Tag Archives: culture

This is Why

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…we can’t have nice schools.

Students at the University of New Hampshire [boycotted] final exams after a student uploaded a picture of another white student in what appears to be a bedtime facial mask, implying it’s “blackface.”

The university caved in to the students’ demands, and postponed the exams.

The right answer would have been to hold the finals as scheduled, let the pupils who skipped them—for whatever reason—receive failing grades on the exams, with attendant consequences for their course grade for the semester and for their graduation.

This should have been a teaching opportunity.  It isn’t civil disobedience unless the disobeyers suffer the consequences of the disobedience; that’s the only way civil disobedience can point up the absurdity of the thing being protested.  Absent those consequences, all that occurs is a toddler’s temper tantrum.  Or a riot.

But University of New Hampshire management (they don’t deserve to be called leadership) was too timid to do the right thing.  Instead, they’ve surrendered the university to the rabble.  In consequence, all this moment taught was that cry-baby temper tantrums get rewarded.

On top of this, the “outrage” was carefully manufactured.

Twenty-one-year-old Eric Buchwald, whose picture was posted without his permission, claims he didn’t depict blackface and it was just a picture of a clay facial mask he’s been using for the last few weeks.
…
A woman who owns the Instagram account that caused the scandal confirmed to NH1 News that Buchwald wasn’t aware his picture was being used; she said it was taken months ago.

A wasted major teaching opportunity combined with the overt racism of manufacturing a racist beef where it’s obvious none exists—a school doesn’t get much more useless than this.

Hysteria

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FBI Director James Comey was fired by President Donald Trump, and the Left is waxing hysterical over it.  Never mind that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (only just confirmed after another example of Progressive-Democratic Party obstructionism in the Senate) laid out the case for Comey’s inability to function as the FBI’s leader.  Rosenstein’s memo can be read here as part of the document chain culminating in Trump’s letter to Comey.  Via Richard Fernandez:

Keith Ellison tweeted “we are witnessing a Consitutional [sic] crisis unfold before our very eyes.”

No.  A Constitutional crisis occurred when President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court with is “Indian Relocation Project.”  A Constitutional crisis occurred when Franklin Roosevelt rounded up vast numbers of Americans of heritages of which he disapproved and moved them onto “reservations.”  A Constitutional crisis occurred in President Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.  A President firing an Executive Branch official in whom he’s lost confidence is ordinary business.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

Were these investigations getting too close to home for the president?

America depends on you [Rosenstein] to restore faith in our criminal justice system, which is going to be badly shattered after the administration’s actions today.

And (via the link just above):

Other Democrats attributed sinister motives to Comey’s firing, with two Senators, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, describing it in press statements as “Nixonian.” Another Democratic senator, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, said the firing “is disturbingly reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal and the national turmoil that it caused,” later adding “We are careening ever closer to a Constitutional crisis.”

And

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the firing “raises the ghosts of some of the worst Executive Branch abuses”

The shrillness of those three remarks speaks for itself.

These squawks come on the relative heels of some other comments by Progressive-Democrats.  Schumer on the occasion of Comey’s October 2016 reopening of the FBI’s investigation of then-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email escapades:

I do not have confidence in [Comey] any longer[.]

And Pelosi:

Maybe he’s not in the right job[.]

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA), then Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on the same occasion:

The FBI has a history of extreme caution near Election Day so as not to influence the results. Today’s break from that tradition is appalling.

Harry Reid (D, NV), ex-Senate Majority/Minority Leader, in December after the election results had settled in:

I think he should be investigated by the Senate. I think he should be investigated by other agencies in the government, including the security agencies[.]

In a non-Nixonian comparison, Slate (same link) cited Reid as making this one:

Reid went as far as to call Comey the “new J Edgar Hoover,” saying he had the information of Russian involvement in the election and kept it from the American public.

This is sad because this manufactured hysteria is all the Progressive-Democratic Party has left.  It’s unfortunate, too, because with this being all the Party has left, Progressive-Democrats cannot function as an effective party in the two-party system our Republic needs.

Is Satire

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…a proper style for what’s claimed to be a serious, scholarly journal?  Here, via The Wall Street Journal, is the abstract of Teresa Lloro-Bidart’s When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California [sic] in the journal Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography [also sic]:

Eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), reddish-brown tree squirrels native to the eastern and southeastern United States, were introduced to and now thrive in suburban/urban California. As a result, many residents in the greater Los Angeles region are grappling with living amongst tree squirrels, particularly because the state’s native western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus) is less tolerant of human beings and, as a result, has historically been absent from most sections of the greater Los Angeles area. ‘Easties,’ as they are colloquially referred to in the popular press, are willing to feed on trash and have an ‘appetite for everything.’ Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for the fields of animal geography and feminist geography.

Unfortunately, the full article is behind a paywall, but the abstract is sufficient unto the day.  And it raises a question: how much of the…research…behind this piece was done with the proceeds of a Federal grant to California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where Lloro-Bidart is an Assistant Professor in the Liberal Studies Department?  Is our tax money funding satire, now?  If so, Congress does need, indeed, need to revisit funding for the NSF and similar entities.

YGTBSM

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…again.  Grant High School history teacher David Lickey wrote an essay and distributed it to the school’s students and teachers.  In it, he wrote

“I find assertions of rape culture dubious,” and “The very wording of ‘rape culture’ seems to me a bit hysterical.”

And

“Rape culture” is a theoretical construct that is ill defined. What exactly is “rape culture?” I don’t see it in my life or the lives of any of the men and women I have known. I have never met a person who believes rape is anything other than a heinous crime.

His boss, Principal Carol Campbell, was upset at his effrontery.  Grant’s essay, it seems,

included some statements that run counter to the way we approach this important subject. The perspective of the teacher does not reflect nor support our approach to educating students on sexual assault. A strong contradictory argument should be accompanied by counter arguments from credible sources.

And

We are working with students and some staff members to organize listening sessions and opportunities for adults and students to get support. It is our primary goal to ensure Grant is a safe place for all.

At least the “all” who comport themselves with the approved viewpoint.  Because fragile snowflakes need to be protected from the heat of disagreement.

The Apocalypse is Upon Us

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Or so Lauren Collins would have us believe in her fearful piece in the New Yorker, titled The Future of Europe Hinges on a Face-Off in France about this weekend’s money round of the Presidential election in France.

After all, this election is a referendum between a globalist economy and a globalist identity (Macron) and a nationalist economy and a nationalist identity (LePen).  That does sound apocalyptic, but really, it’s more apocryphal.

As a practical matter, and as is the case with most democratic-oriented governments, French government power is divided between an executive, the President, and the legislative, which elections are next month.  French government power is divided further: the legislative branch’s majority party appoints the Prime Minister, who has serious executive authorities of his own.

A President Le Pen will face two obstacles to her agenda: a Prime Minister from another party (Front National is unlikely to win more than a few legislative seats) and a hostile legislative.  A President Macron may well have to work with a Prime Minister from another party (his En Marche! is all of a year old and unlikely to win many more seats than Front National), and while he would face a not particularly hostile legislative, its agenda most assuredly will not be his.

Either President will find Executive ambitions greatly dampened.  That’s a purely domestic matter, but it spills across French borders.

As a (n international) political matter, Europe’s political future is not much influenced by either President.  Aside from the domestic dampening, which must also dampen these potential Presidents’ influence externally, both Europe and the European Union are made of sterner stuff.

I’ve written of the lack of long-term viability of the EU, but that weakness stems from weaknesses internal to the EU as an institution, not from pressures from within this or that member State, for all that France is an important member State.  No, the EU is good for several more years, the British departure won’t hurt it or Europe, German continued prosperity definitely won’t hurt Europe or the EU, not even the continued brink-of-bankruptcy state of Greece won’t hurt it.

And neither will a staunch EU-supporting President Macron significantly enhance the viability of the EU, nor will a staunch anti-EU President Le Pen significantly diminish the EU.  Indeed, Le Pen has promised a referendum on French membership in the entity, and the French citizenry are strongly more in favor of Remain than of Exit.

What is a threat to Europe is the aggressively acquisitiveness of Russia and most of Europe’s timidity in responding to that.  Nor Macron’s election nor Le Pen’s will have much impact on Europe’s attitude or what France might do about either that timidity or Putin’s acquisitiveness.  Even with Le Pen’s affinity for all things Putin.