RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272057/california-dem-chair-who-called-kavanaugh-lying-daniel-greenfield

The media keeps screaming that Republicans have a “problem” with women. But it’s women who have a problem with Democrats. This is the latest example of a national trend in politics and media.

The California Democratic Party has launched an investigation into unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct against Chairman Eric Bauman involving party staff members.

In a statement released Saturday evening, Bauman confirmed an investigation was underway but did not address the allegations against him. He said that independent counsel has been hired to investigate the matter.

“I look forward to putting these allegations behind us and moving forward as unified Democrats,” Bauman said in the statement.

Democrats unified behind sexual harassment. Meanwhile here’s Bauman’s statement on Kavanaugh.

The Republican Party has no shame and no soul. Todays vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh is nothing less than an assault on every woman in America. It shows the Republican Party is utterly devoid of humanity and decency…

The United States Senate has disgraced itself today. Its up to the millions of Americans who are feeling righteous anger including the millions of survivors of sexual violence who have been violated all over again today to rise up and defeat every single Republican who betrayed our Country by voting to confirm this lying predator to the Supreme Court…

https://www.wsj.com/articles/skip-the-childrens-instagram-pageant-1543175539

‘How many likes did I get?” When I overheard a friend’s 8-year-old daughter ask how her back-to-school portrait had performed on her mother’s Instagram, my heart fell. No child should grow up believing life is a continuous popularity contest judged on social media.

I have two toddlers myself and people ask why I don’t post their photos. I’ll admit it’s tempting: Who doesn’t get a dopamine rush from a burst of likes or heart emojis? It’s not surprising that the average mom checks Instagram six times a day, according to the platform’s data. Yet I wonder how parents can navigate sharing while relaying the message that life is about more than presenting the perfect image. In weighing the costs and benefits of social media in my life, I realized that signing up for Instagram would only tempt me to be more superficial.

I also worry about the example I’m setting. Since social-media use is associated with disordered eating and body-image issues, do I want my daughter and son to see me documenting my life and then imitate that behavior? When studies link social-media use with depression and anxiety in young adults, and the average teenager spends nine hours a day in front of a screen, it’s worth considering the impact being visibly tethered to our phones may be having on our kids.

In my mind, healthy living requires participating in the moment in a meaningful way. That’s not easy to do while staging and posting photos, then tracking responses. Robin Berman, one of my favorite psychiatrists and author of “Permission to Parent,” prescribes looking at your children with “hearts in your eyes”: truly seeing who they are with warmth. But it’s difficult to appreciate a child’s inner world from the vantage point of an iPhone camera.

Your social-media feed may be full of kids bearing toothy smiles, but will these children be grinning when they reflect back on their meticulously documented childhoods? Since my toddlers have no idea I’ll be broadcasting a photo I’ve taken of them, it doesn’t seem fair for me to do so. If I were a teenager today, I think I’d be furious if my parents had spent my early years urging me to pose for anyone scrolling.

As a psychologist who teaches people how to regulate their emotions, I can imagine the young girl I overheard sitting on my therapy couch a decade from now, describing how her well-meaning mother chronicled her every move for a distant audience rather than paying close attention to her.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/white-privilege-canard-race-determinism/Whites face much the same challenges anyone else faces.

Consider two Americans. One is named Mike. Mike is a straight white Christian male from a decaying industrial city in Ohio or Michigan. He never knew his father. His mother is hooked on painkillers. His home life isn’t great. Mom’s various boyfriends enjoy smacking him in the face. He gets passed around to a variety of family members. He gets into drugs early. Crime too. He drifts around high school and doesn’t graduate. He has no skills and no prospects.

The other American is Malia Obama.

Who has the privilege here? Which one of these citizens is going to have an easier time getting a potential employer on the phone? Who is more likely to find a suitable spouse? Which one of these people is going to have problems getting a mortgage? Who is going to have a better life?

The answer is obviously Mike. All Mike needs to do is present his “white privilege” card to Goldman Sachs, or the Walt Disney Company, or the United States Senate, and all doors will open, because white people like Mike are royalty. Mike will immediately be ushered to a velvet-upholstered throne and be instructed in how to fulfill his duties as a natural-born member of the country’s elite class.

Ah, the Left will protest, but Malia Obama is unique. There is only one of her. Well, two of her. Sort of. But anyway, blacks on average face more challenges than whites in the United States. Yes, but averages don’t tell us much about the lot of any individual. Happiness and success have much to do with personal circumstances — growing up in a stable, loving family; a good education; a strong work ethic. Having two parents who are able to get literally anyone in the world on the phone could help. Having no reliable parents could hurt. Race isn’t the ultimate or anywhere near the leading determinant of how your life turns out, and it’s sloppy to imply otherwise. Yet race determinism is everywhere, and if anything it seems to be growing in popularity.

https://quillette.com/2018/11/17/the-institutionalization

Over the past few years, social justice activists have demonstrated an increased ability to suppress controversial viewpoints. To take a few examples:

A few months ago, mathematician Theodore Hill described in a Quillette essay how progressive groups were able to get a research paper of his on a biological phenomenon known as the “Greater Male Variability Hypothesis” removed from two separate journals, as well as to intimidate his co-author into silence.

Hill’s article was published just a week after another article by endocrinologist Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, who described how social justice activists had managed to get an academic journal to initiate a review of an already-published research paper by Brown University medical researcher Lisa Littman on gender dysphoria. Brown also deleted a reference to the paper from its website.

Both Hill and Flier point out that they’ve never experienced anything like this before. Hill wrote: “In my 40 years of publishing research papers I had never heard of the rejection of an already-accepted paper.” Flier noted: “In all my years in academia, I have never once seen a comparable reaction from a journal within days of publishing a paper that the journal already had subjected to peer review, accepted and published.”

Pressure to suppress controversial viewpoints isn’t just coming from external activists. In many cases, social justice activists within organizations have managed to exert pressure.

Last year, Google engineer James Damore was fired after an internal memo he wrote was leaked to technology website Gizmodo, causing an uproar within the company. His resulting lawsuit offered some insight into how social justice ideology has become institutionalized through training programs and lectures, and is now being implemented into a variety of company policies. This extends to Google’s products as well. Podcast host Joe Rogan announced on his podcast in February about having dinner with a highly ranked YouTube executive who, when asked why a user had received a community guidelines strike for putting a video of a conversation between authors Sam Harris and Douglas Murray on his playlist, was told that it must have been “hate speech.” (Murray is a prominent critic of contemporary European immigration policies.)

That same person, when asked why videos with psychologist Jordan Peterson are often flagged and demonetized, reportedly responded that he’s “a troublemaker.” Last year, Peterson was locked out of his YouTube account due to allegedly violating its Terms of Service, in the midst of widespread crackdown from YouTube against conservative channels. When Peterson reported the story to a conservative news outlet, his account was restored without explanation. (YouTube is a Google subsidiary.)

It isn’t just Google. A recent survey suggested that intolerance towards non-progressives is spreading throughout Silicon Valley, with one respondent claiming there’s a “concerted purge of conservative employees at Apple.”

It’s important to note, of course, that these are select incidents. Controversial research papers are published all the time. Harris, Murray, and Peterson all regularly speak in front of large audiences without issue. Peterson has sold two million copies of his recent book and is in the midst of a worldwide tour.

But it’s also clear that if the most ardent social justice activists could have their way, these restrictions would become the norm. And given what appears to be an increased ability of these activists to exert influence, especially through powerful corporations like Google and Apple, it would be foolish not to take this possibility seriously.

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?

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/11/blacklisting-patrick

My days as an American historian may be numbered.

For the better part of 40 years, my extended family has featured American “living history” on our 760-acre apple farm in Oak Glen, California. When my wife and I built our Georgian inspired home on the farm in 1994, we originally hoped to offer 18th century dinner theater, but two mothers of fifth grade students approached us, asking for a field trip on the American Revolution.

I didn’t think it would work at first. As a child, our field trips were to museums and bakeries and theme parks. Allowing children to witness a mock battle? Allowing 11 year olds to pretend they were soldiers? I loved the idea of showing kids redcoats and minutemen, but I wondered if California elementary teachers would approve.

I could not have been more wrong. Within five years, we were seeing 50,000 students a year, and in the last 17 years, more than 1.2 million students, parents, and teachers visited programs on the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the California Gold Rush.

Our program has no contemporary agenda and for decades it has been loved by all sorts of Americans, who are left, right, and center on the political spectrum. I’ve had great conversations with parents who were federal judges, Hollywood producers, fashion designers, actors and other farmers like me. I once had a pleasant dinner conversation with Bradley Whitford, (“West Wing,” “Saving Mr. Banks”). I wonder, had he known my politics, if the conversation might have taken an arch turn, because I’m pro-life, a lifetime NRA member, and a property rights advocate, but Brad and I kept it very human and convivial. I think, over the years, quite a few of my guests may have known something about my politics, because I’ve always been willing to speak my mind online, but if they ever did have trouble with my views, it always felt like a very Henry Fonda/Jimmy Stewart relationship. I love my customers, and most of them love me, my family, and staff.

Enter ubiquitous social media and a crusading socialist “blue wave” activist—who took the trouble to urge several public schools to blacklist our programs. For my thinking that the Reverend Louis Farrakhan is a bit more dangerous than some mythological (and certainly minuscule) “White Nationalism,” I was called a “racist.” For thinking Stormy Daniels was wildly over the top assaulting an undercover police officer, I was called a “misogynist.” For being bewildered by a sudden multiplicity of gender identities, I was called a “homophobe.” Suddenly, in these polarized times, Riley’s Farm is no longer considered a “safe space” for children by timid, progressive school administrators.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/antifa-lonely-mobs-fight-fantasy-nazis/

Feel blue? Lack purpose? Life a little dull? Get a lift by fighting some fantasy Nazis.

Just before the election, an Andrew Gillum intern named Shelby Shoup was arrested and charged with battery after assaulting some college Republicans on the campus of Florida State University. It was rather less exciting than that sounds: She went on a rant about “Nazis” and “fascism” — Gillum’s Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, finished up at Harvard Law and then joined the U.S. military and helped to fight actual Jew-hating totalitarian thugs in Iraq, in case anybody cares about the facts — before dousing the Republicans with chocolate milk.

There isn’t much of enduring interest in that story: Feckless and hysterical young Caitlyns have been going all rage-monkey from coast to coast for a good bit now, and one might get a feel for the level of maturity at play here by meditating on the fact that a grown-ass woman of legal voting age was walking around drinking chocolate milk. Caitlyns gotta Caitlyn, I suppose.

Of course Shoup should be convicted on a misdemeanor battery charge, this being a fairly open-and-shut case supported by video evidence. Her actions are also a serious violation of the university’s code of student conduct, which could entail punishment up to and including expulsion. Kicking her out of the university would be excessive, I think, and she’s obviously in need of further and better education. I’d suggest having her write a 40-page essay on the works of Russell Kirk or F. A. Hayek, or maybe Ludwig von Mises on the actual Nazis and totalitarianism.

Spilt milk, indeed.

This sort of behavior should be understood as being on a spectrum.

https://www.steynonline.com/8807/the-word-that-cant-be-questioned

EXCERPT

“The more diverse you get, the more stupid you get,” Steyn said. “The more authoritarian you get . . . the more you need people to police diversity and to police cultural sensitivities. And eventually you end up as a totally moronic society.

“Diversity”, as I’ve said for the entirety of this millennium, is morally neutral. You can have half-a-dozen nice middle-aged middle-class NPR-listening ladies, and they’re not in the least bit diverse. So you add Sudan’s leading clitoridectomist. Now you’re more diverse, but not necessarily the better for it.

Do that for long enough, and you wind up irredeemably stupid. A Mark Steyn Club commenter appended this response to yesterday’s Clubland Q&A on the anniversary of 9/11:

This, from Breitbart London and dated 9/11/18, pretty much sums up where the West is at since 9/11: ‘Austria has rejected the asylum claim of an Afghan national who claims to be fleeing persecution for being homosexual after not being able to find any gay pornography on his mobile phone.’ It sounds like the Babylon Bee, but isn’t.

Just so. When historians are poring through the rubble of our civilization, that one sentence will pretty much cover the entirety of the situation in 2018. In fact, denying asylum claims on the grounds of insufficient gay porn on applicants’ telephones may be the best shot Trump has at getting any meaningful immigration policy past the average District Court judge. Although maybe he should add trans porn, too.

Incidentally, for a Pushtun goatherd or whatever he is, the Afghan guy isn’t the least bit stupid: He’s smart enough to know that claiming to be LGBTQWERTY gets you into the express check-in, so why not give gay taqiyyah (tagayyah?) a whirl?

Yet there is also a tragic, suicidal and sacrificial quality to our diversity stupidity:

‘We took him in as if he were a son,’ the girl’s father said, according to the Bild tabloid newspaper. He has lost his only daughter. She was stabbed and killed by her former boyfriend, an unaccompanied refugee from Afghanistan.