Janice Fiamengo pokes through the mental wreckage of some standard feminist boilerplate, in which facts are either absent or inverted, questions are begged at a rate of knots, and criticism of feminist assumptions is equated with both racism and “co-ordinated campaigns of terror.”
Just yesterday, the president of the United States — that would be Barack Hussein Obama — stood before the United Nations and heaped praise on Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, a Muslim cleric who has endorsed a fatwa calling for the murder of U.S. soldiers. Yep, Bin Bayyah is Obama’s candidate of the week for the prize of being a “moderate Muslim.”[Via David Thompson referring to "that pernicious little tool in the White House" ]
Diversity and Inclusion - To be cultivated, obviously, with racial segregation:
If it were only Hamilton College infecting young minds with this kind of insanity it might be funny. But nearly every university and college in North America has similar programs doing similar damage to millions of students and wasting untold $billions. It's an unmitigated disaster.In order to create a safe space, this programme is open to people of colour only. A similar conversation for white students, faculty and staff is planned for the spring semester.You see, it’s a “conversation,” one that’s all about “healing and mutual respect” and “engaging with diverse views.”
I’m actually rather tickled by the notion of students needing a “safe space” at Hamilton College, an elite New York liberal arts college with an endowment of around three-quarters of a billion dollars and where tuition is a mere $46,ooo, excluding room and board. This, after all, is one of the most cossetting and exquisitely PC environments on the face of the Earth. ...
... if you watch at the top centre of the frame around three seconds in, you can see trouble brewing.
... More information here.
...Contrarianism, nihilism, apocalyptic fantasies? All clues.Yes, it’s the stoical and subtle philosophy of Laurie Penny."
...Operatic victimhood, comical bluster?
... All our young lives.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has provided a rare up-close and personal look at a social system animated by the desire for political power that disrespects, if not completely disregards, fundamental property rights. What we can see is a society that fosters squalor, theft, rape and pillage and a political movement based on the very greed it claims to abhor.
... Finally, the OWS movement demonstrates that “social justice” is based on unjust policies similar to those they condemn. The protestors rightfully assail the bailouts of banks and Wall Street executives, but their solution is more of the same including bailouts for student loans and individuals who took out mortgages on houses they could not afford.
In truth, the OWS protestors are only skirmishing over the distribution of the spoils system they claim to abhor. Their demands for higher tax rates on the “1%” shows their desire to join those who pillage through the power of government. They call it social justice. But its credo is the same as the crony capitalists who exploit the American people through government handouts: Both seek to use political power to satisfy their needs by taking the income of others rather than through voluntary exchanges. In each case, its true name is “greed.” ...[via]
... Zoe tells us that the Ark Gala raises “extraordinary sums - £14m in just one night in 2007.” And all for good causes. So, er, what’s not to like?In my previous post I opined that lefties were motivated by their "good intentions". For those of Zoe Williams’ ilk add "resentment" and "stupidity" as motivators.
[ZW]“Nevertheless, I object to high-net-worth philanthropy in principle.”Feel the warmth of that great big socialist heart. Helping orphans is objectionable if the people doing the helping are wealthier than Zoe Williams. Principles, see?
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[ZW] There are financial arguments to be made about whether or not these people would do more good by just desisting from their activities and making do with normal jobs that paid normal salaries.... Zoe’s personal resentments are the important thing and these “obscenely” rich people should stop “creating inequality” while giving money away. Given time, the orphans of Romania will doubtless learn to do without while sharing in Ms Williams’ moral satisfaction.
George “laughing boy” Monbiot has spotted another crisis. ...
... Yes, there are spare rooms in some private houses - space that, according to Mr Monbiot, people just don’t need. And which, therefore, they shouldn’t be allowed to have.
... Sadly, Mr Monbiot doesn’t share with us the details of his own living arrangements, such as whether or not he frivolously uses a room purely as an office or study - say, for the writing of Guardian articles. But perhaps his colleague Polly Toynbee will be spurred to throw open the doors to one of her two rather spacious estates. How about that nice villa in Italy? Or maybe Monbiot’s employer Alan Rusbridger could find a wiser, fairer use for the space currently occupied by his £30,000 grand piano?[via]
So deep is their assumption that egalitarianism is right, they will ultimately justify the principle on the grounds that it is a fundamental law of some kind. But it is not obvious to everyone that it is, or why it should be perceived to be at all desirable.
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And this is the final problem with egalitarianism. It is totalitarian and, therefore, it is tyrannical. Totalitarianism holds that the state has the power to regulate human affairs, rather than make sure the drains work. It is noticeable, in fact, that under most totalitarian systems in the past the drains didn't work. Egalitarians, and totalitarians, hold that it is reasonable for an agent of the state to step between [citizens] at gunpoint, share it out as seems best to the agent, and imprison or shoot anyone who disagrees.It is almost funny that this notion is held by its adherents to be a moral good.
David Thompson remarks on Guardian columnist Tanya Gold’s claim of victimhood for her alcoholism and other dysfunctional impulses. Ms. Gold blames "society's constant assault on female self-esteem" for her bad habits and related woes. In typically leftist fashion, she never gets around to the possibility of her own personal responsibility for the choices she makes.
There’s some excellent discussion and many additional insights in the comments:
At no point does Ms Gold pause to ask why it is she chooses to care about - and be so influenced by - Heat magazine, MTV, thin fashion models, pubic waxing, etc.
...Ms Gold seems a fairly good example of the mindset Thatcher was talking about, whereby "society" is forever to blame, while adults fail to discipline their children or simply act like children themselves.
Society is a perfect scapegoat since it is completely nebulous and is completely incapable of taking any responsibility. Only individuals can take responsibility.
This isn’t to suggest that there are no legitimate grievances to consider, but Ms Gold doesn’t mention any that I can see. And if the notion of "constant assaults on self esteem" gains popular currency, and to some extent it has, the effects appear disabling rather than liberating.
... when you subtract the pretentious radicalism that often goes with it. You’re basically left with someone who’s whiny, confused and morally incontinent.
...the victimhood meme has greatest currency among lefties, not least because it "reveals" an apparently inexhaustible menu of "injustices" to be corrected, generally with some collectivist and authoritarian measure.
Thompson’s post brought to mind the series currently running in the ‘National Post’, "Rethinking the Reserve". There’s a similar pathology at work among native Indians and it’s the Indian ‘leadership’ that pushes it.
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect, and is intended to.
This bold decision would demonstrate our discomfort with the issues we saw at play in Legotown. And it posed a challenge to the children: How might we create a "community of fairness" about Legos?
We also discussed our beliefs about our role as teachers in raising political issues with young children.
...we want to take part in shaping the children's understandings from a perspective of social justice.
These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that "giving" holds.
Our planning was guided by our goals for social justice learning,
Now, with Legotown dismantled and the issues of equity and power squarely in front of us, we took up the idea of power and its multiple meanings.
In Legotown, the children had constructed a social system of power where a few people made the important decisions and the rest of the participants did the grunt work...
[Which, when you think about it, is pretty much how the real world
works. But, as we all know, socialists hate the real world and in their Utopian
fantasies are forever seeking ways to change human nature.]
...it was time to challenge the children to wrestle their theoretical understandings into practical shape and apply their analysis of individual and collective ownership to a concrete project.
If Legotown was an embodiment of individualism, Lego Pike Place Market would be an experiment in collectivity and consensus.
Collectivity is a good thing
Shared power is a valued goal
All structures are public structures,
All structures will be standard sizes.
I first encountered this story in an excellent essay at "Breath of the Beast".
David Thompson offers his take and provokes some interesting debate in the comments.A couple of final thoughts
From the Overview: "Evolving out of the evocative echoes between three countercultural discourses, hypertext, cyberfeminist theory and the Canadian feminist school of writing known as fiction-theory, my dissertation undertakes a study of the function of memory in digital narrative.......Quantum feminist mnemotechnics incorporate the archival nature of the database into the text's structure and interface, privileging self-reflexive narrative and the spatio-temporal elements of postmodernism."
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From Chapter 1: "The digital archive is a model well suited to our times and to a cyberfeminist agenda precisely because it is an efficient tool for inclusive dealings with large quantities of disparate information. The archive, as defined by Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever , is born equally of the compulsion to remember and of fears of forgetting. .....
.......Cyberfeminist embodiment, as a 'database of intensities', is an exploration of the senses and of hybridity (as opposed to simple dualisms or binary oppositions) in the suspended present moment, which engender a new awareness of the body--not a loss of body boundaries as Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" advocates."
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From Chapter 2: "These are what I call quantum feminisms. Quantum feminisms are the new visual perspectives--or, more accurately, orientations--of the age of the matrix."
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And in Conclusion (this is good): "The whole concept of reaching a conclusion or drawing conclusions is, of course, antithetical to the nature of this kind of literature as much as to my aims in this work as a whole. However, it is perhaps appropriate to tuck in some of the loose threads and tie together all of this as some kind of a patchworked piece.........
.........I have explored matrices, folds, knots, all of them, perhaps only adding to their complexity rather than managing to unravel them. The only way to truly unsnarl irreconcilables of course is to twing, as Óh-T'bee demonstrates. I have twinged? Twung? Twisted? Danced as hard as I could through raising arguments, shapes and states--probes, McLuhan would have called them--that cut across and through these constructions in space and time: the quantum, browsing, becoming, agency, noise, flow, différance , interface, objects, events, duration, intervallic space, topology, complexity, ecstasy, incorporation, inscription, translation, heterotopic space, hierophanies, hysteria, hybridity, chora, translation, transformance, interference, entanglement, chaos, Hilbert space, speed, resonance, rupture, rapture, wanderlust, subjectivities, all kinds of systems, including the circulatory one of the body itself.....
.............In mnemonic space, there is no past or future, only intertwined intervals. The twing, however, is irreducible. Transformance is the only door out."
"There are simply too many incompetents, ideologues and charlatans in the PoMo humanities to dismiss them as anomalies. That so many of them survive, even flourish, suggests a dysfunction of the academic environment they inhabit."At best it’s a fraudulent waste of time and billions of taxpayer dollars. At worst it’s a kind of intellectual anarchy that does serious harm - to young student minds and in the longer run to society in general.
OB: ...There are core ideas and allegiances that do place people firmly and openly on the right or the left, but a sceptical view of postmodernism is not one of them....
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DT: ... pomo’s key contemporary figures – its architects and advocates - are almost all leftwing and often pointedly so. I’m guessing this isn’t just a coincidence…
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OB: ...I think the whole subject is mixed up with celebrity-worship, fandom, star-hugging, fashion, trendiness, attention-seeking, in a truly depressing and distasteful ..... But what on earth is 'left' about that? Nothing, I would say.
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DT: Well, as to what’s ‘left’ about the worship of dubious figures, I’m inclined to cough and mutter Marx", "Castro", "Chavez" and Che Guevara T-shirts." Communist societies are surprisingly big on idolatry, aren’t they? .... Ditto the white middle-class lefties who wave placards announcing "We are all Hizballah now." I guess it’s something to do with "giving it to the man" or not liking one’s parents or something. It all seems a tad narcissistic to me, and just a little depraved.
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OB: Yes, but is the idolatry of known Communist societies a feature of their Communism or of something else? .....Maybe it's just groupthink; maybe it's that simple and that obvious and there's nothing more profound to be said about it.
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DT: It seems to me that your idea of what a left ought to be is rather at odds with what much of the left, perhaps most of it, has become. ...
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DT: It’s easy to see what much of the left is against, if not the reasons why. It’s much harder to see what the left is for. I don’t see a coherent set of ideas. I see a patchwork of contradiction, often for its own sake, or the sake of appearance, or in some cases to enact some kind of personal psychodrama.
