The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Counter-reactionaries working to staunch the wokee cultural tide

    By artappraiser on Sat, 02/22/2020 - 6:31pm |

    For those of you who don't know yet, I'll be launching a website next week that should help shed a whole lot of light on Critical Social Justice. Getting excited to show you some of what I've been working in for the last few months.https://t.co/mgEe1wFSpj

    — James Lindsay, being effective again (@ConceptualJames) February 22, 2020

    Between New Discourses and Cynical Theories, it's going to be a good year for explaining what's going on with Wokeness and helping people understand what it is.https://t.co/wVQYt2SsDQ

    — James Lindsay, being effective again (@ConceptualJames) February 22, 2020

    Comments


    by artappraiser on Mon, 08/24/2020 - 11:10pm

    George Floyd was a felon, but it seems in his last 7 years out of prison, he made good on his effort to reform (based on Wikipedia) He shouldn't be lionized not should he be demonized. And it always makes me uncomfortable when someone references Thomas Sowell, who always came across as a superficial partisan hack, though I haven't read him in a decade.

    ETA: ugh, case in point


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 08/25/2020 - 1:57am

    Point taken. But at the same time, I want academics who are always looking at what all colleagues are writing. I do appreciate Anon's challenge here. Perhaps he's sympathetic to Sowell type thinking, so what? Being sympathetic is not the same thing as the almost hysterical acceptance of woke-a-tude that's happening all at once. Which I think Anon. describes well. On Twitter, I am seeing the only ones brave enough to challenge using their name in public are safe Pulitzer winner types like Annette Gordon-Reed. It takes that kind of power to be able to challenge the tide in the history -biz, everyone else is cowed, even those with tenure. 


    by artappraiser on Tue, 08/25/2020 - 2:09am

    Overall it was very well written, and I agreed with much. I pointed out 2 things that detracted from it in my eyes. Sorry I didn't make that clear. Yes, I support the diversity of ideas in academia and elsewhere. I'm a bundle of contradictions myself - how could I not love that? (I also left off his/her petty use of 'Democrat' as an adjective) (Sowell is a rather autocratic thinker, so imitating him would be jumping from the woke pan into the alt-right fire - not an improvement in my eyes - whereas respecting/being interested in some of his ideas is just investing in the market or casino of ideas, wherever the chips may lie - certainly there's more nuance and spectrum to our analysis and intellectual offerings than two (literally) violent extremes?


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 08/25/2020 - 2:33am

    Happened to see a Sowell article praising this book "Injustice" from 2011, and I think it was one of those bellwether events in how the right would deal with race and the justice department (along with voter fraud hype, but the former is more important to today's QAnon fighting "leftwing racists"). Not the heavily sock-puppeted 5-star reviews.

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/1596982772/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_top?ie=UTF8


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 08/29/2020 - 4:00am

    On the author of "Injustice", J. Christian Adams.

    A former commissioner on President Donald Trump’s now-defunct Voter Fraud Commission reached a settlement this week with a group of Virginia voters who claimed they were subjected to false accusations of felony voter fraud.

    The initial lawsuit was filed last year in Virginia federal court by voting rights groups and four individuals accusing the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and its president and general counsel J. Christian Adams of creating and distributing reports that falsely mislabeled them as non-citizens who illegally registered to vote — despite all of the plaintiffs being American citizens.

    The PILF reports, titled “Alien Invasion in Virginia” and “Alien Invasion II,” were released in 2016 and 2017 respectively, and stated that thousands of people had committed felonies by illegally registering to vote in Virginia. According to the complaint, Alien Invasion II contained information about many of the purported felons, including their names, addresses, phone numbers, and “in some cases social security numbers.”

    And

    Adams, a former attorney for George W. Bush’s Department of Justice, must also provide a written apology to the plaintiffs on behalf of himself and the group, which is also required to remove any information of individuals purported to have illegally registered to vote from its current and future reports.

    https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/fmr-trump-voting-commission-official-forced-to-apologize-for-falsely-accusing-people-of-voter-fraud/


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 8:03am

    Heather Mac Donald:


    by artappraiser on Wed, 08/26/2020 - 12:49am


    by artappraiser on Wed, 08/26/2020 - 11:59pm

    just one typical example of "the tide" I see on my Twitter feed oriented towards humanities in academia-I see this kind of thing day in, day out from institutions allover the western world, it's a flood, as in "be there or be square":

     


    by artappraiser on Mon, 08/31/2020 - 5:38pm

    Interesting excerpt from The Politics of Riots by Cathy Young, illustrating how easy it these days to convince a Senator into censoring his normal plain spoken sensible statements because they don't coincide with Critical Race theory:

    Meanwhile, the bizarre claim that looting is only about “property” and that calling it violence cheapens human (and especially black) lives had been made by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the “1619 Project” exploring American slavery, and echoed by many others including Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut). After the rioting broke out in Kenosha, Murphy initially tweeted a condemnation of police brutality and vigilantism as well as looting and property damage.

    An hour later, he deleted it, explaining that he had been told it equated murder with property crime.

    This is how it affects politics: they don't say the things they used to, they just censor themselves, on advice of some aide who is hip to current political correctness. It's better if they're not sure the politically correct will like it, to just shut up. Because one thing they do understand is how activitists use social media to draw attention of the extreme believers.

    This is how it works in academia too. Many who are doing it are not believers, they're just chicken. I've known some who say what they feel when they retire and are free to be honest about it.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 09/01/2020 - 5:55pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 09/05/2020 - 10:50pm

    Chloe S. Valdary, been following her for a while, brave independent thinker, calling out Kendi when he criticizes Trump as pot calling the kettle black:


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/06/2020 - 11:21pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/06/2020 - 11:38pm


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 12:01am

    The op-ed kinda weirdly falls off - is he afraid to get into specifics?


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 12:52am

    better than nothing (admit I have bigotry of low expectations from leftie intelligentsia on this front)


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 1:09am

    more ruminations on the Jessica Krug story:


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 3:51pm

    Didn't Fred Trump pretend to be Swedish to not scare away Jewish tenants? Which is an unfortunate bit of racism, but  if your people just wiped out another people, there might be these little knock-on effects, especially when you act like a ravenous inhuman Teuton.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 5:14pm

    Good story I didn't know.

    Got me thinking about how a WASP friend married to a Jew and they both kept their religions,he explained the stereotype to me about the "culcha" this way--it's not so much a victim thing, rather they celebrate suffering, everything's about celebrating suffering and subsequent deliverance from it by their own power of will/faith. I.E.,what doesn't break you makes you stronger. Almost like suffering should be welcomed.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 6:21pm

    "It is impossible to achieve your goals without suffering" - J.G. Bennett (teachings of Gurdjieff)

    Whether you respect the suffering as being the hurdle to struggle through for next stage enlightenment, or worship suffering itself like monks self-flagellation are 2 different approaches.

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 7:00pm

    Even better family rituals

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8662377/The-families-dig-dead-relatives.html


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 7:07pm

    two new to me, haven't listened yet:


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 5:03am

    Abolish the concept of race? The first thing we do when we open our eyes Day 0 is start to identify the features that make Mom Mom and Dad Dad, and file those characteristics in our tiny "this is good" box. Visual, smell, voice/sound, touch... It's largely subconscious in our pre-literate days. As the Catholics say, "give us your babies til they're 5, they're ours forever". Except by 2 you're already programmed on race to a large degree.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 6:23am

    Identity politics was fine when it was white identity politics, White politics was considered national politics. When blacks and other minorities began looking out for their specie interests, identify politics magically became something horrific.

    There was an article by Thomas Sowell above. He does the lazy scholarship of saying Bull Connor was a Democrat. He then pretends that a shift in racial politics between the parties has not occurred.

    Sowell says

    Perhaps the biggest voter fraud of all is the fraud against black voters, by telling them bogey man stories, in order to try to get them to come out on election day to vote for Democrats.

    As if Republicans have not perfected voter suppression as an art. Trump is even willing to destroy the post office. Sowell is trapped in the past.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 8:35am

    Look 5 posts up - there's a black son with white father. They're a family unit. We like the uplifting stories more than the hate-filled recriminations. Hey, they might even vote different - but it doesn't matter - they've got the vibe. More family clips, less street vandalism. People's Lives do Matter - the focus on BLM is out of necessity, an observable need, an imbalance. Turn that attention into a reverse Injustice, there'll be well-deserved pushback. Respect is earned, and needs to be maintained.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 9:03am

    Wow. I had completely forgotten about Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Halle Berry, etc.

    Edit to add:

    The upbeat stories are nice, glad you like them.

    Many are angry

    Most are not creating chaos in the streets.

    You don't get to set the criteria

    BLM does not have to address "black on black crime"

    The Rochester police department is being reformed in front of our eyes

    Mental illness cases will, at some point, no longer be the sole responsibility of the police

    Baby steps.

    Reform will happen whether you require upbeat stories or not.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 10:09am

    I post whatever the fuck I want - it's not "setting the criteria" - it's my opinion or whimsy. But I do hope it bothers you.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 3:12pm

    Doesn't bother me

    Reform will happen without your input


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 8:30pm

    May or may not happen w/o your long weird pedantic lists


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 10:56pm

    What an absurdly arrogant answer, as if you have a crystal ball.  Do you also predict a pandemic and the fall of the world economy? You are absolutely sure "reform" will happen, whatever that is. The problem is others like you are absolutely sure of a fall into a dystopian tribal stone age of small armed camps fighting for food like in The Walking Dead.

    I asked you once if you could please stay off this thread. I am asking again.

    This thread is not for debating politics or countering the work of people I post on it.

    It's for me and others who are interested in knowing more about the independent thinkers who are challenging woke culture.

    I don't give a damn that you don't like them!!! I really don't care what you think. I am interested in what THEY think. I may not agree with them, it doesn't matter, I'm still interested in what they think.

    I am rarely interested in what rmrd thinks, what he thinks just irritates me as it is often off topic and includes arguing with straw men and activisit political mindset.

     I don't want to be dragged into arguing about it like you just did to use for the umpteenth time. This thread is NOT ABOUT ACTIVISM, JUST THE OPPOSITE. It's analytical. THERE SHOULD BE NOTHING TO ARGUE ABOUT EXCEPT THE INTERPRETATION OF WHAT THE QUOTED SAID. NOT "for or against". Just interpretation, and offering more.

    Please stay off of it and start your own thread if you want to argue about something on it . As I said before, this is for my own personal use and those who share the interest.

    I give a fuck if you consider any of these people your enemy because of their ideas. Doesn't interest me in the least when you do.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 11:47pm

    The Rochester police department is being transformed. Those are the words of the mayor, She said that involving social services in police calls for mental issues was a possibility. I was repeating what Mayor Lovely said at her public press conference. She said it would take time, but that the wheels were turning. Go back and listen to the press conference.

    At a news conference on Sunday, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren pledged to change how the city and its police respond to mental health crises — including moving some services out of the police department.

    "We are doubling the availability of mental health professionals. We will take our family crisis intervention team out of the police department and move it and its funding to the department of youth and recreation services," Warren said.

     

    But she added, "This work won't be done in a week or a weekend.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/09/07/910439021/rochester-mayor-promises-police-reforms-after-protests-over-daniel-prudes-death

    I did not think pointing out what the mayor said was out of bounds. 


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 11:57pm

    AA 

    I took the time to listen to the podcast and posted my impressions.

    I listen to Blogginheads with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter

    As I noted, I listened to the podcast with Loury, Hughes, McWhorter, Chatterton Williams, Kmele, et. al.

    I don't consider them enemies

    McWhorter is clear that he is voting for Biden. He is writing a book on racism and is writing from the perspective that Biden is going to win

    Loury is clear that he is a contrarian.

    In fact Loury's own son points out that if too many people agree with his father, he takes the other side.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 09/08/2020 - 12:14am

    Boy oh boy, you are not going to be very happy when you don't have Trump's co-option of identity politics to kick around any more. Because Biden's a uniter, not a divider.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 1:24pm

    Not gonna be disappointed. This is obviously not just about Trump

    After President Trump won the 2016 election, there was a big debate over the role “identity politics” played in his victory. Some scholars argued that many white voters without a college degree — a group that proved pivotal in that election — jumped from supporting then-President Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 largely because they liked Trump’s framing of identity issues, such as immigration, more than Hillary Clinton’s.1 After the election, some (usually white) liberal and Democratic-leaning voices said that Democrats needed to abandon “identity politics” or face more defeats like Clinton’s. Other liberal voices (often Black) said that Trump had successfully tapped into the racist views of many white Americans. Both of those perspectives implied that debating issues of identity and race was bad for Clinton and good for Trump, and in the future it would be good for the GOP and bad for Democrats.

    Never mind all that, at least for now. America is talking about identity and race, and so are both presidential candidates. And all that racial talk seems to be helping Democrats, not Republicans. Joe Biden led Trump by about 6 percentage points in national polls on May 25, the day a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd. Biden leads Trump by an average of nearly 10 points now, after weeks of race and racism dominating the national discussion.

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/if-talking-about-race-hurts-democrats-why-is-biden-so-far-ahead/

    Kamala Harris

    NEW ORLEANS — Sen. Kamala Harris accused critics of “identity politics” of weaponizing the term to diminish issues of race, gender and sexual orientation, pressing Democrats on Friday to address those issues head on.

    https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/03/kamala-harris-netroots-identity-politics-762254


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 3:02pm

    related Biden cartoon:


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 6:29pm

    Tends to be a gathering of the same people

    Kmele was in a podcast with Loury, Hughes, McWhorter, Hughes, Chatterton Williams, etc.

    Argument is that we shouldn't focus on race

    Then Iman tells us that African immigrants do better than Caribbean immigrants in Britain

    We shouldn't lump people together as Black

    How did we get that information if we were not looking at tribes?

    The discussion continues that it is a great horror to look at race

    Never address how we deal with different levels of care despite identical illnesses and insurance, etc.

    I see a mirror image of Robin Di Angelo and Ibram Kendi


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/07/2020 - 11:19pm

    George Wallace would like it:


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/09/2020 - 1:17am


    by artappraiser on Thu, 09/10/2020 - 1:48pm


    by artappraiser on Fri, 09/11/2020 - 4:49pm


    by artappraiser on Sat, 09/12/2020 - 7:07pm

    Helen Pluckrose on Twitter: "Humour Warning. The thing I am about to retweet is a joke about an aspect of the bizarre cultural situation we currently find ourselves in. Please prepare your brain to receive it as such." / Twitter 

     

    This is what it's like watching academics try to cure racism. pic.twitter.com/uLCXZJKaSO

    — Mike Nayna (@MikeNayna) September 13, 2020

     


    by EmmaZahn on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 9:58am

    heh the little kid's face is the best thing! Way better than a lot of the stock gifs I've seen people use to express the same reaction


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 2:41pm

    Black people wondering why white people coopted zombies.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 4:27pm

    Here are people getting into the music and dancing with abandon. I think that's great but people bound up with and inhibited by socially acceptable behavior laugh at it. Ken Wilber would call this type of undifferentiated union of body and mind the Centaur level, where the ego is not separated from the body directing and riding it like one rides a horse but one with it as a centaur is one creature. Mind and body are one. 

     A good primer on Wilber's theory of consciousness and the many "splits" that need/could be unified is No Boundary. A more comprehensive description is laid out in The Spectrum of Consciousness. 


    by ocean-kat on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 5:32pm

    idk, the older man may have been dancing with abandon but other man and the woman looked more like they were dancing with a sort of primitive ritual intent, particularly the woman. Was she casting a spell? invoking spirits? Whatever. Obviously, neither was to that manner born. The incongruence of that and how out of place and time it was is what made it both amusing and interesting.  Also, the young boy's reaction. :)


    by EmmaZahn on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 5:51pm

     the young boy's reaction.

    His reaction to what he perceives as weird when in my opinion seeing and being weird should be the norm.We are after all unique individuals. The reaction to this reminds me of the, probably apocryphal, story of scientists painting a monkey blue and putting him in a cage with other monkeys. They tore him to shreds.

    We're all wearing a costume, usually of the most banal and repetitive nature. That's what I find bizarre. Rarely is anyone willing to risk being a blue monkey because the reaction from everyone will always be like that young boy's. If we're lucky. 


    by ocean-kat on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 6:03pm

    story of scientists painting a monkey blue and putting him in a cage with other monkeys. They tore him to shreds.

    Quite simply that's an example of a major cancellation for not following tribal norms.

    I always thought that the one very special thing about the combo of democracy and capitalism is that individualism is celebrated.

    The boy's reaction is that of shock and awe of children learning things are not what they thought they were, and it's funny for that reason. Learning not to make presumptions.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 6:19pm

     they were dancing with a sort of primitive ritual intent, particularly the woman.

    It's all a ritual, whatever the style. Whether it's Classical or Romantic as defined and explored in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or Classical and Improvised in Jazz. Is the "I" directing the body to move or is the music dancing the body. Either can be good but they are different. One can dance with abandon within the confines of a style. In this case what you categorize as primitive ritual intent.Isn't the problem that you find her ritual intent outside the norm?  Isn't all of this dancing with ritual intent?

     

     

     

     

     

     


    by ocean-kat on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 7:00pm

    One of my all time favorite YouTube videos! Thanks.

    About the other stuff: me thinks we are talking past one another so I'm done.


    by EmmaZahn on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 7:13pm

     we are talking past one another 

    I expected we would. That's why I almost never talk about it.


    by ocean-kat on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 7:24pm

    I may try again tomorrow. Need to sleep now.

     


    by EmmaZahn on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 7:42pm

    Even before critical race theory--there was a ideology problem:


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/13/2020 - 6:32pm

    Read this and consider it's implications in solving social problems using automated tech (or pick your own fav area: the Unbearable Lightness of Art Research?)


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 1:02am


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 4:10am

    nor anything to learn. History is the landscape of revealing mistakes and atrocities. Pol Pot tried to wipe the slate clean with Return To Year Zero. That didn't work out too well - a Nazi-sized atrocity less than 30 years later.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 4:34am

    I know I keep saying this, but George Wallace would like things saira rao's way


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 5:20am


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 4:28pm


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 4:35pm

    https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=15679


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 4:39pm

    https://www.bbc.com/pidgin

     

    For real, not a joke.


    by EmmaZahn on Tue, 09/15/2020 - 2:10pm

    from an interesting twitter thread


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 5:19pm

    Harper's Editor Christopher Beha on "The Letter" for their October 2020 issue:

     


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/14/2020 - 5:55pm

    this particular wokee invention not very welcome among intended:

    About One-in-Four U.S. Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx, but Just 3% Use It

    Young Hispanic women among the most likely to use the term

    By Luis Noe Bustamante, Lauren Mora and Mark Hugo Lopez @ PewResearch.org, Aug. 11

    Pan-ethnic labels describing the U.S. population of people tracing their roots to Latin America and Spain have been introduced over the decades, rising and falling in popularity. Today, the two dominant labels in use are Hispanic and Latino, with origins in the 1970s and 1990s respectively.

     

    A chart showing most Latino adults have not heard of the term Latinx; few use it

    More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population.

    However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

    The emergence of Latinx coincides with a global movement to introduce gender-neutral nouns and pronouns into many languages whose grammar has traditionally used male or female constructions. In the United States, the first uses of Latinx appeared more than a decade ago. It was added to a widely used English dictionary in 2018, reflecting its greater use.

    Yet the use of Latinx is not common practice, and the term’s emergence has generated debate about its appropriateness in a gendered language like Spanish. Some critics point to its origins among U.S. English speakers, saying it ignores the Spanish language and its gendered form.1 Still, there are examples of the term’s use in Spanish in the U.S. and abroad.2 Meanwhile, others see Latinx as a gender- and LGBTQ-inclusive term, reflecting a broader movement within the U.S. around gender identity.

    Young adults, college graduates some of most likely to have heard of Latinx

    While only about a quarter of U.S. Hispanics say they have heard the term Latinx, awareness and use vary across different subgroups. Young Hispanics, ages 18 to 29, are among the most likely to have heard of the term – 42% say they have heard of it, compared with 7% of those ages 65 or older. Hispanics with college experience are more likely to be aware of Latinx than those without college experience; about four-in-ten Hispanic college graduates (38%) say they have heard of Latinx, as do 31% of those with some college experience. By comparison, just 14% of those with a high school diploma or less are aware of the term.

    In addition, the U.S. born are more likely than the foreign born to have heard the term (32% vs. 16%), and Hispanics who are predominantly English speakers or bilingual are more likely than those who mainly speak Spanish to say the same (29% for both vs. 7%).

    Hispanics who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party are more likely to have heard of Latinx than those who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party (29% vs. 16%).

    Awareness of the term Latinx does not necessarily translate into use [....]


    by artappraiser on Tue, 09/15/2020 - 2:59am

    They can be re-educated


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 09/15/2020 - 3:44am


    by artappraiser on Tue, 09/15/2020 - 6:30am

    KINGS COLLEGE | Faculty of Arts & Humanities | English | Modules |

    COURSE # 5AAEB084

    Post/colonial Pirates

    Credit value: 15
    Module convenor: Professor Ananya Kabir
    Assessment: 1000 word critical review (15%), 3000 word essay (85%)
    Teaching pattern: 1 hour lecture and 1 hour seminar, weekly
    Pre-requisites: None

    Module description: 

    Corsairs, filibusters, swashbucklers, buccaneers, renegades: the rich lexicon of piracy in our vocabulary of rebellion attests the role they have long played in the collective imagination. But there is a complex history from which they sprang on onto the global stage. The rise of the pirate as a dangerously desirable figure is intimately linked to the maritime expansion conducted by several European nations in the early modern period, that coalesced into the creation of Empires and colonies through which European powers came to dominate world history by the 19th century. This module reads against the grain of those dominant narratives of colonialism as world-making by focusing on the pirate as an interruptive force, who derails the movement of peoples, goods, ideas, and laws across the maritime routes linking the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Important tools in the module will be the reading practices of postcolonial theory, which will teach us to extract and assess this alternative history of the post/colonial pirate.

    [....] we shall connect the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean Sea, taking in on the way issues of race and gender on the pirate ship, pirates and colonial commodities such as rum and sugar, Pirates’ English, Somalian pirates today, piracy as still-useful metaphor for hacking the capitalist and neoliberal system, and, of course, the sunken treasure chests that continue to haunt our imaginations. 

    Educational aims: 

    This module reads against the grain of those dominant narratives of colonialism as world-making by focusing on the pirate as an interruptive force, who derails the movement of peoples, goods, ideas, and laws across the maritime routes linking the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Important tools in the module will be the reading practices of postcolonial theory, which will teach us to extract and assess this alternative history of the post/colonial pirate. The module will also teach students to nuance standard maritime historiographies through literary reading practices, as well as evaluate the metaphoric application of piracy to contemporary, interruptive, economic practices.

    [....]


    by artappraiser on Tue, 09/15/2020 - 2:29pm

    Methinks taking fencing and crew might serve them just as well, plus they get in shape.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 6:35am

    It's insulting the way you're trivializing the pirate life style. They'd have to drink substantial quantities of rum as well.


    by ocean-kat on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 12:41pm

    *After* the meets. Strict training regs. This ain't a schooner off floating around in the Caribbean just sipping fancy rum drinks. Something has to separate the tourists from the salty sailors.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 4:39pm

    Aye, attacking the colonialist system with anarchist seizure of valuable goods is hard serious work, matey, and just like with other mind-altering substances, best that the dealer not sample too much of the booty.


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 4:50pm

    Imagine if a group of writers had observed and chronicled the Salem Witch Trials firsthand, as they took place, and set down in clear prose and detached temperament what was occurring. This is what Tablet Magazine is doing with the Woke Panic.

    — Roy Abrams (@RQA) September 15, 2020

    Normies need patient explainers of the online social dynamics that have generated the depraved groupthink that now rules the media. It's a crucial part of the deprogramming process. @Jacob__Siegel
    Jacob__Siegel with an excellent primer here https://t.co/SikMUD4rK8 pic.twitter.com/ktHIrrVEUo

    — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) September 15, 2020

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 2:45am

    Corporatism was amoral - who woulda thunk.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 6:47am

    Calvin Robinson in the UK. Seems like a very astute young man who instinctively realizes Trump identity politics when it's invading his country:

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 4:32pm

    Nor the nonsense that taking a knee insults the troops and the flag, and that stopping police from using illegal chokeholds or other forms of torture on black suspects is a detraction from our precious sports? Sure, more whites die from police abuse than blacks, but there's a long tradition of rather sick exhibitionism in mistreating blacks, as well as the standard tactic of "arrest the nearest black guy" in whatever situation. The Sandra Bland case was a perfect example - middle of the day, broad boulevard, no signs of drugs or guns or other contraband, no crimes being committed, out-of-state woman coming from a job interview, no need to harass a driver, but still the cop did.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 7:21pm


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 6:05pm

    this elaboration strikes me as: could have been quite useful in certain past Dagblog discussions:

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 6:12pm

    Mujanovic, as introduced in this twitter thread, struck me as an idiot. He uses extreme examples along with hostile accusations as if they apply to everyone he is describing as part of a group. 

    The following text is a review by Danijela Dolenec of the new book by Jasmin Mujanović Hunger and Fury: The crisis of democracy in the Balkans (C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2018). Dolenec, a member of the editorial board of the Croatian Political Science Review, is currently a visiting scholar at the Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK. She presented her review of Mujanović’s book as an invited discussant at the book launch event on 24th January 2018 at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford, UK. Dolenec’s generously informed critical reading of the book moves further the debate about the democratic transformation of the Balkans.

    The sumation paragraph:

         In Mujanović’s political vision for the region, emerging civil society actors should be helped by the liberal international community to take power and become the new elite that will govern these societies in a more participatory manner than the kleptocratic elites who are in place now. He is therefore rehearsing a familiar argument for bringing democracy to backward societies, and in this aspect his discussion comes close to conservativism. This is further accentuated by the fact that he declaratively takes on an explicitly anti-Orientalist stance, but the dramatic style of his book relies heavily on metaphors of blood and soil, evoking emotions of fury, chaos, trauma, fear and despair. He portrays the Balkans as a ‘social time bomb with a short fuse and in search of a light’ (p.136) where ‘it seems only a matter of time before some enterprising revanchist pulls that trigger or lights this fuse on the region as a whole’ (p.139). Not only does this language perpetuate the Orientalist image of the Balkans as the powder keg of Europe, but it situates the discussion about social movements within conservative functionalist approaches to social movements that portray mass mobilizations as irrational mobs, born of despair and capable only of disruption and chaos.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 11:31pm

    Whoops, forgot the link.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 11:45pm

    From my time in the Balkans, "bargaining with corrupt elites" is a good summation. The EU is not an occupying power - it is a club with standards and benefits. Yet if it doesn't insist on standards, as frequently happens in the more backwards new member parts of the EU, along with turning accession for prospects into a drawn out game of maintaining the status quo (whereas Russia and China and Turkey are less hands-off), it can result in a *relative* disaster (yes, people in the Balkans see themselves as more important than they are - get used to it)

    https://www.e-ir.info/2018/09/26/review-hunger-and-fury-the-crisis-of-de...


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 09/17/2020 - 1:57am

    this is great, someone actually trying to do something to counteract all the woke agitprop in school curricula and get students to thimk:


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/16/2020 - 8:32pm

    cartoon to think about, not get mad at:


    by artappraiser on Thu, 09/17/2020 - 2:23am

    Background from 2014-we’re all a little like RT America:

    When think tanks are in the tank

    By Jonathan H. Adler Contributor, The Volokh Conspiracy @ WashingtonPost.com, March 9, 2014

    Blogger Zaid Jilani has a post claiming that when he worked for ThinkProgress at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, he was pressured to toe the White House line, even when that conflicted with the positions his organization was supposedly advancing.

    One of the controversial topics that was very constrained in our writing at ThinkProgress in 2009 was Afghanistan. CAP had decided not to protest Obama’s surge, so most our writing on the topic was simply neutral — we weren’t supposed to take a strong stand. . . . Flash forward a couple years, and the Democratic Party’s lawmakers in Congress were in open revolt over the Afghanistan policy. Our writing at ThinkProgress had opened up a lot on the issue, and I was writing really critical stuff. . . . But then phone calls from the White House started pouring in, berating my bosses for being critical of Obama on this policy. . . . Soon afterwards all of us ThinkProgress national security bloggers were called into a meeting with CAP senior staff and basically berated for opposing the Afghan war and creating daylight between us and Obama. It confused me a lot because on the one hand, CAP was advertising to donors that it opposed the Afghan war — in our “Progressive Party,” the annual fundraising party we do with both Big Name Progressive Donors and corporate lobbyists (in the same room!) we even advertised that we wanted to end the war in Afghanistan. But what that meeting with CAP senior staff showed me was that they viewed being closer to Obama and aligning with his policy as more important than demonstrating progressive principle, if that meant breaking with Obama.

    The Daily Caller reports on the post here.  Pejman Yousefzadeh comments here. What Jilani describes at Think Progress, if true, does not reflect well on his former employer. The lesson Jilani draws from his experience is that “we’re all a little like RT America,” referring to the Russian media programming that tends to align its coverage and commentary with the positions of the Russian government. Jilani seems to think that all think tanks and media outlets put similar constraints on their reporters and commentators. Yet that’s an awfully broad generalization based on limited experience. It’s certainly true that some political organizations and think tanks constrain the work of their employees so as not to offend influential politicians or funders. Back in 2006 a right-leaning think tank canned Bruce Bartlett for writing a book that was too critical of President Bush and I am aware of instances in the 1990s when analysts at the Heritage Foundation were pressured to tone down their criticisms of Bush 41. Nonetheless, there are organizations that steadfastly refuse to cater to the politically powerful, and some that actually revel in bucking political pressure and donor interests. At least that was my experience during the decade I spent in the think tank and policy advocacy world. When I worked at CEI in the 1990s, it was a badge of honor if the Bush 41 White House got upset with something we did, and we regularly told funders to kiss off if they didn’t like our work.  I would this is still the rule, rather than the exception. All putatively independent policy organizations have their biases, yet they should all aspire to doing intellectually credible work.  That some may trim their sails when asked by the White House (or anyone else) is shameful, whether or not this sort of thing has become business-as-usual in Washington, D.C.

    UPDATE: Think Progress Editor-in-Chief Judd Legum writes:

    This is an inaccurate portrayal of our editorial process both now and when Jilani left ThinkProgress more than two years ago. (He also inaccurately characterizes the policy position of CAP which advocated a troop surge in Afghanistan — along with a rapid draw-down in Iraq — long before Obama was President.) ThinkProgress is editorially independent and we regularly publish critical reporting of Republicans, Independents and Democrats, including the White House. Like any aggressive journalistic outlet, our work can generate controversy and debate. But we stand by our work and are guided simply by the facts and our progressive values.

    I have asked Legum a few follow-up questions and will post any responses I receive.

    SECOND UPDATE: I asked Legum whether he wished to dispute any of the specific details of Jilani’s account and about the consistency of CAP’s position on Afghanistan.  Here is his response:

    I don’t have the inclination or frankly the memory to do a tick-tock around a post we did 3 years ago. (We publish 40 posts a day, on average.) No one contacted me but my understanding is the White House did not like the post. We left it up. It’s still up today. Fairly typical at any news outlet to get complaints.

    We have and will continue to publish critical reporting of Obama and the White House. I’m happy to send over a bunch of examples, if that’s helpful.

    All of CAP’s major policy reports (Strategic Redeployment, Strategic Reset) called for a surge in Afghanistan. But that was just one component of a broader policy to wind down both wars. ​ThinkProgress doesn’t have policy positions per se — we are a news site.

    Jonathan Adler Jonathan H. Adler teaches courses in constitutional, administrative, and environmental law at the Case Western University School of Law, where he is the inaugural Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation.

     


    by artappraiser on Thu, 09/17/2020 - 7:04pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 2:44am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 2:48am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 2:53am


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 2:57am

    An Electoral College victory for Trump, if he loses the popular vote again, would, in this new elite consensus, prove beyond doubt the centuries’ long grip of “white supremacy”. Some are already calling such a victory illegitimate, even though it would be completely constitutional, under the rules everyone has agreed to. 

    I haven't agreed to those rules. I think the theft of the election by Bush and Trump is a bigger part of the so called delegitimization of liberal democracy by the left than is discussed.  I'm not alone and it's not just far left people like me. In 2000 was working in home repair, painting, construction, for some of the richest democrats in Philadelphia. High powered lawyers and doctors living in these hundreds of years old mansions. Gore's lost really affected these establishment people. I remember one of these lawyers saying to me a few weeks after Gore conceded, "I'm surprised how angry I am about this. I can't let it go."

    I was in AZ by the time Hillary lost so I don't know how that affected them. But if they were that angry about a small popular vote win by Gore I can imagine how a 3 million popular vote win by Hillary affected them.


    by ocean-kat on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 3:28am

    I imagine the 8 years of Bush & co acting like he win a mandate pretty well rubbed the salt in the wounds even before Hillary's was stolen. And Roger Stone was behind both. No wonder he got a pardon.

    But too many in left-media questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency from 2016 onwards, citing Russia and voter suppression.

    Andrew should read the news more. Russia and voter suppression were and are real. Mueller redactions were released last week for more confirmation.

     

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 4:25am

    4 Assange pardon attempts


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 11:21am

    Election (in)Security - access w anon tab if needed


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 4:37am

    One old independent-minded warrior has just been lost:

    Bit dispiriting how long the same arguments have been raging:

    “[Crouch] found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization.” https://t.co/wswGRYOT0v

    — Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 20, 2020

     


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 2:21pm

    yes, just say no to woke math:


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 6:10pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 5:48pm

    no kidding. I'd say more than a whiff:


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 10:59pm


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/20/2020 - 11:38pm

    I noted the words of Stanley Crouch about Janes Baldwin and race. I always viewed Baldwin as speaking directly about race. He commented about police brutality and the need for white people to keep blacks who protested in their place.

    James Baldwin was one of America’s greatest thinkers and writers on the subject of race. What would he have thought about present-day protests against police brutality and for racial equity? We can glean much about his thoughts from his rich legacy of writing and recorded interviews. Here are some quotes from James Baldwin, most from over half a century ago, that are particularly resonant today:

    –From “The Fire Next Time,” 1963: “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were Black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.”

    –Chair of Princeton’s Department of African American Studies and author of “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own,” Eddie Glaude quoting Baldwin in 1980: “What we are dealing with really is that for Black people in this country there is no legal code at all. We’re still governed, if that is the word I want, by the slave code.”

    –Dick Cavett interview, 1969: “If any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing – word for word – he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him”.

    –Dick Cavett interview, 1969: “(The police) are a very real menace to every black cat alive in this country. And no matter how many people say, ‘You’re being paranoid when you talk about police brutality’ – I know what I’m talking about. I survived those streets and those precinct basements and I know. And I’ll tell you this – I know what it was like when I was really helpless, how many beatings I got. And I know what happens now because I’m not really helpless. But I know, too, that if he (police) don’t know that this is Jimmy Baldwin and not just some other nigger he’s gonna blow my head off just like he blows off everybody else’s head. It could happen to my mother in the morning, to my sister, to my brother… For me this has always been a violent country – it has never been a democracy.”

    –From “Florida Forum” on WCKT-Miami in 1963, answering the question on whether the racial conflict in Alabama and Mississippi could happen in Florida: “The situation in Alabama and Mississippi which is spectacular and surprises the country is nationwide. Not only could it happen in Florida, it could happen in New York or Chicago, Detroit or anywhere there’s a significant Negro population. Because until today, all the Negroes in this country in one way or another, in different fashions, North and South, are kept in what is, in effect, prison. In the North, one lives in ghettos and in the South, the situation is so intolerable as to become sinister not only for Mississippi or Alabama or Florida but for the whole future of this country.”

    –Nearing the end of his life in the mid-1980s, Baldwin’s patience had run out. The anger he had channeled into his writing could no longer be quelled. He expressed his outrage and frustration in these words from an interview in the documentary film James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket: “What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? . . . You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your ‘progress’?”

    https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/6-james-baldwin-quotes-race/15142/


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/21/2020 - 1:42pm

    I think Crouch and Chatterton Williams are not promoting something new. The idea that blacks should not be so-called victims was espoused by Booker T. Washington. Alain Locke has a similar message in the Harlem Renaissance. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. The message is now carried by Chatterton Williams, McWhorter, and Hughes. In each time period, they faced the pushback that Crouch received in his lifetime.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/21/2020 - 4:09pm

     not promoting something new

    Oh really?!!! NOBODY HEREIN SAID THAT. ALWAYS THE STRAWMEN!  I actually quote Williams pointing out just the opposite in the beginning: Bit dispiriting how long the same arguments have been raging:...

    Even if they did, which they didn't, the kind of debate you keep trying to bring to the thread does not serve the purpose of my thread! That is why I ask you to take it elsewhere. You don't want to participate in what I want to use this thread for, don't understand why I am doing it and the spirit in which I am doing it , observing and recording a phenomenon about intellectualism at this point in time.

    You want to do something else.

    So for the umpteenth time: do it elsewhere, please. I am not at all interested in arguing your college freshman survey course type stuff on this. Don't want a splainer and don't want debate of the basic ideas involved. You drag it down to freshman level every time and thereby threaten to hijack. Take it someplace else that will appreciate it, discuss with like minded amongst yourselves...


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/21/2020 - 5:54pm

    I like the idea of proving someone's unique and self-thinking by pulling out a quote from 150 years before justifying them. It's like my hippie trip to India was predicted in Plato's Republic.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/21/2020 - 6:46pm

    I posted a response to how the late Stanley Crouch felt about James Baldwin. I did not post a response to you.

    I see no reason not to make comments about Chatterton Williams, et. al. as you...

    [The lady asked you not to post this stuff on her thread. Deleted. A time and a place for everything. Start your own thread. - PP]


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 09/21/2020 - 9:29pm

    Again, PLEASE TAKE IT TO YOUR OWN BLOG, don't do that on this thread. Or go over to Twitter and see if Chatteron Williams will argue with you about This thread is not about discussing ideological and sociological solutions to societal problems!It is meta about trends in intellectualism, intellectual rigor and opposing propagandistic reinforcement of codes of speech and thinking in academia that are warping free thought. I DO NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT ON THIS THREAD AND I DON'T WANT YOU CLUTTERING IT UP WITH HIJACKING. It's my blog, it's not a news post. I am not inviting discussion here about what you want to discuss.

    YES indeed I'm actually inviting ridicule of some trends. Everyone else seems to get what's appropriate to post on this thread except you. All you do here is continue to make yourself look dense and naive. 

    Take a clue from who signed "The Letter". Lots of people who disagree politically and/or socially.

    PLEASE START YOUR OWN BLOG IF YOU WANT TO ADDRESS content rather than wokeness codes.

     


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/21/2020 - 11:53pm


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/21/2020 - 5:34pm

    Marx w/o a beard, or kinkier than that?

    Alternate title: Where Engels Fear to Tread


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/21/2020 - 6:48pm

    see all the comments on this thread:


    by artappraiser on Tue, 09/22/2020 - 11:42am

    laugh


    by artappraiser on Tue, 09/22/2020 - 7:49pm

    how a criminal defense attorney sees Kendi's instructions:

     


    by artappraiser on Wed, 09/23/2020 - 4:50pm


    by artappraiser on Thu, 09/24/2020 - 2:34am

    See whole thread.

    A true scholar would not block Conor Friedersdorf. She can't handle the situation that's developed, whatever it is.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 09/24/2020 - 7:31pm

    I suspect youse in trouble when ye olde Worldwide Socialist Website run by the official ICFI publishes unhappy chatter about your woke history project

    The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones abandon key claims of the 1619 Project

    By Tom Mackaman and David North
    22 September 2020

    The New York Times, without announcement or explanation, has abandoned the central claim of the 1619 Project: that 1619, the year the first slaves were brought to Colonial Virginia—and not 1776—was the “true founding” of the United States.

    [....]

    The Times’ “disappearing,” with a few secret keystrokes, of its central argument, without any explanation or announcement, is a stunning act of intellectual dishonesty and outright fraud. 

    [....]


    by artappraiser on Fri, 09/25/2020 - 3:03am

    yup scholarly trouble and maybe other kind too:


    by artappraiser on Fri, 09/25/2020 - 3:09am


    by artappraiser on Fri, 09/25/2020 - 2:38am


    by artappraiser on Sat, 09/26/2020 - 3:26pm

    this is quite some catch!


    by artappraiser on Sat, 09/26/2020 - 11:39pm

    Richard Spencer is an idiot.

    Steve King, VP Mike Pence, the NRA and others have taken the words of Martin Luther King Jr. out of context. If you think Spencer is clever, you are mistaken.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/22/irony-flogs-itself-steve-kings-mlk-tweet-was-worst-number-tributes-gone-wrong/


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 1:02pm

    you are making yourself look like an idiot for saying that on this thread as if the people discussing it don't know that.

    PLEASE STAY OFF THIS THREAD, you consistently hijack it with simplistic agitprop shit that doesn't apply, clearly not able to understand its purpose WHICH IS NOT POLITICAL.

    Edit to add:

    I am trying to avoid being tempted to be insulting about things you say by asking you not to participate on this blog of mine.

    It would just be to everyone's benefit here on Dag if anything that interests you on it you just start your own blog entry instead of dragging mine where you think it should go.

    If you think you have something insightful to add on a topic addressed here, start your own blog on it and see the response you get there or not. Don't use me for your agendas.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 1:32pm

    p.s.  and I purposefully have not started a new blog on topic precisely because I want it to be hard to find and don't want all kinds of mundane political arguments on it. I don't want your attention or input in this case, really I don't, last thing I want. Your arguments are actually always with the people I am quoting. I am not those people!!! If you want to argue with them, go over to Twitter and argue with them there.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 1:38pm

    If I have a position different than something posted in a link, why should I not be able to comment? 
    There are few people here because they have been chased away.

    You constantly post then have monologues. 


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 1:51pm

    You constantly post then have monologues. 

    That's basically what the blog is for!. You know, like taking lecture notes in college. I am not asking you or anyone to look at it by posting on it! It shouldn't matter to you. MAKE YOUR OWN PLEASE, Make your own blog for your own interests. Especially if you want to debate. I don't want to debate you on this, others get it and offer useful input, you don't, you want to fight with some of the people quoted on it. I think that's a useless exercise, a waste of my time, all about opinion, emotions and not analysis, and if you wish to do it, start your own blog or go over to Twitter.

    I do not want to know what you would say to them! Tell them not me! Why are you after me to harange me on these issues, why not just leave me alone? I am trying to keep this blog a semi-private sort of thing, I do not want or need a large audience for it, I don't advertise it and I can't help my additions turn up on "latest comments".

    None of your comments on this blog over a long time have been helpful, every single one has been a distraction or a hijacking.


      by artappraiser on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 2:09pm

      There are few people here because they have been chased away.

      By who and how? By my observations of this site most left many years ago and before I started posting. So I actually don't know what happened. What I do know is that many people left TPM and joined this site when it started. Soon after that I had to leave this site, and all the internet, when I moved to a ghost town without electricity and internet. When I returned after a few years in isolation most of those people weren't posting. And not too long after I returned Arta stopped posting. She's only recently returned. PP wasn't on the mast head at that point. So who exactly are you claiming chased them away and how do you think they did it?


      by ocean-kat on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 2:59pm

      Here's fact on that front, which others can interpret  however they like. After my return from hiatus, Michael Wolraich thanked me via email for posting so much news on his site even though he himself had stopped posting much on it. And he offered to put me on the masthead which would include moderator privileges. I thanked him and declined.  As I have no interest in doing this for anything other than personal hobby/gratifcation.

      For that reason I do not have any guilt about hogging up a lot of space posting things that interest me. I know nothing more. I very much appreciate his keeping the site in good order and paying for it. It works for me! Very well indeed he keeps it operating much better than a lot of other sites.

       And I have no interest in invading his privacy by asking why he himself doesn't use it more, I guess that he likes to keep it in good shape in case he does need it for something in the future but I am not sure. Don't care, why look a gift horse in the mouth. Like you, I like the smallness, don't need or want a big audience.

      Edit to add: Also, at my Twitter account under my real name, which I use for professionally related posting, I have following/follower relationships with Wolraich, Maiello and Cardwell, who have accounts there under their real names. I don't bother them there about Dagblog and they don't bother me about it either.

      I noticed in the past that Dagblog also has an account there and posts from here feed into it--it has 586 followers--but I never look at it and don't follow it, just looked at it now for the link for the first time in years. Don't know how it works and don't care. Imagine there might be similar on Facebook as Wolraich has their "like: button on top.

      Not revealing anything that's not public.


      by artappraiser on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 4:09pm

      There's a happy median, subjective of course. I'd like to see one or two dozen more posters. We're a bit too few and we know each other too well. Much more than that it would get too large for good conversations. One problem is people who have come have agendas and leave when that agenda is over. Like Hal who only came to support Sanders and attack Hillary. He never talked about anything else and after the election was over he left.

      Frankly the site would be dead without you posting articles In The News.


      by ocean-kat on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 4:37pm

      We got stuck with Wattree and Hal and others, where discussions turned into repetitive harangues, which also blocks up the Comments, so all a visitor usually sees are the long-drawn uninteresting spats.

      I've just recently found a partial solution.


      by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 09/28/2020 - 5:22am

      Of course the flip side of that is how the "colonizers" white children were nursed by black mammys and raised by them and other black house servants.

      Is what we are seeing now with CRT and general Wokeness among the descendants of both those "privileged" black and white children simply the logical end of those practices?

       


      by EmmaZahn on Mon, 09/28/2020 - 4:55am

      I get what you are saying but the irony is right now because of Covid almost everyone was and is "stuck at home raising their own children"! And the only cultural and class mixing is online virtual. Where you don't really know if other people are who they say they are anyways. Gives me a headache sometimes for everyone to be hashing over this tribal and class stuff, sometimes violently, when everyone worldwide is pretty much in the same boat except for billionaires, changing their own sheets, washing their own dishes and being their kids teaching assistant. Amazon and and other contactless delivery people are the essential workers now, there's a lot fewer housekeepers nannies or cleaning ladies becoming part of your family. If you have them, they are contactless, no different than pool cleaners or grounds maintenance.

      Wearing a mask and keeping social distance, you can't even use smiling or some other facial expression to become closer with those outside your "pod" doing physical tasks for you. Unless you do it through cell phone video!

      Intelligentisa aren't ready to deal with the reality of the new world so they focus on relitigating the past?


      by artappraiser on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 12:59pm

      If a person demands that other people stop protesting because the issue is not a major concern of that particular person, we are  all not in the same boat. 


      by rmrd0000 on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 1:10pm


      by artappraiser on Sat, 09/26/2020 - 9:09pm


      by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 1:40am


      by artappraiser on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 2:15pm


      by artappraiser on Sun, 09/27/2020 - 9:57pm

      Glimpsed like this, this vision is crazy bleak yet also astonishingly hubristic—both an appeal to authority and a claim to authority. A desire not to persuade but to control and engineer. A belief that there is a single truth and that one possesses it on behalf of everyone else. pic.twitter.com/YL6bTntDbe

      — Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 28, 2020

      This is delicate, but ... is it that he is seeking to "control" or is it that he sincerely thinks he's speaking truth? Over the past couple weeks, I have gotten a sense that he genuinely doesn't comprehend the criticisms he receives.

      — John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) September 28, 2020

      by artappraiser on Mon, 09/28/2020 - 8:13pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 09/28/2020 - 8:17pm

      related two stories near top of PP's thread Raised by own Stuffard


      by artappraiser on Mon, 09/28/2020 - 8:29pm

      Important "Short letter to the misunderstanding right" by Helen Pluckrose @ New Discourses:


      by artappraiser on Mon, 09/28/2020 - 8:32pm

      330. million, most don't do anything. Of those who do, what do they do, what kind of faction is that, etc. If we talk about 70 year olds, what is their politics, how extreme their different factions of belief and action (incl the effect of using money & laws for action your own way). Same for 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, etc.


      by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 9:00pm


      by artappraiser on Tue, 09/29/2020 - 7:14pm


      by artappraiser on Fri, 10/02/2020 - 7:39pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/05/2020 - 12:06am

      This guy needs re-education, he named The Bible, Sun Tzu and 6 long dead white colonizer types, go figure:

       


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/05/2020 - 12:27am


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/05/2020 - 3:28am


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/05/2020 - 3:31am


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/05/2020 - 3:36am

      "Rest in Power", uggh. Eaten by worms is as powerless as one can imagine. What self-delusion to think that our carcasses display power. Perhaps if we embraced futility and disintegration, we'd make better use of time on earth, rather than thinking we waltz victor-like into the afterlife.

             Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. 
             There is always something
                    - Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

      by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 10/05/2020 - 6:07am

      So confused and bewildered by the brave new wokee world, he made a picture to try to sort it all out for himself:


      by artappraiser on Wed, 10/07/2020 - 8:43pm

      The thread includes the info that John McWhorter finished his new book on race

      Says the tone is angry

      It seems that he doesn't have a publisher yet.

      The book should be interesting 


      by rmrd0000 on Wed, 10/07/2020 - 9:05pm


      by artappraiser on Thu, 10/08/2020 - 9:55pm


      by artappraiser on Thu, 10/08/2020 - 9:55pm


      by artappraiser on Thu, 10/08/2020 - 11:07pm

      This one gone viral on Twitter under "Yelp"


      by artappraiser on Thu, 10/08/2020 - 11:42pm


      by artappraiser on Fri, 10/09/2020 - 7:10am


      by artappraiser on Fri, 10/09/2020 - 5:14pm


      by artappraiser on Fri, 10/09/2020 - 7:33pm


      by artappraiser on Sat, 10/10/2020 - 1:38am

      the commies at least had a two-tier system?


      by artappraiser on Sat, 10/10/2020 - 3:05am

      Lake Woebehere - all the children are *below* average


      by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 10/10/2020 - 3:23am


      by artappraiser on Sun, 10/11/2020 - 6:29am

      The champagne in Spain fails mainly to complain.


      by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 10/11/2020 - 6:35am


      by artappraiser on Sun, 10/11/2020 - 11:47pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/12/2020 - 6:09pm

      Of course #17 isn't an imperialist capitalist etc., but 22 and 42 obviously are. Some people just don't understand math!


      by ocean-kat on Mon, 10/12/2020 - 6:18pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/12/2020 - 9:23pm

      reply to above:


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/12/2020 - 9:30pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/12/2020 - 11:34pm

      While I agree that ideas should be supported by evidence, shouldn't be immune from criticism or debate, and especially there should be no  coercion and silencing, consciousness raising is a big part of the college experience. In practically every field education should raise up the students from the simplistic and often false ideas they learned in high school and the culture. A woman should be free to argue that women are not oppressed but I believe in a vigorous debate on that question the evidence would clearly support that they are. Perhaps one could argue that oppressed is too strong a word but at least discriminated against in significant ways.


      by ocean-kat on Tue, 10/13/2020 - 12:14am


      by artappraiser on Tue, 10/13/2020 - 10:40am

      Note (in reference to the Clifford Levy tweet and not the Yang retweet)


      by artappraiser on Tue, 10/13/2020 - 11:48am

      All the Juicy Narratives that's Hip to Print


      by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 10/18/2020 - 5:07am


      by artappraiser on Fri, 10/16/2020 - 2:59pm

      I am not sure why Lindsay is posting this, but as a former Wisconsinite, born and bred, I read it as "we are not racist but no way are we ever going to cotton to elite coastal CRT lingo like 'anti-racist'":


      by artappraiser on Fri, 10/16/2020 - 3:04pm


      by artappraiser on Sun, 10/18/2020 - 2:42am

      Intriguing voice new to me, has few followers, retweeted by Tho. Chatteron Williams

      Mimi Reyes @mimiko_reyes Queens girl, @bronx_science grad, @smithcollege, @TeachersCollege grad student, #hispanicsforeducation, #educationnews, ~opiniones son mías~ Queens, NYJoined May 202


      by artappraiser on Sun, 10/18/2020 - 3:15am

      Not all far lefties go along with the woke police, this guy's a proud Marxist:

      Anyone who thinks that free speech is conditional on not offending anyone has just decapitated a schoolteacher.

      — JJ Charlesworth (@jjcharlesworth_) October 17, 2020

      by artappraiser on Sun, 10/18/2020 - 4:21am


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/19/2020 - 6:32pm

      Boris thinking about it:


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/19/2020 - 7:18pm


      by artappraiser on Wed, 10/21/2020 - 1:53am


      by artappraiser on Fri, 10/23/2020 - 3:05pm

      A take certainly worth noting:


      by artappraiser on Sat, 10/24/2020 - 3:29pm


      by artappraiser on Sat, 10/24/2020 - 4:32pm


      by artappraiser on Sat, 10/24/2020 - 7:20pm


      by artappraiser on Sun, 10/25/2020 - 8:18am

      new one on my follow list, he hooked me with this tweet:

      One of the hardest truths to accept is that most evil is caused not by malevolence, but by a perverted pursuit of the good.

      — Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) October 25, 2020

      turns out he self-describes as  Exiled academic promoting science, discourse, debate, and the conservation of the values of the West. Culture wars, movies, psychology, and cute animals. Ohio. Joined May 2014


      by artappraiser on Sun, 10/25/2020 - 8:06pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/26/2020 - 12:37am

      In realizing that Bo's apparently very politically oriented

      I realize that many of these other guys and gals are not!


      by artappraiser on Mon, 10/26/2020 - 6:44pm


      by artappraiser on Tue, 10/27/2020 - 3:30pm

      Kind of the kicker for me

      (being obviously non-woke)


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 10/27/2020 - 4:07pm

      Best comment on that thread, Women get pregnant, even if they think they are men. Men don't get pregnant, even if they think they are women.


      by ocean-kat on Tue, 10/27/2020 - 4:33pm

      fascinating (at least to me) conjecture by Wesley Yang, reminds me that I should really get around to reading his book "The Souls of Yellow Folk":

      The cultural emasculation of Asian American men also serves a sociological function: being portrayed as docile and harmless makes it easier for the majority to accept academic and income-based over-performance without undue resentment.

      — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 27, 2020

      Yuri Slezkine's the Jewish Century set out a taxonomy of the gender inversion characterizing "middleman minorities" wherever they appear throughout history pic.twitter.com/2NiVsuKNrc

      — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 27, 2020

      As many have noted, Asian immigrant over-performance has gotten so extreme that the culture has moved to curtail it. What's interesting is that it is being done in the name of a struggle against "white supremacy."

      — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 27, 2020

      Japanese Americans were a group who arrived in large in the early 20th century. They prospered in America but were expropriated by the government during the 2nd World War.

      — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 27, 2020

      They responded to this trauma by becoming intense assimilationists and intermarrying in large numbers such that today there are mixed Japanese than pure Japanese.

      — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 27, 2020

      Their desire for the promise of full integration has largely been achieved, though to some degree they remain a "middleman minority" in the racial imaginary -- "perpetual foreigners" as the ethnic studies literature puts it

      — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 27, 2020

      I met a mixed Japanese-American guy who was writing a book about the American navy whose intense militaristic patriotism and bluff American masculine demeanor was regarded in a gently bemused way by the artists and writers at the colony where he was working.

      — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 27, 2020

      The initial and lingering bemusement everyone felt is an index of the extent to which Asians remain middlemen minorities in America

      — Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 27, 2020

      Very thought provoking, especially if you compare it to things about some young black males admiring Trump style for certain reasons and how Jewish males are so confident about their place in society that they feel free to use self-deprecatory humor all the time....etc.


      by artappraiser on Tue, 10/27/2020 - 8:01pm

      Intriguing comment by Ken White:


      by artappraiser on Wed, 10/28/2020 - 2:46am


      by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 10/28/2020 - 8:04am


      by artappraiser on Wed, 10/28/2020 - 4:45am


      by artappraiser on Thu, 10/29/2020 - 1:57am

      GLENN GREENWALD RESIGNS FROM THE INTERCEPT

      By A Guy Called LULU on Thu, 10/29/2020 - 3:59pm |

      October 29, 2020 "Information Clearing House" -  Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.


      by artappraiser on Thu, 10/29/2020 - 5:07pm

      You suggesting an embalming?
      Lying in (deep) state?


      by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 10/29/2020 - 7:05pm

      I just think the post on Dagblog by Lulu of this news at this point in time is a significant milestone in itself of this whole continuing saga! cheeky


      by artappraiser on Thu, 10/29/2020 - 7:11pm

      Say it - Lulupaluuza!!!


      by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 10/29/2020 - 7:46pm

      this is a woman with one fine scholarly mind, she's really onto something here:


      by artappraiser on Thu, 10/29/2020 - 7:13pm

      from Arts & Letters Daily: The Theory Wars of the '90s never ended; they just migrated from Diacritics to Twitter. There’s no end in sight  ... 

      Who’s Afraid of Theory? by Ed Simon @ TheMillions.com, Oct. 29


      by artappraiser on Fri, 10/30/2020 - 2:56am

      see full threads for both of these:


      by artappraiser on Sat, 10/31/2020 - 2:36pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/02/2020 - 6:17pm

      Lest Izzy's screed get lost - not that mind bending but needs saying: https://letter.wiki/liab/1001

      And the irony of globalized times:

       


      by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 11/04/2020 - 10:49pm

      sooo excellent, thank you for posting it


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/04/2020 - 10:57pm

      Sometimes when you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Even if they are "false flag" revolutionary fleas, they're still fleas.

      WWI MEMORIAL IN KANSAS CITY VANDALIZED WITH ANTI-VOTING GRAFFITI


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/03/2020 - 1:53pm

      More fractionating of the woke:

      Where's the little red book so everyone's on the same page with what words to use?

       


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/03/2020 - 8:26pm

      Just a good example of things getting quite tense between the anti-wokee crowd and the trend of many of the woke blaming whypipple for the closeless of the election


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/04/2020 - 8:42am

      one more example:


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/04/2020 - 10:03am


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/04/2020 - 9:41pm

      flagellation fest:


      by artappraiser on Thu, 11/05/2020 - 1:51am

      It depends on how one defines progressive. The republicans try to label anyone with a D after their name as a progressive and a socialist. But no one that I consider a progressive thinks Biden or Harris is a progressive.


      by ocean-kat on Thu, 11/05/2020 - 2:07am

      Dupe of last comment elsewhere

      from this thread which have other applicable articles PRO-TRUMP LATINOS NOW BEING EXILED FROM THE PROGRESSIVE COALITION

       


      by artappraiser on Thu, 11/05/2020 - 2:18pm

      Olivia Nuzzi:


      by artappraiser on Sun, 11/08/2020 - 2:27am


      by artappraiser on Fri, 11/13/2020 - 5:40pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/16/2020 - 11:53pm


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 12:11am


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 12:13am

      If "Mark Twain" wasn't embarrassed by his embrace of racism and white supremacy why did he try to hide behind a pseudonym?


      by ocean-kat on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 1:51am

      1) bad spelling? (wanted a railroad motif)
      2) hiding pseudofed addiction?
      3) didn't deserve "Clemensy"?
      4) cuz ppl had low attention spans then as well?


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 5:56pm


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 12:55am

      What beeth this Substack of which ye speak?


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 2:30am

      Thank you! I find that an extremely common sense comment. I agree too! All three of them fit that. In makes total sense that a libertarian would see it that way, because the bigger the corporation or organization, the more like socialism or communism it becomes Here's some more on the debate I just found:

      Thx Rod. The idea that MSM now marginalizes nonwhite writers is the reverse of the truth. They marginalize non-leftists, whatever their race or gender. https://t.co/PurxWpQgRV

      — Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) November 16, 2020

      It's so very intriguing how this hardline free speecher crew fighting back against p.c. straightjackets right now goes totally across the political spectrum!

      I noticed some complaining that the ACLU is showing signs of becoming more p.c., don't know how true. PEN however is not, everyone still seems happy with them. Also saw Maiello retweet a tweet by the latter recently, recall how he was pretty purist on free speech even though also classically liberal. Don't know where he stands on this all, it is perhaps different in that he has the view of a humorist; they often seem to consider themselves a special category that are alllowed to write or say things that others shouldn't, so I'm just not sure.


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 4:29am

      Focus was supposed to be the Substackerati piece

      https://www.cjr.org/special_report/substackerati.php


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 4:33am

      no worries, I checked out both


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 5:05am

      Ben Collins shreds Glenn

      (see whole thread, well worth it)

      While some people make a whole career on 1-2 stories, others have to (and want to) prove themselves week by week.


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 8:04am

      Glenn having a bitter sad-on

      (and fighting with the left cuz the right doesn't care)

      Thought it odd he found the CJR Substack article was an attack, rather than good journalism


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 12:24pm

      I have this premonition that the other Harper's Letter people are gonna be sorry they invited Glenn to be in their little group, because he is first and foremost, above all other things, a prima donna.


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 6:45pm


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 2:07am


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 4:46am

      warning: sassy material


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 5:20am

      Maiello just retweeted this:

      "As I’ve traveled the country, I've found that this kind of open-mindedness has dissipated on many campuses, particularly over the past decade and long before performative opposition to Trump became a fixture of campus life."https://t.co/Hg7pS8upNi

      — Quillette (@Quillette) November 17, 2020

      Confirmation for me that he's interested in the topic. Hits home how it's dangerous if you are a writer by profession (or in many other fields) to tweet your own opinion under your real name, but it's much safer to retweet others' opinions without making clear where you stand. And how it's true that most of the people who signed The Harper's Letter don't have to worry about their income depending upon a large institution of some kind.


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 4:19pm

      addressing "the first PoMo president" problem

      Poor Anthony. His mom is clueless. https://t.co/zvT1h4cAtQ

      — Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) November 17, 2020

      luckily for the rest of us, Anthony is still being taught conventional western mathematics


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 4:38pm

      Admit that sometimes I think a majority (tho not all) of "the woke" are mostly doing the thing Obama talks about in this anecdote about his first years of college:

      I also admit to similar my first couple years of college.


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 9:14pm


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/17/2020 - 10:50pm

      this just strikes me as old-fashioned trolling culture wars for fun and profit


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/18/2020 - 3:57am

      There's a "says it all in a nutshell" kinda thing going on here:

      Hard-Working Plumber Looking Forward To Paying For His Neighbor’s Gender Studies Degree https://t.co/lVR8CYqT4Z

      — The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 17, 2020

      Of course there's not a lot new about this, as a recipient of degrees in art history I know full well. Still, there's a line where you crossover in the humanities when what you are teaching has a strong political message for "the other."


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/18/2020 - 12:08pm

      Third academic conference announcement I've seen along these lines in as many days. May be the start of a trend, I dunno:


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/18/2020 - 12:39pm

      Great thought-provoking addition for this thread thanks to Emma Zahn:

      HOW SOCIAL GOSPEL BECAME SOCIAL JUSTICE BY MICHAEL LIND

      By EmmaZahn on Thu, 11/19/2020 - 3:21am |

      [...] Properly understood, the Great Awokening is the revenge of the Yankees [....]

      Direct URL: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/revenge-of-the-yankees


      by artappraiser on Thu, 11/19/2020 - 3:14pm


      by artappraiser on Fri, 11/20/2020 - 6:58am

      good point from a data geek and nice coined term to go with it Wokemeter™


      by artappraiser on Fri, 11/20/2020 - 7:19pm


      by artappraiser on Sat, 11/21/2020 - 4:30am

      Fables and fairy tales are a ubiquitous part of childhood. They're a cultural touchstone so they've been rewritten for years. It's been happening for so long we've forgotten they were rewritten. 

      Alterations in the fables date at least to the 18th century, when a translator named Samuel Croxall freely expanded the original works. "Well over 50 percent of Croxall's so-called translations were written by Croxall," Robert Temple said.

       In my 20's I came across a book by some famous author, can't remember who or find a link, called Fables For a New Age that twisted the moral on many traditional fables. For example Chicken Little runs around proclaiming the sky is falling while all the animals laugh at him. Then a huge part of the sky falls and kills all the animals. Moral: Sometimes the sky is falling.

      Andrew Dice Clay rewrote dozens of Mother Goose rhymes sexualizing the content. 

      I'm not denying some problems with woke and cancel culture but why care that feminists or anyone is rewriting these fairy tales. Every one of them has already been rewritten, try reading Grimm Brothers in the original versions. Really not considered suitable for children in today's world.


      by ocean-kat on Sun, 11/22/2020 - 11:15am

      I think her point was that the modern rewrites lose the solid mesmerizing literature value, even as they substitute values. Ronald Dahl's fairy tales are humorous, but they rely on knowing the original (depending, Grimms or the sanitized version). Similar to Biblical anecdotes or Shakespearean pieces. It's like a sign at the doctor's office is not literature, even if it imparts healthy values. The woke ones are focused on a message, without the completeness if vision, the cathartic experience. It's fast food - it has its place, but it's off fine dining, even if luxury cuisine has too much fat or red meat. 


      by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 11/22/2020 - 12:24pm


      by artappraiser on Sun, 11/22/2020 - 2:05am

      It's kinda hilarious that "Latinx" might end up being the downfall of the entire attempted Woke revolution as it causes more and more Latinos to splinter off in disgust.

      — James Lindsay, JLDS (@ConceptualJames) November 24, 2020

      The Woke will find a way to explain it away. Not real Latinos. White adjacent. Etc.

      — The Woke Temple (@WokeTemple) November 24, 2020

      Getting paid less than a colleague who has more experience, awards, and probably a larger readership makes sense? pic.twitter.com/hn3jBSZwo1

      — Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) November 23, 2020

      The Common Sense Group of Tory MPs is trying to enlist @BorisJohnson into adopting active measures to curb woke-led institutions. Will it succeed? asks @Critic_GStewart https://t.co/VEuoIeydtJ

      — The Critic (@TheCriticMag) November 23, 2020

      Black parent to Asian parent: Asians are keeping black people down out of fear that they (Asians) will be overtaken by blacks in STEM.

      Asian parent: "First you blame white people, now you blame us! Grow up! Study harder!"

      (h/t @jurijfedorov)https://t.co/HVN1S3J5yU pic.twitter.com/N2JMDWggPe

      — A New Radical Centrism (@a_centrism) November 23, 2020

      I make this same point, but more narrowly: Although middle-class blacks experience more advantages than disadvantages (because it's at this level that most of the racial preferences exist), I suspect lower-income blacks experience more discrimination than preferential treatment. https://t.co/DsuarhhrIh

      — A New Radical Centrism (@a_centrism) November 23, 2020

      see whole thread:

       


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/23/2020 - 11:11pm

      A lot depends on what she was told.

      But there's been recent uproar where the minorities on food programs basically got to work for free/très little. I'm sure these reasons have been used for every female lead getting paid 1/3 the lead actor. Every female exec getting paid below her male counterpart. You know the drill. Racial minority? Double that.

      They hired this Latina because that gringo outsider from Eater doesn't have too much cred in La-La Land reviewing ethnic food with a half Hispanic population. So if they want Latino outreach, they should be quite careful how they pay and treat that Latina attraction. Capitalism 101.

      Of course HR departments know how to splain away racial discrimination and sexual harassment - that's part of their main tasks.

      And i don't like how it gets all personal on her in this thread. Mob swarms, ye know not what ye do...

      The gringo that *3 of them* are replacing built up a lot of cred in the community. But of course LA Times recently fired 2/3(?) if it's staff - maybe they were all petulant workers, amirite? Corporations just wanna have fun.


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/24/2020 - 2:54am

      PS - Marcy Wheeler bowed out of Omidyar's superteam at The Intercept when it turned out all the white dudes got full-time hire positions, and by the time they got to her, the promised slit was part-time gig work, where she wouldn't get paid for her extensive prep time/research, only what got published, so flush weeks of effort/work down the toilet if the editor's disorganized, too slow, or just a duck.. She did this for a little while, but just not worth it. Greenwald however got paid much more than the going rate for bloggers, whatever his following. You'd think a billionaire setting up a new-gen media prototype could've foreseen this or at least fixed it as developed, but let's just blame the uppity bitch - more precedent - shame it was pre-Karen days, the that would've been rolled out.


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/24/2020 - 2:59am

      I'd agree in the past, especially with big corporations, but now I have just seen so much evidence that the attitude is rampant in fields like museum work where there is this incredible sense of entitlement that everyone deserves the same salary no matter how little experience.and no matter the value of their work to the employer. That's without even getting into that most museums are so broke now that 1/3 of them may close permanently. Just a gob-smacking incredible sense of entitlement, especially if they are not white males. And like money grows on trees. Zero concept of giving the employer something for your pay, zero. I guess I'm just really shocked at how spoiled some educated millennials are. It's the everyone gets first prize thing come home to roost. And though they were probably raised the same way, most white males of the generation have been so berated by academia in humanities as responsible for all the evils of society that they are the only ones who sort of get it and show a little bit of humility.

      It is what it is, I'm not doing this thread for anything but the history of the phenomenon. When I see something noted that I myself have noted, I put it down as "maybe not imagining things." It's really just mean as a record of the phenomenon over time, and those fighting against it.

      Upthread a bit is a post by a guy pointing out that all of this was there in the late 70's and early 80's, but was basically rejected. What happened that it came back with this generation. Why and how did it happen? I'm just interested in the popular culture history of it all.

      (Most western art history isn't that different, ya now. Probaby why this appeals to me. At first there's usually this small group of radicals rejected by society...)


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/24/2020 - 3:17am

      As I noted 2/3 of staff got whacked - whites, Latinos, whoever. My response was about a single high-profile position where LAT was trying to get a standard-bearer on the cheap. And all of social media is slapping her down and becoming sudden HR experts. Her being Latina is worth his food award, not to mention the female balances the male in the modern media and cuisine market, so just pay her the fucking same and save those precious $ elsewhere.

      I'm not trying to balance the whole industry, and i know people can easily overestimate their worth, and in general the male privilege/bonus for being white has quite evaporated in many realms. I've been on the receiving end if unfair and arbitrary pay decisions a couple times, lucky that my boss intervened once. But it's still going to be "those uppity women think they're as qualified and deserve to be paid the same" for the next hundred years, no matter how hard they work, what they bring to the table. Sure, i deal with the woke attitude of the new presumed "what's fair" ("hint, buttercup, life ain't fair") every day. 

      Again, I'm not fighting or defending the new woke entitlement battle - I'm talking flagship positions. Every one of Biden's picks will get paid the same by law. Outside that, totally arbitrary standards take hold, including women having to bargain more than males to get equal treatment and pay for their credentials and skills.


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 11/24/2020 - 3:20am

      Here's a rich (pun intended) twist on the equitable pay topic, PP:

       


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 2:52am


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/23/2020 - 11:58pm

      classic stereotypical GenX sarcasm:


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/24/2020 - 11:46am

      and another one! Gen X ers on a tear today


      by artappraiser on Tue, 11/24/2020 - 12:00pm


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 12:58am

      I don't get why people are upset that Peterson's book is being published. Don't they realize they can always have mass gatherings to burn it after it's published? Or is this all about worries of getting covid at the book burnings?


      by ocean-kat on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 2:26am

      Maybe there's a difference between the more delicate snowflake type can only cry and then get PTSD and sue their employer that caused the trauma, and then there's the  kind that would be more proactive and able to do physical things like book burnings and street action? I dunno just guessing


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 2:32am

      The humorous, then the distinctly unfunny


      by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 3:03am

      Didn't expose the one I wanted to...

      JP's s many misquoting & misinterpreting Hitler and the Nazis while pretending he's a "scholar". That's actually one of the more absurd & disturbing things about him. If he was just Uncle Remus making shit up, but he pretends to be part of the academic elite while completely avoiding the rigor, yet he draws a crowd - the Gentlemen's C goes on book tour.

      https://www.haaretz.com/amp/world-news/.premium-jordan-peterson-s-barrag...


      by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 3:10am

      The culture warring over trans thing is getting even more serious than before in England, see whole twitter thread, you'll get the gist from commenters, without accessing The Times article:


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 3:05am

      I guess "diversity and inclusion" might be a secondary hot topic there--


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 3:13am

      Oh man, the trans thing in England, sheesh, sounds beyond a hysteria:


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 3:52am

      yet more involving The Guardian and culture warring (note the piece blames us 'mercans, we sucked them in)


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 5:04am

      Don't think he's blaming - just noting 1 of the few media survival tactics is dependence on either the big American social media platforms and/or tapping into the huge possible pot of voluntarily given money from the much larger US market, whereas the UK market is still divvied up as usual.

      Humored that Sully doesn't know what an Agile Scrum Master is - the people who enable his cloud platform to make his columns appear may now feel uncomfortable working in this tech-hostile environment. (also implies he's missing out on a key factor in 21st century productivity efficiencies, but guess that's not his side of the street)

      I was curious about numbers, and the Guardian's listed as:

      - Editorial and production : 869

      - Sales, distribution and support: 626

      So Moore's managed to make over 1/5 supportive of the  "uncomfortable work environment" thesis that they publicly denounce her, nevermind that she never comes to the office because *she's* long felt uncomfortable, most of the news world is no longer going to the office anyway because if pandemia, and presumably as a left-wing publication they signed in to some semblance of promoting - not just respecting - free speech, at least for opinion pieces, less so hard news reporting.

      Put alongside Jordan Peterson's successful pimping of Hitler misquotes and other scandalous shit-disturbing-as-profitable-profession through outrageous lies and appropriation, in a year of outrageous Trumpian and Borisian confabulations, plus Covid-24x7, you'd think Moore's comments would be too trivial and unnoticed to be amplified with such zeal - presumably these people haven't heard of the Streisand Effect, or not realized she was/is left-wing but it still holds.

       


      by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 5:34am

      Wow, so much, er, "Moore" - covers a lot of territory, much having little to do with the trans debate, and much the blinkered left - i.e. us, whether we're ...(heretics? There's a much better word, more coffee...)

      Anyway, it sums up a lot of why the left isn't making the gains it thinks it should, screaming at any dissenters that they're idiots, not seeing how no degree holders could view much of this as pampered shit.

      Also covers that female journalist pay inequality thing in the newsroom quite well (making 1/3 her male colleagues, encourage to write lifestyle pieces despite political awards...) And her certainty that Cameron would win - listening to people who aren't "on your team" - sounds a bit witchy and mysterious.

      And the function of the new internet, brutalizing people, enforcing conformity...

      And the one show-stoooer topic in talking to everyday people is: "immigration"

      https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian/?=frlh


      by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 5:19am

      a prediction that definitely sounds possible:


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 3:23am

      One major thing you get with culture wars-distraction:

      Yes. The fact that Democratic voters expect their politicians to solve governance problems rather than just feed an endless hunger for cultural grievance makes clever "emphasize this, not that" strategies harder. People expect solutions to pressing problems! https://t.co/AIg8GvDnZv

      — Daniel Blinderman (@Dannyblinderman) November 25, 2020

      edit to add: I saw this happening in the specific with the Parkland kids' activist group. I saw them counter-productively get interested in giving BLM support (no surprise, thinking coalition as well as sympathy of their generation, I guess, but unwise.) Nope, just the opposite, as: how can one get excess guns off the street without police on your side? If one managed to enact some gun controls, one has to have someone to enforce them. Then throw in more people buying guns and ammo like never before, as a reaction to BLM, including blacks...and their movement silenced if not killed.


      by artappraiser on Wed, 11/25/2020 - 3:31pm


      by artappraiser on Thu, 11/26/2020 - 12:30pm

      Geez, this is new? The hidden secret of why Thanksgiving is the most contentious, beloved holiday.
      Bonus points if you get thrown out before noon. Without alcohol. In a snowstorm/hurricane.
      [I had my Dad try to throw me out of my brother's house - thought some kind of eminent domain prevailed.]


      by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 11/26/2020 - 12:35pm

      Yes, I was thinking the same thing even before I posted it. But then I thought, it still makes a good point: do we want the whole world to be like a miserable family Thanksgiving? And how it can be a quite lovely occasion if you do it with lovers, friends and one relative for whom you are truly thankful. Just another example of how tribalism based on genetics can get quite ugly.

      In the phrase "nature vs. nurture", the word "nurture" is the nicer one.


      by artappraiser on Thu, 11/26/2020 - 12:55pm

      "Murture" she wrote - a fine midpoint between nurture, torture and murder


      by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 11/26/2020 - 1:06pm

      Turkey fights back - bad attitude? You betchure ass.

      https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/25/oakland-turkey-gerald-at...


      by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 11/26/2020 - 5:00pm

      Univ. Chicago president goes to bat for tenured geophysicist vs. the wokees:


      by artappraiser on Fri, 11/27/2020 - 3:49pm

      Ken White, who doesn't often opine on topic, sees Orwell:

      That’s a nasty bit of student safety-totalitarianism.

      — Don’tEverTalkToTheHatThatWay (@Popehat) November 27, 2020

      by artappraiser on Fri, 11/27/2020 - 4:08pm


      by artappraiser on Sun, 11/29/2020 - 7:02pm

      read all three of these, found them quite worthwhile, just took awhile to get around to posting them; some nuanced criticism of James Lindsay's book in the second was especially welcome

      A strong critique of "social justice theory" from a "progressive liberal" perspective https://t.co/1BSFh1oZd5

      — Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) November 23, 2020

      A careful review of Pluckrose & Linsday, detailed criticism: The Cynical Theorists Behind <em>Cynical Theories</em> - https://t.co/CVPOTt8xL1

      — Patricia Churchland (@patchurchland) November 26, 2020

      "As I’ve traveled the country, I've found that this kind of open-mindedness has dissipated on many campuses, particularly over the past decade and long before performative opposition to Trump became a fixture of campus life."https://t.co/Hg7pS8upNi

      — Quillette (@Quillette) November 17, 2020

       


      by artappraiser on Fri, 11/27/2020 - 4:00pm

      Quillette is one of my favorite sites but one issue I have with it and with the link is it ignores some of the conservative causes of the "woke" reaction. There was a time when college republicans invited conservative intellectuals who debated and attempted to convince people with their ideas and rational arguments. Buckley and George Will are two examples. At some point there was a shift to college republicans inviting Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ingraham. They were invited not to sway or convince people with ideas and arguments but to deliberately distort the narrative in a way that would piss off the left. The simple truth is these dumb ass provocateurs had no business speaking on a college campus. Conservative intellectuals, and one should expect a certain amount of intellectual rigor from college students, should reject these morons. How did these college republicans expect the liberals to react? The story is more complex than just the woke shutting down free speech.


      by ocean-kat on Fri, 11/27/2020 - 7:25pm

      totally agree!

      edit to add: I recall the first round ot the "invite the conservative speaker to cause outrage" thing you are referring to as more than distasteful in that a lot of it was like really gross frat-boy trolling for fun and entertainment, go see Coulter, hoot and holler, own-the-libs and then go get a barrel and get drunk. All bogus infotainment. Not real intellectual anything, more like cable news talking heads and talk radio.

      but this reaction of critical theory, it is real and has infiltrated academia very deeply and across the world, not just the U.S. It's much more broad and deep, it's a change in the way colleges educates people and in that way it's affecting the whole world now.


      by artappraiser on Fri, 11/27/2020 - 7:15pm


      by artappraiser on Fri, 11/27/2020 - 7:19pm

      UK review of the Lindsay/Pluckrose book:


      by artappraiser on Sat, 11/28/2020 - 12:11am

      John Cleese:


      by artappraiser on Sat, 11/28/2020 - 12:26am

      No I don't think that's it. I hate to disagree with Cleese but I have a different take on it. Since my last musings on humor seemed to go over well I'll try again with religion. You'll have these comedians of the past or in evangelical communities making jokes about religion. They can use a basic Muslim stereotype of someone bowing repeatedly while on a prayer rug. They have to make it funny but that's the premise of the joke. This stereotype might be all their audience know about Islam.They can get laughs with that but they dare not make jokes about Christianity that points out the conflicts or inconsistencies. When the college educated person hears it it doesn't hit. Forget about outrage it's not funny. The college educated person has had at least a comparative religion course. They've learned the history of Islam. They know how it's similar to other religions and how it's different. At a certain level they know more about Christianity than the evangelical.

      If you have a more sophisticated understanding of the religion this joke comes off as a lie, just a crude untrue stereotype. It's not funny because it's not true or insightful. They've grown out of it. You can joke about Islam, Buddhism etc but not so simplistically. They're looking for a more sophisticated joke about religion. You can even joke about Christianity because even though they believe they see the conflicts and inconsistencies in their own religion and can laugh at them. There were many comedians in Lenny Bruce's time making jokes about other religions using crude false stereotypes, the problem was he was making jokes about Christianity. And in a very insightful way.

      One can get offended by the crude false stereotype but that's not the crux of the matter. The joke is unsophisticated and untrue so it's not funny. I really think a good comedian could talk about humor and how it's changed using all the racist and religious tropes of the past and get us laughing at the trope for it's ridiculousness and stupidity instead of the trope getting us to laugh at the ethnic group or "strange" religion believer.

      Does Cleese really think that the "woke" are offended by racial or religious jokes that the ethnic or religious group would find funny. I don't think that's the case. They woke are offended by jokes that with a high probability would offend the groups the joke target.

       


      by ocean-kat on Sat, 11/28/2020 - 1:25am

      There was a female activist in the 60s who noted that the prize for the male activists was still the girls - the women were still cheesecake whatever they role they played.

      We lived a long time on dumb blond and "take my wife...please" jokes - the humor of the 50's was pretty oassive-aggressive towards women, with the emphasis on aggressive. At some point that female half of the Vegas or Catskills audience wakes up and realizes the joke's usually on them. Can't take a joke? Not when you deny me property and credit, keep me in loveless marriages, sexually abuse or harass me, or other standard setups. This morning there was an article fine-tuning a rapper calling his daughter a ho vs ho-like behavior. Like, WTF? It's your daughter, just STFU.

      The Indian character on the Simpsons is a good debate about evolving standards. Sure, it's funny - but Indians also don't want to be just that ridiculous but lovable character - they're doctors and engineers, intellectuals and academics, eventually mostly generic Americanized Americans. So is it after the 400th or 1000th time if hearing a lame joke that you're allowed to cough and object a bit, or is that always a spoilsport? We use humor as a device to pop the pain, but if it keeps popping the same sore spot, it's no longer a remedy.

      As we supposedly progress in knowledge, it's also awful to see us stuck with childish stereotypes that won't go away. My wife was watching Queen Victoria, and wondering how much people knew about sex to see her hopping up and down to "prevent pregnancy". The fact is, informed intelligent people have known the essential details of how babies are born and prevented for millennia - yet we keep managing to make sure there's an uneducated/uninformed laughable component of our population.

      Along with these gaps despite our information glut, there's also joke overload. In the 60s, BBC was the single main source of this comedy. Now it's 24x7 everywhere. So getting over a joke told on Sunday Night TV is different than a joke people keep sending you because you're Muslim and they just know you'll get a larf, and after 50 friendies send it to you, you're exhausted.

      There is no easy solution, but here it's not just the fault of the woke - *some* of the black and Jewish "jokes" growing up were truly horrendous. Funny in a way, of course, but also totally mean and cruel. But figuring out which of the jokes cross the line can be tough. It used to help when a black guy in the office supplied the jokes - but with millions posting in the internet, it's harder to find a safe & effective neutral source - not slanderous, but still damn funny. Of course we can go un-PC, Andrew Dice Clay comes to mind, but that wears out pretty quick. There's the Lenny Bruce equal time offender - "we got 2 kikes, 1 wop, 3 niggers, a couple polacks and a mick..." which may work for 2-hour celebrity roasts, but hard to fit into a single Tweet.


      by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 11/28/2020 - 3:59am

      retweeted by Matthew Yglesias 11-28-20


      by artappraiser on Sat, 11/28/2020 - 9:05pm

      Conservative Idealist | featured in @FDRLST and @dailysignal ​ | "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

      found retweeted by James Lindsay


      by artappraiser on Sat, 11/28/2020 - 10:22pm


      by artappraiser on Sun, 11/29/2020 - 3:01pm


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/30/2020 - 1:18am

      there is more context on his feed


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/30/2020 - 1:54am

      more on his feed


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/30/2020 - 5:51pm

      but we got cynical stuff like this going on anyways:

       


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/30/2020 - 6:50pm

      John Wood Jr. @ persuasion.community-


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/30/2020 - 7:49pm

      Fukuyama Oct. 5: Liberalism and Its Discontents. The challenges from the left and the right.


      by artappraiser on Mon, 11/30/2020 - 11:58pm


      by artappraiser on Tue, 12/01/2020 - 12:13am

      Did Coleman make Thomas Sowell interesting? Maybe Dowells comes across better in books and research than op-eds, idunno - always found him knee-jerk, grasping for the right-wing line to toe.


      by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/01/2020 - 1:35am

      thanks, will check it out


      by artappraiser on Tue, 12/01/2020 - 3:22am

      haven't watched this yet, found retweeted by Maiello, recall he's a fan:


      by artappraiser on Tue, 12/01/2020 - 3:21am


      by artappraiser on Tue, 12/01/2020 - 2:29pm

      by a current college student who is Jewish, who considers himself a progressive activist, or at least did, until...

      “In the view of the new left, everyone in the world can be separated into one of two camps: Victims, and victimizers. And in this zero-sum worldview, Jews do not fall on the good side of the ledger.” https://t.co/Z3Rd9SRhCS

      — Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) December 1, 2020

       


      by artappraiser on Tue, 12/01/2020 - 5:09pm


      by artappraiser on Wed, 12/02/2020 - 12:58am

      This twitter thread is a good illustration of why I rarely can join with the right to confront abuses of woke culture. It's nothing but a hate thread on Ellen Page and transgendered. Page is a 30 year old actor. I really don't care if 30 year old men or women come out as transgendered and I don't care what actors say about anything.


      by ocean-kat on Wed, 12/02/2020 - 12:12pm


      by artappraiser on Thu, 12/03/2020 - 2:20am


      by artappraiser on Thu, 12/03/2020 - 5:05pm


      by artappraiser on Thu, 12/03/2020 - 9:40pm

      I have no words except "so it has come to this"

      Identifying Slut-Shaming, Racism, and Transphobia in the Byzantine World

      In his new book, Roland Betancourt examines how stories of gender, race, and sexuality from the Byzantine world of the Eastern Mediterranean provide insight into the intersectionality that existed in the medieval world.

      By Sarah Bond @ Hyperallergic.com, Dec. 2 


      by artappraiser on Fri, 12/04/2020 - 2:54am

      this guy has words, though, for the Brit organization of which he is a board member:


      by artappraiser on Fri, 12/04/2020 - 2:54pm

      Pages