SEEMS LIKE. THE REAL QUESTION IS, IS IT STILL WORTH A MASS? AND SHOULD THAT BE AN EXORCISM MASS? Is Paris Burning ?
Archive for 2018
December 6, 2018
THEY’RE ADHD CHILDREN: As Usual, It’s All About Donald Trump.
THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: The war on standards: fare-jumping edition.
WASTING TAXPAYER MONEY: Feds Spend $230,769 to Increase Diversity of Veterinarians.
WELL, IF SHE DIDN’T TELL US, WE MIGHT BELIEVE OUR LYING EYES AND EARS INSTEAD! Senator Hirono Says Democrats Are So Much Smarter Than Rest Of Us.
December 5, 2018
BRENDAN O’NEILL: In Praise Of The French Protesters. “It’s little wonder that the graffiti left behind following the latest uprising in Paris at the weekend compared Macron to Louis XVI and demanded that he resign. This leaderless, diverse revolt, packed with all sorts of people, including both leftists and right-wingers, is important for many reasons. First because it beautifully, fatally shatters the delusional faith that certain Europhiles and piners for the maintenance of the status quo have placed in Macron since his election in May 2017.”
AT AMAZON, save on Bestselling Jewelry.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Fearing False Accusations, Men Are Asking Women To Create ‘Consent Videos’ Before Sex. Feminists Are Not Happy:
King, who mocked that “it’s apparently ‘a scary time for young men,'” also emphasized that false accusations just don’t happen, pointing to a popularized hashtag on Twitter as evidence. “In reality, the vitriol that victims of rape and sexual assault are subject to is enough to put anyone off making a false report. If you don’t believe me, check out the #WhyIDidntReport tag on Twitter,” she wrote.
“So what’s the easiest way not to need that consent recording?” King posed, before offering her brilliant solution: “Just don’t rape someone.”
Katie Russell, a spokesperson for Rape Crisis, said the concept of consent videos “is ‘deeply troubling’ and perpetuates the lie that most reports of sexual assault are false.”
I’m so old, I can remember when the left advised using protection before sex.
DEPLORABLE BEHAVIOR: Bitter Hillary Clinton Snubs Melania Trump At Funeral.
DISPATCHES FROM TRUDEAUPIA: When Trudeau slandered blue collar men, “he attacked my family.”
It’s eyebrow raising stuff — but if Trudeau did that, they’d fall off.
YES, EVEN IF THE QUOTE IS GENUINE, IT’S JUST ANOTHER CASE OF TRUMP SAYING WHAT EVERYONE THINKS BUT WON’T SAY:
INSTANT KARMA’S GONNA GET YOU IF YOU DON’T WATCH OUT: The People On The Weekly Standard’s Deplatforming Target List Aren’t Super-Sad to See the Weekly Standard Deplatformed by… Free Market Forces and the Wisdom of the Invisible Hand That They Supposedly Champion.
OPEN THREAD: You know, like every night.
JUST NBC THE VIOLENT ANTI-SEMITISM. Al Sharpton’s Anniversary: 23 Years Since He Incited Freddy’s Fashion Mart Massacre.
THE APPEAL OF FRIENDS TO AMERICA’S YOUTH — NO SCREENS: “Where nowadays we’ll catch up really quickly, but everyone’s always on their phones. Back then, it’s more of a person-to-person relationship, instead of through technology.”
ROSS DOUTHAT ON WHAT THE H.W. BUSH NOSTALGIA IS REALLY ABOUT: Why We Miss the WASPs: Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.
Franklin Foer described “the subtext” of Bush nostalgia as a “fondness for a bygone institution known as the Establishment, hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools, acculturated by the late-night rituals of Skull and Bones, sent off to the world with a sense of noblesse oblige. For more than a century, this Establishment resided at the top of the American caste system. Now it is gone, and apparently people wish it weren’t.”
I think you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today. . . .
However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms. You can get rid of the social registers and let women into your secret societies and privilege SATs over recommendations from the rector of Justin and the headmaster of Saint Grottlesex … and you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite, filling your schools and running your public institutions.
Not only that, but you even end up with an elite that literally uses the same strategy of exclusion that WASPs once used against Jews to preserve its particular definition of diversity from high-achieving Asians — with the only difference being that our elite is more determined to deceive itself about how and why it’s discriminating.
So if some of the elder Bush’s mourners wish we still had a WASP establishment, their desire probably reflects a belated realization that certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion — and that the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive.
Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country.
The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it, because for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.
Well, this is the stuff of Tom Wolfe novels. The biggest flaw of the old WASP establishment — and Douthat gets to that as well — is the eagerness with which it abdicated. And now those who were eager to see it gone look around and see . . . what replaced it. But the real point of Douthat’s column is that the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and the Steyers and the Gateses need to be more comfortable about taking and holding power for generations. I don’t think that’s going to be an easy sell, except to the Zuckerbergs, the Bezoses, the Steyers and the Gateses.
THESE ARE GOOD LOOKING CARS: 2018 Mercedes-AMG GT C Coupe Offers Performance and Exclusivity.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Is a Frying Pan Shrinking Men’s Penises?
GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY: Um, blacks are attacking Jews because they see Judaism as ‘a form of almost hyper-whiteness?’
As Noah Pollack tweets, “The hyper-woke [Forward] tried so hard to blame anti-Semitism on Jews that it managed to be blatantly racist toward black people. Nicely done @Jane_Eisner & @joshnathankazis.”
THE CAUSE OF OUR OPIOID AND MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS IS OBVIOUS, BUT WE CAN’T MENTION IT.
Read the whole thing.
THAT WOULD BE GOOD, THOUGH SOMETHING THAT DESTROYED ALL KINDS OF CANCERS IN MINUTES WOULD BE BETTER: This New Test Could Detect All Types of Cancer in Just Minutes.
REMINDER: All modern American presidents exercise power that is morally and constitutionally illegitimate.
Also, the U.S. has no nobility or official ranks, and over-the-top state funerals and public mourning for retired leaders are more reminiscent of monarchies than redolent of the principles of a constitutional republic. Before the growth of the modern federal behemoth, we had funerals like Grover Cleveland’s, “marked by simplicity and absence of pomp.” Carry on.
MALE CONTRACEPTIVE GEL BEING TESTED: “The male gel keeps other tissues in the body functioning at normal testosterone loads, so it won’t chemically castrate the men, which has been a concern in the past with some male birth control pill trials.”
Well, that’s a relief.