It is a measure of the hypocrisy and endemic intellectual confusion of today’s elite university administrators that they will commonly lavishly fund identity houses for spooks, beaners, broads, Injuns, and queers where representatives of recognized and privileged minorities can hang out, party, and discuss all their historic grievances ad nauseam in their very own safe spaces, while the very same university administrators will denounce male-only private clubs as flawed with a “deeply misogynistic attitudes, reflected by the long-standing refusal of many clubs to admit women as members.†Meanwhile, we are supposed to assume that the Harvard Women’s Center is obviously totally free of even superficial “misanthropic” attitudes.
The Harvard Administration is busy these days twisting the arms of its final clubs to co-educate, holding over their heads the threat of banning undergraduate membership in single gender fraternities or clubs with the expulsion of anyone who dared to violate such a ban as a penalty.
The Wall Street Journal remarked negatively on Harvard’s attack on students’ freedom of association.
Harry Mount is frustrated to find that most tailors have succumbed to the two-button suit trend.
Last week I walked along Jermyn Street, spiritual home of the gentleman’s suit, and noticed something shocking. The jackets in the shop windows had lots of materials — tweed, cotton, wool — in all colours, shades and checks. But every single jacket had two buttons.
When did tailors get so boringly uniform? Why has the three-button suit — the classic style that dominated the 20th century — been wiped off the map? As a diehard three-button man, am I a fogeyish dinosaur, a walking Bateman cartoon: ‘The Man Who Wore a Three-Button Suit in the 21st Century’?
I seek solace (and a new three-button suit, in storm- grey, 13-ounce birdseye wool) from Tina Loder, a tailor for more than 30 years, and one of the few women tailors on Savile Row. ‘We’re going through a two-button cycle, just as we went through a three-button cycle a decade ago,’ she says. ‘Two buttons signal a casual informality and egalitarianism.’
But what if I don’t want to look casually informal and egalitarian?
Read the whole thing and insist on three-button suits.
Guyette & Deeter Auction, 22 April 2016, Lot 483, A turkey call hand-made circa 1950 by famous Outdoor Writer and Poet Laureate of South Carolina Archibald Rutledge.
Estimate: US $1,250.00 – US $1,750.00 — Opening Bid: $650.00
Archibald Rutledge was heir to Hampton Plantation, Poet Laureate of South Carolina, and the direct descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a governor of South Carolina, and a Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. He published numerous articles on hunting and the out-of-doors in Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and similar serial publications, as well as close to 40 books. He taught English for many years at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania.
Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang Ti of the Ch’in dynasty ‘burning all the books and throwing scholars into a ravine’ in order to stamp out ideological nonconformity after the unification of China in 221 BC.
Ian Johnson reviews, in the New York Review of Books, Sarah Allan’s Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts, a study of ancient Chinese manuscripts written on bamboo slips containing the views of heretofore-unknown Ch’in-suppressed Chinese philosophic schools completely outside the familiar Confucian and Taoist traditions, views favoring meritocratic rather than hereditary dynastic government.
As Beijing prepared to host the 2008 Olympics, a small drama was unfolding in Hong Kong. Two years earlier, middlemen had come into possession of a batch of waterlogged manuscripts that had been unearthed by tomb robbers in south-central China. The documents had been smuggled to Hong Kong and were lying in a vault, waiting for a buyer.
Universities and museums around the Chinese world were interested but reluctant to buy. The documents were written on hundreds of strips of bamboo, about the size of chopsticks, that seemed to date from 2,500 years ago, a time of intense intellectual ferment that gave rise to China’s greatest schools of thought. But their authenticity was in doubt, as were the ethics of buying looted goods. Then, in July, an anonymous graduate of Tsinghua University stepped in, bought the soggy stack, and shipped it back to his alma mater in Beijing. …
The manuscripts’ importance stems from their particular antiquity. Carbon dating places their burial at about 300 BCE. This was the height of the Warring States Period, an era of turmoil that ran from the fifth to the third centuries BCE. During this time, the Hundred Schools of Thought arose, including Confucianism, which concerns hierarchical relationships and obligations in society; Daoism (or Taoism), and its search to unify with the primordial force called Dao (or Tao); Legalism, which advocated strict adherence to laws; and Mohism, and its egalitarian ideas of impartiality. These ideas underpinned Chinese society and politics for two thousand years, and even now are touted by the government of Xi Jinping as pillars of the one-party state.
The newly discovered texts challenge long-held certainties about this era. Chinese political thought as exemplified by Confucius allowed for meritocracy among officials, eventually leading to the famous examination system on which China’s imperial bureaucracy was founded. But the texts show that some philosophers believed that rulers should also be chosen on merit, not birth—radically different from the hereditary dynasties that came to dominate Chinese history. The texts also show a world in which magic and divination, even in the supposedly secular world of Confucius, played a much larger part than has been realized. And instead of an age in which sages neatly espoused discrete schools of philosophy, we now see a more fluid, dynamic world of vigorously competing views—the sort of robust exchange of ideas rarely prominent in subsequent eras.
These competing ideas were lost after China was unified in 221 BCE under the Qin, China’s first dynasty. In one of the most traumatic episodes from China’s past, the first Qin emperor tried to stamp out ideological nonconformity by burning books. … Modern historians question how many books really were burned. (More works probably were lost to imperial editing projects that recopied the bamboo texts onto newer technologies like silk and, later, paper in a newly standardized form of Chinese writing.) But the fact is that for over two millennia all our knowledge of China’s great philosophical schools was limited to texts revised after the Qin unification. Earlier versions and competing ideas were lost—until now.
Then leftist W.H. Auden, paying valedictory tribute to the reactionary William Butler Yeats in 1939, condescendingly conceded that Kipling’s literary merit gained him forgiveness for his Imperialist views:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Columbia graduate Katherine Trendacosta, night editor of io9, writing in 2016 is a lot less tolerant than was W.H. Auden back then.
Ms. Trendacosta decisively warns potential viewers of Disney Movie’s “The Jungle Book” (2016) that “Rudyard Kipling Was a Racist Fuck and The Jungle Book Is Imperialist Garbage.”
We are currently in the 21st century. We are in the second decade of the 21st century and there are not one, not two, but three Jungle Book movies on the horizon. And that means that it’s time to remind everyone that Rudyard Kipling was a piece of racist, imperialist trash. …
[There is] inherent racism and imperialism baked into The Jungle Book. And the argument about when the book was written and by whom doesn’t excuse either Disney or Warner Bros. from making adaptations of it in the 21st century. Unless these movies are loaded with historical context, or are subversive critiques of Kipling, they’re still adapting, for entertainment, a story that has fundamental issues. …
I’m not saying that Kipling should be censored, but I am saying that he cannot be presented without context. There are messages in The Jungle Book that are very hard to remove. Hell, Disney managed to add to the problems in the 1960s when it added a character called King Louie, who is widely seen as a racist caricature of black people. (Kipling’s book has monkeys, which are the worst of the animal lot, being incapable of having government and only able to mimic others without a decent culture of their own.)
And, at the end of the day, we’re still left with a story where a white person exoticizes a country and its people. How does this idea pass muster in 2016?
I find, to my amazement, that I now live in a world in which a graduate of an elite university is (apparently) unable to read “The Jungle Book,” a tremendously lovable children’s classic, with appreciation or enjoyment because she finds the author’s world-view and politics ideologically offensive.
Ms. Trendacosta does not actually find it necessary to review the Disney cartoon. She considers it sufficient to indict the author of the book on which, I expect, the animated feature is very loosely based, and to heap abuse on him and the original book.
I am frankly more than a little skeptical as to whether this reviewer has ever actually read “The Jungle Book.” She is probably, in reality, just applying political taxonomy based on a glance at the Wikipedia plot summary and an on-line political critique by Edward Said she found somewhere. Had she really read the book, I have to believe that she would speak differently.
Apart from this reviewer’s manifest unfamiliarity with, what the late Susan Sontag would have referred to as, the erotics of the reading experience of “TJB,” I was myself struck by this writer’s total reliance upon petitio principii, “the assumption of the initial point.” It never remotely occurs to Ms. Trendacosta that she is under any obligation to offer arguments against Imperialism or the late Rudyard Kipling’s belief in the superiority of British culture and institutions to those indigenous to India. Her own perspective is totally absolute and goes without saying, and if you were to violate it by thought crime, one gets the impression that you’d be lucky to get off being merely humiliated and ostracised. You should really be immediately taken out and shot.
io9 is a techie geek sort of blog, the kind of blog that reviews games, software developments, and nerd culture sorts of things, Marvel comics, Star Wars, Game of Thrones. It is depressing and alarming to find the likes of io9 infested by Social Justice Warrior-types, too illiterate to have ever read “The Jungle Book,” but ideologically intolerant and arrogant enough to denounce it anyway.
The 30+% of the Republican base’s enthusiasm for Donald Trump is, by any standard, an extraordinary national political development. A lot of people have tried to explain what’s going on here. Rush Limbaugh, who is always an intelligent commentator, I think, yesterday did a better job than most.
I’ll just tell you, the ones I know who are for Trump, some of them are reluctantly for Trump. Some of them are adamantly for Trump. … The first reason — and not in any priority here — but they just have had it with the Republican Party, call it the establishment or whatever. They just lost total confidence. The last seven years there has been no opposition to the things the Democrat Party has done that have wrought, tremendous, real, measurable, demonstrable damage and change, for the worse, to this country.
The cultural depravity that’s going on and being normalized is one thing. The economic destruction. There’s no economic growth. There can’t be. The government is taking all of the growth and absorbing it. It’s getting bigger. The private sector cannot create enough growth to keep up because it’s getting smaller and smaller, and 94 million Americans in it are not even working. So there is no GDP gain of any substance, and that is maddening. It is frustratrating. These people all have kids and grandkids. And government is not where fortunes are made. Well, see, if you’re Solyndra, if you’re GE, if you’re a corporation engaging in corporate cronyism with government, you can make a fortune, and even some individuals can do it.
But for the most part the way it’s always been done is the tried-and-true way defined as the American dream. That’s getting more and more limited as time goes on because the economy is shrinking because the government’s taking. This worries people tremendously. And it’s not, by the way, folks, it’s not that they think Trump — I want to be very clear about this — it’s not that they think Trump is eminently qualified.
They just have had it with these so-called experts trying to run everything and screwing everything up, from the economic system to the health care system to targeting private sector industries as the enemies of America, they’ve had it, they’re fed up with it. Not to mention immigration and what’s happening to the demographic makeup of the country. It’d be one thing if this were happening with controlled assimilation and the definitive American culture that there’s always been was being maintained and sponsored and grown. But it’s not. It’s being eroded, on purpose and by design. And the Republican Party’s not lifting a finger to stop it and, in fact, in many ways wants to join in it when it comes to immigration.
So they’re fed up. They’ve been told one too many times to hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.
I’d say myself that no one expected George W. Bush to fritter away his own, the Republican Party’s, and the Conservative Movement’s national prestige and good name by taking far too long to win a decisive victory in the Middle East while sitting there passively and letting all his (and America’s) domestic adversaries make mincemeat of both his credibility and the American Cause. No one expected the democrats to successfully manufacture and run an international Pop Star for the presidency, and no one expected the bottom to drop out of the real estate and securities markets just over a month before the election. No one expected either that Barack Obama would intransigently insist on taking a couple of large steps toward European-style Socialism even at the cost of prolonging recession.
Everyone blames the GOP “Establishment” for failing to stop all of this, but everyone obviously fails to recognize that Republican senators and congressmen tend to be either idealistic theorists of political philosophy or down-home Rotarians and Elks. Democrats, OTOH, tend to be demoniacal revolutionary fanatics or mutant alien carnivorous life-forms bent on clawing their way to wealth and power at any cost. Republicans tend to behave honorably and respect customs, rules, and precedents. Democrats treat every significant contest as a no-holds-barred, total war, damn-everything-but-winning! struggle between the forces of Light and Eternal Darkness. They fight harder and much more professionally, uninhibited by honor, rules, consistency, or decency. It’s difficult for normal and decent people to behave the way they do, and we consequently tend to lose more often.
Everyone blaming the “Establishment” also fails to recognize that the democrats are backed up every inch of the way by the Iron Triangle of Academia, Media and Entertainment, and (generally) the Courts. If Republicans try fighting on the budget, the press will scream that those Republican bastards are shutting down the government, denying the veteran his healthcare, granny her Social Security check, and our children their vacation trip to Yosemite Park. If Republicans take some kind of stand against public recognition and celebration of perversion, they will be vilified as monsters of intolerance the length and breadth of the land by the liberal press, their teachers will turn their children against them, and –before very long– the courts will overturn anything they did.
The truth of the matter is that we have skilled and effective enemies with tremendous resources who are fully and totally in control of Academia; the high ground of fashion, culture, and communication; and commonly the Judicial System as well. When our Establishment has one house of Congress, and they have all that they have plus the Executive Branch in the hands of a determined and ethically-uninhibited adversary, we are not going to have a lot of power. Even adding the Senate but lacking a veto-proof majority in the upper house still leaves us in no position to do all the things those angry voters wish Republicans had done.
The anger is understandable, but it rests ultimately on the foundation of a lack of understanding, on low-information.
Dan Greenfield contrasts the barbarous, vigorous, and decadent stages of civilization in another of his superb must-read essays.
The decadent civilization has a million laws which it applies selectively. Its universal laws, inherited from a vigorous civilization, are buried between equivocation. Decadents don’t believe in objective truths and so they cannot have universal laws. Instead they mire them in so many legalisms as to be meaningless. The laws must be interpreted by a specialized caste. Everyone is always in violation of some obscure law. Life depends on a lawless dispensation from the law. Justice is impossible. Corruption is mandatory. The only way for the decadent civilization to function is to bypass its own safeguards through corruption, black markets and lobbying. This is true in all things.
The crucial task of the law is interpretation that keeps everyone from constantly being punished. This task is accomplished by lawyers, lobbyists and the politicians who are constantly adding more laws to fix the interpretations in the old laws creating a complex mass of contradictory information.
This holds true in every other area of decadent life.
Right now, a lot of people are eager to embrace the barbarian (Donald Trump) precisely because at an instinctive level they perceive him, with all his faults, representing an alternative to the decadence of our current elite culture, and they are ready to jump over the cliff to escape the latter.
