Archive for 2021
April 18, 2021
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stanford students told they better not agree with J.K. Rowling on trans issues.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Prof: ‘The problem with academia today is that it has too many conservatives.’
SITCOM KING CHUCK LORRE BOWS TO CANCEL CULTURE:
As Christian Toto asks, “The cable stars are beloved by both the press and the Left, and yet they realize saying one wrong thing could end that love affair in a hurry. It’s a lesson not lost on Lorre, arguably the most powerful TV producer of the modern era. If they can’t stand up to woke bullies, what chance do other, less powerful, talents have?”
GREAT MOMENTS IN HARD-HITTING SATIRE: Samantha Bee Is Wrong about Comedy.
‘It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it,” wrote G. K. Chesterton. Those who hold their beliefs strongly can laugh at the world, their predicaments, and themselves. Those without confidence in their beliefs cannot laugh at all, for fear the whole thing will come crumbling down. Of course the same applies to political beliefs, too, which are often now a mere stand-in for religious ideas.
Comedian Samantha Bee recently remarked that she can’t make fun of Joe Biden in the same way she made fun of Donald Trump, admitting that she pulls her punches when it comes to the 46th president:
“You’re like, okay, well we could be making jokes about, we could be making jokes about the infrastructure plan, but in general, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is great. Why would I purposefully undermine something that is, seems to be a great idea, pretty much across the board?’ Like, I don’t need to make jokes just to make jokes. I like to make really targeted jokes. There are more worthy targets right now, I think.”
Bee’s comments offer perhaps the best example of what has gone wrong with leftist comedians as of late: They think the point of comedy is to make “really targeted jokes,” to “undermine” things, or to “target” things they — and presumably their audience — disagree with. Over the last decade, late-night hosts across the board began to lay aside their relatable, everyman’s brand of comedy and pivot toward lecturing the crowd on their moral values. They went from chasing laughter — no matter who the butt of the joke may have been — to chasing applause. The result has been anything but funny.
But in the age of a massively splintered media, the palace guard approach is the safest approach to holding onto an audience that’s a sliver of what Johnny Carson enjoyed:
This is also my theory about the big entertainment awards shows like the Oscars and the Emmys. If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.
What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.
—Why Late Night Hosts Like Jimmy Kimmel Are Suddenly So Political, Robert Tracinski, the Federalist, October 5, 2017.
GREAT MOMENTS IN HARD-HITTING JOURNALISM: WashPost Submerges Kamala’s Border Duties, Promotes Her ‘Mark’ on the ‘Crochet Scene.’
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Whoops! One of the Critical Race Theory Elect goes down.
Jim Best is out as headmaster of the Dalton School. Knew this one was coming. He totally deserved it, but I wonder if the board was just upset at all the publicity.
Johnston did a couple of damning blog posts on Dalton back in December, attracting the attention of Roger Kimball and Ed Driscoll, and even others. Faculty demands were breathtakingly woke. In March, Bari Weiss interviewed terrified parents at a number of prep schools. Terrified of CRT. But they should really be terrified that the prep schools are pushing CRT because that’s what the Ivy League wants.
Then Caitlin Flanagan took on the whole prep school edifice. Including the parents. For reasons that go beyond CRT. Dalton is one of the most selective private schools in Manhattan, in part because it knows the answer to an important question: What do hedge-funders want?They want what no one else has. At Dalton, that means an “archaeologist in residence,” a teaching kitchen, a rooftop greenhouse, and a theater proscenium lovingly restored after it was “destroyed by a previous renovation.”
Were online classes a mistake? Heh.
Plus several quotes from from John McWhorter on the topic, including:
One more thing: We need a crisper label for the problematic folk. . .
The author and essayist Joseph Bottum has found the proper term, and I will adopt it here: We will term these people The Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence. But they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.“The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which is sadly accurate as a depiction. Of course, most of them will resist the charge. But its sitting in the air, in its irony, may also encourage them to resist the definition, which over time may condition at least some of them to temper the excesses of the philosophy, just as after the 1980s many started disidentifying from being “too PC.”
But most importantly, terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are. The medieval Catholic passionately defended prosecuting Jews and Muslims with what we now see was bigoted incoherence, rooted in the notion that those with other beliefs and origins were lesser humans. We spontaneously “other” those antique inquisitors in our times, but right here and now we are faced with people who harbor the exact same brand of mission, just against different persons. . .
I’m not sure about “The Elect,” when Thomas Sowell had the perfect phrase for elite leftists 25 years ago in the title of his classic book The Vision of the Anointed.
Read the whole thing.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Lori Lightfoot: Chicago Mayor to Resign After Being Caught Cheating on Wife? “The reports are unconfirmed and no official statement has been released from the mayor. However, news of Lightfoot’s alleged resignation has sparked outrage on Twitter with many expressing their anger over the mayor’s decision to resign over a cheating scandal instead of other recent unfortunate events including the misappropriation of COVID relief funds to the Chicago Police Department, covering up a botched raid on Anjanette Young, as well as the fatal shooting of Adam Toledo.”
Yeah, that’s the least of her scandals. As a friend comments, “It must be a difficult choice for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to resign over a personal sex scandal, vs her city burning to the ground, with children shooting each other up, over and over and over again, every single day.”
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? White House Report Card: Joe Biden, flip-flopper in chief.
QUESTION ASKED: Does This Make Any Sense to You? Me Neither.
“The Queen and the late Prince Philip had been in a bubble with some members of their household for the last year and so the monarch was not eligible to join a support bubble with other members of her family,” CNN helpfully explains.
[Aside: She’s the queen. She doesn’t need permission nor “eligibility” to do anything. In earlier times the British sovereign would have had such contumacious subjects beheaded]
So the 94-year-old monarch bid farewell to her beloved husband of 73 years masked and alone in a church pew— without the reassuring squeeze of a hand or an encouraging word from a family member whispered into her ear.
But why? The queen has been fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. If these vaccines are as effective as we’re told they are, why on earth would she need to wear a mask, let alone social distance from family members?
Because politicians, pundits and ‘experts’ don’t want COVID to end.
HMM: Biden Administration Asks Supreme Court To Drop Challenge to Men-Only Draft: Justice Department signals support for efforts to include women in the draft. “The Justice Department told the High Court on Thursday that judicial action is unnecessary because Congress is actively considering whether to change draft registration rules. The National Coalition for Men and the ACLU say the Military Selective Service Act is unconstitutional because it discriminates against women, and they asked the justices to say as much in January.”
It’s not moot until it’s moot, but this Supreme Court seems eager to duck cases.
JOHN NOLTE: BLM, Antifa Checkmate Democrat-Run Cities into Committing Suicide.
If a Democrat-run city polices crime, BLM and Antifa will destroy the city via non-stop rioting and anarchy.
If a Democrat-run city backs away from policing crime, the city is doomed to a future of urban blight, one where everyone who can gets the hell out, while the poorest of the poor and those who prey on the poorest of the poor remain.
Basically, we are looking at a future with a whole bunch of Detroits.
And it’s being aided and abetted by the DNC-MSM:
● Chris Cuomo: Police reform comes when ‘white people’s kids start getting killed.’
● CBS Posts Cropped Video of Adam Toledo Shooting on Twitter, Leaving Gun Out of Frame.
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH BILL MAHER IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Maher praises DeSantis, knocks Cuomo, ‘liberal media’ for getting COVID wrong: ‘Those are just facts.’
April 17, 2021
ALL OF JOE BIDEN’S PROMISES COME WITH EXPIRATION DATES: Biden Caves to Radicals: Will Increase Refugee Admissions After Saying He Wouldn’t.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: How corporations conspire with Democrats to hoard power at the public’s expense.
OPEN THREAD: Saturday night’s alright for posting.