Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 9

“As institutional morality has advanced, personal morality has retreated”

…time and time again I have seen white men with clearly underage girls in hotels and bars throughout Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. I have never been able to understand how this became normalised. (…)

As for the underlying worldview, in which aid workers see poor countries as a moral vacuum in which to purchase pleasure while we sympathise because they are working in difficult situations – that won’t change until we fully understand the colonial hinterland on which some attitudes rest.

Toby Guise: Let’s call Islamo-fascism what it really it — Islamo-Stalinism

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

          Related Stories“Black Panther’s blatant conservatism” shows that “this decade’s cultural energies are flowing toward the right”David Cole: “Feminists and trannies are like Stalin and Hitler”Jim Goad: How to Exploit a High School Shooting  

“Black Panther’s blatant conservatism” shows that “this decade’s cultural energies are flowing toward the right”

Steve Sailer writes:

Since its first self-produced film, 2008’s Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr., Marvel has tilted subtly to the right. For example, Iron Man 2 in 2010 was the first movie I can recall that dared even briefly to satirize Obama. (…)

Then, his globalist ex-girlfriend argues that Wakanda should use its high-tech riches to help the countless poor of Africa by opening its borders. But as an adviser to the king sagely points out:

“If we let in refugees, they will bring their problems with them and then Wakanda will be like anyplace else.” (…)

King T’Challa, however, subscribes to his ancestors’ views that Wakanda, with its priceless Magic Dirt, should first take care of its own business. When Poland and Hungary subscribe to a similar view, it’s considered horrifyingly extremist, but when a nonexistent African country does it, it’s the height of political wisdom.

 

Sailer reviews Dinesh D’Souza’s Obama movie

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

          Related StoriesDavid Cole: “Feminists and trannies are like Stalin and Hitler”Jim Goad: How to Exploit a High School ShootingI always hated “I Love Lucy.” Now I have another reason.  

David Cole: “Feminists and trannies are like Stalin and Hitler”

writes:

So why is there such strong anti-trans sentiment in leftist socialist “let’s arrest children for hate speech” U.K.? Well, my guess is, the more far-left the nation, the sooner the feminist/tranny war will erupt. The less influence the right has, the more leftists will feel comfortable openly battling each other. Here in the U.S., the left is so united against Trump and his “Nazi” supporters, many leftists are willing to put their own squabbles aside…for now. At the moment, should a conservative criticize a state or county’s “tranny dudes in the ladies’ room” policy, feminists who might, deep down, agree that women’s restrooms should not be open to any swingin’ dirlywanger will probably feel compelled to stay quiet, lest they be seen as being on the same side as “Trump fascists.” Conservatives and rightists in the U.S. still have a voice, and leftists live in fear of inadvertently helping them advance their agenda.

David Cole: ‘A President Trump will be neither the hero his supporters take him for…’

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

          Related StoriesJim Goad: How to Exploit a High School ShootingI always hated “I Love Lucy.” Now I have another reason.Nobody listens to me… Ban schools, not guns.  

Jim Goad: How to Exploit a High School Shooting

Jim Goad writes:

The ADL certainly didn’t offer any updates about the fact that Cruz claims his mother was Jewish, which would make him one of those White Supremacist Hispanic Jewish Nazis they keep soliciting funds to combat.

“Africans vs. African-Americans in Minneapolis: Somali Cop’s Black Neighbor Not Surprised By Shooting”

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

          Related StoriesI always hated “I Love Lucy.” Now I have another reason.Nobody listens to me… Ban schools, not guns.“A new book suggests the Catholic-born icon was more spiritual than the “beatnik” label suggests”  

I always hated “I Love Lucy.” Now I have another reason.

Yes, Lucille Ball was a gifted female show-biz entrepreneur, although she was preceded by Gertrude Berg, who receives only one-one-millionth of the credit for doing the same sort of thing years earlier.

However, I hate I Love Lucy. “Shut that screaming off!” my mother would yell when she was within earshot of the show and it accidentally came on the TV after something we’d actually been watching. “Lucy” was a bawling scheming incompetent mess, and in real life of course that husband of hers was a total creep, so watching her hang all over him is just… ugh.

Even the title: I Love Lucy — a coy, cynical pre-emptive strike against those of us who hated her, and it.

Now we can surely trace many of America’s problems to this:

The show was putting a voodoo curse on the country.

You think I’m kidding…

Is I Love Lucy the real Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the Vault of the Adepti, the Island Beneath the Sea? Robert Anton Wilson used to talk about “the sect of Fred Mertz, Bodhisattva,” and its adherents’ simple creed:

They believe that if you look at enough I Love Lucy re-runs when you’re really wasted, even­tually you’ll hear Fred reveal the most esoteric Zen teachings. . . .

If that sounds far-fetched, consider this: Ricky Ricardo’s signature song was addressed to a fearsome deity in the Yoruba pantheon. For practitioners of Santería, Babalú-Ayé is the orisha who controls health and prosperity. You want to be very cool around Babalú-Ayé because he can cover you with boils or give you the Ebola. The next time a conga drum tempts you to do your impression of Ricky Ricardo singing “Babalú,” remember that you might be mocking the god who decides whether you catch leprosy. Ixnay on the abalúbay!

Below, in his hit version of Margarita Lecuona’s song, Desi Arnaz lights 17 candles and offers aguardiente, tobacco and money to the orisha in exchange for a woman’s love.

 

Gavin McInnes: What Women Want

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

          Related StoriesNobody listens to me… Ban schools, not guns.“A new book suggests the Catholic-born icon was more spiritual than the “beatnik” label suggests”Steve Sailer on “Black Panther” and “the real Wakanda” — Ethiopia  

Nobody listens to me… Ban schools, not guns.

I wrote this in 2012 and stand by every word:

A survey of popular culture indicates that attitudes about compulsory public education have drastically devolved. Children have always hated school, but the Our Gang kids only “played hooky” from class, they didn’t shoot it up. The “juvies” in Blackboard Jungle (1955) just smash up some classical-music records* and manhandle a teacher (who probably liked it).

The sea change dates back to—you’ll never guess—1968, when Lindsay Anderson’s film …if climaxed with an armed student rebellion at an English public school.

A multitude of Tom Brown-turns-John Brown fiction pieces followed. “School’s been blown to pieces,” Alice Cooper growled triumphantly in 1972. Then came Massacre at Central High (1976), Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979), and the ingenious satire Heathers (1988). School in countless American films is depicted as a conformist concentration camp with a marching band.

Today, two multi-million-dollar entertainment franchises, Twilight and The Hunger Games, revolve around teens fighting each other to the death—but God forbid gun-phobic, video-game-banning suburban moms question their own reading habits, right?

A belated correction:

Blackboard Jungle was on a while back, and the records are jazz, not classical.

In fact, when a well-meaning teacher tells Glenn Ford about his collection of rare and in some cases irreplaceable jazz records, which it has taken him a lifetime to accumulate, and which he is absolutely certain will be a big hit with those juvvie kids when he brings them to school…

I had to change the channel at that point.

On the list of “scariest scenes in non-horror movies,” surely that is right up there…

 

Sammy Davis Jr’s ‘A Man Called Adam’ (1966) is on TCM tonight

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

          Related Stories“A new book suggests the Catholic-born icon was more spiritual than the “beatnik” label suggests”Steve Sailer on “Black Panther” and “the real Wakanda” — EthiopiaDavid Cole: What “hood pranks” reveal about the “collapsing” black “community”  

“A new book suggests the Catholic-born icon was more spiritual than the “beatnik” label suggests”

Rather old news, but the American Conservative seems to think not.

(And “of the end of time” is the only variety of “eschatology” there is, but no matter…)

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

Underlying all of this as Kerouac’s spiritual bedrock was his Catholic upbringing in Lowell, Massachusetts among working-class French Canadian immigrants. Kerouac described himself as a “strange solitary Catholic mystic” whose ecstatic vision of life was the direct result of an eschatology of the end of time. What he longed for was contact with the heavenly eternity overlaying and occasionally penetrating our anodyne perceptions of time. “Life is a dream already over,” he said. It was the furthest thing from an existential claim of the primacy of death and absurdity. It was life reinvigorated by recognition of a transcendent reality.

Is America Overdue For a Satanic Revival? My NEW PJMedia column

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

          Related StoriesSteve Sailer on “Black Panther” and “the real Wakanda” — EthiopiaDavid Cole: What “hood pranks” reveal about the “collapsing” black “community”Julie Burchill on Katie Price, tall-poppy syndrome and “social racism”  

Steve Sailer on “Black Panther” and “the real Wakanda” — Ethiopia

Steve Sailer writes:

Wakanda, as you may have heard, is vibrant due to its massive deposits of vibranium, a literal Magic Dirt, which proves Trump is racist. Or something.

Nobody can quite explain the logic of Wakanda Worship, but it’s extremely popular at the moment.

In the old days, however, it was easier to fantasize about distant lands that were at least nominally existent.

The most famous Cult of Ethiopia was the Rastafarians, who first appeared in 1930s Jamaica. They worshipped as a messiah for blacks the emperor Haile Selassie, who before his 1930 coronation had been known as Ras (roughly, “Duke”) Tafari. When the emperor stepped out of his airplane at the Jamaican airport in 1966, the poor man was so alarmed by the mob of dreadlocked ganja smokers welcoming him that he retreated back into his plane.

Todaze ‘hate fact’: ‘Average IQ in Jamaica’

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

          Related StoriesDavid Cole: What “hood pranks” reveal about the “collapsing” black “community”Julie Burchill on Katie Price, tall-poppy syndrome and “social racism”Jim Goad on Quentin Tarantino, x eleventy  

David Cole: What “hood pranks” reveal about the “collapsing” black “community”

writes another must-read:

You may not know this, but there’s an entire subgenre of YouTube prank videos in which white, Asian, and Hispanic pranksters venture into black communities just to fuck with the locals. They’re called “hood pranks,” and, cumulatively, they have hundreds of millions of views. And within this subgenre is a sub-subgenre in which pranksters fart on black people. Or at least they pretend to (they use a handheld noisemaker called a “pooter”). (…)

This is what it’s come to. Black America is now seen as a joke, a prop for comedy. Wanna see a startling Black History Month statistic? On YouTube, the most watched upload of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech has 9.8 million views. The most watched “farting on black people” video? 16.7 million views. (…)

Morgan State professor Jason Johnson (…) frets that “African-American birth rates have fallen below what is known as ‘the replacement level,’” adding, “A shrinking black population puts many of our age-old strategies for success at risk, since black power has always come from maintaining political majorities in cities like Washington, D.C., being a crucial voting bloc, or acquiring federal or private investment after a census.”

Yeah, about those “political majorities.” Based on U.S. Census Bureau calculations, Washington, D.C.’s “black population is disappearing.” And in Chicago? “Chicago’s white population seems to be on the rise. In fact, the total population of whites now may exceed that of blacks.” And what of the “progressive” West Coast? The region is seeing “an exodus of blacks” even as many “economically struggling Midwestern cities” have “declining black populations.”

As we know all too well, the elite Left and the bumpkin Right (I’m looking at you, Glenn Beck) enjoy deploying Dr. King’s speech for their own purposes.

(This suits the King family fine, as they own the copyright — even on the plagiarized bits, amusingly — and charge a fee for its use.)

Both sides sigh that “Dr. King’s dream still hasn’t come true,” although of course they differ furiously on the reasons why. (Or pretend to when the camera’s red light is on.)

They are all missing the point, because they’re making what may or may not be called “a category error” but I didn’t go to university and am also too lazy to google that right now.

What I mean is: They treat King’s speech as a blueprint, when it is in fact more like a song.

This is surely how “I Have a Dream” has been (unconsciously) “consumed” all this time:

As the rhetorical equivalent of a particularly stirring vocal performance — an aria, or, more aptly, an anthem:

Whitney Huston singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” The “Marseille” scene from Casablanca…

We do not think to ask with a tsk, “Well, that’s all well and good, but have those songs come true?” Because the last two words would stumble on their way from our brains to our tongues.

Yet we demand such an answer when it comes to King’s speech.

About a bloated all-star performance of “We Are the World” in 1993 (which seems to have had some kind of White House imprimatur) Greil Marcus writes:

It may be that behind the great good feeling of this performance lies only propaganda, a fabulous sheen of communitarian self-recognition disguising a new government that means to leave the country as it found it. But as John F. Kennedy proved against his own will, or for that matter his thoughtlessness, false promises can be taken up by those who only hear the tune and don’t care about the copyright.

If, as Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen puts it, “The sound of Dylan’s voice changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did,” then the same can be said for the sound of Kennedy’s voice and his political acts.

This is the most profound thing I’ve ever read in Marcus’ somewhat overrated critical ouvre (and, amusingly, given my subject, he is quoting someone else — but at least giving the other fellow credit…) but I’ll leave my own musings about the similar effect that, say, Joe Strummer’s “singing” voice evokes for another time (and coffee.)

For now, I wonder if I, and not a few other dismayed souls, black and white, were being rather too hard on those folks I wondered at a few years back at Taki’s:

From what I can make out, every year, African-Americans celebrate MLK Day with boozy parties at “da club.” Which is fine, I guess. White people have been commemorating statutory holidays with drunk driving and explosives since forever.

It’s not like I celebrate Canada Day by getting really drunk and holding a séance to contact the ghost of my dog, so it would be peevish to expect Americans of any shade to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. through, say, displays of ritual plagiarism. If we’ve learned anything from the aforementioned Kwanzaa, it’s that historical accuracy is largely optional in the sphere of holidays.

But from what I can make out from these MLK party flyers, the whole “adultery” thing, on the other hand, is a key component. (…)

In some cases, fireworks are Photoshopped, with exuberant, distasteful obliviousness, behind his head. (…)

“Voter suppression” hysterics will be relieved to learn there’s no ID required at Club Technics’ MLK bash.

Delivering on the promise of its “Free At Last” theme, the Wish Ultra Lounge in Dallas lets everyone in, no cover charge (“before 10 PM”).

All very tasteless and undignified, and seemingly breathtakingly, well, tone deaf — but only if, I now realize, you make the category error mentioned above.

Let’s face it: Dr. King’s speech is the only thing that 85% of those partiers (along with most of the rest of the world) probably know him for.

And they “know” (whether they know it or not) that that speech is a song.

And so they leave the think-tank-ing and bad faith hand-wringing to the rest of us, and sing.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr: A Taki’s mini-treasury!

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

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Julie Burchill on Katie Price, tall-poppy syndrome and “social racism”

Julie Burchill writes:

Last week, Katie Price addressed Parliament on the subject of social media trolling – which her 15-year-son is particularly affected by, due to his weight, ethnicity and handicaps. She is calling for online abuse to be made a criminal offence. Coming from the sticks-and-stones school of thought, I don’t agree. But if you’d ever wondered what sort of pond-life gets their jollies from calling a blind boy names, they took this opportunity to come out once more in force and condemn his mother in terms that might better have suited a serial killer.

(…)

Weirdly, the British can be far more resentful of the self-made rich than they are towards the inherited rich, perhaps because inheritors give us a get-out on our own failure; they were born to it/there’s no point in trying, whereas the self-made highlight our own lack of oomph.

Julie Burchill: “Is Roxane Gay’s relentless self-analysis compounding her problems?”

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

          Related StoriesJim Goad on Quentin Tarantino, x eleventyPeter Hitchens seems vexed that not every book ever written was intended for him. Also that he didn’t write it.“Is a parade a good idea? A bad idea? Irrelevant! It’s a hilarious idea”: THIS x eleventy squared