The Church of England defaced the interior of the historic Canterbury Cathedral with ugly graffiti. Which is a tautology because they are all ugly.
Here is how Reverend David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury, explains the reasoning behind the project:
There is a rawness which is magnified by the graffiti style, which is disruptive. It is unfiltered and not sanitised. This exhibition intentionally builds bridges between cultures, styles and genres.
Just the language itself couldn’t be any more neoliberal if the Reverend tried his reverendest to make it so. Disruptive? Honestly? Why should people come to church if even there they can’t escape the inane language of disruptive bridge-building between unfiltered cultures?
I regularly speak at the local community center for retirees. I love this audience because these are people who know a lot and I don’t have to describe everything from scratch. Engaged, knowledgeable, focused people.
This year, a very young person got the job of organizing the speaking calendar. I’m at the point of losing my temper, so I left the office to take a walk and breathe. She’s acting like I’m about to speak to a group of preschoolers. First, she suggested that I bring “homemade treats.” I reacted with horror, so she changed tack and is asking me to prepare “some fun, engaging activities” for the audience.
I have a long-standing relationship with the attendees of the community center. They’ve been inviting me as a speaker at least once a year since 2011. I always have great attendance, great reviews. But I don’t do fun activities or homemade treats. This is not how I position myself publicly. The idea is repellent.
I’m two seconds away from telling the young person to leave us oldsters to our own funless and treatless devices. Who even uses the word treats outside of the elementary school context?
People need to read Zygmunt Bauman. He described precisely this in 2000 as the difference between the solid and the liquid forms of capitalism. I still have my very first copy of Liquid Modernity with all the shocked ??? and !!! on the margins because I didn’t believe what he was saying. Then it all started to come true.
Here is a quote from political theorist Roger Foster that I used in my book:
In earlier, laissez-faire variants of capitalism, the entrepreneur symbolized an ideal of self-mastery, but also embodied the notion of sacrifice of self on behalf of duty, honor, and integrity. The entrepreneur’s economic success also served as a symbol of his virtue, evidenced by the capacity to subordinate immediate wants and needs to rational control and planning. In its neoliberal form, the figure of the entrepreneur is stripped of the vertical dimension of moral self-sacrifice, and accompanying notions of honor and duty. In its place, neoliberalism develops a notion of responsibility divorced from submission to collective ideas, as the responsibility for the management of one’s own life.
We still often talk as if we were living in the same form of capitalism that existed before the 1970s and we don’t. The leftist terrorism of the 1970s serves as the wrecking crew to open up space for neoliberalism. It was very successful.
An abyss will form between people who have limited intelligence, detachable body parts, and a flat inner world vs those who will have the discipline to develop a true depth and, most importantly, help their children develop it. Fake food, fake art, fake news, fake relationships and a life of raging, unschooled emotionality will await the former. An iron self-control will be required of the latter. The prize in this game will be remaining fully human.
Why, why do people insist on prattling moronically about religions they don’t remotely understand?
Do I express opinions on Hinduism or Buddhism? Never. Because I know nothing, and it would be presumptuous to opine.
Christianity built our world. Our Western world. It seems normal to us because that’s all we know. Fishes perceive the world as wet because that’s their world. Thankfully, fishes don’t write tweets because there’s already enough stupidity out there as it is.
The Christian civilization-building process was painful and difficult. There’s absolutely nothing easily commonsensical about Christian teachings. Even today, two thousand years after Jesus’s birth, there’s not a Christian in existence who isn’t struggling daily with following his teachings. It’s not easy or “basic”. It’s very, very hard. Back in Jesus’s time, what he had to say was beyond revolutionary. It was otherworldly.
Many people have this weird idea that Christianity is about perceiving yourself as vaguely nice. And since everybody thinks themselves to be exceptionally nice, that’s it, all that is left to do is to pout that others are not as nice. It’s of course a failing of the churches that stopped explaining the doctrine or requiring anything at all. Like colleges who admit everybody and hand out diplomas for anybody who deigns to pretend to attend.
I woke up at 5:45 am to make blini and have been going a mile a minute since then. Held a meeting, created the Fall schedule for the department, sent in the annual report, answered many emails, translated 4 documents, did a taping, went to Sam’s, cooked salmon two ways (diabetic and normal), folded laundry, did German, started packing for Spain, squeezed in an hour of reading…
Why, why didn’t I have all this energy when I was 25? Or 30? On a regular day back then, I did maybe 5% of what I do now. And there was no cooking, folding, husband, or child, so I should have been swimming in free time.
That’s an interesting question but it’s impossible to discuss because people get triggered.
People in primitive tribes have a completely different subjectivity from ours. They are people. But they are people in a very different way than we are people. Their subjectivity, their way of being who they are inside their minds is unreachable to us. And ours is to them. The idea of being traumatized belongs to our very Western sensibility. They idea of a child as we perceive it, ditto.
And it’s not just primitive tribes. Our fellow Westerners who lived 200 years ago also were completely different in the way they experienced themselves. Our children are less mature at 25 than theirs were at 10. And this is not a bad thing. Ours need a lot more room inside their minds. They need more time to grow into that room.
A subjectivity begins to form before birth. So a Western not even an 8-year-old but an infant absolutely does perceive an invasion into their genital area as traumatic because these children already have the kind of subjectivity where bodies are autonomous and highly individualized. Whether they remember it or can verbalize it is entirely beyond the point.
In the linked discussion, Hanania is the closest to the truth but he’s still off by a mile because he’s unaware that his entire conceptual framework of society versus individual is very contemporary Western.
Can you psychoanalyze a member of a primitive tribe? Of course, not. Because that part of me that gets psychoanalyzed when I go to an analyst is entirely absent from his mind. He doesn’t need it. He wouldn’t survive if he did. In the same way, he has parts of his mind that I don’t.
There’s no perspective, actually. This isn’t a book that offers an analysis. The author states from the start that he doesn’t want to take a position and he stays true to that, at least in the 80% of the book that I’ve read so far.
Days of Rage narrates what happened. It doesn’t evaluate or judge. The author is way to the Left compared to me, which I notice, for example, in his wholesale acceptance of the Left’s narrative of race relations in the US. But he abstains from offering any judgment. You could absolutely read the book and conclude that the Weathermen, the BLA, the SLA, and all the rest of them were completely justified in everything they did. Or you could conclude the opposite.
The value of the book isn’t in its perspective, which it pointedly avoids giving. It’s in the extraordinary amount of research that Burroughs did. You could find all this information yourself but you’d have to dedicate years to seeking out all the books, records, interviews, etc.
Some of the groups Burroughs describes are more interesting than others. I was bored by the chapters on Puerto Ricans and enjoyed the ones about the Weathermen a lot more. You might see it differently, of course. But please don’t worry that you’d get brainwashed into any system of beliefs by this book. Burroughs wanted to give a comprehensive narrative of what happened and he definitely achieved that.
Between 1981 and today, Qatar has given more than $6.3 billion to U.S. universities — making it the largest foreign donor to American higher education.
Why? Because it understands Mao: whoever educates the youth shapes the future.https://t.co/frahLW8CNe
Well, that was a major waste of money given that there’s only a handful of students in the whole country who know what Qatar is.
The idea that there are any Muslim, Arab or Qatari values represented in US higher ed is laughable.
People should stop looking for foreign influences and look closer to home. If Qatar never existed, would the US higher education be any less woke? Of course not. Then let’s stop wasting our time and concentrate on what is actually causing the problem.
I detest the fellow but here he’s right. The words gifted and talented should be eliminated altogether from elementary schools. Teachers who mention these words in school around such small children shouldn’t be working in education.
I’m saying this as somebody whose favorite author in elementary school was Theodore Dreiser and who could read him and write about him fluently in three languages. The absolute last thing I would have wanted at nine was to be called gifted and talented and streamed away from my very few friends into a freak class.
Thankfully, even my narcissistically afflicted mother was lucid enough to realize that it’s not OK to do that to a child and refused all attempts to gift-and-talent me into skipping a couple of grades.
“Yes, but what if she’s bored in class with regular kids?”
I was deathly bored in class. This helped me develop a rich inner life and now I’m never bored.
So yeah. Elementary school! These are tiny kids. They don’t need to prepare for the competitive workplace just yet.
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