Hence we are led directly to the corollary of progressivism, the shunning of a past that one views as utterly “anti-intellectual.” Progressivism fosters two of the major phobias of liberalism, stagnation and retrograde. Placed in an accusatory formula, the liberal finds refuge in the enthusiastic endorsement of societal reforms (presented as so many ‘advancements’) that only serve to feed their illusions of progress. Who cares about usefulness, justice, or benevolence regarding the changes that are being pushed? And who minds their absurdity? At the risk of invalidating liberal thought, one must change! One must change womanhood, one must change the TV station, one must change sexuality, clothing styles, teaching methods, ways of reading, cars, porno sites, cell phones, civilization … in all, from the moment that it is possible for such things to be still new.
For the liberal, new is the same as “good, ” new is the Triumph of Progress. There is no point in explaining to him that in their time, slavery and Zyklon B were also novelties, as well as apartheid, poisonous acids, thalidomide, the atomic bomb or the Khmer Rouge: if told as much, the liberal will have an immediate outburst and will brush away all that does not fit into his vision of “the meaning of history”, ascribing bad things to the rank of temporary errors or regrettable relapses into anti-intellectualism. He doesn’t see that the future can be clouded and that the changes to humanity have so often given birth to monsters.
“But let anyone born in 1926 try to stay home on a Saturday night in 1998 and listen to Dick Haymes singing ‘Those Little White Lies.’ Just have them do that, and then tell me afterwards if they have not understood at last the celebrated doctrine of the catharsis effected by tragedy.”
Maynard Keynes saying: “Hello, Sailor!” to Duncan Grant
Michael Cook described the hair-pulling, fingernails-clawing, Hell-hath-no-fury media reaction to a comment on Keynes’ economics by Niall Ferguson.
Conservative economic historian and media star Niall Ferguson touched a raw nerve this week with the gay lobby. He was addressing a gabfest of millionaire investors in California when he made an unscripted remark. It ran something like this:
“Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of ‘poetry’ rather than procreated.â€
This is about 40 words.
The response was as immediate and impassioned as North Korea’s threats to turn its southern neighbour into “a sea of flamesâ€.
The media artillery barrage moved in stages from simple outrage at the implication that gays were indifferent to future generations, to repudiations of Ferguson’s immediate and forthright apology, to sneers at his economic competence (the tail end of his “awesome arc of insanityâ€, according to Paul Krugman in the New York Times).
It culminated in the full Monty, a 7,800 word review by a professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City of Ferguson’s degeneracy, his dishonesty, his economic incompetence, his political conservatism, his documented homophobia dating back to 1995, and so much, much more.
The firepower lobbed onto Ferguson would have made Kim Jong-un proud.
But what exactly was the problem with what Ferguson said? Parsing his words – as reported by a very indignant reporter – he implied four things:
1. Keynes’s ideas were flawed. This is widely accepted by many economists today, certainly by those of a neoclassical bent. In fact, he was probably invited to the speak at the conference to dump on the Keynesian-inspired stimulus of which the Obama Administration is so proud.
2. Keynes was gay and not interested in children. There’s no disputing that Keynes was a homosexual, or at least a bi-sexual. He married at 42 and had no surviving children from his marriage to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Whether or not his heart melted at the thought of the pitter-patter of little feet is largely surmise.
3. Our care for the future comes through utility derived from our descendants. This is a standard economic assumption. Economists assume that everyone is selfish and only cares about his private consumption. In models of economies over time they assume that we care about the welfare of our children, our children’s children, and so on. Is this reasonable? Evolutionary biologists will tell you that it is. And it is reasonable from a Darwinian point of view to ask whether a homosexual economist would have as much interest in the welfare of future generations as an economist with a large family.
As British journalist Brendan O’Neill pointed out, there is one sense in which Keynes cared deeply about future generations. He was a fervent eugenicist and served as the director of the Eugenics Society in Britain from 1937 to 1944. None of the Ferguson’s critics mentioned this.
4. Keynes’s ideas were influenced by his sexual orientation. This point also cannot be known definitively, but it is hardly homophobic. Why wouldn’t our sexual orientation (whatever it is) influence how we think about the world? We all see and interpret the world around us through a theoretical lens.
In fact, politics at the moment is dominated by the notion of sexual orientation. Positions on big issues like the nature of marriage, on the limits of discrimination, on the role of government in enforcing human rights, on free speech are bound to be influenced by sexual orientation. Why should economic theories be exempt from the subtle influence of sexual orientation and sexual behaviour?
No, the vehemence of the reaction to Ferguson’s remarks has little to do with what he said. The real problem is the hyper-sensitivity of the gay community to the least slight.
The enormity of the reaction by the Hominterm’s representatives and allies in the media to Niall Ferguson’s basically conventional observation on the limited perspective associated with the culture of sexual perversity reveals just how much the truth stings.
The homosexual subculture has always had a recognizable air of sadness, of bitterness and melancholy associated with the knowing choice of futility, of perversity, of rejection of normal life and ordinary morality. Homosexuals have always partied furiously, plunging determinedly into the pursuit of sensual pleasure, precisely because they understand how limited a period of time they actually have.
Now, with political victory, with official patronage, protection, and formal certification that vice is even more privileged than virtue, within their grasp, a comment like Ferguson’s rudely breaks the spell of fantasy and self-delusion and spoils all the fun they have been having.
In Roermond, The Netherlands, the headstones of two members of a mixed Protestant-Catholic marriage manage to overcome strict 19th century religious divisions.
I can only sketch here the many other things that trouble me about Gatsby and its place in our culture. There is the convoluted moral logic, simultaneously Romantic and Machiavellian, by which the most epically crooked character in the book is the one we are commanded to admire. There’s the command itself: the controlling need to tell us what to think, both in and about the book. There’s the blanket embrace of that great American delusion by which wealth, poverty, and class itself stem from private virtue and vice. There’s Fitzgerald’s unthinking commitment to a gender order so archaic as to be Premodern: corrupt woman occasioning the fall of man. There is, relatedly, the travesty of his female characters—single parenthesis every one, thoughtless and thin.
I always enjoy a good rant, however wrongheaded it is.
The hippo who tried to kill me wasn’t a stranger – he and I had met before a number of times. I was 27 and owned a business taking clients down the Zambezi river near Victoria Falls. I’d been working this stretch of river for years, and the grouchy old two-ton bull had carried out the occasional half-hearted attack. I’d learned to avoid him. Hippos are territorial and I knew where he was most likely to be at any given time.
That day I’d taken clients out with three apprentice guides – Mike, Ben and Evans – all in kayaks. We were near the end of the tour, the light was softening and we were taking in the tranquillity. The solid whack I felt behind me took me by surprise.
I turned just in time to see Evans, who had been flung out of his boat, flying through the air. His boat, with his two clients still in it, had been lifted half out of the water on the back of the huge bull hippo.
There was a cluster of rocks nearby and I yelled at the nearest apprentice to guide everyone there, to safety. Then I turned my boat and paddled furiously towards Evans.
I reached over to grab his outstretched hand but as our fingers were about to touch, I was engulfed in darkness. There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf.
I was aware that my legs were surrounded by water, but my top half was almost dry. I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around – my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo’s snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.
I wriggled as hard as I could, and in the few seconds for which he opened his jaws, I managed to escape. I swam towards Evans, but the hippo struck again, dragging me back under the surface. I’d never heard of a hippo attacking repeatedly like this, but he clearly wanted me dead.
Hippos’ mouths have huge tusks, slicing incisors and a bunch of smaller chewing teeth. It felt as if the bull was making full use of the whole lot as he mauled me – a doctor later counted almost 40 puncture wounds and bite marks on my body. The bull simply went berserk, throwing me into the air and catching me again, shaking me like a dog with a doll.
Then down we went again, right to the bottom, and everything went still. I remember looking up through 10 feet of water at the green and yellow light playing on the surface, and wondering which of us could hold his breath the longest. Blood rose from my body in clouds, and a sense of resignation overwhelmed me. I’ve no idea how long we stayed under – time passes very slowly when you’re in a hippo’s mouth.
Canadian blogger Jon Rafman explores Google Street Views and selects screenshots of the most interesting and unusual scenes captured, like the (above) tiger roaming near a convenience store.
The original pictures are taken by Google’s fleet of hybrid electric automobiles, each carrying 9 cameras, hence Rafman’s web-site name: 9-eyes.com
One key weakness in his concept is the editor’s failure to link each image to its Google maps location.
If anyone doubted that the regime of political correctness in Great Britain, there is this story in the Telegraph to change his mind.
A Welsh woman has been made to pay compensation for using a racist slur against an English woman after calling her “an English cow”.
len Humphreys, 25, of Garndolbenmaen, near Porthmadog, pleaded guilty to racially aggravated harassment, after she branded Angela Payne, who had an affair with her father, an “English cow.â€
The court in Prestatyn in North Wales heard that Humphreys levelled the insult at Ms Payne when she went to her house in Rhyl to collect some of her father’s property and told her : “Leave well alone, you English cow”.
For Angela Payne it was the final straw, said prosecutor James Neary, as Humphreys’s mother had previously been warned by the police about her conduct. The court heard Humphreys had also called the victim other names previously.
Andrew Hutchinson, defending, said that Humphreys’s parents had been married for 32 years but her father had then started the other relationship, going “backwards and forwards” between the two women. “Emotions were running high,” he explained.
Humphreys was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay Angela Payne £50 in compensation.
Someone is seriously supposed to be injured by the application of the term “English” as a pejorative? Absurd.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports that tyrannical efforts to stamp out fraternities at Trinity College may have backfired and led to the early departure of the revolutionary regime.
Trinity College President James Jones announced his intention to step down from his post in June 2014, one year before the end of his contract. Jones reported in the same email that Board of Trustees Chair Paul E. Raether will also leave the Trustees’ top position. Trinity’s two top leaders signaled their departures as student and alumni dissatisfaction is increasing over a new social code that violates Trinity’s promises of freedom of association and effectively bans fraternities and sororities through gender quotas and other measures. …
In October 2012, Trinity’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved the recommendations of a report by the Charter Committee for Building Social Community at Trinity College, including a new social code that will effectively eliminate fraternities, sororities, and other campus social organizations. Among the new requirements for such organizations are:
All social organizations must be recognized and approved by the college, and students are prohibited from participating in unrecognized social organizations. Students who associate with unapproved groups “will be subject to separation from the College.”
Social organizations may not be single-sex. “Trinity students,” the code states, “shall not be affiliated with national organizations that do not adhere to a coeducational philosophy.”
Quotas for gender parity in membership and leadership. By 2016, all fraternities and sororities must achieve 45% “minority gender” membership and 40% minority gender leadership. Organizations that fail to do so will be prohibited.
The new requirements are specifically targeted at Greek life on campus, as musical, athletic, and even academic and professional organizations are explicitly exempted.
Trinity also intends to seize the properties of organizations that do not comply with the new code, stating that the college will “establish a fair sale price for these assets with alumni owners and reassign them to another organization for the betterment of the College.”
