Archive for 2021
October 31, 2021
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Forget the Gender Unicorn, Genderbread Person is here to explain sexuality.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY FOR BIDEN’S “UNITY PRESIDENCY:” Top Democrat: America in ‘mass depression,’ families at war.
HEY, THOSE PRESS RELEASES DON’T WRITE THEMSELVES, YOU KNOW: Colin Kaepernick compares NFL Draft process and training camp to slavery.
Related: “The San Francisco 49ers selected Nevada quarterback Colin Kaepernick with their 36th overall pick in the second-round of the 2011 NFL Draft. They signed Kaepernick to a four-year, $5.1 million contract and his average salary was $1.2 million annually. Kaepernick also received $3.8m of the $5.1 million in guaranteed money.”
Hey, you know what else can be compared to slavery? The manufacturing of the sneakers that Kaepernick is paid millions to endorse: Nike would very much like to keep its slave labor, thank you.
SCARY BUT APPROPRIATE: F*ck Joe Biden Coloring Book: Anti President Political Memes and Quotes for Adults. #CommissionEarned
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Rushing to defend terrorism-linked NGOs: Why are so many Americans taking the side of groups that work with terrorists?
OLD AND BUSTED: “Dissent is a Patriotic.”
The New Hotness? Smelling Salts Rushed in After ‘Reporters,’ ‘Profs’ Go Nuts Over Southwest Airlines ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Story.
An AP reporter who happened to be on the plane bragged about nearly being kicked off of it for trying to get to the pilot through a locked cockpit:
* * * * * * * *
“Also in defense of airline I was asking them to open locked cock pit [sic — Ed] and probably sounded insane!” she later stressed.
Liberal podcaster/Salon writer Bob Cesca said if such a horrible thing happened to him, he’d be checking the safety equipment and procedures on the plane just to be on the safe side.
“If this happened on a flight I was on, I’d spend as much time as possible thoroughly reacquainting myself with the safety and rescue procedures because there’s an incompetent weirdo who believes a con-man’s obvious lies piloting the aircraft,” Cesca pouted.
I found that response rather perplexing, considering one doesn’t have to be a staunch supporter of former President Trump’s to not be happy with the direction this country is going under the current Oval Office occupant, as numerous recent polls have made very clear.
And thus, this New Yorker cartoon from the dawn of the Trump era comes full-circle:
SALENA ZITO: Major League Baseball’s C-suite cowardice.
Last April, when Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star Game out of suburban Atlanta, sending what it thought was a strident example of the powerful corporate punishment every state would face if Republican lawmakers passed laws it did not like, its corporate, academic, and cultural peers applauded the move.
Commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision was seen by those who agreed with him as a heroic one that leading American institutions should take when they want to counter what they consider a societal wrong.
In fact, Manfred was just trying to avoid being canceled by the mob. If he had really believed in what he did, he would have made a statement the day after the Atlanta Braves clinched their division last week declaring that none of the World Series games would be played in Atlanta because he is standing on his principles outlined in the boycott.
But all along, Manred acted from fear, not principle. He did not want anyone to protest the MLB, so he cowered, accepted the mob’s lies about the legislation in question, and disparaged an entire state just to avoid a boycott.
That’s what we call C-suite cowardice — the way corporate America cries uncle, usually silently. Our cultural curators in corporations, academia, entertainment, and the media will willingly make that happen over and over again until the day comes when people wise up and decide that the emperors have no clothes — that the curators’ opinions mean nothing.
For lifelong Atlanta Braves fan Joe Cobb, that tipping point already came. When I interviewed him in Georgia last spring about the boycott, Cobb said he was done with MLB, despite his undying love for the Atlanta Braves.
He has not looked back. Cobb said it isn’t as hard as he had expected to follow through on his principled stand of refusing to consume something that had been such a part of his life. “If Major League Baseball truly wanted to make a statement,” he told me, “they would have said, ‘Not only will there be no All-Star Game in Georgia, there will be no playoff games or World Series played here as well.'”
The Athens native, who works as a training manager for a Fortune 500 company, remarked that there has not been a peep about Georgia’s election reform law as the Braves have moved into the playoffs and now into the World Series. To him, that shows just how hollow and purely performative MLB’s decision was last spring.
“I publicly said I would not watch the Braves, and I meant what I said,” he added. “I know I’m just one voice. To me, the problem is that so many people caved, and now what do we have? Well, we have the World Series. That’s great. And we’ve got full stadiums. That’s great. But you know what else we have? Major League Baseball wasn’t penalized. They got away with it. They were able to dictate and change people’s lives, and there’s no penalty for it.”
They need to pay.
October 30, 2021
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Geomagnetic storm watch in effect this Halloween following intense solar flare.
OPEN THREAD: Insert obscure musical reference here.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: U.A.E. examining options for future human spaceflight missions.
TWITTER THREAD: “There’s an organized effort to blame a ‘Republican group,’ aka the Lincoln Project, for the disgraceful neo-Nazi prank. The LP is intimately tied to Democrats of all levels. I’ll show you how.”
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Loyola Marymount U. establishes ‘Black Student Space’ for ‘culturally specific needs.’
IS BONHOEFFER’S ‘STUPIDITY’ KEY TO UNDERSTANDING TODAY? The German pastor/theologian’s analysis of the role of stupidity in the rise and rule of Hitler rings steadily more relevant as the rotten fruit of the Left’s stifling dominance of media, entertainment and academia becomes ever clearer.
AN UNEXPECTED VICTORY: “A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously. Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed.”
THE DEMANDS OF THE NARRATIVE DETERMINE THE ANSWER: Why is what transgender women are doing different from blackface? Moore’s answer is implied and worth discussing: Because it’s “my existence.”
THE AP MORPHED INTO INSPECTOR CLOUSEAU SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: The AP Discovers the ‘Code’ Behind ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Cheer.
In a magnificent piece of investigative reporting, the Associated Press has discovered that the viral phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” is actually “code” for a far more vulgar insult of our beloved president Joe Biden.
The AP “wire service” — a misnomer in a wireless age — took great pains to explain where “Let’s Go Brandon” originated and the shocking truth about the people shouting it: They don’t like Joe Biden very much.
But how did Republicans settle on the Brandon phrase as a G-rated substitute for its more vulgar three-word cousin?
It started at an Oct. 2 NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Brandon Brown, a 28-year-old driver, had won his first Xfinity Series and was being interviewed by an NBC Sports reporter. The crowd behind him was chanting something at first difficult to make out. The reporter suggested they were chanting “Let’s go, Brandon” to cheer the driver. But it became increasingly clear they were saying: “F—- Joe Biden.”
The Pulitzer is in the bag for that level of detective work!
THE CONSERVATIVE HANNAH ARENDT?
The book hits all the standard biographical notes: Arendt’s education in Germany, including studies with her lover, the philosopher and future Nazi Martin Heidegger, her internment in France and escape to America, and the publication of her major works, from Origins to her masterwork of political theory, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, her controversial report on the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.
But the book also sheds new life on Arendt’s life, particularly her youth. Some of these insights are merely amusing, as when Arendt was arrested in 1933 for collecting antisemitic articles to send to Jewish organizations abroad. After searching her apartment, the Gestapo interrogated her about the “secret code” in her notebooks. The “code” was Greek.
Some insights, however, can shed new light on Arendt’s thought. For instance, we learn that she attended Christian Sunday school in addition to her synagogue education, and as a child, she told her rabbi that “all prayers should be offered to Christ.” It’s hard not to think of this early education when considering Arendt’s lifelong study of St. Augustine and her argument that politics depends on forgiveness.
Most intellectual biographies emphasize ideas over personal details, which is generally the correct approach. But Arendt is different. Her work, as Hill repeatedly shows, was influenced by the events of her life. She turned to politics after the Reichstag fire vaulted the Nazis to power in Germany, and she studied the American founding once she took refuge in the United States. Her complicated relationship with Heidegger and his flirtation with Nazism inspired some of her most insightful work on forgiveness in politics and the dangers of thinking.
This is not to say that we can only understand Arendt in her historical context. But because she wrote so widely and was so influenced by her friendships and experience, a biographical study illuminates Arendt’s thought in a way it wouldn’t some of her contemporaries. Arendt, who long rejected the label “philosopher,” worked more like a journalist, observing and reporting as she went through life.
But with some severe limitations in her reporting skills. As Ron Rosenbaum wrote in 1999:
Perhaps now is the time. Perhaps the imminent publication of the diaries alleged to be Adolf Eichmann’s makes this the moment to put to rest one of the most pernicious and persistent misconceptions about Eichmann and the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust: the fashionable but vacuous cliché about “the banality of evil.” It’s remarkable how many people mouth this phrase as if it were somehow a sophisticated response to the death camps, when in fact it is rather a sophisticated form of denial, one that can come very close to being the (pseudo-) intellectual version of Holocaust denial. Not denying the crime but denying the full criminality of the perpetrators.
You’re probably familiar with the origin of “the banality of evil”: It was the subtitle of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (She didn’t use it in the New Yorker pieces that were the basis of the book.) The phrase “banality of evil” was born out of Ms. Arendt’s remarkable naïveté as a journalist. Few would dispute her eminence as a philosopher, the importance of her attempt to define, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, just what makes totalitarianism so insidious and destructive.
But she was the world’s worst court reporter, someone who could be put to shame by any veteran courthouse scribe from a New York tabloid. It somehow didn’t occur to her that a defendant like Eichmann, facing execution if convicted, might actually lie on the stand about his crimes and his motives. She actually took Eichmann at his word. What did she expect him to say to the Israeli court that had life and death power over him: “Yes, I really hated Jews and loved killing them”?
But when Eichmann took the stand and testified that he really didn’t harbor any special animosity toward Jews, that when it came to this little business of exterminating the Jews, he was just a harried bureaucrat, a paper shuffler “just following orders” from above, Arendt took him at his word. She treated Eichmann’s lies as if they were a kind of philosophical position paper, a text to analyze rather than a cowardly alibi by a genocidal murderer.
She was completely conned by Eichmann, by his mild-mannered demeanor on the stand during his trial; she bought his act of being a nebbishy schnook. Arendt then proceeded to make Eichmann’s disingenuous self-portrait the basis for a sweeping generalization about the nature of evil whose unfounded assumptions one still finds tossed off as sophisticated aperçus today.
A generalization which suggests that conscious, willful, knowing evil is irrelevant or virtually nonexistent: that the form evil most often assumes, the form evil took in Hitler’s Germany, is that of faceless little men following evil orders, that this is a more intellectual, more interesting evil, anyway-old-fashioned evil being the stuff of childish fairy tales, something intellectual sophisticates feel too refined to acknowledge. Either that or too sheltered to have glimpsed.
Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder eventually took their revenge on Arendt’s perfidy, according David P. Goldman, aka “Spengler:”
Arendt made herself hated in the Jewish world by pooh-poohing Eichmann’s crimes in her famous New Yorker series on the Eichmann trial, as mere “mediocrity of evil.” The implication was that lofty minds like Heidegger’s couldn’t be implicated in such crimes.
Arendt started sleeping with the married Heidegger as a graduate student in the 1920s, and bolstered his postwar reputation by appearing with him in public, although Heidegger had remained a Nazi Party member until 1945 and never offered word of apology. Mel Brooks get Arendt back, though, by including her in “Young Frankenstein.” Her married name really was Frau Blucher, and her film incarnation–the aging spinster pining for the mad maker of monsters, the mention of whose name terrifies animals–suits her perfectly.
Heh, indeed.™
TOO BUSY WORKING ON TRANSGENDER-CORRECT PRONOUNS AND SEXUAL-HARASSMENT TRAINING: Sure, China’s Hypersonic Weapons May Have Incited a “Sputnik Moment.” But why is the Pentagon surprised?