Boldly Speaking Truth to Not-Power

Via Crooked Timber an awful article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.
April 30, 2012, 10:24 pm
By Naomi Schaefer Riley

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

A helpful comment followed:

Once again, [Naomi Schaefer Riley] makes definitive evaluations of academic research without having bothered to read it. Or the dissertation proposal; or any of the chapters done so far (since it seems this is work in progress by students in the dissertation writing phase). She is clairvoyant, and can judge it in advance. The Queen has delivered her verdict, judging it in advance. There's a word for that: prejudice.

Chuck Kleinhans

Burned. From the follow-up:

Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them.

Oh joy. What might editors at the Chronicle of um...wait a minute...oh yes, Higher Education think of such things?

Many of you have asked The Chronicle to take down Naomi Schaefer Riley’s recent posting, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” I urge readers instead to view this posting as an opportunity—to debate Riley’s views, challenge her, set things straight as you see fit. Take a moment to read The Chronicle’s front-page story about the future of black studies, written by Chronicle reporter Stacey Patton and weigh in.

Please join the debate.

I shit in your breakfast! What do you think about that?

Exclusive!!!

Once upon a time a dumb guy had a bad time with an asshole.

Then he wrote a complaint about it. But isn't there more to the story? Some angle nobody had explored before? Who could get to the bottom of the story?

This, friends, is journalism:



Yes, John Nolte asked Jonah Goldberg what he thought about it. Well done! After all, what outlet did Jonah have to get his views across? That of course leads to EVEN MORE GROUNDBREAKING NEWS:

Rich Lowry at The Corner:

Apparently in the back-and-forth over his notorious “Tyranny of Cliches” interview, Piers Morgan invited Jonah to come back on his show. As Jonah notes here, “it’s clear that if he felt like he came out the winner of the exchange he wouldn’t be inviting me back.”

Yes, the link is to that mighty scoop from Big Hollywood about the National Review's own editor-at-large, the one with the headline taken from Jonah's complainy complaint above. I declare this circle jerked.

Thanks mark f!

Before the Internet I Wouldn't Have Noticed

Mind you before the internet there were no Nerfgun-cum-rayguns either.

The Etch-a-Sketch

Dorothy Rabinowitz:

Things won't be different this election season, Mr. Romney should know. The race card will be played even more energetically this time around, despite such proof of racism as white America's overwhelming support that put Mr. Obama into the presidency in the first place. Mr. Romney could do worse than a presidential run in the spirit of the Mr. McCain we see today—a man free of useless caution. Of course, the senator now has a fat target: the four years of the Obama presidency. But so has Mr. Romney.

I support any and all efforts to turn Mitt Romney into a crazy bitter old liar nobody likes.

Film?

I love this shit:

It wasn't the evil god Loki who defeated the Avengers last week; it was the slippery fingers of a projectionist.

The new film "The Avengers" ran into a glitch at a recent press screening, according to The Verge. The digital file of the movie being readied for the press was accidentally deleted by the projectionist. Though one would hope certain safeguards would be in place to prevent such a hiccup, apparently deleting a digital copy of a film is no different than deleting any other type of file.

No word on why the file couldn't be recovered or why there was no backup. But the press had to wait more than two hours for the film to be downloaded again.

You won't be stumbling around in a vault somewhere discovering a whole bunch of ones and zeros that collectively form a complete copy of Metropolis. Also I support this trolling effort at a bus stop near that place where I buy booze:



I want to correct that graffiti EVERY GODDAMNED TIME I SEE IT. Troll, you have revealed my nature and I am ashamed.

Pretty Sure I Have To Manipulate This

Really Now

Should I be finding this in the office printer? The link will ask you if you want to print, hit cancel. Avoids the ads and some irritating formatting and javascript.

Comics vs. Cool

Yes, this supervillain in disguise - or not in disguise, one or the other - is singing a Travelling Wilburys song which appears to be about smug assholes nearing death.

Is it possible that dreck written by middle-aged white guys now says more to me than it did when I was thirteen?

Schtik Shift

Town Hall once again features one-idea loser John Hawkins:

Top five cliches that liberals use to avoid real arguments

Look at that mug.



You may recall John Hawkins from such classic thought-avoidance columns as "Four Ways to Insert"—

No wait, it's Jonah Goldberg! Writing in The Washington Post! Mercy me, I have been hornswoggled.

Look at that mug.



Let me now list the 5IVE CLICHÉS so we can pretend we're not making a scurrilous ad hominem argument and in fact dealt seriously with a whole bunch of intellectual somethings-or-other:

‘Diversity is strength’
‘Violence never solved anything’
‘The living Constitution’
‘Social Darwinism’
‘Better 10 guilty men go free . . .’

Dealing seriously with it: I figure that a mob of completely non-diverse black people should be able to beat the shit out of Jonah Goldberg and shove the constitution up his ass and castrate him for the sake of the gene pool and have a whole bunch of other guys put in jail for it.

Now: what's better than some third-rate column in which complaining via list substitutes for an idea?

A third-rate column Hawkinsing a book entitled The Tyranny of Clichés.

ALSO:

Jesus Christ.

ALSO ALSO:

I see I was beaten to this before I was awake.

ALSO ALSO ALSO:
The hideous John Hawkins for real:

7 Mistakes Women Make with Men

How to avoid unleashing the Hulk.

That site is coming in handy.



Here's #1:

1) Sleep with him too soon.

Okay, that's enough of that.

In Celebration

Don Surber:

After 7 years of blogging, I am quitting. I am exhausted. It was simply too much work. I am still employed by the Charleston Daily Mail and still writing editorial and columns and performing the sundry other tasks that go with any job.

Blogging was something extra. I loved blogging because I came in contact with readers directly. But over the past few months I realized I cannot continue doing both. I ain’t Superman.

Close enough:



This site is just full of silly things to appropriate.

This Day and Age

Via The Corner, video of unrepentant racist Pat Buchanan:

In this day and age, if you are not called some names and you have been in journalism as long as I have, then you probably have not said anything very much worthwhile in my judgment…. What I am is a heretic to the conventional wisdom as it moves further and further left and you are more and more outside. I mean my views in that book many of them would not even have been controversial had they been written a while ago.

Pat's in his 70s so I imagine that "a while ago" is somewhat more elastic than The Lovely Daughter's definition.

Look out Pat! The National Review just fired a couple of racists in a completely sincere attempt to gather amulets. Will The Corner's commentariat weigh in?

Pretty Smart

The past month has had a lot of this:



I can see him coming
He's walking down the highway
With his big boots on
And his big thumb out
He wants to get me
He wants to hurt me
He wants bring me down
But sometime later when I'm feel a little straighter
I will come across a stranger
Who'll remind me of the danger
And then I'll run him over
Pretty smart on my part
Find my way home in the dark

Also:

Little More Than Intuition

What does the infamous author of the 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs John J. Miller have to say about John Dos Passos?

Dos Passos was one of the best-known novelists of his day, though he is almost forgotten now. I have a theory about him, based on little more than intuition: His political turn from Left to Right, which began in the 1940s and perhaps culminated in his support for Barry Goldwater in 1964, resulted in his failure to win a Nobel Prize in Literature and, perhaps more importantly, compelled liberal professors to remove him from reading lists and course syllabi. Carr’s biography does not address this subject–in fact, it seems unaware of the possibility–but I’m halfway convinced. A couple of years ago, we put his book Midcentury on our list of ten great conservative novels.

God damn those liberal elitist censors.

Togetherness

Ben Shapiro gives Barney Frank the smackdown:

"Government," says Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., "is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together." This, of course, is eminently untrue -- we do plenty of things together that don't involve the government, thank God. One can only imagine how dull and dreary our sex lives would be if they had to run through a DMV-style bureaucracy.

HA. The joke is slightly lessened if we acknowledge that there are a few people who have to wait in a long line to get needs like that taken care of, but well-spotted young Ben. Do go on:

But this foolish liberal meme has value. It does carry a grain of truth: government represents us. Without us, there is no government. More to the point, without our money, there are no government programs.

Aha! There is government and it does stuff. Also well-spotted. What can be done with this grain of truth? A grain is a seed, right? And from tiny acorns mighty oaks grow:

The truth is that capitalism, not government, is the name of the things we choose to do together. I choose to pay somebody to wash my car; that person chooses to wash my car in exchange for the cash.

Stupid Barney Frank.

The rest of the column is about how Sandra Fluke should do Ben's laundry. No really.

Lines

You May Now Stop Believing

Here are my tax dollars at work:



The CBC folks in the building downtown show Vancouver games in a basement studio during the playoffs, and there they get people to sing songs by Americans. There was also a version of this which I should not have linked to. Sorry. The Indonesian and Pakistani acquaintances seemed to do okay with both the game and the hideous music.

I give nearly zero shits about hockey, but I went along to placate others and wound up watching an entire hockey game for the first time since...I dunno. Ever? Maybe there was a Canada Cup series in which I paid attention. It's actually not a bad game as far as suspense goes, so good for you if you like it. Myself, I watched for Peter Puck (shown dancing in the above video) when I was little:



Then the game would come on and I'd go do something else. When pressed by my peers I would claim to like the Flyers because they beat people up.



There was, until recently, one rooting interest: the destruction of the downtown Sears. So fuck you Canucks, I sat through an entire game PLUS OVERTIME for nothing. No riots this year.

To round out the CanCon here are some early beneficiaries of radio stations being forced to play the substandard from the general era in which I paid attention to hockey because other people cared. Gee whiz, I thought this one was really dirty.



█

Jonah the Socialist

Hey look!



Well.

Jonah being Jonah, the writer linked to is Brian Resnick, not from 1932, who points to the writing of Nicolas Fairweather on Hitler. You should visit the Fairweather link: the 10 points Fairweather lists in his summary of Hitler represent TEN GOALS THE SOCIALIST OBAMA IS PURSUING RIGHT NOW! Or something. Jonah's link is a preaching-to-the-brainwashed kind of proof: unless you're out of your fucking mind you may see some of the ten things contradicting Jonah's vision of whatever it is his readers are helping him envision when he gets back from walking the dog.

I am, compared to young Jonah the hip South Park conservative, sort of a fuddy duddy, but should it be telling that Jonah's link in his original post ends with "#.T5J_eXhOKw0.twitter"? I mean, has he read the story? Or maybe someone tweeted it to him with a hearty "OMG UR RIGHT!" and he passed it on. Possibly, he saw point 4 listed in the Resnick post - His concern for social betterment ('true Socialism') as a necessary prerequisite to the acceptance of his ideals by the masses. - and thought "AHA! TRUE SOCIALISM! THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT'S WHAT!" and read no further. Perhaps I am just unkind and unhip and everybody gets their news from Twitter, and then does their damndest to read it with the kind of care and attention to detail I could never muster in the service of assembling vast amounts of noble and important scholarship.

The end of Fairweather's essay:

This new party Nazi, or Fascist, it is commonly called is 'National' because Hitler's fundamental ideal is nationalism. It is 'Socialist' (in Hitler's own meaning of the word) because he saw that the people would have to be made comfortable before they would listen to his gospel. It is 'German' because his national aspirations are for Germans only. It is a 'Laborers' party because Hitler intended to appeal particularly to the laboring masses.

Know WHO ELSE has his own meaning for words?

Nature Hates You

33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed in you.

17. This Rabbit
This rabbit wants the best for you but honestly isn't sure if you even want the best for yourself right now.

Reprisals

One of the things I'd never figured out about JanusNode was how "RepriseTextDNA" worked. I think I've got it and it's simultaneously more and less powerful than I thought, in the JanusNode way. Due to combinations of unexpected behaviours, slight but meaningful changes to the code on the author's part and bad coding by yours truly, I think I finally get it.



So, here's my little set of testing files. If you have a named folder inside the TextDNA folder and you start up your JanusNode that folder will appear in the main drop down folder, and when you click Janus to write text it'll process the text file named after the folder first. The only line in that file is this one (and note that every line that starts with "Subject" is a single line.):

Subject(Tester) < loadTextDNAfile("0Tester") > < chooseTextDNA(title1) >

This loads the second file in the folder, 0Tester, and chooses a line (title1) to start with. Multiple files are a necessity if you have a starting place in mind: JanusNode is built to be capricious and will choose any goddamned line it pleases unless you force it to do things differently. One line, one instruction will make it do one thing. On to 0Tester, then, and this batch of nonsense:

Subject(title1) < assign(Chooser,"100,200") > < chooseTextDNA(test1) >
Subject(test1) < RepriseTextDNA(Chooser) > < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(test2) < RepriseTextDNA(Chooser) > < chooseTextDNA(DKW1) >
Subject(DKW1) "Your mother is still a whore." < chooseTextDNA(test1) >
Subject(100) "fuck"
Subject(100) "that"
Subject(100) "shit" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(100) "asshole" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(200) "fluffy" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(200) "bunnies" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(200) "love" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >
Subject(200) "smiles" < chooseTextDNA(test2) >

We'll get to the inherent wrongness some may spot in a sec. "Subject(title1)" loads up a variable called "Chooser" with either "100" or "200" and then moves on to "Subject(test1)". There's where we took a stab at < RepriseTextDNA(Chooser) >. Initially, because it was called "reprise" I thought it was going to be a way to store a line of already-used TextDNA and the documentation is somewhat baffling, referring to incomplete examples that don't exist. C'est la vie. So I banged away at it, wondering why I wasn't getting repetition out of the thing, examined the Robot Johnson files, and discovered that it wasn't doing that either; repeated lines (with variations) were coded in. SO, back to the manual to Actually Read The Sentences Properly and we find out that < RepriseTextDNA(Chooser) > is not really different from < chooseTextDNA(title1) >, it's just that the subject line chosen can be assigned from a variable, and "reprise" is an eccentric name for the function. Hooray! That can still lead to some ferociously complicated stuff, but let's check the output of this one:

shit fuck Your mother is still a whore. Asshole shit fuck Your mother is still a whore. That that Your mother is still a whore. That shit shit asshole asshole that Your mother is still a whore. That shit fuck Your mother is still a whore. That that Your mother is still a whore. Shit fuck Your mother is still a whore.

OR

bunnies smiles smiles smiles bunnies love smiles fluffy smiles fluffy fluffy bunnies love smiles smiles smiles bunnies fluffy love love fluffy fluffy love

So, when "assign" grabs "100" you get JanusPottyMouth, when it grabs "200" you get JanusFluffyBunny. Which is cheatable in other ways, but they're longer (multiplying instances of lines and files). So now I have these ideas around villanelles.

Note that due to various problems getting my shit together I was getting no output and tried everything and ended up DOING IT RONG: the "< chooseTextDNA(test2) >" in most of the 100 and 200 subject lines is there because of that, and therefore the 200 subject lines keep doubling back before the execution of DKW1, thus keeping fluffy bunnies loving and smiling. Or so you would think.

smiles bunnies bunnies love love love bunnies Your mother is still a whore. Smiles bunnies smiles fluffy love love fluffy smiles love love bunnies love fluffy bunnies fluffy fluffy

It just does its own thing sometimes.

Home Sweet Home

Over at Town Hall, Charles Payne quotes a Great Book:

Final Paragraphs of Candide
Voltaire

The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable design and set themselves to exert their different talents. The little piece of ground yielded them a plentiful crop. Cunegund indeed was very ugly, but she became an excellent hand at pastrywork: Pacquette embroidered; the old woman had the care of the linen. There was none, down to Brother Giroflee, but did some service; he was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss used to, now and then, say to Candide:

"There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts."

"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."

Here is what he gathers from Candide:

After a rip roaring adventure that saw love and heartbreak, war and death, and wealth beyond imagination, the characters in Candide decided life was so much sweeter in a commune existence where everyone pulled together their strengths to live the perfect life.

And here is how this is applied to the present-day situation:

I get a lot of grief for bringing up Voltaire or more obscure figures from the European Enlightenment movement like Robert Owens and Malthus, but there is no doubt we are being ushered into an existence that was crafted by these dreamers of a modern day utopia.

They espoused the shared sacrifice and collectivism theme that is being sold to the American public.

Yes, this will be the most important election in our lifetime, because it could usher in an experiment that can only end in disaster. The masses may cheer the notion of wealth redistribution and the comeuppance of the rich (and not so rich) until they live in a world where jobs fade, incomes atrophy, and quality of life deteriorates.

Pictured below, a hippie.