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November 2018

Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World by Claire Lehmann

https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/camille-paglia-its-time

“I am wholeheartedly in favor of women students or employees knowing their rights and speaking up to defend them. However, the #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track in encouraging uncorroborated accusations dating from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.” Camille Paglia

I discovered Camille Paglia’s work when I was pursuing my undergraduate arts education at The University of Adelaide, South Australia, in the early 2000s. I was deeply disillusioned with the courses in my arts degree and their monomaniacal focus on social constructionism, and was looking for criticism of Michel Foucault on the internet. I stumbled across a 1991 op-ed written by Paglia for The New York Times, in which she described the followers of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, as “fossilized reactionaries,” and “the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality.” I was hooked.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that my university’s library contained each of her books, including the essay collections Vamps and Tramps and Sex, Art and American Culture. For the final year of my arts degree, (before pursuing my studies in psychology) I spent the bulk of my time at the university reading Paglia in the library. She was like a revelation. Her work was subversive but erudite, and she synthesized insights made in the realm of the arts, ancient history and folk biology—something that no other scholar of the humanities had attempted to do. Thirteen years later, it is an honour to be able to interview Camille Paglia for Quillette.

Paglia is an essayist, author, and professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has taught since 1984. She completed her PhD at Yale under the supervision of Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon. Her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence, from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, was listed by David Bowie as one of “100 books we should all read.”

Her other books include Break, Blow, Burn, a close-reading of 43 classic poems, and Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. In recent years, her essays have been collected and published in new editions, including Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender and Feminism (February 2018) and Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex and Education, which was released by Pantheon in October 2018.

I interviewed Paglia over email for Quillette. What follows is an unedited reproduction of that interview.

* * *

Claire Lehmann: You seem to be one of the only scholars of the humanities who are willing to challenge the post-structuralist status quo. Why have other humanities academics been so spineless in preserving the integrity of their fields?

Broward’s Ballots Voters are right to be suspicious about vote-counting in the Florida By James Freeman county.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/browards-ballots-1542062920

Continuing irregularities related to voting in Florida’s Broward County have inspired a local judge to require more oversight of the recount of ballots from last Tuesday’s election. But the overseers are unlikely to inspire confidence among voters in south Florida or anywhere else in the United States.

The Miami Herald reports:

A Broward judge on Monday turned down Gov. Rick Scott’s request to “impound and secure” all voting machines in Broward’s elections headquarters when they’re not being used to recount ballots.

But Circuit Judge Jack Tuter offered a compromise: Add three Broward Sheriff’s deputies to the current lineup of [Broward Sheriff’s Office] officers and private security guards overseeing the recount under way at the county’s election’s center in Lauderhill.

Tuter stopped short of granting the Scott campaign’s request for an injunction to impound the machines, but agreed with his lawyers that “there needs to be an additional layer of confidence” in the vote-recount system in Broward. The votes in the U.S. Senate race between Scott and incumbent Bill Nelson are part of the recount.

The judge is correct about a lack of confidence that Broward officials will conduct a fair and competent count. A Journal editorial on Saturday summarized the jurisdiction’s disturbing recent history of legal violations. This morning Politico’s Marc Caputo wrote that a change in leadership is imminent:

Counting unlawful votes. Destroying ballots. Sunshine Law violations. Busted deadlines.

So many controversies have bedeviled Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes — culminating in her office’s troubles in the aftermath of Florida’s chaotic 2018 elections — that her days in office are now numbered, insiders and lawmakers say.

She’s losing support from fellow Democrats and faces the increasing likelihood of an embarrassing suspension from office at the hands of either Gov. Rick Scott or his likely successor, Ron DeSantis.

Israel, Gaza Militants Exchange Heavy Fire After Raid Goes Awry Escalating hostilities following military operation in territory threaten to upend fragile cease-fire talks with Hamas By Dov Lieber

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-seek-calm-after-gaza-raid-goes-awry-1542033474

TEL AVIV—Israel’s military and Gaza militant groups exchanged heavy fire in an escalation of hostilities that threatened to upend fragile cease-fire talks that had been gaining momentum.

Israel said Hamas and other militant groups fired more than 300 rockets at Israel on Monday in what is the largest barrage aimed at the Jewish state from the Gaza Strip since their war in 2014. The militants said they were responding to an Israeli operation Sunday night in Gaza that left seven Palestinian militants and an Israeli military officer dead.

At least one Israeli was seriously injured on Monday when an antitank missile fired from Gaza struck a bus near the border, Israeli paramedics said, and at least 10 others were lightly injured by shrapnel in or near the Israeli town of Sderot. Homes in the Israeli towns of Ashkelon and Netivot took direct hits from rocket fire, according to videos shown on Israel’s public broadcaster Kan.

In response to the rocket fire, the Israeli military said it carried out 70 airstrikes against military targets in Gaza, including the building that housed Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV station, an official media arm of the militant group. Israel accused the outlet of directing terror activities against it.

The strikes killed at least three Palestinians and injured nine others, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an armed group, said two of the dead were their members, and Islamic Jihad, also an armed group, said one of the dead belonged to it.

The attacks were the most intense fighting in weeks on the Gaza border, following a period of calm that coincided with stepped-up peace talks between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, mediated by Egypt and the United Nations. After months of worsening restrictions on Gaza, Israel had begun allowing humanitarian aid from Qatar to flow in, easing conditions there.

The relative quiet was broken Sunday night by what Israel described as an intelligence-gathering mission gone wrong.

A Tale of Two Migrants by Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/8990/a-tale-of-two-migrantshttps://www.steynonline.com/8990/a-tale-of-two-migrants

There was a terrorist attack in Melbourne on Friday. I believe it’s the fifth, publicly speaking, but I gather there’s also a sixth one that’s sub judice. An excitable fellow blew up his Holden Rodeo ute (that’s “SUV” in American) on busy, crowded Bourke Street, a couple of blocks from Victoria’s parliament. It unfortunately didn’t cause quite the mass slaughter he’d been looking forward to when he loaded it up with gas bottles. So he staggered from the flaming vehicle, and a pedestrian, assuming the car detonation had been an accident, went to the driver’s aid. And thus two migrants to the Lucky Country briefly came face to face:

‘Melbourne is mourning one of the founders of the city’s famous coffee culture after the murder of Sisto Malaspina in Bourke Street’s terror attack yesterday…

‘It is believed Mr Malaspina had gone to the aid of the attacker after his car blew up.’

And as Tim Blair adds:

Of course he did. And of course the jihadi stabbed him to death for it.

Of course. Because, as London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, has assured us, this is just part and parcel of what it means to live in a big vibrant metropolis in the early twenty-first century. On the one hand, you get a hardworking gregarious immigrant who creates an iconic coffee bar that becomes part of the fabric of city life – and, on the other, you get a different type of immigrant who kills the first guy. Tim Blair again:

Sisto Malaspina arrived in Australia from Italy, and for more than 40 years ran Melbourne’s wonderful Pellegrini’s restaurant. Hassan Khalif Shire Ali arrived from Somalia, and did rather less with his life.

Pellegrini’s had the first espresso machine in Melbourne, and my recollection is that Mr Malaspina’s staff know how to use it to far greater effect than, say, the lads at Starbucks do theirs. By contrast, Hassan Khalif Sire Ali’s talents lay elsewhere: He was linked via “social media” to his “fellow Australian” and serial decapitator Khaled Sharrouf. He had his passport canceled when he attempted to leave the country to fight for Isis in 2015. Because the Australian Government’s policy is to keep all the jihadists at home so the only infidels they can kill are the locals.

Many Aussie readers have written to me about Friday’s events and, “of course”, the dishonesty and evasions of the media. The fact that Sisto Malaspina was the proprietor of a Melbourne institution has enabled the press to talk about how beloved he was and how his granddaughter had been born just six days earlier – instead of how he didn’t deserve to die, and his week-old granddaughter doesn’t deserve to grow up without a grandfather, and her parents don’t deserve to have the joy of her birth tainted and bloodied by his murder, because of lunatic government policies that insist everybody on the planet is entirely the same and that to attempt to distinguish between any of the seven billion potential immigrants to your country is totally racist.

“Burrowing into Books – The Thirty-One Kings” Sydney M. Williams

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“As the sun slanted toward the west, the cries of plovers and curlews echoed off the hills

and the breeze carried a tang of burning peat from the hearth of a far-off cottage.”

Robert Harris

The Thirty-one Kings

Richard Hannay was the creation of John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir as he became known. Buchan was born in Scotland in 1875. He was a product of a time when chivalry was a powerful force, when war was viewed heroically, before the slaughter at the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele and Meuse Argonne. Buchan was a novelist, historian and politician who was serving as Governor General of Canada at the time of his death in 1940. Hannay, his character, is a Scotsman who bears the traits of a Victorian gentleman. During the Great War, Mr. Buchan wrote three novels in which Richard Hannay appeared:The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle(1916), and Mr. Standfast(1918). Two more Hannay novels were published after the War:The Three Hostages(1924) and The Island of Sheep(1936). In a posthumously published novel, Sick Heart River (1941),Buchan predicted that Hannay and his friends would be going back into action, as clouds of war descended over Europe. Mr. Harris has provided that opportunity. Readers of a certain age will recall those novels, along with the Alfred Hitchcock 1935 movie, “The Thirty-Nine Steps”starring Robert Donat. The book has never been out of print.

Robert Harris was asked by Polygon, which currently publishes Buchan’s books, to create a new series. The Thirty-one Kingsis the first. Like Buchan, Harris is a Scotsman, a graduate of St. Andrews, a classicist, historian, popular author and designer of the fantasy board and digital game “Talisman.” The rubric at the top of the page indicates how closely he mimics John Buchan.

The Phony War? by: Diana West

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3799/The-Phony-War.aspx

Returning from a few days away, I find several emails alerting me to a recent pronouncement by David Horowitz on his supposed rift with Ronald Radosh.

Supposed…?

Truth be told, every time I happen to write either of those two names, I stop, halted by misgivings over wasted time and thought. Why throw any more of either at these two longtime prevaricators now pretending to be at odds?

Pretending…?

It’s just a notion, but I think it has some appeal. If only to avoid thinking about the midterm elections now in progress (Vote GOP!), I’ll tease it out for a bit. Maybe there’s something there.

Background (there’s always background): On August 18, 2017, FP appeared to cast Radosh out of its orbit in a curious article by Daniel Greenfield. The headline, likely by Horowitz, was: “NEVER TRUMP DRIVES A FORMER COMMUNIST BACK TO HIS ROOTS: What happens when you lose every principle except hating Trump.”

The average reader surely expects that the “roots” to which “former Communist” Radosh is alleged to be returning are Communism. What else? Reading the headline and then skimming the article the first time around, I remember getting the feeling the piece came up short. Forcing myself through a second time, I find the “roots” Radosh is “returning” to are “McCarthyism accusations.”

McCarthyism accusations?

Guess what, gang? Radosh never left those roots. I know. In 2013, at FP, Radosh dubbed me “McCarthy’s heiress,” and Horowitz called American Betrayal “McCarthyism on Steroids.” (Quote Horowitz: “She should not have written that book.”)

So, who are they trying to kid? You. Everyone. They return to “McCarthyism” when it suits them, ho hum, and then pretend it’s a big deal to return to “McCarthyism” when it suits them, woo woo.

Thus, to underscore, the 2017 FP piece does not accuse Radosh of returning to Communism — or even to the Left. The point Greenfield makes is that Radosh, as a “Never Trumper,” has no beliefs, just spite and malice against Trump.

In FP’s telling, then, it is just as if Donald Trump were not the counter-revolutionary figure that he is, and that Never Trump and its allies in the so-called Resistance were not attempting to save the Revolution from his mighty, providential assault.

‘Asabiyah…Or, Another Prolonged Wandering In The Desert? by Gerald A. Honigman

http://www.geraldahonigman.com/blog/
Spend some time on many-to-most university campuses these days; read or listen to numerous Jewish commentators and editorialists in the mainstream media dealing with Israel and the Middle East.

With rare exceptions, you’ll be hard pressed finding Jews (let alone others) who have not succumbed to the pressure to adopt one set of standards by which Israel and Zionism is studied and judged, and another entirely different set by which the rest of the Middle East and North Africa—indeed, the rest of the world–is scrutinized.

Frequently, Jewish organizations (J Street U, Jewish Voice For Peace, and too many others–including Hillel, at times) are prominent, or at least collaborative, in partaking in the one-sided Israel and Zionism-bashing goings on of other groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association, radical Leftists, and so forth https://ekurd.net/students-justice-palestine-2018-07-05.

While starry-eyed, naïve students learn about the admittedly imperfect quest of Jews to cast off their millennial victim, scapegoat, and whipping post status, they’ll neither hear nor read anything about the plights of scores of millions of other non-Arab peoples in the region. They won’t find, for example, a local chapter of Students for Justice in Kurdistan or for the Kabyle or Amazigh (Berber”) people, whose programs they can attend. And they won’t find a post-Zionist, “Progressive” Hebrew or other professor mentioning anything about them either https://kabylia.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/berber-autumn/.

Clueless Alert: Macron Says He Needs An Army To Defend France From The United States By Douglas V. Mastriano

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/12/clueless-alert-macron-says-needs-army-defend-france-united-states/
The idea that Europe needs an army to defend itself against the United States demonstrates a hitherto unknown level of hostility by an ‘allied’ leader.

Displaying a dazzling lack of connection with reality and utter contempt for the United States, last week French President Emmanuel Macron called for creating an independent European army.

“We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia, and even the United States of America,” he said. Such a thought is not new in France. However, the idea that Europe needs an army to defend itself against the United States demonstrates a hitherto unknown level of hostility by an “allied” leader.

The timing of Macron’s remarks is also baffling. He said this just days before the centennial commemoration of the end of the First World War. One hundred years ago, the United States of America deployed 2.1 million men to Europe to expel the German Imperial Army from France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The war was nearly lost to the Germans in 1917 after the French army mutinied and Czarist Russia quit the war as a result of the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution.
Thousands of Americans Died to Save France

After the bloody losses of Verdun and the blunders at the Somme in 1916, there was no way the Allies could win the war without the might and power of the United States. One of America’s largest and bloodiest campaigns in its history was the Meuse Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918 and lasted until the Germans signed an armistice to end the war on November 11, 1918.

The American Expeditionary Forces, under the command of Gen. John “Blackjack” Pershing, were asked to attack the most heavily fortified and thickly defended part of the Western Front between the Meuse River and the ancient Argonne Forest. This would threaten German supply lines and thereby draw off their strategic reserve divisions.

The Americans attacked and paid dearly in blood, suffering 20,000 casualties a week so that the British and French armies further to the north could break through. What Macron conveniently forgets is that without the United States giving so generously of its sons and treasure, Paris would have been captured by Imperial Germany and the war lost. Today, more than 30,000 American men rest in six military cemeteries as silent witnesses to the sacrifice the United States paid to deliver France from Germany in 1918.

The Dan Crenshaw Moment By David French

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/dan-crenshaw-forgives-pete-davidson-saturday-night-live/There’s a market for grace in American politics.

Given the spirit of our times, things could have gone so differently. On November 3, when Saturday Night Live comic Pete Davidson mocked Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw’s eye patch, saying he looked like a “hit man in a porno movie” — then adding, “I know he lost his eye in war or whatever” — it was a gift from the partisan gods.

A liberal comic had gone too far. He had mocked a man who was maimed in a horrific IED attack, an attack that had taken the life of his interpreter and nearly blinded him for life. He mocked a courageous man’s pain. And thus Crenshaw had attained the rarest position for a Republican politician: aggrieved-victim status. He was free to swing away.

Instead, he refused to be offended. He noted that the joke was bad, but his handling of the whole affair was — as the Washington Post described him — “cool as a cucumber.” Then Saturday Night Live called. The show wanted to apologize, and they wanted Crenshaw on-air. He said yes, and this happened:

It was the act of grace heard ’round the nation. Davidson came on the “Weekend Update” set and offered his apology, and then Crenshaw joined. He took some good-natured shots at Davidson — Crenshaw’s phone had an Ariana Grande ringtone (Grande recently broke her engagement with Davidson), and he mocked Davidson’s appearance — but then things took a more serious turn.

Vogue Claims ‘White Women’ Are Voting ‘Against Their Own Interests’ by Voting Republican By Faith Moore…See note please

https://pjmedia.com/trending/vogue-claims-white-women-are-voting-against-their-own-interests-by-voting-republican/

“In February, 2012 Vogue magazine published, for the benefit of its 11.7 million readers, an article titled “A Rose in the Desert” about the first lady of Syria. Asma al-Assad has British roots, wears designer fashion, worked for years in banking, and is married to the dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has killed over 5,000 civilians and hundreds of children this year. The glowing article praised the Assads as a “wildly democratic” family-focused couple who vacation in Europe, foster Christianity, are at ease with American celebrities, made theirs the “safest country in the Middle East,” and want to give Syria a “brand essence.”

If you want to know how out of touch progressives have become, look no further than Vogue magazine. In an article for the magazine published last week, contributing editor Michelle Ruiz asks this mind-numbingly obtuse question: “Why do white women keep voting for the GOP and against their own interests?” How, Ruiz wants to know, could women possibly vote for candidates who are “passionately pro-life” over candidates who are “staunch protector[s] of women’s reproductive rights”? Surely, Ruiz laments, all women ought to be in favor of “a right to health care, to choose what’s best for our bodies, [and] that our children should be safe at school” (in other words, abortion rights and gun control). Voting against these things, Ruiz says, is “unsisterly.”

The complete and utter refusal of progressives to understand that there might be other legitimate viewpoints than their own would be fascinating if it wasn’t so infuriating. Do Vogue, and Vox, and Cargle, and Eltahawy, and countless others who share their views truly not understand that people might disagree with them? Do they really not know that some women believe that a pro-life stance (or support for the Second Amendment) is pro-woman? Or even that, for many women, a vagina isn’t actually their defining feature? It seems like they actually don’t understand this.

In her article, Ruiz tries to come up with reasons why white women would vote for GOP candidates. “Are they so invested in their own white privilege that they simply don’t care about other women? Are they parroting their Republican husbands and/or brainwashed by Fox & Friends?” Or are they simply “protecting their own power and status”? That’s it, according to Ruiz, those are the choices. White women are either uncaring evil trolls hell-bent on hoarding their own privilege and power, or they’re oppressed victims brainwashed by the patriarchy. Ruiz doesn’t even entertain a third option — doesn’t mention it in her article at all — that these women might just disagree. Tolerance, it seems, does not extend to those who think differently.