Saturday, January 26, 2019
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
The Inanity That Is The "White Male Theory of History"
January 20, 2019
Great piece by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez at NRO on what he rightly calls "a highly inane interpretation of history -- an interpretation that one might call the White Male Theory of History, or WMTH for short":
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Great piece by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez at NRO on what he rightly calls "a highly inane interpretation of history -- an interpretation that one might call the White Male Theory of History, or WMTH for short":
As with other pathological political movements and ideas (e.g., support for government censorship, or loathing of liberal democracy), the WTMH comes in rightist and leftist variants.
...What both the Right and the Left White Male Theories of History share is the fundamental assumption that the telling of history must monomaniacally focus on the actions of white men -- an identity category that is silently assumed to have always existed, but which is in reality a recent concoction. (Homer and Plato were not "white men" in the same way that Donald Trump is a white man.) In the Right WMTH, white men are held to be the epitome of science and progress and glory; in the Left WMTH, they are presented as oppressors, enslavers, and colonizers. In both versions, groups other than whites are assumed to have had little to no agency to decide their future for themselves, whether for good or ill; and even today, they still don't. In both versions, the world's peoples are divided into ludicrous binaries: civilizer vs. barbarian on the right, oppressor vs. victim on the left. In both versions, the cleavages that divided men with white skin are dismissed as unimportant; distinctions in class, nation, ideology, and religion are systematically ignored. For the proponents of the White Male Theory of History, there is whiteness, and there is maleness, and such nuisances as the subtleties of history do not much matter....The influence of the WMTH can be most clearly seen in the debate over the record of "Western civilization." The loudest and most obnoxious voices in that debate tend to be rightists and leftists who subscribe to their side's respective version of the WMTH, invariably conflating the history of the West with the history of "white" people. In both cases, historical illiteracy replaces sober thought.For instance, when Congressman Steve King, Stefan Molyneux, and Faith Goldy hide their white-nationalist prejudices by rattling on about the importance of "defending Western values," they ignore that much of what makes the West great is precisely its efforts, however imperfect, to abandon tribal bigotry and extend legal rights and protections to people who are not white -- an achievement that the Steve Kings of the world rarely trumpet, and that if anything probably oppose. The irony of racists' and sexists' championing a culture that has sought to emancipate minorities and women is, of course, lost on such people.In a homologous fashion, the leftists who chant that "Western Civ has got to go!" do so because they equate Western values and history with white oppression, thereby neglecting to acknowledge that their demand for political equality and individual dignity for minorities was itself influenced by a Western (not "white") heritage that produced theories of legal, political, and social equality. William F. Buckley made a related point convincingly in his famous debate with James Baldwin. As he put it, "anyone who argued that English civilization ought to have been jettisoned because Catholics were not allowed to vote as late as 1829 and Jews not until 1832 should consider the other possibility. Precisely the reason why they did get the right to vote was because English civilization was not jettisoned." Buckley reached the conclusion that we should not "rush forward to overthrow our civilization because we don't live up to our high ideals.
via @Gurdur
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Saturday, January 12, 2019
The de-civilising process
In his new book, “In Pursuit of Civility”, British historian Keith Thomas tells the story of the most benign developments of the past 500 years: the spread of civilised manners. In the 16th and 17th centuries many people behaved like barbarians. They delighted in public hangings and torture. They stank to high heaven. Samuel Pepys defecated in a chimney. Josiah Pullen, vice-principal of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, urinated while showing a lady around his college, “still holding the lady fast by the hand”. It took centuries of painstaking effort – sermons, etiquette manuals and stern lectures – to convert them into civilised human beings.
Reading Thomas’s book on a train recently I was gripped by a terrible realisation: everything our forebears worked so hard to achieve is now reversing. A process that took centuries has been undone in just a few decades.
There is no better place to observe the collapse of manners than on mass transport. The most basic move in the civilising process was to make a distinction between the public and the private: persuading people to defecate in lavatories rather than chimneys and eat at regular times in designated places, not whenever or wherever the mood took them. Yet today city streets reek of urine and trains smell of fast food. I recently had the misfortune to sit next to a quivering man-mountain on a train who proceeded to slurp a Coke, demolish a Big Mac, munch fries and spill ketchup onto his beard while giggling at a film on his super-sized iPad. His only concession to the fact that he wasn’t in his own sitting room was to wear headphones.
Overnight flights are worse. I’ve never witnessed anybody urinating on the back of an airline seat, as apparently happened on a Frontier Airlines plane this May. But I’ve watched a man next to me floss his teeth and then carefully place the thread on the tray table, another do a vigorous push-up routine in the corridor, and a modern-day Henry VIII discard his chicken bones on the floor.
Enlightenment philosophers were convinced that the great engines of modernity – urbanisation, commerce and travel – would also spread civilisation. Commerce was supposed to polish people’s manners as well as fill their pockets. The closer association of people with each other would allow the masses to learn refinement. Today those very engines are turning against the civilising process. San Francisco is at the centre of the biggest creation of wealth on the planet, yet its streets are often littered with faeces, garbage and syringes.
The people who were supposed to act as guardians of high culture have collectively turned against it. Psychotherapists disparage self-restraint as a sign of unhealthy hang-ups. Academics are now so keen to denounce bourgeois civilisation as a tool of exploitation, patriarchy and/or misogyny that it can only be a matter of time before they start behaving like Josiah Pullen. One Cambridge economist, Victoria Bateman, turned up to a faculty meeting naked in protest at Britain’s vote to leave the EU. No wonder that today’s young, the most educated generation in history, are more likely to model their style on the urban underclass than on yesterday’s educated elite – hence the spread of tattoos, piercings and beards.
Civilisational decline is contagious: however hard you try to preserve your own manners you can’t resist the general trend. Make way for someone in a queue at Starbucks and you’ll have to wait ages as they order some ridiculously convoluted drink and then take the only free table. Keep the seat next to you clear on a train and you’ll find yourself sitting next to somebody who decides to treat it like their own sofa.
I don’t think I’ll ever give in to the fashion for beards and tattoos, let alone turning up to meetings naked. But I’ve noticed that I increasingly circumvent the normal rules of politeness in a desperate attempt to keep going. I carry a pair of headphones with me at all times to insulate myself from the noise of my neighbours. I sprint ahead if I see any possible competitors approaching the queue for coffee. And I’ve graduated from putting my bag on the seat next to me on a train to a more cunning technique: I leave a copy of Jack Rosewood’s “The Big Book of Serial Killers” on the chair and smile manically at anyone who comes anywhere near. So far the serial-killer strategy has worked remarkably well.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Cabalgata de los Reyes Magos 2019 Barcelona
Barcelona, 2019, Jan. 5
Via Laietana - Plaça de Ramon Berenguer el Gran
Via Laietana - Plaça de Ramon Berenguer el Gran
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I would suggest that Trump knows that there are people who matter that do NOT have Twitter accounts - that matter a LOT.
> not you, right?
> generally negative response to
> Trump tweets and the enthusiasm
> for AOC's?
*Sorry for the redundancy.> and declare it real.
- Never said you did.
- You don't need one to read his tweets.
- He's got x,000,000,000 followers no less adoring of him than you are who track him assiduously; that you might not in no wat excuses you from their pathetic rank.
- *HE* obviously relies on his Twitter account and the preeminent instrument of his communication with his zombies.
- If everyone was as thoughtful in composing a timeline and massaging its borders as am I, their lives would be no less enriched than my own, which would a remarkable blessing to conscious thought on a planet of the simple-minded.
- Do you think others go through life looking for "content"?
Perhaps most quintessentially: Do you worry a lot about being perceived as "common"?