RUTHFULLY YOURS

.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. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/coca_cola_abandons_american_ideas.html

Now that we have entered the new world of diversity, inclusion and equity, the acronym DIE aptly applies.  While schools have long been involved in these activities, businesses have now voluntarily adopted or been forced to accept this left-wing ideology as well. 

Consequently, Coca-Cola has sent out notices to law firms demanding that the company will “require diversity among law firms who bill it for work in the United States and reduce payments if they do not comply.”

Because of pressure from the Marxist, anti-American Black Lives Matter, many Fortune 500 companies have pledged to address alleged racial inequality more aggressively.

In fact, there is almost a competition among firms to see who gets the highest score of diversity and inclusion.  How is this accomplished? 

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/535732-rupert-murdoch-rails-against-awful-woke-orthodoxy-while-accepting-award?utm_source=thehill&utm_medium=widgets&utm_campaign=es_recommended_content

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch blasted so-called cancel culture and a “woke orthodoxy” that he described as “awful” and suggested was a threat to the free exchange of ideas in the U.S. and around the world.

“For those of us in the media, there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential,” Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp., said in recorded remarks while receiving an award from the Australia Day Foundation, according to The New York Times.

“This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility,” Murdoch added. “Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”

Video of the remarks was also posted on the website of the Herald Sun, an Australian newspaper owned by Murdoch, whose media ownership includes Fox News and the New York Post.

Many GOP lawmakers and media commentators on the right have decried “cancel culture,” calling it a concerted effort by those on the left to suppress opposing viewpoints.

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/535512-cancel-culture-comes-for-the-moderates

The increasing tendency to interpret obviously sarcastic metaphors of violence as if they were real threats makes me want to kill somebody. Am I in trouble because I wrote that? That would be silly, wouldn’t it?   

If you read that sentence as an actual call for violence, you are at best a careless reader. It’s an obviously insincere, satirical claim about my state of mind. It doesn’t call for anyone to do anything. Does it mean that I’m threatening someone? Who? 

The pressure to cancel people because they have violated vague and unpredictable norms has claimed its latest victim in Will Wilkinson, who was vice president for research at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, and who (tenuously) remains a New York Times contributing opinion writer. His firing is particularly depressing, because Niskanen has been one of the most useful sources of independent, contrarian policy analysis. It was started by Cato Institute refugees who were disaffected with the Institute’s dishonest climate change denial. They thought, correctly, that libertarianism properly understood does not allow businesses to harm others, as the fossil fuel industry does. For Niskanen to join the cancellation bandwagon is a major disappointment.

Here’s what happened. After the inauguration, some conservative writers complained that although Biden called for unity, he proposed policies that Republicans could never agree to. “‘Aha! Biden proposes policies I dislike. HIS CALL FOR UNITY IS A LIE!!!’ is all the forlorn conservative mind can seem to muster. Sad,” tweeted Wilkinson.  

Soon after, he followed up with the line that got him fired: “If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence.” 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/05/rowan-atkinson-is-dead-right-about-cancel-culture/

Actor, comedian and national treasure Rowan Atkinson has attacked cancel culture, comparing it to the actions of the ‘medieval mob’. In a world where ‘controversial’ opinions can be banned from social media and dissenters are subjected to hate campaigns, he could not be more right.

In an interview with the Radio Times, the actor spoke of a serious problem with online debate – or rather, the lack of debate:

‘The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be “cancelled”’.

Atkinson also highlighted the vital importance of free speech:

‘It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion, but what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn. So it is scary for anyone who’s a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future’.

He is, of course, correct. Exposure to different views broadens our minds. In suppressing alternative ideas, we behave like the irrational and hysterical witch-hunters of old.

This is not the first time Atkinson has spoken words of wisdom about freedom of speech. When Boris Johnson was attacked for comparing women in burqas to letterboxes, Atkinson argued that ‘All jokes about religion cause offence, so it’s pointless apologising for them’.

More recently, he has criticised the authoritarianism of the SNP’s Hate Crime Bill, which would criminalise speech even in the privacy of our own homes.

We should all be free to air our opinions in the public sphere, safe from censorious interventions by either the government or the cancel-hungry mob. That this even needs to be said is a sign of our illiberal times.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/seven-deadly-sins-woke-loyd-pettegrew/

“Woke” as a term originated in the 1940s. Oxford Dictionaries recorded its early politically conscious usage in a 1962 article, “If You’re Woke You Dig It” by William Melvin Kelley in The New York Times. The term has reared its ugly head again recently as a concept symbolizing perceived awareness of social issues and enlightened social movement. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics, social justice activism and progressive or socially liberal causes such as anti-racism.

Many believe woke is simply a manifestation of adolescent consciousness and wannabe activism. Besides the social idiocy with which woke is aligned, the term’s problem stems linguistically from the fact that it can be used as an article (woke actor), a noun (AOC is woke), an adjective (Chuck Schumer is a woke senator), a verb (the radical feminist really woked her accounting class), an adverb (Kamala Harris governs woke), a conjunction (progressive and woke), preposition (Biden’s stealing the 2020 election from Trump was a woke election) and last but not least, an interjection (woke, how socially responsible of her).

Perhaps woke isn’t a word form at all, but simply a leading indicator of abject stupidity. It would seem that if you are a progressive, woke has become both your being and your nothingness (with half-hearted apologies to Phenomenological Ontologist Jean-Paul Sartre). Jorge González-Gallarza argues convincingly what woke is a cannon of identity politics, “a toxic outgrowth of Protestant Christianity that threatens the American regime of liberty and self-government…both Christian and woke worldviews build moral orders around the categories of innocence and transgression—but with vastly different effects.”

González-Gallarza continues, “By placing atonement for past transgressions at the center of politics, wokeness seeks to apportion power in proportion to innocence. Note that how in woke terminology ‘speaking as’ a member of an innocent group instantly confers a legitimacy akin to what Coleman Hughes calls ‘heightened moral knowledge.’” Ah ha! All those George Floyd rioters last summer had to be given a hall pass from prosecution and lionization from Democrats because of their moral courage! So that’s how it goes!

Those who aspire to live the woke life are electrified at being able to thrust their cravenly nonsensical views in our face. All of us, if truth be told, believe in justice but only if it is applied blindly to every morsel of our Constitutional Republic. When the woke are blinded by the fires of their social justice insurrection, they are unable to see the injustice of their destruction of businesses and the myriad lives who overcame real injustices to create their own American Dream. When woke suppresses other’s rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, it becomes a vacuous four-letter word. You may be innocent of the soup du jour social injustices but if you dare to question methods and results, you likely will be shouted down, knocked down and put down with a loud WOKE YOU! Here are the seven deadly sins of woke.