RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/03/the-cancellation-of-dr-seuss-should-disturb-you-because-youre-next/

Dr. Seuss has been cancelled. Some of his work has been deemed racist, and we can’t have that. On Tuesday, the entity that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel announced it would no longer publish six of Geisel’s books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Among the works now deemed unfit for children are Geisel’s first book under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, and the much-beloved, “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950. The former depicts a “Chinaman” character and the latter shows two men from “the African island of Yerka” in native garb.

There’s not much point in quibbling over whether these and other such illustrations in the condemned Dr. Seuss books are in fact racist or bigoted, or whether Geisel held racist or xenophobic views. By all accounts he was a liberal-minded and tolerant man who hated Nazis and, as a political cartoonist, mocked the antisemitism that was all-too-common in America during World War II.

He was also a man of his era. Later in life, he regretted some of his political work during the war that stereotyped Japanese Americans, which, as jarring as it might seem today, nevertheless reflected attitudes that were commonplace at the time.

But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel.

The Left Is Carrying Out a Cultural Revolution

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/video-coca-cola-being-less-white-frontpagemagcom/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Will Johnson, the Founder of UniteAmericaFirst.com.

Will focuses on Coca-Cola & Being ‘Less White’, unveiling The sick and twisted world of “diversity training.”

Don’t miss it!

https://spectator.us/topic/beware-linguistic-trojan-horse-dictionaries/

Print dictionaries used to act as drags on popular misunderstandings (no, ‘notorious’ does not mean ‘famous’)

It’s the bane of many an author these days: those newspaper-filler Q&As. One I recently filled out included the question: ‘What’s the book you’re never without?’ Of course, there’s no book I lug about with me everywhere, but inanity comes with this territory. I responded: ‘A tattered, duct-taped blue hardcover of my Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (based on Webster’s Third) published in 1969.’

Lame? Actually, no. Access to older analogue dictionaries has become politically invaluable.

Pre-internet, august dictionaries such as Webster’s and the OED functioned as linguistic anchors. Beneficially slow to adapt and resistant to vernacular fashion, print editions that were expensive to reissue acted as drags on popular misunderstandings (no, ‘notorious’ does not mean ‘famous’). By calling us to shared agreement on what words did and didn’t mean, hard-copy dictionaries helped facilitate clear, precise communication. But online dictionaries have jettisoned this conservative purpose. Capable of being updated daily, digital definitions change with the wind, and are eternally playing catch-up with galloping popular ignorance. The hoi polloi, not the fuddy-duddies, are in charge.

This leaves English susceptible to witlessness, yet also to deliberate manipulation. We’re not talking merely about rapidly evolving slang, but about the meaning of staple, commonplace vocabulary, revised definitions of which can slyly import partisan ideological baggage to everyday discourse.

.https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/16/now-even-classical-music-is-racist/

In a world where, sooner or later, everything is racialised, it was only a matter of time before classical music became a target of the crusade against whiteness. So I wasn’t particularly shocked when I read this headline in the New York Times: ‘Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles over Race and Free Speech.’

The obscure musicology journal in question is the tiny Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The journal’s editor, Timothy Jackson, a music-theory professor at the University of North Texas, is under fire for his hard-hitting response to the claim that the interwar Austrian-Jewish composer and theorist Heinrich Schenker personified the white racist attitudes that dominate classical music. Jackson’s university has launched an investigation into his behaviour, barred him from editing the journal, and suspended funding for the Schenker Center, which he runs.

Jackson has been vilified by the Twittermob and ostracised by his colleagues. Graduates who have previously worked with him are now worried that their association with this fallen professor could harm their career prospects. How did this all happen?

The story of the demise of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies began in the autumn of 2019, when Philip Ewell, a black music-theory professor, gave a talk at the Society for Music Theory in Columbus, Ohio. Ewell takes the view that classical music is compromised by its whiteness.

For Ewell, white supremacy is evident in the teaching, playing and interpretation of classical music. From this perspective, where everything is seen to involve white racism, all the values celebrated in classical music are expressions of whiteness; they are all coded in a ‘white racial frame’, says Ewell. So, the reason Beethoven enjoys such high esteem among lovers of classical music is not because of his genius but because, as Ewell explains, he ‘has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for 200 years’.

The Cultural Revolutionaries at the New York Times this week reviewed the witch hunt against classical musicians, who stand accused of racism simply because the great Western composers happened to be white. Cancel culture is despicable in all of its manifestations, but I take this particular instance personally: I trained in the school of musical analysis founded by Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). My principle teacher was Carl Schachter, who also taught Prof. Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas, the target of this particular witch hunt

It’s all about envy.

My childhood piano teacher kept a recording of Florence Foster Jenkins, the deluded society lady portrayed by Meryl Streep in a 2016 comedy, as a horrible example for youth. Her voice would de-feather a screech-owl, but no-one was allowed to tell her she couldn’t sing. The only classical musician still active who bears comparison to Ms. Jenkins is a certain Philip Ewell, now a professor of music theory at Hunter College, who posts videos of himself torturing a cello until it squeals in pain. Prof. Ewell is African-American and has won his fifteen minutes of fame by denouncing whiteness in classical music.

All this would be of scant interest except that Prof. Ewell has become the scourge of alleged racism in the classical music world, and may have succeeded in extirpating from the academy a grand tradition of musical analysis that began with Beethoven. Ewell also dismisses Beethoven as merely “an above average composer” whose prominence erases the contribution of composers of color. Thanks to Ewell’s rampage against supposed white supremacy in classical music, the living chain of teacher-to-pupil transmission of this aspect of Western civilization may be broken irreparably.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/02/05/sex-on-the-washed-out-brain-n1423480

What we are observing in our feminized and “socially correct” culture today is a prurient obsession with sex—in particular, an inverse preoccupation with matters sexual, as if exemplifying the puritanical perversity of condemning that which one secretly desires. It’s as if we are now living in some febrile Na’vi world, our progressivist reformers having embarked on a vendetta against sexual desire and romantic love as felt and practiced by normal men and women. Jakob Burckhardt’s “terrible simplifcateurs” and concupiscent apologists proliferate among us in their myriads.

In Canada, for example, implied consent has not been a defense for sexual assault since the 1999 Supreme Court of Canada case of R v Ewanchuk, when the court unanimously ruled that consent has to be explicit, instead of merely “implied.” That’s a decision that serves to take the fun out of sex, turning it into a kind of mechanical transaction in order to prevent what official society regards as a rape epidemic devastating the country, the culture, the campus, the marital household. The statistics cited are always inflated—on the order of one in four or five women will be raped in their lifetimes—which is intended to buttress an ideological imperative and which every sane person knows is utter nonsense. 

Not to be outdone, according to M&F magazine Dr. Ava Cadell warns that the words ‘no’ and ‘stop’ “have been used frivolously, playfully, and teasingly in the past and are not always taken seriously.” Therefore, women in sexual encounters should inform their partners that they will use code expressions like ‘Code Red’ or other safe words to stop the sexual process in its tracks. Cadell and other “professionals” offer “sexual consent forms” and “consent kits” which can be signed before sex, like a blizzard of pre-nups, or carried in one’s purse like pepper spray.