Binders full of PC thought

The New Neo Posted on by

This piece by Jonathan Chait that appeared in New York Magazine has become the talk of the internet. It’s about the overwhelming monster that insistence on PC thought has become, which is apparently alarming even the liberal Chait.

He’s not alone:

…[O]ne professor at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights; she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma ”” or, more consequentially, violating her school’s new sexual-harassment policy ”” merely by carrying out the traditional academic work of intellectual exploration. “This is an environment of fear, believe it or not,” she told me by way of explaining her request for anonymity. It reminds her of the previous outbreak of political correctness ”” “Every other day I say to my friends, ”˜How did we get back to 1991?’”…”

But it would be a mistake to categorize today’s p.c. culture as only an academic phenomenon. Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.

I would say to all those liberals who are surprised and disturbed at how far this has gone: what on earth did you think was going to happen? Do the words “slippery slope” mean anything to you? Do you understand why academic freedom is so prized? Do you appreciate that it is not everyone’s right—or really, anyone’s right—to demand not to be “triggered” or upset by the speech of others?

And do you understand that this didn’t start around 1991? That may be when you began to notice it and find it offensive, but that’s probably because it may have been when the attackers stopped attacking only those you found offensive and started to attack those you didn’t (maybe even to attack you).

And it’s not just the “the more radical members of the left” who do this—it’s most liberals these days. Chait spends quite a bit of time trying to deny this last fact—but very few of today’s “liberals” defend the tenets of free speech in the way he seems to think they do. And apparently, he’s not always one of those defenders, either (for example, several writers have pointed out that Chait recently wrote an article saying that Republican AGW-deniers are “unhinged” and unqualified to hold public office).

In his anti-PC piece, Chait describes how PC-accusations poisoned an invitation-only Facebook women writer’s forum called “Binders Full of Women Writers” (his piece contains quite a few astounding quotes from the forum’s participants):

The name came from Mitt Romney’s awkwardly phrased debate boast that as Massachusetts governor he had solicited names of female candidates for high-level posts, and became a form of viral mockery. Binders was created to give women writers a “laid-back” and “no-pressure” environment for conversation and professional networking. It was an attempt to alleviate the systemic under­representation of women in just about every aspect of American journalism and literature, and many members initially greeted the group as a welcome and even exhilarating source of social comfort and professional opportunity. “Suddenly you had the most powerful women in journalism and media all on the same page,” one former member, a liberal journalist in her 30s, recalls.

Binders, however, soon found itself frequently distracted by bitter identity-­politics recriminations, endlessly litigating the fraught requirements of p.c. discourse….

Who would have thunk it? How could those supportive, kindly, lovely, misunderstood, discriminated-against-but-extremely-worthy-of-renown women end up turning on each other in a tangle of competing and aggrieved special-interest identities?

When the raison d’etre of a large number of a group’s members starts boiling down to complaining about victimhood and hurt feelings, exchanges are going to degenerate into a competition for who’s got the most to complain about and who stands highest in the approved-victim hierarchy.

I remember long long ago, in the early days of ’60s and ’70s feminism, hearing some women (and even some men) claim that women were inherently nicer, better, kinder, and more spiritually evolved than men, and that the groups they formed would just naturally be nicer, better, kinder, and more spiritual than other groups. Well, anyone who believed that hadn’t yet spent a whole lot of time among women in groups.

[NOTE: Ace makes some good points about mobs and speech.]

Beyond creepy

The New Neo Posted on by

Want to be virtually preserved? These guys are trying to turn it into a business.

But that’s nothing compared to this:

What if, rather than simply picking and choosing what we want to capture in digital form, it was possible to record the contents of a mind in their entirety? This work is neither science fiction nor the niche pursuit of unreasonably ambitious scientists. Theoretically, the process would require three key breakthroughs. Scientists must first discover how to preserve, non-destructively, someone’s brain upon their death. Then the content of the preserved brain must be analysed and captured. Finally, that capture of the person’s mind must be recreated on a simulated human brain.

It gives me the willies. It also reminds me of a short story titled “The Diary of the Rose” by Ursula Le Guin, which appeared in her book The Compass Rose, one of my favorite collections.

This particular story is about a futuristic society in which a machine that images people’s minds and thoughts has been invented, and is being used for political indoctrination and control. People whose minds deviate too greatly from the PC norm are sent for a type of electroconvulsive therapy that destroys their memories and personality.

Here’s an excerpt of a conversation between the technician who operates the brain scanning machine (and who by this time has begun to realize that her purpose is not as therapeutic as she had heretofore thought) and a brilliant but irascible patient of whom she has grown quite fond:

In the scope room this morning I told him what I had been doing. His reaction was (as usual) not what I expected. He is fond of that old man and I thought he would be pleased. He said, “You mean they saved the tapes, and destroyed the mind?” I told him that all tapes are kept for use in teaching, and asked him if that didn’t cheer him, to know that a record of Arca’s thoughts in his prime existed: wasn’t it like his book, after all, the lasting part of a mind which sooner or later would have to grow senile and die anyhow? He said “No! Not so long as the book is banned and the tape is classified! Neither freedom nor privacy even in death? That is the worst of all!”

Measles and the demon-haunted world

The New Neo Posted on by

It is ironic that the success of modern vaccination programs against ancient scourges such as measles has been part of the reason parents today are so ignorant about what these diseases can do. A recent outbreak in California has demonstrated the effects of this lack of knowledge:

Researchers have found that past outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases are more likely in places where there are clusters of parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated…

In California, vaccine exemptions have increased from 1.5 percent in 2007 to 3.1 percent in 2013, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times.

That’s a surprisingly large number—but hey, this is California:

Researchers have found that those who refuse vaccines tend to share similarities.

“In general, they’re upper-middle to upper class, well-educated ”” often graduate school-educated ”” and in jobs in which they exercise some level of control,” Offit said. “They believe that they can google the word vaccine and know as much, if not more, as anyone who’s giving them advice.”

An enormous amount of damage was also done by fraudulent science in the guise of an influential 1998 article in Lancet claiming a link between vaccines and autism, that has since been proven to be a fraud and retracted. But the study’s author, Andrew Wakefield, couldn’t have done it alone:

But it couldn’t have been done without a willing and for the most part scientifically ignorant public, clamoring for easy answers to medical mysteries. In an editorial in BMJ, editor Fiona Godlee writes that the furor against vaccines continues to be “fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession”¦”

Measles is a serious disease. It is very serious in populations that have not been exposed to it—just ask the Hawaiians, or what’s left of them. Measles is more commonly a relatively mild disease contracted in childhood, but one that in a small but not inconsequential number of cases has very severe repercussions that can include the complication of encephalitis (see this for more details on why doctors are very concerned about measles outbreaks).

But many people cling to the notion that it is vaccinations that are the greater danger, and they will not be dissuaded by mere facts. I wrote about the phenomenon in 2008, and I’m sorry to say the problem is still as current as ever (see also Part II, here).

I will add that I have a dog in this race: personal experience. When I was young, virtually every child got measles as a rite of passage, along with mumps and chicken pox, and often German measles too. There were no vaccines for any of them. But it’s not primarily my own experience of having measles—which I remember only vaguely (I was around two or three)—that made the deepest impression. What was far more searing was the fact that, when I was two, my only cousin (age 6) had measles encephalitis and was so severely brain-damaged from it that he’d had to learn to walk and talk all over again.

He never quite made it back all the way, either; I remember him well after that. He remained partly paralyzed, walked with a strange gait, could not use one of his arms, had a great deal of emotional lability, and was subject to frequent seizures. When I was six he died of complications of the disease.

That is the sort of thing a child is unlikely to forget.

Well, the weather report may have been in error for New York City…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but it’s been spot on for much of New England.

Boston has already gotten almost 2 feet, for example, and it’s not over yet. Airports are closed. Nantucket is without power, as is much of the Boston south shore, and plenty of other New England areas are experiencing the same thing.

I still have power (for now). But looking out the window I see whiteout, high winds and snow coming down hard, as it’s been since some time in the wee hours of the morning—although “down” isn’t quite the word because the snow’s blowing at a sharp angle. It’s hard to tell how much snow we have because of drifts, but it’s very substantial.

Your intrepid blogger is cozy and warm, however. For now, for now…

Obama the shark

The New Neo Posted on by

And middle-class savings smells like blood in the water to him, according to Glenn Reynolds:

When a government is desperate for cash, it goes after the middle class, because that’s where the money is. Yes, the rich are rich, but the middle class is far more numerous. And this has raised other fears. As McArdle also notes, if 529 plans aren’t sacrosanct, what about Roth IRAs? People have worried for a while that the government might go after retirement accounts as another source of income ”” to the point that there have even been calls for Congress to make such grabs explicitly off limits. But, ultimately, no one is safe, as what is enacted by one Congress can be repealed by another.

The truth is, in our redistributionist system politicians make their careers mostly by taking money from one group of citizens that won’t vote for them and giving it to another that will. If they run short of money from traditional sources, they’ll look for new revenue wherever they can find it. And if that’s the homes and savings of the middle class, then that’s what they’ll target.

Obama running out of other people’s money? Not quite yet:

The calm before…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the storm.

This storm is being hyped as the storm of the century. I’ve been in quite a few of those, but I guess they were in the previous century. So we’ll see.

I really, really, realy hope not to lose power. But I think it’s likely that I will.

[NOTE: Forecast here.]

[ADDENDUM: They give names to winter storms these days, and this one is called Juno. Here’s quite a bit about the Roman goddess Juno. Metaphoric significance?]

So, what’s up with Sarah Palin?

The New Neo Posted on by

Long-time readers here know I’ve never joined the Palin-bashing. I’ve always thought she was pretty smart, and that most of the negative hype about her was exaggeration and/or outright lying, based not only on political animus but also on class snobbery and a profound cultural gap.

That said, I’ve always acknowledged that articulation and gravitas are not her strong suits. Ever since Palin quit the governorship of Alaska, she’s lost gravitas rather than gained it. I always figured that was her decision to make, and that she had pretty much left electoral office behind in favor of becoming a media personality, a gadfly, and backer of people in the Republican Party who agree with her conservative point of view. And that’s fine.

Lately there’s been a lot of muttering in the press about a recent statement of Palin’s that she’s thinking of running in 2016. There was an ambiguous and teasing quality to it, though; was she baiting the press?:

Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential nominee, said she stood by comments she made Thursday in Las Vegas to ABC News, where she first expressed enthusiasm about potentially competing for the Republican presidential nomination.

“I am. As I said yesterday, I’m really interested in the opportunity to serve at some point,” Palin said Friday, as former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a potential 2016 rival, looked on…

Palin said, “It is a significant step, of course, for anyone to publicly announce that they’re interested. Who wouldn’t be interested? Who wouldn’t be interested when they have been blessed with opportunities to speak about what is important to this country and for this country?”

Still, Palin said that she is not yet ramping up a national political operation. Instead, Palin said, she is contemplating her political future and does not feel rushed to make a final decision.

Sounds to me like she’s not running. I hope she’s not running, just as I hope Romney’s not running. There are plenty of new, fresh, conservative Republican faces with a proven track record and none of Palin’s baggage (same for Romney’s baggage). Yes, the new ones have their own baggage, and that baggage will be taken full advantage of by the MSM, of that you can be sure. But I’d much rather see someone like Scott Walker—who seems to have given a galvanizing speech at the Freedom Summit in Iowa—run. Walker is that rarity, a conservative Republican with a proven track record in a blue state, who’s been through the fire and shown true political grit.

Speaking of speeches and the Freedom Summit (although as I’ve said many times I don’t like to listen to political speeches and haven’t watched the Freedom Summit ones), apparently even Palin-supporters thought hers was pretty rambling and incoherent.

Did anyone here watch both Walker’s and Palin’s speeches? What did you think?

La Ronde of Netflix

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m one of those people Netflix must love.

I have the cheapest type of account, it’s true, so they don’t get too much money from me per month. But they often get it for doing relatively little or nothing at all. Although I periodically watch movies and return them fairly quickly, I also go through long arid stretches when I can’t seem to find the time or the inclination to watch a thing, and that DVD they’ve sent me (I still use that system because my TV is too old for streaming) just sits on counter or desk silently reproaching me with my shameful waste of $7.99 a month.

I have odd taste in movies. I tend to gravitate towards obscure and/or foreign ones, mostly old. This time I had gotten the French 1950 movie “La Ronde” last summer and I only got around to watching it two nights ago, which is some some sort of record even for me. It had been so long since I put the movie in my queue (love that British word!) that by the time I saw it I could no longer remember where I’d heard of it or why I’d found whatever was said about it to be compelling enough to order it.

It’s an odd, odd flick. Did I like it? Not exactly, but sort of. It was—one of my favorite words—interesting. Although it was made in France in 1950 and based on an Austrian play from 1900, it’s still a bit shocking in its cynical treatment of human sexual interactions.

And that’s pretty much all the movie is about—human sexual interactions, albeit portrayed in a stylized manner (no nudity whatsoever, for example). Each sexual encounter is represented by a fade-to-black and some characteristic waltz music, and sometimes there are clever cinematic devices such as when a carousel breaks down to show a gentleman having a bit of trouble with his own—er—apparatus, or a narrator character taking a strip of movie film and cutting it up to censor the sex scene that has just been implied previously.

The movie features all sorts of innovative camera shots and angles, I’m told, but that’s not the sort of thing I ever notice or appreciate. I’m there for the story and the acting, and any film technique is secondary or tertiary or not even on my radar screen. In “La Ronde,” for example, I was floored by the stunning youth and beauty of Simone Signoret, who was in her late 20s at the time but looked even younger, but whom I had only known from 1965’s “Ship of Fools” where, although only in her mid-40s, she had played a burnt-out case opposite Oskar Werner (the movie was pretty bad, but I remember Signoret and Werner as touching, delicate, and fascinating, and I immediately fell in love with Werner).

Max Ophuls, director of “La Ronde,” was one of many Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who enriched the cinema. The movie was based on the work of the Viennese (and also Jewish) Arthur Schnitzler*, and had been written only for his friends and considered way too scandalous to produce at the time (1900). Later it was given a performance that caused a huge outcry:

Schnitzler’s play was not publicly performed until 1920, on 23 December 1920 in Berlin and 1 February 1921 in Vienna. The play elicited violent critical and popular reactions. Schnitzler suffered moralistic and personal attacks that became virulently anti-Semitic. Schnitzler was attacked as a Jewish pornographer and the outcry came to be known as the “Reigen scandal.” Despite a 1921 Berlin court verdict that dismissed charges of immorality against the play, Schnitzler withdrew La Ronde himself from public production in German-speaking countries.

The play remained popular in Russia, Czechoslovakia, and especially in France, where it was adapted for the cinema twice, in 1950 and again in 1964. In 1982, forty years after Arthur Schnitzler’s death, his son Heinrich Schnitzler released the play for German-language performances.

Not till 1982!

As I said, by modern standards the sex in the film is non-existent, merely implied. But sex is the basic theme, and the people in it are portrayed as highly cynical about their “love” lives. If one person is in love the other isn’t. If both are in love it is rare and doesn’t last long. Often there is an exploiter and an exploited, or even two exploiters. Not exactly my cup of tea, but as I said—interesting. And compared to today’s films, really quite refined.

Next on my Netflix list: “Boyhood.” I think I’ll try to take less than six months to get around to watching it.

[*NOTE: I had never heard of Schnitzler before the other evening when I watched the film. Nevertheless, in one of those odd coincidences that life seems loaded with, after seeing the film I settled in to read some more of Victor Klemperer’s Nazi-era diaries, and promptly encountered a passage in which Klemperer related a humorous anecdote he’d heard about—Arthur Schnitzler!]

It’s probably the very least of Obama’s flaws, but…

The New Neo Posted on by

…really, the guy seems to be highly addicted to nicotine.

I would guess he still smokes cigarettes in private, too, “occasionally” or even more frequently, because his need for Nicorette gum when he can’t go near a ciggy seems to be profound. The latest example is the uproar his gum-chewing is causing during his visit to India, but it’s happened before.

Of course, some people quit smoking entirely and yet retain their dependency on Nicorette for years; it’s not an uncommon phenomenon, and it doesn’t seem to be much of a health hazard. So it’s possible that cigarettes really are a thing of the past for Obama and yet his need for nicotine remains powerful. But whatever’s going on with the president and his love affair with Nicotine, the overwhelming need for the substance belies his image of coolness, self-control, and of course is not especially PC (particularly if he’s still smoking cigarettes). The gum-chewing doesn’t gain him respect around the world, either. But the days of Obama and widespread world respect have long been over.

Being wrong

The New Neo Posted on by

I first started reading blogs some time around 2002. I immediately liked them, although I no longer remember the first blogs I found and I suspect most of them are now defunct. I liked the bluntness, the honesty, the humor, and the comments sections, all so different from the newspapers that had been my major news sources previously.

I remember one of those original blogs had a joke that amused me mightily at the time. It went something like this: Hey, I think I know what’s wrong. We thought it was 9/11/2001, but actually we got the year backwards; it was really 1002.

The idea was that progress was an illusion, and that somehow through some terrible time warp or wormhole we’d been catapulted to the Middle Ages, or what used to be called the Dark Ages.

That was a joke, but not really a joke either. I’ve had occasion to think of it many times since. It seems to be a common thought among people who live in times of jarring transition.

For example, there’s this quote from a letter by Henry James, written the day after World War I (or “The Great War” as it was known prior to #II) began:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

You can feel James thinking how could I, how could we, have been so stupid, so wrong, about what we were living through and where the whole thing was going?

The style of the following excerpt is as different as different can be from that of Henry James. It’s more telegraphic and journalistic. But the sentiment is the same, although this time it’s from Victor Klemperer, diarist of the Third Reich, a converted Jew married to an Aryan woman and living in Dresden during the Hitler era. A scant two months after Hitler became Chancellor, Klemperer wrote:

Mood as before a pogrom in the depths of the Middle Ages…We are hostages. The dominant feeling…is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us…In fact I feel shame more than fear, shame for Germany. I have truly always felt a German. I have always imagined: The twentieth century and Mitteleurope was different from the fourteenth century and Romania. Mistake.

It’s that one short word that overwhelms me and creates that sock-in-the-gut feeling: “mistake.” I was wrong; wrong about something hugely important. Klemperer has no false pride—he realizes immediately the enormity of his error, and the error is hardly his alone. He was, after all, a professor (a position of particular prestige in Germany) who specialized in the literature of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, that “whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering…”

Klemperer, and the Reich’s, “abyss of blood and darkness” was just beginning, but Klemperer could clearly see where it was ultimately heading. He was wrong about the duration—he was underestimating the human capacity for both evil and for endurance (including his own endurance and that of his wife who, though sickly and depressed, survived the war and an astounding amount of suffering both petty and profound). But he was right that its fall “will bury us”—the Jews of Germany, and Germany itself as a bastion of culture and learning.

I have also known that feeling of “I was wrong about something extremely important.” My political change was based on a realization that I’d been wrong. More recently I’ve been wrong about what the American people will tolerate and accept in a president.

I wonder what else I’m wrong about.

[ADDENDUM: I just remembered another case of someone realizing they’d been wrong about something political and very, very important. It involves author Azar Nafisi, who originally supported the 1979 Iranian revolution and lived to regret it. The quote is from her book Reading Lolita in Tehran:

In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [the author’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence”¦I turned and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.]