrily. The mindless wind-up toys are not spent yet and so they inexplicably glom onto these topics as opposed to meaningful ones. "Destruction is its own end," Bottum says, clearly because he's already dismissed the possibility that working to end war, rape, and racism are earnest, meaningful goals.

    ReplyDelete
  175. . . . tightfisted, cheap, mean, uneducated (and ineducable), indifferent to style and aesthetics or philosophy and education. Just jumped up, greedy, grabsters without even the pretension to gentility.

    Basically the kind of people who, today, would be working at Goldman Sachs.

    ReplyDelete
  176. Here's a dirty little secret about the classics: if you have an e-reader, you can get most of them for free.

    Even in print, they're much cheaper than new releases.

    ReplyDelete
  177. i don't disagree with any of this. I think lots of groups, regardless of their overt ideology, end up being run by narcissists, exploiters, and authoritarians. Its not the followers exactly who are the problem, its the nature of power and ideological conformity that is either 1) necessary or 2) endemic to the organizational situation. The kind of people who end up being passionate enough to get sucked in to any kind of movement are sometimes exactly the kind of people who really need to avoid becoming "joiners" and to figure out how to do what needs to be done without too passionate an attacment to a particular leader or cult style.

    ReplyDelete
  178. smut clyde6:59 PM

    I prefer my Gibbons to scribble, scribble, scribble.

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  179. This may be nitpicking, but I don't think "Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training" is an accurate summary of what Marcotte and other liberal commentators have been saying about the case. What I see Marcotte and similar writers saying is that Kipnis wrote an inflammatory essay that was full of shit in many ways, but that filing a Title IX complaint against her was not a helpful way to respond. Saying that her critics used the wrong weapon isn't the same as saying they were "hypersensitive."

    ReplyDelete
  180. montag27:52 PM

    I'm casually working my way through Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, and there's a few paragraphs on the great distress that the Birchers caused William F. Buckley, because he was afraid of antagonizing them in any way, and because he'd taken a lot of money from them to keep the magazine afloat, and because Robert Welch was a friend, and yet, even he knew they and Welch were going off the deep end. I'm reasonably certain that he knew that not endorsing just one of their views would put him on their growing list of Communist spies, too.

    That's as rigidly-held dogma as anything the Holy Mother Church could come up with.

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  181. montag28:16 PM

    There's an hypothesis among historians of the sugar trade that some of the worst aspects of slavery in this country were introduced by British sugar plantation owners who'd simply run out of room in places like Barbados to plant sugar cane and had come to Louisiana and Mississippi in search of more land and slaves to work it, and that they were the most rapacious, indecent, scurrilous bastards on the face of the earth, and they became the Joneses to keep up with in the South.

    Somehow, I think that view was meant to be somewhat exculpatory of American slaver colonialists, something they do not deserve, but at the same time it would seem to also definitively rule out any liberal tendencies among the group.

    ReplyDelete
  182. billcinsd8:33 PM

    so you want to help write the new primate Shakespeare, I guess?

    ReplyDelete
  183. tigrismus8:48 PM

    I prefer mine cowdle me as a mommet.

    ReplyDelete
  184. coozledad8:57 PM

    I AM it.

    ReplyDelete
  185. smut clyde9:05 PM

    I didn't hear a Harumph from that man!

    ReplyDelete
  186. susanoftexas9:42 PM

    Maybe a dear enemy was the closest she had to a friend. Look at Harmony, whose character was improved by becoming a soulless monster.

    ReplyDelete
  187. "...free of Federal tyranny, free to say whatever they wanted, and so on."



    So they thought they were libertarians?

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  188. Don't overthink it. Taranto was simply trying to be the first grifter to name the principles as *Liberal*. It's like any argument between two half-bright eight year olds: if you're the first one to use an epithet, your opponent can't use it against you.

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  189. smut clyde10:27 PM

    peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys"
    The Universal Law of Projection leads me to predict that most of the initial negative reviews of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and McCarthy came from right-wing essayists.

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  190. "Assuming they read anything at all, it's either Tom Clancy (wait, is he
    still a thing?), Ayn Rand, or whoever Regnery is bulk offloading this
    month."


    They all seem to have read Alinsky. No wonder I haven't been able to find a copy...

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  191. Well, would it kill them to vote?

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  192. coozledad10:36 PM

    Sugar and cotton built New York. There waseven a moment where New York Capital favored an alignment with the south.


    They figured out an end run to purchase cotton from the belligerents during the war, and that made it all better.

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  193. Well, that's a relief.

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  194. It's just a kind of Jonahism. Since they've been forced to confess that slavery is bad, it must be liberal, just like fascism and we'll think up the argument later. The earliest version I've caught in online life was Allen West explaining in 2012 that slavery was the same thing as welfare, because it fostered a dependency culture.


    Also of course they were the Democrat party. Pay no attention to the fact that they opposed women's emancipation, public education, industrial policy, and the protective tariff, they were the leftiest leftists ever.

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  195. smut clyde11:10 PM

    That requires monkeys to type, type, type.

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  196. smut clyde11:17 PM

    What does 'cowdling' mean? No, you need not tell me. I can guess.

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  197. Me like books.

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  198. That's my next Steinbeck, BTW. Picked it up at the Friends of the Library bookstore for a buck. Woo-hoo!

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  199. smut clyde12:05 AM

    A pint of plain is your only man!

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