davidthompson

Friday Ephemera

They grow up so quickly. (h/t, Tim) // Swedish ladies gymnastics, 1905. // At last, black ice cream. // Sweaty vest and power loader not included. // London’s ganglands. // Thomas Sowell on the greed fallacy. // Battle of the sexes. (h/t, Obo) // Iceberg Alley. // His name was Bill Hitler. // 200-watt laser bazooka brings instant death to cardboard and balloons. // Cargo cult. // One-bean cup of coffee. // On earworms and chewing gum. // Tiny shrimp tempura. // Irony. // Robot game-play is an acquired taste. // Robot knife game. // An interview with a serial killer. (h/t, Jordan Peterson) // Recognition. // Morricone and Theremin. // Anamorphic sculptures. // If you fix the stars in place. // Artificial uterus. // Rutland State Fair, 1941. // And finally, the Great Emu War of 1932.

But Why Aren’t People Rushing To Buy My Art?

Because I know you heathens are all starved of high culture, here are edited highlights of Shannon Cochrane and Márcio Carvalho performing their colossal work Untitled at the 2013 Miami Performance International Festival. For those who may be confounded by the profundity of the piece, a handy walk-through guide is available here. Said guide points out that the performance “requires the audience to contemplate ways in which different actions are read on different bodies,” thereby inspiring “a deeper level of critical thought.” Among the many ruminations that will doubtless be inspired is the following:

After seeing someone wrap their head in meat twice, does it still hold the same weight as it did the first time?

“This usage of time,” we’re told, “is an interesting one.” Indeed, such is its artistic and intellectual immensity, the piece you’re about to witness “invites a fundamental shift of paradigm.” So brace yourselves. 

New Realms Of Pleasure

Dicentra thinks you should see this. And frankly, you deserve no less.

You see, Ms Rachel Bloom is dropping knowledge. With her sex junk.

Unspeakables

Ordinary people are perfectly comfortable with the idea that some people are smarter than others. They’re perfectly comfortable [with the idea] that what we call smart gets you kinds of jobs that you can’t get otherwise, all that kind of stuff. It’s the elites who are under the impression that “Oh, IQ tests only measure what IQ tests measure, and nobody is really able to define intelligence,” and this and that, “it’s culturally biased,” and on and on. And all of these things are the equivalent of saying the Earth is flat. These are not opinions that you can hold in contest with the scientific literature.

Sam Harris has a long and wide-ranging discussion with Charles Murray, spanning the taboos of IQ, social stratification, the poisonous effects of identity politics, the pros and cons of a universal basic income, and how Donald Trump became a weapon against a disdainful establishment.

Dr Murray’s adventures among the campus Mao-lings have been noted here previously. 

She’s Radically Disgruntled

Portrait of a mindset in a single Tweeted selfie: 

Friday Ephemera

I think it’s fair to call it a partial success. (h/t, Damian) // Today’s word is unceremonious. // Space make-up. // Thinking meat. // Crab versus banana. // With its devilled crabs and gold piano, the Everleigh Club was a better class of brothel. // Because at some point you’re going to want to hire a male belly dancer. // Some British follies. // Museum of Failure. // Fifteen seconds in, something can be heard. // Create your own language. // Lead us, oh wise one. // How to carry wine. // The coffee revolt of 1674. // Converted school. // Unrealistic New York apartments. // “I’m trans and I love Jordan Peterson.” // It’s the Japanese way. // His hand-carved food is more intricate than yours. // Feminist dilemma. // How to fix a faulty traffic light. // And finally, bluegrass interrupted.

The Moron Veto

I was sent an urgent email the day before, saying they were considering moving the venue to a place with fewer plate glass windows and more means of egress. That’s not exactly reassuring.

In the latest FIRE podcast, Nico Perrino interviews Heather Mac Donald, who discusses her recent, rather lively visit to the Land Of The Mao-lings.

Elsewhere (230)

Alex Southwell, a pseudonym, on “diversity” hires and the deskilling of academia:

I mentioned that I had received an email from one of the candidates and shared it with the committee members. After reading the email aloud, I argued that the missive effectively disqualified the candidate. The writing was riddled with awkward expression, malapropisms, misplaced punctuation, and other conceptual and formal problems… I asked my fellow committee members how we could possibly hire someone to teach writing who had written such an email. The candidate could not write. I also pointed to her application letter, which was similarly awkward and error-laden. My committee colleagues argued that “we do not teach grammar” in our writing classes. 

Further to the above, Amy Alkon has identified the unnamed beneficiary of these piously lowered standards, and shares some student feedback. As even basic grammar and punctuation are apparently deemed superfluous, even among faculty, and even in official documents, I suspect the “Liberal Studies” department at NYU is probably best avoided.

For more on the Clown Quarter’s disdain for competence, see also this and this. 

Noah Rothman on the delusional excuses of campus Mao-lings: 

Georgetown’s student paper The Hoya endorsed Oberlin’s assessment of the threat posed by Christina Hoff Sommers - and thus, critical statistical analysis - by asserting that her invitation to speak at the university amounted to endorsing “a harmful conversation.” The notion that one is under physical assault eventually legitimises — even demands — a preventative response. The editors at Wellesley College’s student newspaper inadvertently endorsed this grim totalitarianism in an editorial advocating the use of “appropriate measures” against those who support those they deem to be irresponsible politicians or lecturers. “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted,” the piece read. Amid laborious prose that read as though an algorithm translated it from the original Mandarin, these students articulated the logical foundations of fascism: We, the victimised, are owed reparative justice. And here it comes.

And Theodore Dalrymple on vanity as policy: 

The Swedish government agreed to take 160,000 refugees or migrants from the Middle East in a single year (who did not want to claim asylum in Denmark, where the social security payments were lower). The government did this because it (and its supporters) wanted Sweden to be an ethical superpower, a country responsible to and for the whole world, rather than to and for itself… Even these ethical narcissists soon realised, however, that if they proceeded in this fashion for, say, ten years, Sweden would have become, with the aid of a little family reunification and a higher birthrate, a semi–Middle Eastern country stuck in the Baltic, and they promptly closed the borders… Since they were motivated not so much by the desire for change as the desire to preen themselves like ducks at the edge of a pond, they suddenly realised the danger they were in. Their desire to be good was much shallower than their desire to appear good.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Friday Ephemera

Convenient. // Three’s a crowd. // Breakdancing trio. // Fantastic foursome. // Ragnarok. Or, Marvel goes Flash Gordon. // The glorious outdoors. (h/t, Ben) // This. (h/t, Julia) // That. (h/t, Obo) // Big cat, scary noise. // “NASA says no humans have ever had sex in space.” // Parenting done well. I do like number one. // Labour of love, or maybe just doing things the hard way. // $6000 “luxury performance” smartphone boasts ruby buttons, on-call round-the-clock concierge, dated software. // Always double-knot, I say. // Warning: disco. // Sshh. I hear something. // Archery made simple. // A brief history of the cardboard box. // Clunk, click. // If they learn to make fire, we’re totally screwed. // And finally, heartwarmingly, dads and daughters: the eternal struggle.

Academia, That Temple Of The Mind

Further to this, Heather Mac Donald recounts her recent harassment by 300 or so student Mao-lings:  

When speakers need police escort on and off college campuses, an alarm bell should be going off that something has gone seriously awry… I am reluctant to wield the epithet “fascist” as promiscuously as my declared opponents do. But it must be observed that if campus conservatives tried to use physical force to block Senator Elizabeth Warren, say, from giving a speech, the New York Times would likely put the obstruction on the front page and the phrase “fascist” would be flying around like a swarm of hornets, followed immediately by the epithet “misogynist.” 

Indeed. But it seems highly unlikely that the mob of dogmatic morons – the ones banging on windows, blocking fire escapes and assaulting faculty - would wish their behaviour to be constrained by something as inconvenient as consistent and reciprocal principles. Despite the chanted professions of piety, what matters to the ‘protestors’, whose grasp of Ms Mac Donald’s written output is somewhat sketchy, is the thrill of harassing people, frustrating them, scaring them. And thereby, a sense of power.

Also this:

Of all the chants, “How do you spell racist?” “C-M-C,” was the most absurd. “Racist” Claremont McKenna College is so desperate for “diverse” students that it has historically admitted black and Hispanic students with an average 200-point lower SAT score than white and Asian students. Such racial preferences satisfy CMC’s desire for racial virtue but set the alleged beneficiaries up for academic struggles, if not failure.

As noted here. Such institutional privilege also provides an unending supply of academic inadequates who, feeling incongruous, direct their resentments into thuggish ‘activism’, which gratifies all manner of unbecoming impulses, and requires less intelligence.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Time-Keeping Technology

There’s much you can learn during a “diversity” course for faculty at Clemson University. Including the revelation that punctuality is racist:

The online training presents a variety of scenarios featuring fictional characters…  [On one slide], a character named Alejandro schedules a 9:00 a.m. meeting between two groups of foreign professors and students. The first group arrived fifteen minutes early, while the second arrived ten minutes late [and wanted to “socialise” first].

According to the course material, any acknowledgement of this tardiness, or of the customary expectation that people arrive on time for meetings, and that they generally apologise when they don’t, is denounced as wrong, and is marked with a large ‘X’ to stress the deviation from the new moral purity. Because casually disrespecting your host – by turning up late and offering no apology and then wasting more of everyone else’s time - is fine, and indeed culturally enriching, provided those arriving late have sufficient racial otherness. And so, instead,

Alejandro should recognise and acknowledge cultural differences with ease and respect… Time may be considered precise or fluid depending on the culture. For Alejandro to bring three cultures together he must start from a place of respect, understanding that his cultural perspective regarding time is neither more nor less valid than any other.

Yes, punctual and tardy are equally valid, apparently. Which will be a huge comfort when all of Alejandro’s subsequent appointments run late as a result or have to be truncated. Thanks to the “respect” in question being entirely unilateral. According to the course literature, this commitment to “diversity” and “inclusion” - and with it, a freewheeling approach to time-keeping - can “lead to better decisions.”

Somewhat related: “We should disrupt Eurocentric notions of time.” 

Imagine The Picnics

Nature doesn’t have to be a rich, white playground. However, structures humans put in place – capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism – allow some people to access the outdoors and force others home.

Everyday Feminism’s Emily Zak wants us to know that the allure of fresh air and countryside is in fact, like everything else, terribly oppressive:  

Those of us who manage to get outside, we need to go beyond calling ourselves lucky. We need to understand ourselves as privileged.

Well, I suppose we all knew that was the predestined conclusion, the only permissible one, and that fretting about it theatrically is something we need to do. And naturally, Ms Zak has an extensive, at times bewildering list of excuses for why any outdoors recreation should be tinged with guilt and wretchedness. From the claim that, “our society leverages natural spaces as a tool for capitalism and colonialism,” to the “toxic binary expectations we have about gender.” You see,

Society actively discourages millions from playing outside, possibly stopping budding conservation activists. 

And then the inevitable list-cum-incantation:

Media paint a homogenous picture of who enjoys the outdoors, as well. They’re typically white, male, cisgender, slender, able-bodied, and assumed straight.

To spare you the tedium, I’ll paraphrase: If you can’t borrow a tent or don’t have a pair of suitable shoes, and if you don’t see enough adverts featuring gay people kayaking, and kayaking in a discernibly gay-affirming manner, it turns out you’re being oppressed by society.

Of course there’s also the issue of girth:

Only last year did anyone think to build a bike for someone who’s heavier than 300 pounds.

The inhumanity of niche markets. And if the limited availability of reinforced bicycles weren’t quite enough of a stretch:

Many outdoor jobs, like wildland firefighting and logging, remain hyper-masculine and painfully heteronormative.

You heard the lady. The logging industry is painfully heteronormative. And so – er, obviously - “marginalised people” can’t enjoy the great outdoors. “The barriers to outdoor recreation are very real,” says she.