That pas de deux: a few telling moments

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “AesopFan” had this to say about a very short passage within the “Agon” pas de deux we discussed a while ago:

There is a small section that I noticed has different movements in the two samples.

The woman, in front, slips backwards between the man’s legs, lifts her legs in a wide V, then he pulls her up again…

I liked the original much better, although I don’t know that I have the words to say why. Both are very expressive and fluid, but the first seemed more connected.

Well, I believe I can tell you why you thought the original was more connected.

But first watch the passage in the original, and then in the newer production. It’s very short, just a few seconds really. You can even set it to slow motion if you’d like, and if you want to make it full screen go right ahead. But don’t blink, or you may miss it:

So, why would AesopFan feel them to be more connected in the original version? Because they are more connected.

In the first few seconds of the first clip, as the woman (Diana Adams) slides downward towards a seated position, she holds her torso – her back and her head – against Arthur Mitchell’s torso (his front). She seems a bit stuck to him in some way and slightly reluctant to move. There is resistance to getting down on the floor. She appears conflicted; perhaps with a “should I stay or should I go?” feeling. But the woman in the other couple (Maria Kowroski) is just moving quickly and effortlessly downwards. Although she’s holding onto his arms, she’s otherwise doing it totally on her own. We have no idea why she’s going downwards, or what the relationship might be between these two people.

Then, after each woman goes backwards into a split while reclining on her back, Diana Adams performs her split with some resistance and less ease, whereas Kowroski is once again merely showing us how tremendously flexible she is.

But it’s the next part that’s more telling. Each man leans waaaayy back to grab his partner’s hands and hoist her up onto her feet again. But by the time Mitchell reaches back, most of Adams’ body is still reclining, so that the backwards-leaning Mitchell really is pulling her right off the floor, propelling her forward with his power. They are connected, and she is somewhat dependent on him – although she seems somewhat desirous of being pulled.

In contrast, Kowroski is almost completely autonomous. She gets up mostly under her own steam. Why is her partner even bothering to lean all the way back? She does lean on him just a bit as she gets up, using him rather like the armrests on a chair. That’s about all he seems to be to her. The entire sequence has lost or changed its meaning because of the slight change in movement and emphasis. Why are they going down and up again; why should we care? But we don’t know what’s missing unless we’ve seen it done differently, and even then it goes so quickly and smoothly that a viewer might have trouble, just as AesopFan did, explaining why he or she feels a bit flat about it.

And that’s just a few seconds’ worth of the pas de deux. The entire ballet is like that. The differences are small but profound, and the feelings they evoke in the audience are different. I suspect it not only reflects differences in dance, dance directors, and dancers themselves, as well as what audiences have come to expect, but it expresses a difference in the idea of relationships between men and women in 1957 (when the piece was first performed) and now.

“It wasn’t a real trial so it’s illegitimate and Trump is still guilty”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is one of the more bizarre of the Democrats’ criticisms of the goings-on in the Senate, if you go by the laws of logic. Impeachment trials use the word “trial” as a sort of shorthand for some sort of legal proceeding, but it is not one that is constrained by all the procedural paraphernalia of an ordinary trial – including the rules of evidence.

The Democrats believe they can pretend otherwise. The reason is quite simple: they want to say it doesn’t count and Trump is still guilty, as “proven” in their own investigation and witness-questioning that followed none, and I mean none, of the protective rules involved in a trial. They want to pick and choose what parts of a trial they require Republicans to follow in the Senate, and what parts Democrats can ignore in the House (and the Senate, too, if the Democrats ever got a chance to interrogate witnesses there, too).

This serves to set up the Democrats’ continual, perpetual bleat of “he’s guilty forever, he will never be unimpeached” – although in accomplishing this supposed feat the Democrats violated the due process they insist that Republicans must follow in the Senate “trial” portion of the proceedings.

Doris Lessing, changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Doris Lessing was a well-known writer who died in 2013 after a very long life and many prizes, including a Nobel. I confess that I’ve never read a thing she wrote, although I tried a few times. It just didn’t grab me, and I don’t even remember why. But this post isn’t about her novels – it’s about her political beliefs, which I find of interest.

Lessing began as a committed leftist, a Communist. She also was a feminist, and I believe she remained so in one way or another for her entire life. But in many ways she thought for herself and quite early on understood the danger represented by PC thought. She left the hard left quite early on, as well.

Here are some interesting quotes from this article in November, 1997:

Lessing: Capitalism was dead [postwar 40s and 50s in England]. It was done and finished. And the future was socialist or communist. We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks — everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people.

Question: You call these beliefs a kind of mass hypnosis.

Lessing: I call it mass psychopathology. Because what we believed was rubbish. It had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on in the world.

Question: But it was such a heady kind of belief, wasn’t it? Was it truly all rubbish?

Lessing: Look, most of it was rubbish. But it had an enormous emotional charge behind it, which meant that people could achieve more if they believed this kind of thing. You know, if you are fueled by this pure belief, amazing things get done.

Question: You write about all of these interesting, caring, passionate people who put so much work into their belief in communism, and what they got in return was Stalin. It was a cruel kind of a joke.

Lessing: Well, that’s why socialism is, for our time, dead. Because young people say, “Right, all you Reds — look what you were supporting. China and the Soviet Union.” The interesting thing is to ask yourself this question: Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it. That had a disastrous effect on — this is another cliche, forgive me — progressive thinking of every kind.

I think she sees it somewhat clearly in some ways, but in others she connects the failure with Stalin and Communism rather than something inherent to leftism. In the 90s, when she gave this interview, young people were more aware of the Soviet Union and its horrors. It was recent, and the fall of the USSR was recent and within their experience and memory. Nowadays “young people” seem to either have no clue what happened then and earlier, or to know about them and to figure they will avoid them when they get the power, or to be drawn to repeating those horrors because they regard them as an important and necessary tool to be used by the left for control.

More:

Question: You compare that kind o[f progressive thinking to today’s political correctness, to use another cliche. How true is that?

Lessing: I think it is true. I think the attitudes of mind behind it are the same.

Question: What are those attitudes?

Lessing: A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.

Question: Your book is, in many ways, about falling out of love with communism….

Lessing: This process was going on right from the beginning. I’m talking about the Soviet Union — people seeing what it was like and leaving. Everywhere you went you met people who had been communists and understood perfectly well the perils of the dream, and were now angry with themselves for falling for it. I think [this interest in communism] was rooted in the First World War and people’s passionate identification with what had been done to the soldiers, which crossed all the national boundaries. I think that’s where a disgust and contempt for government began, at the level we see it now. The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism [I don’t think shes talking about Islamic terrorism here]. Anyway, that’s my thesis. It’s very oversimplified, as you can see…

Question: On the subject of feminism, let me ask a different question. You’ve written that women seem to be much more easily shocked these days.

Lessing: Yes, they are. Almost as a political intention, they’re shocked. I can’t remember ever being shocked if someone exposed himself, or made a pass which I though was inept. I’d just go, “Well, that’s life.” But now, it’s a whole political agenda.

Question: The sudden vogue of sexual harassment, you mean?

Lessing: Well, I’m not saying this isn’t serious, obviously I’m not. That’s the difficulty of this discussion, because I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to women who are sexually harassed, because I know they are. But I think a great many women complain about sexual harassment when it’s nothing of the kind. It’s just one of the minor annoyances of life. When a little boy kisses a little girl at school and it becomes a national issue, what can we say about this? It’s just such lunacy.

Remember, that was in 1997. And then in August 2001 Lessing gave this talk at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Oh, can you imagine? Someone should go to every book festival in the world and just re-read it:

The novelist Doris Lessing yesterday claimed that men were the new silent victims in the sex war, “continually demeaned and insulted” by women without a whimper of protest.

Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a “lazy and insidious” culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men.

Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy which could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men.

“I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed,” the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday…

“We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?

“I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.

“You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.”

Lessing said the teacher tried to “catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish”.

She added: “This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.

“It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.

“It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

“Men seem to be so cowed that they can’t fight back, and it is time they did.”

That was almost twenty years ago.

The left announces the death of the Republican Party – again

The New Neo Posted on by

On MSNBC, for example:

That was apparently today. I would like to find the segment that followed, but in a quick search I haven’t been able to do so. However, it’s not hard to imagine how it would go, and how different it is from the way the right sees it.

Of course, I’m not sure the left really sees it that way; perhaps they merely want their viewers to see it that way. It’s all about the narrative for the left, after all, and they believe their words can create a reality. And they do create that reality in the minds of a lot of people – I know some of those people – with the result (an intended result) that when actual reality contradicts the narrative, and the right wins an election as happened in 2016, the next narrative is already fully in place: the right only won because it cheated and the winner is therefore illegitimate and must be vilified and if possible removed.

This “death of the Republican Party” business is hardly new. Just do a search on YouTube, for example, and you’ll find a bunch of older videos such as the following three. The first and third are from about a year ago. The second is from about two months ago. (And apparently you have to go to YouTube to warch the first one, for some reason. The segment I’m talking about begins around 1:20.):

And then there’s this article from February of 2016, during the campaign.

In my gloomiest days I think they may be right about the party’s death, although not for the reasons they give and not because they have something better to offer. What they offer is much, much worse. But they might be correct that the right is not going to prevail for the simple reason that the Gramscian march through the institutions by the left is highly advanced and may already have done the right – and liberty – a fatal blow.

But that’s by no means certain. And I fervently hope it’s incorrect.

What I think is almost certainly correct is that they are mourning the demise of the pushover, gentlemanly GOP. They could count on the majority of Republicans in leadership to be of that ilk, and that was a big part of the left’s calculation when strategizing. However, I have to be careful about that, too, because I seem to recall a period during the 90s when a more pugnacious group of Republicans was in charge (“Contract With America”), and ultimately they got pushed out. They lacked the populist touch and wider appeal of Trump, however.

The Democrats’ race to the left: Warren, Pelosi, and company

The New Neo Posted on by

Elizabeth Warren’s attempt to out-leftist Bernie Sanders.has her leaping over several sharks in a row with plenty of room to spare.

First, she goes for the 9-year-old-trans vote:

During a campaign event in Iowa Sunday, Warren said “a young trans person [had] asked about a welcoming community and I said, ‘It starts with the Secretary of Education, who has a lot to do with where we spend our money’ … and I said, ‘I’m going to have a Secretary of Education that this young trans person interviews on my behalf,'”

She added that “only if this person believes that our Secretary of Education nominee is committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment, and a full educational curriculum for everyone, will that person be advanced to actually be Secretary of Education.”

It’s unclear who exactly Warren was referring to but a 9-year-old who identifies as transgender previously asked Warren what she would do in her “first week as president to make sure kids like me feel safer in school.”

Second, she insults and attempts to humiliate Chief Justice Roberts:

Even the abominable Schiff tried to backpedal from what the abominable Warren had done, adding: “I think the chief justice has presided admirably.”

Speaking of abominable and races to the left, we have Nancy Pelosi:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday hammered the lawyers leading President Trump’s impeachment defense, saying they’ve trampled on the Constitution while questioning how they’ve been allowed to keep their licenses.

“I don’t know how they can retain their lawyer status, in the comments that they’re making,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.

Pelosi was responding largely to comments made Wednesday evening by Alan Dershowitz, a celebrity lawyer on Trump’s legal team, who asserted on the Senate floor that presidents cannot be impeached for actions designed to boost their reelections — if they believe that retaining a grip on the White House is in the best interest of the country. And “every public official I know,” he added, considers that to be the case.

That’s the Hill reporter in that last paragraph in the quote – mischaracterizing what Dershowitz said, in the same way I’ve read it done almost countless times today. The party line is, as usual, to incorrectly paraphrase the argument in a way that makes it sound both absurd and dangerous. No way did Dershowitz say that, but the MSM and people like Pelosi count on the American public to either not have been watching or, if watching, to have not understood. So the left feels that it can characterize it any way they want, and to use selective quotes to “prove” their preferred narrative.

The thrust of Dersowitz’s remarks was that a president cannot and should not be impeached for having some political motives for an act that is otherwise legal and not a high crime and misdemeanor, as long as there is an arguable independent justification for that act. The Democrats distort this, of course, into “presidents cannot be impeached for actions designed to boost their reelections — if they believe that retaining a grip on the White House is in the best interest of the country.”

And that allows them to call Alan Dershowitz “Hitler”:

NN contributor Joe Lockhart, White House press secretary for President Bill Clinton, said Alan Dershowitz’s “public interest” argument against impeachment is something you would hear from Hilter, Mussolini, Stalin, and others who rationalized genocide.

“Having worked on about a dozen campaigns, there is always the sense that, ‘Boy, if we win, it’s better for the country. But that doesn’t give you license to commit crimes or to do things that are unethical. So, it was absurd,” Lockhart said Wednesday.

“What I thought when I was watching it was this is un-American,” Lockhart told CNN host Erin Burnett. “This is what you hear from Stalin. This is what you hear from Mussolini, what you hear from authoritarians, from Hitler, from all the authoritarian people who rationalized, in some cases genocide, based what was in the public interest.”

And yes, these people understand full well that they are distorting and misrepresenting what Dershowitz said.

No witnesses

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE 9 PM: The vote is over, with no surprises on the GOP side. Romney and Collins voted for more witnesses, as did all the Democrats. I’m a little bit surprised – just a little bit – that not a single Democrat in a red state decided to go with the majority and close off witnesses, since this would have helped those Democrats maintain their support in those states and it wouldn’t have changed the outcome one iota. But the Democrats were apparently very stern on party discipline.]

I don’t want to count unhatched chickens, but if no senator goes back on his or her word, the impeachment trial should be wrapping up very very soon, because Senator Murkowski of Alaska has joined Lamar Alexander and announced she plans to vote “no” on witnesses.

I can think of some Democrat senators (Warren, Sanders, Klobuchar, Bennett) who must be breathing sighs of relief. They get to vote for witnesses but not have to actually sit there and endure listening to them while their 2020 opponents race around the country campaigning.

And now that it no longer matters all that much what they do, perhaps a few other Democrats might vote against witnesses in an attempt to protect their own political futures in states that voted for Trump. Susan Collins will apparently do something similar on the opposite side: in her case, vote for witnesses, hoping that the GOP voters in her state give her a pass on it because they have no viable alternative candidate, while simultaneously hoping that her vote will placate enough moderate Democrats in her state that they will choose her again over the Democrat.

As for Romney, he seems to believe he’s the star of his own morality play. Far more people on the right, however, consider him the villain of his own revenge play (that is, of course, assuming he votes for witnesses). If Romney tries to run for re-election when his term is up in 2024, I assume he will be primaried by a more conservative candidate, probably successfully.

And as for Murkowski, I agree with Allahpundit here:

What would Murkowski have gained by forcing a 50/50 deadlock that would have left John Roberts and McConnell scratching their heads about how to resolve it? By voting this way [no to witnesses], she earns a favor from Trump and Cocaine Mitch and gives Trump fans back in Alaska a reason to forgive her the next time she votes no in a Kavanaugh-magnitude situation.

Will they forgive her? I think it depends on who may try to primary her next time.

The bottom line is that Murkowski and Romney are in red states, so the election of more conservative senators from those states is possible. In Collins’ case, however, she is almost certainly about as conservative as it could ever get, and the state could easily go entirely blue if she is challenged by someone more conservative for the GOP nomination.

However, I’m under no illusion that the drive to impeach Trump, and the attacks on him – as well as clandestine operations against him by the self-styled “Resistance” – are over. They will continue, probably unabated and perhaps even with increased vigor (if such a thing be possible). The Democrats and the “deep state” are desperate to be rid of him, their hatred is a thing of great force, and they believe that the ends justify the means.

By refusing to read the name of the whistleblower during the impeachment trial…

The New Neo Posted on by

…didn’t John Roberts inadvertently reveal that this is indeed the whistleblower?:

“It’s very important whether or not a group of Democratic activists, part of the Obama-Biden administration were working together for years looking for an opportunity to impeach the president,” Paul explained. He blamed Roberts and the Senate for “selective belief in protecting the whistleblower statute … nobody says they know who the person is. But anybody you say might be all of a sudden is protected from being part of the debate.”

Roberts communicated to senators on Tuesday that he would not read questions that outed the alleged whistleblower, prompting Paul to complain afterward.

Everyone who follows the news at all closely knows the whistleblower’s supposed identity: Eric Ciaramella. It’s not any kind of secret at all. And Rand Paul has said that was the person named in his question.

What a stupid charade – but it’s one that plays quite nicely into Schiff’s hands.

And by the way, it would be different if this was a whistleblower whose identity is protected by statute. It is not.

Mis-educating the young, on purpose

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s otherwise known as the indoctrination of impressionable children – and the left is hard at work at this task, and has been for many many decades. But in recent years it’s reached a very critical mass.

I linked to this article in a previous post today. But now I’m giving it a post of its own, for emphasis.

I’ve written several times before about the 1619 Project of the NY Times, as well as the plan of its creators to make it part of the school curriculum. And yes, that’s what’s happening, exactly as contemplated.

The voices of historians – even historians somewhat to the left – criticizing the “facts” in the 1619 Project are just so much hot air at this point, because the “educators” who make the decisions couldn’t care less what historians think:

Since its publication in August, the 1619 Project has been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states, according to the 2019 annual report of the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project. Five school systems, including Chicago and Washington, D.C., have adopted it district-wide. It is mostly being used as supplemental, optional classroom teaching material. By and large, school systems are adopting the project by administrative fiat, not through a public textbook review process…

Gordon Wood, a leading historian of the American Revolution and emeritus professor at Brown University, told RealClearInvestigations the Times material “is full of falsehoods and distortions.” In its current form, without corrections, which the Times has declined to run, the only way to use it in the classroom, he said, would be “as a way of showing how history can be distorted and perverted.”…

Defenders of ethnic studies argue the movement is a necessary corrective to a whitewashed version of history. But critics denounce it as propaganda used to indoctrinate students. And they’re troubled by the endorsement of racial and identity-based histories by prestigious institutions such as the New York Times and publicly funded schools.

The project’s leader, Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, has declared since the magazine’s publication that her goal “is that there’ll be a reparations bill passed” – meaning financial reparations for slavery and subsequent racial discrimination.

If you have young children or grandchildren – or even if you don’t – try to find out whether this is what they’re learning. If it is, please try your best to fight it. I’ve looked (rather quickly, just now) to see whether there’s an organized group opposing this. I can’t locate one, but if anyone has any information or suggestions, please comment below.

Oh, and if anyone says the NY Times doesn’t have much influence anymore, think again. Its influence is hardly limited to articles in a newspaper.

Dershowitz makes a great point

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Something is wrong with the YouTube videos of this show, and therefore this clip won’t play. I will be busy for quite some time today and unable to try to fix it till tonight. Sorry about that, but perhaps it will spontaneously heal in the meantime.]

About the shifting politics-dependent opinions of legal so-called scholars:

NOTE: And by the way, Dershowitz is a brave man. The left hates him already as a betrayer, and for his role in defending the Constitution in the Trump trial they will try even harder to destroy him.

Those dumb Trump supporters…

The New Neo Posted on by

…did pretty well on a test of verbal and science ability compared with Clinton supporters. The test is called the GSS:

We don’t have great data on the intelligence of Trump supporters, but the best available is in the 2018 General Social Survey. For those unfamiliar with the GSS, it is usually regarded as the leading omnibus academic survey in the US; it usually achieves response rates about 10 to 20 times higher than the typical public opinion poll.

You can read the results at the link; many were not statistically significant, but some were.

But that’s not what really caught my eye. What riveted me was this:

Indeed, less than half of 2016 Clinton supporters (49.6%) are able to answer correctly both of two related questions: whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth (EARTHSUN) and whether that takes a day, a month, or a year (SOLARREV). Remember these two questions are multiple choice! You would have a 50-50 chance of guessing correctly on the first part: whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa. Sadly, the general public didn’t do hugely better than Clinton supporters, with only 57.1% (compared to 49.6%) knowing that the earth goes around the sun and that it takes a year to do so.

This is the sort of basic knowledge usually learned in the early years of grade school and then refined and repeated later on. If approximately half the public doesn’t know the answers, that indicates they know barely anything about the world around them.

At this point, the Republican/Democrat split is of interest because part of that ignorance apparently involves the arrogance and condescension of those on the left about those on the right (see this, for example). But the larger question is: what hope do we have if so much of the public is this deeply ignorant?

The remedy, of course, is back to basics in education. But since the left has almost completely taken over the function of educating our children, and would much rather feed them a diet of lies that advance the leftist narrative than bother with truth, it is hard to see how that tide can be turned.

[NOTE: And I don’t believe the answers can be explained by the phenomenon of flat-earthers, because they’re just not numerous enough to account for the results.]

Another one bites the dusts: Windows 7

The New Neo Posted on by

We had a long love affair. But now Windows 7 is leaving me, although not of its own free will. I got this in an email today:

As of January 14th, 2020, Microsoft, the developer of the Windows 7 operating system, announced that additional security updates and technical support will no longer be available for home users of Windows 7. While the operating system is over a decade old, it is estimated to still run on a quarter of all PCs worldwide. Microsoft is encouraging all users still on Windows 7 to upgrade to their latest operating system, Windows 10, in order to continue to receive security and functional updates.

I hate Windows 10.

It’s always the same. First the “suggest” you change. Then they force you to change. And although every now and then the change turns out to be for the better, it’s usually not.