Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 5

Jordan Peterson gets a haircut

And then one day it happened.

She cut her hair and I stopped loving her.

— Billy Bragg, “Walk Away Renee”

 

Yesterday I read a Daily Caller piece called “Yes, Jordan Peterson Really Is That Smart,” because with that title, how could you not?

So would he have voted for Donald Trump? You might think this question would have elicited a slam dunk “Yes!” coming from a man who has become something of a regular guest on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight.

“Jesus,” says Peterson, “that’s a hard question.”

“I think what I would have done was walk into the voting booth with the intention of voting for Clinton, and then, at the last minute, gone, ‘To hell with it. I’m not doing it,’ and voted for Trump,” he said.

Like many on the right, this is a question he struggles with.

“For the entire election, virtually, I thought, well, Clinton has the experience necessary to at least keep the status quo in motion. So, in some sense, she was a conservative choice,” he continued. “Because she’d been in politics so long.”

Ultimately, though, Peterson became concerned about Clinton’s ideological direction. Likewise, he believes that Americans concluded they liked “the unscripted, impulsive lies of Trump better than the conniving, scripted lies of Clinton.”

“I think I would have impulsively voted for Trump at the last moment,” Peterson concedes. “But it wouldn’t have been with a sense of delight—I can tell you that.”

This was an academic exercise for a Canadian, but the fact that he reasoned through this hypothetical question, and answered with a sort of intellectual honesty is why Jordan Peterson matters—and why economics professor Tyler Cowen says he’s our most influential public intellectual (even if he doesn’t know it yet).

The smart answer for a guy pandering to the Fox News crowd would be to praise Trump. The smart answer for a professor trying to win friends in academia would be to praise Clinton. But Peterson did neither: He thought about it. And his nuanced answer is the kind that we don’t see enough from political commentators these days.

Ah, nuance!

The Left loves it, or pretends to.

Did you know that David Brooks loves Jordan Peterson too?

Well, “I Am David Brooks’ Friend With Only A High School Degree. I Have Never Seen A Sandwich and All I Know Is Fear.”

Now, to state the obvious: Jordan Peterson is a brilliant man with balls of steel, and is (therefore) sooper hawt.

But:

Hillary Clinton?

You know who “was in politics for so long”? Where do we start? Ted Kennedy? Maxine Waters? How is that a good thing?

Clinton has the experience necessary to at least keep the status quo in motion

And we should want that, of all things, because why now?

Peterson matter of factly presents these two points as de facto positives.

But I am David Brooks’ Sandwich Friend and therefore don’t operate on such assumptions.

I reject those very foundational premises, like I do most boring, lazy received elite “cocktail party” wisdom.

And not being a genius, I simply lack the mental capacity to comprehend how anyone could even consider voting for Hillary Clinton, for any office, let alone the presidency.

I’m not exaggerating. I. Cannot. Imagine. It.

And have you read my poetry?

(If even my most loyal 5FF readers got a glimpse of the sorts of things I can imagine, and which do not make it “down on paper,” they would be horrified. Yes, even you. Let’s just say there’s a reason I’ve never dropped acid. I burn approximately 500 calories a day sheerly through the effort of keeping these ideas inside my head…

(Anne Lamott called her mind “a bad neighbourhood,” and we all know that Anne Lamott is just a garden variety flaky yet harmless old hippie broad. She’s hardly Charles f***ing Bukowski. My “bad neighbourhood” is, I guess, pre-Giuliani 42nd Street after the bomb dropped. And was dropped by me. Actually, that’s still pretty mild. But I have to keep these ideas inside my head…)

Anyhow:

Last week a friend and I went back and forth over Jordan Peterson’s beard, a look he’s been sporting on tour. She approves. I do not.

The beard wasn’t the beginning of the end, of course. I’m not that ridiculous. Quite yet.

But I guess it was the beginning of the middle.

Personality cults are bad. They’re especially bad for the personality himself.

So I sense a welcome-yet-saddening lowering of fandom’s temperature — even though, ironically, spring has just arrived.

“What a pathetic fallacy!” as my best high school friend and I used to say.

You had to be there.

I don’t know where she is now.

She said it was just a figment of speech


And I said, “You mean figure?”


And she said, “No, figment”


Because she could never imagine it happening


But it did.

 

 

 

 

WATCH: Tucker Carlson and Mark Steyn talk about Hillary Clinton’s book

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

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My last refuge was Speakers’ Corner. I remembered my mother telling me about that special place when I was a child. It seemed almost magical to me. A place where everyone, without exception, could just stand on a box and start to speak to those who wanted to listen. I have always loved this tradition of Speakers’ Corner, which seemed very British to me.

But I came only to see that this tradition — the tradition of freedom of speech in the United Kingdom — is dead.

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Julie Burchill reviews Andrew Lloyd Webber’s memoir

Julie Burchill writes:

But the image of the lonely little boy creating a toy theatre based on the London Palladium becoming the man who wakes up every morning marvelling that he owns the actual London Palladium is the stuff of beautiful theatre – far more magical than anything he has actually staged. I found myself pleasantly surprised by this book, but having said that, I’ll be swerving the next one. Life’s too short to take a liking to people whose work you loathe, let alone to do it over the course of a three-volume memoir.

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“But now in 2018, Chetty is more or less admitting he got it wrong: Race matters.”

Sailer takes on Chetty again. (Of course, in a real country, Sailer would have Chetty’s NYTs job, but we’ll have to settle for this):

Chetty has pretty much given up on finding magic municipalities where they do things right that can be studied to close America’s gaps. As I’ve always argued, and Chetty now agrees, instead the race gap is geographically pervasive and consistent:

“Among children with parents at the 25th percentile, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts.”

The few exceptions tend to be neighborhoods in Queens or in the D.C. suburbs that have many high-achieving black immigrants.

It’s almost as if whites and blacks, on average, tend to have somewhat different cultures, ancestors, and genes. (…)

As comedian Dave Chappelle notes, there is a lot of pressure on black men to be Keeping It Real.  (…)

Seriously, contemporary African-American hip-hop culture, while it’s idolized by losers around the world, is poisonous for black males.

More generally, blacks tend to be quick decision-makers. About 80 percent of NFL defensive players are black, because blacks tend to have a knack for reacting with rapid violence. But off the football field, impulsiveness can be destructive to careers.

What can be done?

Well, my personal suggestion is that black males should try to commit fewer crimes.

But that’s not a very respectable thing to say.

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“Sorry folks, but Donald Trump is funny. Intentionally funny.”

Damian Reilly writes:

Worse, they’re going to have to admit that he’s funny for precisely the reason that Hillary Clinton isn’t: because he’s able to laugh at himself.

Did you see him at CPAC? He bought the house down. Halfway through his speech he seemed to drift off into a kind of reverie. Leaning on the lectern, he saw himself on the monitors. “What a nice picture. Look at that. I’d love to watch that guy speak.” (…)

Trump’s humour, I think, is archetypally mercantile – the laughter of business. It’s the comedy of a man who understands the exquisite pleasure of stiffing and the equally dreadful agonies of being stiffed. His gags are the gags of the guy on the make – a character from a Philip Roth novel, or a Martin Scorsese movie – a man who understands that in life you pay for everything. He’s aware, in other words, that in suffering there is comedy and that life is an inherently funny business.

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David Cole on the collapse of the Florida “diversity bridge”

David Cole writes:

Prior to pancaking, Diversity Bridge had been championed as “an engineering feat come to life.” One of the geniuses who accomplished this “feat” is an engineer who was hailed by President Obama in 2015 as a “champion of change”: Atorod Azizinamini (…)

Needless to say, the day after the collapse, damage control needed to be done, and fast. The piece on the FIU website was updated (in bloodred letters, no less) to read: “To clarify, Leonor Flores did not work on the FIU-Sweetwater University City Bridge project in any capacity.” Funny, because in that very same piece the bridge is referred to as “her work.” On its Facebook page, MCM deleted tags with Flores’ name. Also deleted (but archived by me) was a March 8 post declaring: “A strong woman looks a challenge dead in the eye and gives it a wink. Thankful for all of our MCM women who help us overcome challenges every day and #BuildExcellence. #HappyInternationalWomensDay #WeAreMCM.”

(…)

It should be noted that in the months prior to the bridge collapse, FIU was awarded millions of federal dollars to “diversify” its STEM classes. And even after the disaster, FIU’s president, Mark Rosenberg, defended the project, claiming that at least they were trying to “build a bridge, not a wall.” Yes, a fucking pedestrian bridge is now a symbol of anti-Trump “resistance.” In a perfect world, the fact that Rosenberg tried to excuse the death of six people by saying, “Hey, at least your loved ones were crushed by something that is symbolically anti-Trump” would lead to his immediate dismissal. In our imperfect world, however, it will probably lead to him having his own show on MSNBC.

Cole (being Cole) recalls the worst accident in Amtrax history, back in 1993. You might have seen a show about it on the History Channel or whatever; I know I did…

Ask Willie Odom, the pilot in question. And lest anyone think I’m being unfair in my description of him, I’ll leave that part to The New York Times: “The pilot, Willie Odom, could not read his radar, had left his chart of the river at home and did not have a compass.” The Times added that “he had no formal training,” and “he had received his piloting license only months before, after failing the exam seven times.” Since I’m sure the name totally didn’t tip you off, I’ll mention that Mr. Odom is black. And indeed, he had no formal training, was unable to read radar, had left his charts at home, possessed no compass, and had failed his licensing exam seven times. That night in 1993, he was supposed to be on the Mobile River, but he took a wrong turn in the fog, ending up in the Bayou Canot. And he wasn’t even aware he’d hit the bridge until he saw the fireball from the exploding trains. At that point, he exclaimed, “Oh Lord, I done made the wrong turn” (I wish I were making that up, but that’s his actual quote).

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Jordan Peterson the latest in long line of fascists, and p.s. THE HOLOCAUST!!!! says NY Review of Books

zzzzzzzzzz soooo sleeeeepppppy….

It is imperative to ask why and how this obscure Canadian academic, who insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science, has suddenly come to be hailed as the West’s most influential public intellectual. For his apotheosis speaks of a crisis that is at least as deep as the one signified by Donald Trump’s unexpected leadership of the free world.

He even mentions Wagner, Max! Wagner!!!

The big finish — er, this was all YOU guys tho…

In the end, deskbound pedants and fantasists helped bring about, in Thomas Mann’s words in 1936, an extensive “moral devastation” with their “worship of the unconscious”—that “knows no values, no good or evil, no morality.” Nothing less than the foundations for knowledge and ethics, politics and science, collapsed, ultimately triggering the cataclysms of the twentieth century: two world wars, totalitarian regimes, and the Holocaust. It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a similar intellectual and moral breakdown, one that seems to presage a great calamity. Peterson calls it, correctly, “psychological and social dissolution.” But he is a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.

 

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Jim Goad writes:

It is quite clear that not only do the post-WWII cosmopolites who comprise the modern British managerial elite not only have no compassion for England’s poor and abused whites—rather, they actively hate them.

(…)

To my knowledge, England’s citizens were never consulted about their deliberate replacement, and I highly doubt that if they were, they would have consented to it. Instead, their gradual erasure has been planned for them, and if they so much as make a peep about it, they will be crushed.


Sadly, far too many Britons seem to have been brainwashed into accepting their extinction as a moral cause. They’ve been taught to feel guilty—rather than proud—that their soggy little nation once ruled the world. Those are the ones for whom the planners of the modern English technocratic state are helping perform assisted suicide.

But for many if not most others, it’s only made to look like a suicide. In reality, it’s deliberately orchestrated mass murder.

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So it’s not just me?! “‘Seven Days in Entebbe’ and the nostalgia for 1970s terrorism”

:

It was only Seven Days in Entebbe, but it felt like an eternity. The rescue in July 1976 by Israeli commandos of 102 Jewish and Israeli hostages from Palestinian and German terrorists at Entebbe airport in Uganda was a scriptwriter’s dream: a three-act drama of crisis, complication and resolution, in which the good guys won—good guys that is, unless you were rooting for the hijackers to murder 106 men, women and children for no other reason than they were Jewish. Three films were in production almost immediately. None were made by Arabs or Germans.

(…)

The movie business loves a remake, but the Entebbe story is too familiar. All that remains is for someone to make Moral Defeat at Entebbe. Step forward José Padilha, who should not be confused with Jose Padilla. Padilha is the Brazilian director who remade RoboCop. Padilla is the homegrown Islamist currently serving a twenty-one year stretch for trying to make a dirty bomb. If he behaves himself and gets a DVD player as a privilege, he would probably enjoy Seven Days in Entebbe, at least until the last five minutes.

The unique selling point of Seven Days in Entebbe is that, instead of focussing on the [suffering] of the hostages of the bravery of their rescuers, it focuses on the [conscience] of the hostage-takers and the Israeli politicians.

(PS: The US Speccie needs a proofreader. I spotted those two typos at 6am with no coffee. Expect more.)

The “nostalgia” the author eventually, dryly, addresses isn’t mine, quite:

It’s a pining for a time when the terrorists, like the terrorised, had secular ideologies, and there was still hope of negotiating with them. You know, the good old days. When the terrorists only killed Jews, and the European governments could feed the crocodile, by paying off the hijackers and helping them on their way to Libya or Iraq, where they could plot another atrocity.

No, quite the opposite:

I miss the days when no one but their fellow freaks “understood their motivations, if not their methods” — a well-rehearsed rhetorical gambit that was practically one very long word, as familiar to my ears back then as the jingles for Coke and McDonald’s.

The days when we blew the terrorists away, in a Los Angeles “safe house” or on the tarmac in Africa.

The days when we all (not just some of us, like today) hated the “Arabs” and cheered for Israel, for the Jews, and their, to us, seemingly new-found determination to be macho ass-kickers.

Anyway:

This is the excuse I needed to post a clip from the greatest movie ever made, which is, of course, Delta Force…

 

 

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“Intellectual women such as George Eliot, Hughes demonstrates, could be comfortably ugly…”

Eliot was “shockingly plain … with a huge nose and missing teeth.” Why, then, did her family fixate on the seemingly insignificant rumor that her right hand was larger than her left, attempting to change and control the narrative about this appendage after her death? In the chapter “George Eliot’s Hand,” Hughes carefully unpacks this persistent story and explains why such a physical disparity was problematic.

An enlarged right hand (from crushing cheese curd) would have been emblematic of her working-class upbringing as a dairymaid, a background her middle class-descendants found decidedly uncomfortable. As Hughes argues: “It wasn’t just that the story of George Eliot’s large right hand gave her the clumsy body of a working-class country girl; it hinted that she had the sexual morals of one too.” At the end of the chapter, Hughes gives a tantalizing answer to whether or not Eliot’s right hand was actually bigger, with a discussion of newly uncovered material evidence.

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