HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Social justice’ majors, courses, events are new norm on college campuses.
Archive for 2019
August 18, 2019
AT AMAZON, Deal of the Day, Leather Shoes for Men.
“CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION”: Written by Myron Magnet. Reviewed by Peter Wood.
THIS EXPLAINS A LOT: ‘Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans.
A former classmate from Yale recently told me “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society. So I asked her what her background is and if she planned to marry.
She said she comes from an affluent family and works at a well-known technology company. Yes, she personally intends to have a monogamous marriage — but quickly added that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone.
She was raised by a traditional family. She planned on having a traditional family. But she maintained that traditional families are old-fashioned and society should “evolve” beyond them.
What could explain this?
In the past, upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.
People care a lot about social status. In fact, research indicates that respect and admiration from our peers are even more important than money for our sense of well-being.
We feel pressure to display our status in new ways. This is why fashionable clothing always changes. But as trendy clothes and other products become more accessible and affordable, there is increasingly less status attached to luxury goods.
The upper classes have found a clever solution to this problem: luxury beliefs. These are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class. . . .
In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status. When laws are enacted to combat white privilege, it won’t be the privileged whites who are harmed. Poor whites will bear the brunt.
It’s possible that affluent whites don’t always agree with their own luxury beliefs, or at least have doubts. Maybe they don’t like the ideological fur coat they’re wearing. But if their peers punish them for not sporting it all over town, they will never leave the house without it again.
Because, like with diamond rings or designer clothes of old, upper-class people don a luxury belief to separate themselves from the lower class. These beliefs, in turn, produce real, tangible consequences for disadvantaged people, further widening the divide.
Well put.
ROGER KIMBALL ON TRUMP AND TONE: “At any rate, the situation in China reminds me of one of the political philosopher James Burnham’s famous political laws: Where there is no alternative there is no problem. What’s the alternative to Donald Trump on any of these issues? Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? To ask the question is to answer it.”
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): What’s funny to me about China is that the same people who were saying that Trump would blunder into a war with some thoughtless angry tweet are now dumping on Trump for not interrupting his delicate negotiations to call the Chinese murderers.
WHICH IS SAYING SOMETHING: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s claim about the homeless was so absurd even Politifact couldn’t spin it.
LOG CABIN REPUBLICANS: Trump Met His Committments To LGBTQ Americans. He Has Our Endorsement.
IS THAT EVEN ALLOWED? Janet Albrechtsen: Let us now praise masculine men.
On Tuesday afternoon a handful of men ran into the face of danger. Going about their business only seconds before, they confronted a man brandishing a bloody knife, pinning him down in the middle of a bustling Sydney street. The men who stopped further bloodshed have been called heroes, and they will be recognised for their courage. In passing, can we praise masculinity too? Or is that too controversial in an age when masculinity is raised only to condemn what is wrong with men and to preach how to change them.
Today, any celebration of masculinity is limited to praising men who do more housework and get involved with their kids, men who are able to cry, empathise with women and express their feelings. All very important stuff. But none of that would have restrained a crazed man who was threatening more violent carnage in Sydney’s CBD. Can we praise men who do both please?
Lawyer John Bamford picked up a wicker chair from the cafe he was in, raced outside and chased the attacker, 21-year-old Mert Ney, who was bloodied, jumping on a car bonnet while wielding his knife and screaming at passers-by. Ney was jammed to the ground by men using a milk crate and two chairs. Bamford returned the chair to the cafe and ordered a pie.
Traffic controller Steven Georgiadis tried to tackle Ney to the ground. “As soon as I saw the knife I moved to the side so I could crash tackle him sideways so he wouldn’t stab me,” said Georgiadis, who managed to stand on the bloody knife.
From their office window, brothers Luke and Paul O’Shaughnessy saw the mayhem unfolding in the street below and raced down to help. They followed a trail of blood to the man who is alleged to have murdered one woman and stabbed another. “(We) were like ‘Right, where is he? Where is he?’ … I’m shouting, because I’m a bit more risk-averse than Luke, (who is) straight in there.”
NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller described these men as heroes of the highest order. It is also true that the heroes were all men exhibiting traits now routinely derided as part of traditional masculinity — brute force and aggression, taking charge, adrenalin pumping, taking risks.
Do we fear praising masculinity in case it leads to a scolding for encouraging toxic masculinity?
It’s not an unreasonable fear because the conflation of masculinity with toxic masculinity, to use the phrase favoured by the roving gender police, has become routine. This common sleight of hand to use gender to confect some crudely defined phenomenon stokes pointless gender wars and risks harming both men and women. . . .
Perhaps Gillette’s next foray into “The Best Men Can Be” will include some vision of those brave men saving Sydneysiders from further violence earlier this week. It does no one any favours when gender is used as a cheap weapon, a stunt for ulterior motives.
I remember when people used to say with a straight face that feminism isn’t about hating men.
August 17, 2019
POST-CHRISTIANITY: Methodist University Hires a Muslim Chaplain.
OPEN THREAD: Saturday night’s all right for threading, get a little word play in.
I THINK HE OWES FRANK J. A ROYALTY: Elon Musk Floats ‘Nuke Mars’ Idea Again (He Has T-Shirts).
COLLEGE FIX: UVA receives an award for increasing its diversity in its engineering school, but won’t clarify how …. Alas, we can guess.
DISPLAYING ADAPTABILITY: Marines Use Armored Vehicle to Defend Navy Ship from Small Boats off Iranian Coast.
I LOVE A STORY WITH A HAPPY ENDING: He awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Then he shot and killed the person who broke in.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Johns Hopkins University Fires Professor Who Defied Campus Protesters. “Daniel Povey, an associate professor of speech and language processing, who used bolt cutters to gain entry to an administration building on campus that was taken over by student protesters who had chained the doors shut.”
ZOOM: The Drako GTE Is a 1200-HP Electric Sedan That Can Hit 206 MPH. It’s pretty.
REVIEW: ROGER SIMON’S THE GOAT. A tennis pro pays a steep price to be the Greatest of All Time:
And so The GOAT follows the Faustian adventures of Dan Gelber, an aging screenwriter with back problems. When surgery fails to help him, he turns to the quackery of Himalaya herbs, offered by a guru who (this is California, after all) practices in a strip mall in Reseda.
The herbs have miraculous effect, promising to restore Gelber’s youth, if only he will swim deeper into the net. Which he does, of course, trekking off to the Himalayas to be transformed into an entirely new person—an athletic man in his twenties who returns to America pretending to be a tennis player from Tennessee named Jay Reynolds. A phenomenal tennis player, as it happens. And rapidly he progresses from local to international success, qualifying for Wimbledon where he will play the likes of Roger Federer and have a chance to prove himself the GOAT of tennis.
Most readers first discovered Roger Simon through his mystery novels about the 1960s student radical turned California private eye, Moses Wine—the best of which probably remains The Big Fix (1973), made into a 1978 movie with Richard Dreyfuss. A dozen books later, Simon is probably best known for his political work, transformed from a conventional liberal to a well-known conservative by such events as the O.J. Simpson verdict and the attacks of September 11. He helped found Pajamas Media (now PJ Media) in 2004 and writes regularly on socio-politics.
Which is all fine, of course, but he started as a solid middlebrow artist, and he’s returned to that art in the nonpolitical The GOAT. The only possibly politicized element is the fact that Simon has self-published The GOAT, which is an interesting option for an established author. Arguing that publishers do not know how to promote books and claim too high a percentage of the purchase price for the supposed power of their imprints, Simon has set out to become his own publisher, offering the book through online sellers. In its way, this is of a piece with the origins of Pajamas Media, which took its ironic name as a swipe at what was called “mainstream media” in those days—proclaiming that the online world of blogs had broken through the old gatekeepers of news, which had long ceased to hold to the political impartiality that had justified their existence.
DIY – it’s not just for music and journalism anymore. Buy The GOAT here.