Joe panders to the pro-Hamas crowd and praises their “passion”

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s how Biden reacted to a disruption from pro-Hamas demonstrators while he was speaking at a South Carolina church:

He acknowledges their “passion,” which puts me in mind of this old essay of mine on romanticism and terrorism, which begins with this Isaiah Berlin quote:

[Romantics] believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body …they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was for….

We on the right already know that Biden has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on the war in Gaza, based not on principles but on his pressing need to please both sides of his party – pro- and anti-Israel – prior to November 2024. It makes for a muddled and unreliable message to Israel and a weak and vulnerable one to the terrorists.

Nor does Biden explain how Israel can survive without staying in Gaza to do the task it set out for itself post-10/7. Nor does he explain why rewarding the terrorists with a pullout would be a good thing at this point. These are not his concerns. Trying to win an election in 2024 is his concern.

The conformity gauntlet

The New Neo Posted on by

Ideological conformity is required in academia:

We then take the reader on an imaginary tour of academia from the point of view of an independent-minded highschooler and demonstrate how many conformity pressures he or she will face on their way to becoming a scientist. Layering the threats to free speech and conformity pressures on top of each other is key to really understanding how the Conformity Gauntlet works, because no single case really conveys how bad it’s gotten for freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought on campus on a systematic basis.

I’ve been musing on the word “conformity” lately. It was something I recall being much-discussed during the 50s and early 60s. The idea was that Americans, and young Americans in particular, were too timid to rebel against the prevailing social and intellectual mores. They were supposedly too worried about the opinions of others.

Well, the late 60s exploded all that – or did they? It superficially seemed that way, but nonconformity became all the rage, and many young people competed to see who could look and act most outrageous. It was mostly cosmetic, and became a type of conformity in and of itself.

By the 80s and 90s we saw a form of leftist mind control that began in the universities, grew more widespread there, and then in the first two decades of the 21st century spread out into America at large and particularly government, the press, entertainment, sports, and businesses. The demands for conformity became tighter than they ever were in the 50s – it was just conformity to a different standard.

Claptrap from Harvard interim president Alan Garber

The New Neo Posted on by

Blahbitty blah blah blah:

Since I first arrived here as an undergraduate in 1973, I cannot recall a period of comparable tension on our campus and across our community. That tension has been exacerbated by concerns about how we address and combat antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bias; safeguard free expression; and foster a climate of mutual understanding. We have been subjected to an unrelenting focus on fault lines that divide us, which has tested the ties that bind us as a community devoted to learning from one another.

Note the balancing act that’s so prevalent on the left: one cannot mention antisemitism without immediately mentioning “Islamophobia.” We first heard about the latter, to the best of my recollection, right after 9/11. The terrorism attack supposedly spawned a wave of fear of Muslims and hate crimes against them, although in fact the reactions were surprisingly mild considering 3,000 innocent Americans had just been murdered by Islamicist jihadi fanatics.

Right now the Jews are the focus of the hatred, and Jew-hatred rather than “Islamophobia” is the problem on the Harvard campus.

Nor has Harvard been the least interested in “safeguarding free expression” in recent years, and Claudine Gay (whom the new president praises) has been instrumental in damping down the free expression of ideas if they are from the right – or if, for example, they include a black law professor being the defense attorney for Weinstein, a role for which Ron Sullivan lost his deanship.

And then there’s this: “We have been subjected to an unrelenting focus on fault lines that divide us…” . From whence does this focus come? Why would this focus be wrong (to me that’s what Garber’s words would seem to imply), if such fault lines do indeed exist and Harvard has many problems that need fixing? Why would Harvard be subject to that focus? Wouldn’t Harvard want to focus on such things and make them better? (Rhetorical questions, of course.)

And not a single mention of plagiarism.

Random thoughts of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Regarding a discussion about AI in today’s Open Thread – any source of information, be it tedious old-fashioned library work, Google, or AI so far (and maybe into the future), is vulnerable to “garbage in, garbage out.” The human consumer always has to decide what’s true and what’s false, what’s real and what’s fake, what’s biased and what’s objective. With a book, we rely on the author’s judgment; with Google, it’s the programmers’ algorithms and judgment; and with AI it’s similar. The “information out” is only as good as the information on which AI has been trained – at least, that’s how I understand the workings of the system at present. In the end – concerning any information we get that’s second-hand – we have to rely for judgment on our own pre-existing knowledge base, which with so many people seems to be getting smaller and smaller. That’s a big problem.

(2) New England had its first significant snowfall over the weekend. It’s no fun to dig out, but fresh snow is certainly more beautiful than brown bare ground and brown bare trees, especially when it’s sunny, which it is today.

(3) The General Austin hospitalization-secrecy flap is both disturbing and strange. Why was it kept hidden, not only from the public but from the higher-ups? I can understand the former but not the latter. Was it just negligence, or something more? I don’t have an answer.

(4) Now they’re erasing William Penn. I guess he was just too nice.

(5) The pro-Hamas demonstrators continue their disruptions that are designed to make everyone else angry (see this, this, and this). Their motives, IMHO, are to show off their leftist “virtue” to each other, and to give everybody else – especially the Jews – the finger. They don’t feel at all at risk from the authorities; they know they won’t be treated like the J6 demonstrators. I haven’t noticed the pro-Hamas crowd pulling their stunts in red areas; just blue ones. Have you?

Balanchine’s Serenade in Sacramento

The New Neo Posted on by

Serenade is one of my favorite ballets. It was the first ballet Balanchine choreographed in the US – in 1934, ninety years ago, although it’s timeless – and one of his very greatest as well as one of the greatest ballets, period. Balanchine incorporaed serendipitous events into its structure: for example, one time a dancer was late to rehearsal and he used that in the ballet, when one dancer makes a late entrance and then finds her way into the pattern. Another dancer falls, as happened one day in rehearsal. Different numbers of dancers showed up on different days, and so he varied the number of dancers in different sections of the piece. He didn’t have too many male dancers, so he didn’t use very many.

The end result was a sublime creation.

And yet – like many ballets, but even more than some – Serenade is very difficult to photograph. For this post I watched many YouTube renditions, and none convey the beauty of this ballet in person. The following performance by the Sacramento Ballet is, strangely enough, the best-photographed one I’ve found; even though the company, while very very good, is not considered one of the very best companies in the US. But other video versions tend to cut back and forth between distant views and closeups in a really stupid way; this one does it in a smart way. However, there’s always a built-in conflict between wanting to get the entire pattern onto the screen, and wanting to be able to see more clearly what’s happening in terms of clarity of movement and individuals. Plus, all videos are two dimensions and therefore lack that exciting 3-D element of reality.

I think it’s still very much worth watching. The opening sequence is especially wonderful in this ballet but tends to photograph especially poorly, so after this video I’ll offer another video that shows the opening movements in more closeup:

Here are those opening moments again, from a different company (Pacific Northwest Ballet). Such beautiful Tchaikovsky music, too, although purists will notice that the order of the movements is different than in the original piece “Serenade for Strings“:

[NOTE: I’ve seen the Sacramento Ballet in person, and I recommend going if you’re anywhere nearby.]

Biden’s Valley Forge speech, the Democrats, and mirror politics

The New Neo Posted on by

Guess what? The gloves are off!:

This time it’s personal. On Friday Joe Biden tore into his predecessor Donald Trump as never before. He brimmed with anger, disdain and contempt.

“As never before”? If you’ve been hiding under a rock, perhaps.

Here’s more of how the Guardian writer describes yesterday’s Valley Forge speech by Biden. Do people really buy this “grandfather” “predisposed to give people the benefit of the doubt” business about Biden? Hard to believe, but I suppose some do:

… Biden spoke the name “Trump” more than 40 times in less than an hour as he warned that his likely 2024 opponent would sacrifice American democracy to put himself in power. The 81-year-old president generally seems like a grandfatherly figure predisposed to give people the benefit of the doubt, which makes his detestation of Trump all the more striking.

Here’s the text of the speech, which the White House site titles “Defending the Sacred Cause of American Democracy.” And if you’re really a glutton for punishment, here’s the video.

More quotes from the Guardian article on the speech:

Against a backdrop of 11 American flags and four faux Roman columns, Biden went on: “The guy who claims law and order sows lawlessness and disorder.” Trump is planning a full-scale campaign of revenge and retribution, he said, and promised to be a dictator on day one.

Trump has threatened to terminate the US constitution, impose the death penalty on military leaders who defied him and referred to dead soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”. Biden looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth. He was worked up and had to steel himself.

He mused: “Sometimes I’m really happy the Irish in me can’t be seen.” …

Democrats are often criticised for pulling their punches and refusing to fight dirty as Republicans do. For as long as Trump has been on the political scene, they have wrestled with the question of whether to rise above him or roll in the dirt with him. …

… [F]or now, one thing is clear. The gloves are off …

Good to know that the Russiagate hoax, the bogus impeachments, the spying on Trump, the multiple lawfare prosecutions of dubious legal reasoning, the Floyd summer demonstrations and riots, the “Hitler” accusations, the muzzling and blocking of Trump, the coverup of the Hunter laptop, the attempts to keep Trump’s name off the ballot in many states, and all the rest, were accomplished with the gloves on.

It is astonishing that anyone would buy the absolute bilge Biden and his speechwriters are dishing out. But they will.

So what does the phrase “mirror politics” mean in the title of this post? It’s something I came across last night, when I was doing some research on the absolutely horrific Rwandan genocide of 1994. In the Wiki article, it described the following as having occurred in Rwanda a couple of years prior to the genocide (to refresh your memory, the vast majority of those murdered were Tutsi, plus some Hutu who weren’t quite murderous enough in eliminating their fellow countrymen who happened to be Tutsi):

To make the economic, social and political conflict look more like an ethnic conflict, the [Hutu] President’s entourage, including the army, launched propaganda campaigns to fabricate events of ethnic crisis caused by the Tutsi and the RPF. The process was described as “mirror politics”, also known as “accusation in a mirror” whereby a person accuses others of what the person himself/herself actually wants to do.

We see that a lot here. Not genocide, but “accusation in a mirror.” Wiki defines that in this way:

Accusation in a mirror (AiM) (also called mirror politics, mirror propaganda, mirror image propaganda, or a mirror argument) is a technique where one falsely attributes to one’s adversaries the intentions that one has for oneself and/or the actions that one is in the process of enacting. …

… The name was used by an anonymous Rwandan propagandist in Note Relative à la Propagande d’Expansion et de Recrutement. Drawing on the ideas of Joseph Goebbels and Vladimir Lenin, he instructed colleagues to “impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do.” By invoking collective self-defense, propaganda is used to justify genocide, just as self-defense is a defense for individual homicide. Susan Benesch remarked that while dehumanization “makes genocide seem acceptable”, accusation in a mirror makes it seem necessary.

The tactic is similar to a “false anticipatory tu quoque” (a logical fallacy which charges the opponent with hypocrisy). … The weakness of the strategy is that it reveals the perpetrator’s intentions, perhaps before it can be carried out.

Actually, the Democrats have already revealed their intentions through actions and proposed actions. Genocide isn’t necessarily part of it, however – although they seemed quite happy with plenty of rioting, property damage, and a few murders in 2020. Cancellation, censorship, lawfare, and leftist power are enough for the present, although they wouldn’t be disturbed by a Trump assassination either.

Using that search function

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then I get a commenter asking why I don’t write about a certain topic. But it’s often something I have written about.

For example, today a commenter mentioned – perhaps tongue in cheek, so I’m not intending to pick on him – “I’m praying that the day will come when the New Neo discovers J. S. Bach.” Of course, not only have I discovered Bach, I also have played Bach on the piano, although I’m certainly no pianist. And I’ve written about Bach many times.

Then again, there are – as of the moment I’m writing this – 19.483 published posts on this blog. That means that even I have trouble remembering what I’ve already written about. Sometimes I come across an old post and I have literally no recollection of having written it or even reading it before. But I can assure you I’ve written everything that appears here, although I’ve been doing it for over – gasp! – nineteen years.

But it occurs to me that maybe not everyone has noticed that there’s a search function on the blog. So I’ve decided to write this post to call your attention to it. On a desktop or laptop it can be found directly under my photo with the apple, towards the top portion of the right sidebar. On a cellphone it’s also under my photo, but the photo is way down at the bottom, under the posts. The way the search works is that the first set of posts will be ones with the search word in the title, and then there will be the posts where the search word is only found in the body of the post.

As for Bach and my writing about his work, there’s this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. There are probably others, but I got tired of scrolling. Enjoy!

ADDENDUM:

By the way, I just made an adjustment I’d been meaning to make for a while. Now people will have 10 minutes to edit comments rather than only 5 minutes.

Academia: brilliance, race, and politics

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Mike K” writes:

The sad and infuriating thing about what was done to Roland Fryer is that he was a genuine academic star. No need for that thumb on the scale or affirmative action. The book “The Bell Curve” shows that there is a right “tail” on the distribution of IQ and these DEI zealots are determined to control black scholars, even if they themselves are a cluster of losers like Gay.

True. For example, although Thomas Sowell – another black academic star – came to prominence prior to DEI zealots, he nevertheless has been deprived of the honors he should have been given. It’s even the case that – at least as far as I can tell – Sowell’s not in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.. Many and probably most black people today have never heard of him (although I’ve noticed that there’s a tiny cottage industry on YouTube of young black “reactors” to some of Thomas Sowell’s interviews and writings). Nor is Sowell included in the recent AP African American Studies course which nevertheless had room for “academic writers on critical theory, queerness, and reparations.”

It’s about politics. If Sowell had been a leftist, he would have become far more generally famous and not just on the right, where he’s very well-known and highly respected. And of course, white scholars who are on the conservative side also have been finding it hard to get jobs in academia in the last decade or two, and to a lesser extent even in the decade or two prior to that. But the left and the DEI crowd are especially determined to diminish the voices of brilliant black scholars who are insufficiently leftist – and even to cancel them.

However, I don’t think of someone like Gay as a “loser.” Although she has indeed lost her prominent and previously-respected and powerful position as Harvard president, she still has her teaching job and her nearly-million-dollar salary. She is now lauded by many as a victim of right-wing racism, a role she has embraced.

I don’t think Mike K meant “loser” in that sense, however. My guess would be that he meant that, were the criteria objective, she would not have risen to academic prominence at all – unlike Fryer and Sowell, just to take two examples. I wouldn’t call her a “loser,” however, or unintelligent. I would instead call her a devoted apparatchik or maybe even a member of the nomenklatura. She is a party hack rather than an independent thinker, but that’s exactly what is wanted today in university administration and also in academia as a whole.

Gay’s problem was that events occurred which thrust her out of her element and into the glare of Congressional testimony on a subject – anti-Semitism on campus – on which she’s long toed the party line. The awful remarks she made in Congress would have been completely unremarkable and acceptable had she made them only to a Harvard faculty or administrative audience, for example. The American public was shocked, however. And it was only then that the thinness of her academic resume, as well as the fact that she’d plagiarized, came into prominence and together with those remarks precipitated the end of her presidency.

Gay isn’t brilliant, but she never needed to be and I doubt that most professors – even at Harvard, of any race, and especially in the humanities – are brilliant these days. That’s not what’s wanted. What’s wanted is leftist political conformity, and that tends to be antithetical to brilliance – which is always a rare commodity anyway.

Oh, and another thing: Claudine Gay made a career out of taking down black male professors who were insufficiently leftist

The New Neo Posted on by

Another aspect of Claudine Gay’s illustrious career as a Harvard administrator:

…[I]n the face of numerous mounting scandals, many are defending Gay by claiming that the attacks against her are racial in nature.

They are not. They are all well deserved.

The demand that Gay resign stems from the utter lack of moral competency she displayed in her testimony before Congress, in which she said that calling for the genocide of Jews is only against Harvard rules in certain contexts. She also failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities against Israel in real time on October 7, another reason she should resign. There is also now evidence of serial plagiarism. And did I mention Gay has published no books — an unprecedented feat for a Harvard President, unless one travels back in time to the year 1773? …

Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors?

As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College.

What was Professor Sullivan’s offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein — an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system.

… Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal.

Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer’s research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay’s crusade of discharge but Fryer’s lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.

The author of the piece is a black male, a former law professor and a graduate of Harvard Law School.

It is worth mentioning that the mechanism by which Roland Fryer was semi-canceled was the accusation of sexual harassment. You can find the story in this documentary made long before Gay’s current travails: