On the subject of musicians’ sensibilities for the hard and physical, I’ve always enjoyed the following quote of Hindemith, who briefly served on the front in WWI, which concerns the suitability of composers for war (a sphere not too far off from that of athletic competitions) : “I can hardly imagine most musicians as soldiers. Bach as a staff-sergeant (handing over a pair of oversized boots), that would be okay, but Beethoven practicing rifle drill, Mozart throwing hand-grenades or standing guard in front of a barracks; Schubert as an air force lieutenant and Mendelssohn as an NCO at a vehicle fleet convoy? They are inconceivable.” Hindemith’s contemporary Ravel didn’t seem to have much of an appetite for the front either, in spite of sincere efforts. And come to think of it, I could list a whole host of other front rank twentieth century composers who were about as well cut out for the wars of their era as Pierre Bezhukov was for Tolstoy’s Borodino.

Though I don’t feel inclined to pursue the matter here, I would submit that, interestingly, the situation in terms of personality match differs quite a bit for the case of poets….

Among American poets, Wallace Stevens is king.

I concur that this conversation has largely exceeded its expiration date, but I will append a few more notes for posterity.

As evidence of composed music’s fading relevance, you mention the attentions accorded to Beethoven’s funeral. I might mention that during the publication of the ‘Brothers Karamazov’,
which was released over several installments, each of these were publicly received with rapturous public acclaim, and continued anticipations. I have even read that whereupon Dostoyevksy was spotted in public during this period, it was not uncommon for recognizing bypassers on the street to doff their hats, shower him with applause, and exclaim their plaudits. Could one possibly imagine such an exalted reception for a public work of genuine literature today? You see, literature, concomitantly with the traditional arts, has also experienced a general diminution in public standing.

You ask as to whether recent composers “inspire other artists or thinkers the way Beethoven inspired Goethe or Wagner, Proust?”. Well, that is an interesting angle, but I think that there are more results here than you realize. Off the top of my head, Gabriel Garcia Marquez apparently had deep interests in modern music. Olga Neuwirth has collaborated with Elfriede Jelinek on an opera rendition of David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’. Takemitsu has created film scores for respectably admired Japanese Films. Kaija Saariaho has collaborated on works with Finnish litterateur Sofi Oksanen.

Most galling is your snippet “Do they arouse passions, not only emotional, but aesthetic-cognitive?”. The idea that contemporary composed music merely ‘arouses passions’ but lacks an ‘aesthetic-cognitive’ component is bogus. The entire thrust of my recent screeds has been that there exists a cannon of recent composed works which amount to much more than merely dead ended experiments in the hyper avant garde. As one example, consider Dutilleaux’s ‘Ainsi la Nuit’, which I consider to rank among the most venerable of string quartets. The music is sophisticated and challenging, by no means facile, but also richly lyrical, and, as Dutilleaux characterizes it, palpably exhibits Proustian qualities of introspective reflection. It evokes a nocturnal vibe, comparable to the famed ‘night music’ middle movements of various of Bartok’s masterpieces. As another example, consider Ligetti’s piano etudes, which I consider, along with maybe Messiaen’s ‘Vingt Regards’, to comprise one of the most seismically innovative piano suits of the approximate past 75 years. The works are technically virtuosic, and often quite complex, but also well more than merely academically rarefied. Etude 13 (“The Devil’s Staircase”) evinces elements of humor. Some of the etudes, EG “Autumn in Warsaw” manifest frissons of inner anxieties. And I could cite a veritable battery of pieces from recent composers which measure up quite rightly in quality with the front catalogs of anthologized common practice composers. My recent posts bestow more than ample points in that direction. Anyone who denies the existence of deeply artistically enriching musical masterpieces over the recent period is either being disingenuous in his acknowledgments or simply lacks an aptitude for music.

And as for the comment about European literary habits, that one gave me a good chuckle. I don’t quite know where your 50% is coming from, but I do know that I have met (not unintelligent or entirely disinterested people, mind you) Hungarian graduate students who prefer American negro rap over the music of their national composers, Portuguese professors who think that Saramago isn’t worth a pair of boots, and so forth. Okay, I’ll admit that literature is maybe slightly more read than composed music is listened to, however, I am afraid I can but place dim stock in your assurances regarding European belletristic sensibility and sophistication.

These considerations tend to circle back upon the conclusion that recent and contemporary high brow composed music is generally unlistened to, that it is not party to a meaningful and continued
cultural consciousness. Of course, I mainly grant this, though in matters of magnitude, I dissent to a fair degree. If 2% of the 1% most educated people engage with this spectrum of the arts and form tangible sustained sub-communities, that’s good enough for me. If venerable institutions like the New York Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra more than occasionally incorporate recent and contemporary works into their repertoire, that isn’t nothing.

But there are two particular counterpoints I’d like to advance in response to your latest, one of which concerns the untenability of your assertion concerning historical “precedence”. Specifically, you write, “Nobody even knows names of the composers who have appeared on the scene in past 50 years. This is, having in mind Western culture in past 200-300, a situation without precedence.”
With respect to musical accomplishment, France, England, Poland, Russia, Finland, Hungary, America, and Japan each had nil or at best about fewer-than-you-can-count-on-one hand truly stand out, culturally remembered, intellectually trailblazing composers prior to the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, the number of composers each of these national cultures could boast drastically dwarfed that of preceding periods. In fact, I would argue that Germany is the only major cultural entity whose institutions of musical composition backslid during this time (so much for Schoenberg’s promises about German musical supremacy for centuries to come, lol). In light of this chronological disparity, how are the general circumstances of musical achievement of recent times relative to those of the preceding 300 years “without precedence”?

Secondly, you seem to invest a quixotically enthusiastic confidence in the influence of recent literature. You adumbrate “Yourcenar, McCarthy, Updike, Vargas Llosa, Canetti, Grass, Eco, Bloom” but you provide zero evidence that any of these figures are grist to the mill of a communicative, letter writing public which thrives on the consumption of great literature. You provide zero evidence that these figures are part of some healthy literature appreciating zeitgeist. For my part, I will admit, pardon, that I have never engaged with Yourcenar, Vargar Llosa, or Canetti. To me, the zany mannerism of Gunter Grass invites unflattering comparisons to the mixed metaphor riddled style of NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Regardless, my perception is that to an above average educated person in the West, the list you furnish consists of people he’s never heard of, a middlebrow American about whom he had to slog out an assignment on some odd occasion in primary school, and a guy who inspired a zombie movie. A person here may occasionally dabble with the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Another might prefer that of Mark Strand. But from the perspective of recognition, relevance, and unified scene, the ‘sterility & utter insignificance.’ prevails in equal measure as with music. Now, you might respond that the literary figures you have so delineated are at least more readily intelligible than those of the musical artists I have mentioned. But this would not be a fantastically convincing path to pursue. For one, many of the composers I have presented are quite understandable. To boot, intelligibility as not tantamount to cultural relevance or quality. As well, more than a few loosely supposed masterpieces of recent literature, such as Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, are even more difficult to grok than the works of many of the composers I have variously enumerated.

I slightly disagree with a few comments.

To start, I must confess that one of my principal frustrations (not with you in particular, but generally) with discussing modern composed music on Unz is that there seems to be a great deal of confusion as to how and why twentieth century music became abstract. A typical Unz attitude proceeds as thus; Schoenberg introduced atonality into modern music, after that the lemmings
followed him off of the cliff. All music devolved into an ’emperor with no’ clothes scam in which pretentious frauds spew desultory notes, analogous in visual art to a New York City hipster
dumping some metal scraps on the floor and presenting these as deep sculpture. But this ignores the deep rootedness of Schoenberg’s music within the traditions of Wagner / Brahms, and ignores the continuity with which he self consciously extended upon this German romantic tradition. Schoenberg was indeed a German expressionist; his music was intentionally angsty, musically comparable in character to Georg Trakl or Stefan Georg poems, which he would sometimes orchestrally narrate. His infamous tone rows served less as vehicles for random fiddling than as filtration mechanisms to guard against slipping into sentimental cliches of the past. Similarly with Alban Berg. It was not until Webern that total abstraction became the end in and of itself. Then, apotheosizing Webern, Pierre Boulez and company established the Darmstadt school, thereby initiating a transient period from somewhere about 1950-1980 whereby ‘total serialism’ became the prevailing dogma in certain influential quarters. Ranking amidst this milieu were figures like Stockhausen, Babbit, Carter, Cage, Lachenmann, Kurtag, Xenakis and others who composed extremely difficult, abstract music. Thus is my extremely brief historical delineation of affairs.

But into this picture, a few popular misconceptions enter on Unz. First, contra insinuations which get bandied about, almost none of these composers credibly embodied ‘postmodernism’ in any real way. Many Unz commentators seem to allege that modern composers are frivolous, that their music is so overtly ridiculous that they must be participants in a fraud of which they are inwardly self conscious. But this is not so. Babbit, a proponent of analytic philosophy, snidely criticized imprecise thought and averred that technical analysis is the only valid modality of music criticism and appreciation. Boulez, renowned for his precision, represents the sober, Cartesian rationalist aspect of the French intellectual. John Cage, though he naturally invites such categorization upon himself for having composed 4’33, was really more musically sincere than people credit, and to judge him exclusively on the basis of 4’33 is like judging Ravel exclusively on the basis of Bolero. Indeed, I personally rather dig compositions such as ‘Fifty Eight’. But I digress. My main contention of this paragraph is that most Darmstadt school styled high atonal music is buttressed by an intense devotion to mathematical purity and to structural integrity with underlying theories. These composers are not generally the caliber of goofs who grift off of a reputation for being artsy while churning out craftless dreck, as seems to get imputed by your invocation of ‘postmodern’.

A second misconception, in my opinion, is the notion that Darmstadt style total serialism became dominantly influential; that it completely decimated music, or as you phrase it, that intuitively listenable music is ‘not prevalent, nor characteristic among post-WW2 composers’. Perhaps one could have gleaned this impression around the 1950’s, when Boulez and his ilk were publically bullying traditional composers, or when they succesfully pressured Stravinsky into abandoning neoclassicism to join the dark side. But really, by the late 70’s / early 80’s, the founding project had well lost its elan, and the general musical academy had fractured along many schisms. A fair number of ‘progressive but tasteful’ composers of the post 1950s period seemed to glide by total serialism altogether, and preferred to continue where Ravel, Debussy, and Bartok left off. I have namedropped such composers on other occasions, and I think it would be vulgar at the current juncture to insert a laundry load list, but here I have in mind, say, Henri Dutilleux, or Toru Takemitsu, or Alexander Goehr, or Salvatorre Sciarrino, or Witold Lutoslawksi. Even among certain initial radicals, retrenchment ensued. EG, Penderecki returned to composing in the idiom of traditional concert music, and Ligetti began doing things that might have been passe during the height of formal abstractionism, such as incorporating elements of Eastern European folk songs into his work. Today, one could boast of more than a few contemporary listenable composers (Ades, Peka Salonen, Saariaho) who somewhat disdain the Boulez paradigm and write colorful, lyrical music influenced by the the Ravel-Debussy-Bartok-Stravinsky-Scriabin axis of modernism.

Summating, my problem with modern music hating on Unz is that it obsesses (often from a somewhat distorted perspective) with the the genre of atonalism initiated by Schoenberg and continued to extreme form by Boulez, Stockhausen, et al.. Simultaneously, it ignores the contributions of the Ravel-Debussy-Bartok-Stravinsky-Scriabin axis of musical composition and the enduring influence of this axis upon future generations of composers.

Taruskin is an interesting case. On one hand, I find his erudition extremely impressive, I find his manner of prose snappy and engaging, and I find his ‘Oxford History’ volumes deserving of their esteemed standing. There is even a blog called the ‘Taruskin Challenge’ I used to follow, which was maintained by sincerely motivated graduate students who documented their opinions of Taruskin’s epic Oxford tomes as they plowed through them. But Taruskin espouses a conceited arrogance and a tendency to indulge some of the most noxious academic tendencies as his career progresses. I find his thinly substantiated indictments of antisemitism in Stravinsky particularly odious, along with his feigned outrage of scholars who dare contest them. In these allegations there are no stimulating insights about Stravinsky’s art or the context of his art, just the indecently gleeful specter of a cat playing with its prey, and the vulgar triumph of a narcissist who has successfully manipulated certain perversities of the contemporary academy, to his personal ego enrichment, but not towards the scholarly cause. In a sense, Taruskin resembles Harold Bloom as someone who churned out impressive, assiduous scholarship into his middle years, but who, upon assuming the mantle of a primary institutional critic, lapsed into a caricature of his initially high brow originating self.

We partook of an exchange concerning some of these points about a month or two ago. I found aspects of merit in your responses. But in your final reply, which I never addressed, you opined that contemporary composed music is hopelessly obscure and you commented that ‘ Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, … is [the] literary equivalent of most post-1950 concert composers’ . This coincides with the sentiment of ‘guest’, who wants to ‘ to rip [his] chair out of its moorings and throw it onstage’ whereupon he beholds modern compositions. But this flippant philistinism ignores the accessibility of many mid twentieth century and onward classics. Consider, for instance, Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’, which is simultaneously highly intellectually progressive, heart wrenching, and universally acclaimed. I can vividly recall being instantly entranced by it’s ‘wheels within wheels’ rhythmic effect when I first listened to it as a teenager, on the recommendation of a Frank Zappa interview. Have the Unz philistines who bash modern music in the most banal manner ever listened to this piece? Are they even faintly aware of the hugely influential musical titan Messiaen comprises? As another example, I attended a concert a few years back in which Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto constituted the main centerpiece. The audience consisted significantly of grey hairs, of the variety who usually show up to hear the likes of Mozart or Tchaikovsky. Nearly all responded rapturously to this composition, which is indeed quite modern, but also quite romantic in the sense of being striving and adventurous, rather than in the sense of being soppy and sentimental. How many Unz philistines have listened to it? As another example, consider the ominous, nocturnal, and intensely foreboding masterpieces of composers like Bartok, Penderecki, or Ligetti. Many a plebeian with no background in music theory or modern music has found himself enthralled with these works as they appear within Stanley Kubrik soundtracks. Some are even inspired to take these as footholds for continued modern musical explorations. How can one flatly proclaim that modern composed music is sterile, abstruse, over intellectually indulgent junk when there are viscerally thrilling composers like these around?

I get your point about earlier jazz sounding like cartoon music, but as a matter of degree, I would personally designate that Parker falls on the right side of the demarcating line. As I see it, his blustery, virtuosic style of play and his complex harmonic reengineering of the standards set the expectations of 1950’s era bop, and paved the way for what Coltrane was to accomplish in his ‘Giant Steps’ phase.

Vis a vis the broader phenomenon you emphasize, concerning the “Black Community’s” diminishing interest in jazz, I find Miles Davis’s response to this to comprise rather a tragedy of artistic decline. The talents that Miles convened in the course of his first and second great quintets, the type of music these outfits explored, not to mention the modal, tasteful, lyrical but also remarkably economical, and often mysterious registers of trumpet playing which Miles exhibited in these endeavors, is nothing short of awe inspiring. But as Miles Davis deviated from his artistic integrity to try and curry favor with his fellow negros, the quality of his work directly deteriorated. It is well biographically established that Miles was immensely personally concerned with the manner in which his music was being received by his fellow blacks. The album “On the Corner”, whose music is commensurate with its garish ghetto cover art, manifests the first harbinger of this. Miles Davis’s final album, “Doo Bop”, produced by a hip hooper named “Easy Mo Bee”, is a pathetic joke. Miles might very well have been better off overdosing, like many jazzers did, while still at his peak.

As an aficionado of the ‘new classical music’, I’ve about 90% resigned myself to the trends and conclusions you so delineate, and contented myself to subsist among the dwindled ranks who would strike up a Milton Babbit  “Who Care if You Listen?” attitude in these affairs.  

I wouldn’t at all say that there have been no Jewish composers. From Hungary, two of the country’s finest post Bartok composers, as well influential composers generally, Gyorygy Ligetti and Gyorgy Kurtag, were Jewish. Of France’s ‘Les Six’, the neoclassical superstar Darius Milhaud, who was once quite popular, but whose reputation diminished as the Pierre Boulez aesthetic eclipsed that of neoclassicism, was Jewish. Of Slavic extraction, the Czech Republic had a burgeoning school of Jewish composers, not too dissimilar in their aims from ‘Les Six’, comprised (among others) of Pavel Haas and Gideon Klein, who got prematurely offed by the holocaust. The Polish Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and the Russian Alfred Shnittke, who are fairly well recognized and criticized by modern music connoisseurs, were Jewish. Of American heritage, Gershwin/Bernstein are not quite to my taste, but they count for something. The early Aaron Copland (before his populist turn) is quite a strong composer, competitive with European modernists. So too is the Swiss American Jewish composer, Ernest Bloch. And of course the brilliant Morton Feldman, the principal representative of the NY School of Music, was Jewish. And today, there really is a smattering of other great Jewish composers around the globe. I quite like the audacious music of Chaya Czernowin, as well as the string quartets of Alexander Goehr, who is sometimes credited as being the first composer to popularize modern composition within England’s musical academy, (efforts which have paid off, as the country has come to cultivate composers like Thomas Ades or Harrison Birstwistle). At one of my more recent visits to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a quite delectable selection was premiered written by the contemporary Israeli composer Avner Dorman. Indubitably, Jewish achievements in composition are quite notable.

Actually, in the current times, they might in fact need to impose such quotas to ensure that black representation in jazz is up to proportion. In my view, jazz music can indeed be regarded as a black cultural product, one of the few which blacks have contributed of impressive and lasting meaning. No doubt, the likes of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy were brilliant musicians who pioneered demanding new terrains of musical art. The thing is, however, that as of the 2020’s, jazz no longer remains the province of the black folk. When I was in high school / college, I happened to notice that most of people I knew who ended up pursuing jazz music as a career fell into two categories. One consisted of rich American jews who lived in wealthy suburbs, who in high school qualified for all regional or all state orchestra / band programs before enrolling at the college level in top 10 ranked musical conservatories. The other consisted of intellectually and musically curious people, typically of European parents or tastes, who were bred in the harmonic idiom of Debussy/Ravel/Messiaen and the rhythmic idiom of Bartok / Stravinsky, who found a natural convergence of interests between these genres and the category of mid sixties era post bop styled jazz. It is notable that many of jazz music’s contemporary leading lights (and here I am talking about people born in 1970 or later, not jazz musicians born in 1935, who hit their prime in the sixties, who happen to still be alive) such as Vijay Iyer, or Brad Mehldau, or Stephan Crump, etc. are not of African extraction.

It is jarring to see pictures of the Chicago south side during the 1940’s / 1950’s, taken from neighborhoods like Bronzeville, which had by then become dominantly black. I’ve witnessed many such photographs in local Chicago libraries or history museums wherein the negro subjects are finely dressed in well tailored suits, wherein the negro family is proudly posing in front of its home / car, or outside of a church on a Sunday morning. Not withstanding, I’d imagine that your principal conclusions are here correct. In spite of being a black advocate, W.E.B. Du Bois apparently wrote some passages decrying negro criminality in the first half of the century in pre contemporary America. I’ve always found Dubois to be a bit of a snooze, but if one could dredge these paragraphs up, they may prove to comprise some of his most enduringly relevant social commentary.

The prescription jested at in AnotherDad’s post is humorous to indulge, and perhaps directly pursuing it instilled a bit of common sense in you, personally. Unfortunately, I don’t think it quite does the trick for many aspiring young leftists. In fact, when I attended undergraduate / graduate school in the not too distant past, it was commonplace for left leaning college students to wear it as a badge of chic that they inhabited the most ghetto and disrepaired corners of town, and to flaunt this with an airs of cultivated nonchalance. On more than one occasion, in the coffee shop, in the library, or wherever, I can recall being proximate to conversations in which hipsters would be acquainting themselves with one another. When the topic of location of residence arose, one party might name drop an address obviously located squarely in the the epicenter of the nearest ghetto, in and area nearby to a housing project, where notorious armed robberies / sexual assaults of students had occurred, where as a matter of common knowledge parents would admonish their progeny not to wander, etc. Though these aspects immediately presented themselves as the pink elephant in the room, the other party to the conversation would nod his head, and assent that he had heard that that’s a “neat place to live”, and off the conversation would continue. In particular, for many students, the ego rush, status boost, and vanity of being able to brag that they lived in the ghetto while appearing glibly unconcerned with the associated dysfunctionality seemed to genuinely outweigh for them the possibility that they could end up (as more than a trivial number did) robbed, stabbed, raped or shot from doing so.

I’ve been observing the said flag in Chicago as well. The first time I witnessed it, I was slightly disarmed to see someone flaunt their reverence for America by means of some off kilter, Christmas color kind of aesthetics, but I really thought nothing else of it. Then, I began to notice more of these, and it dawned upon me with dreary realization that this is some burgeoning, new, and likely social justice directed phenomenon. I am not cognizant of what degeneracy this flag is supposed to be championing. I am not cognizant of how the green and black colors exactly match to whatever the cause. And I dread to know these answers sufficiently that I haven’t even google searched for them. I don’t want to know or think about any of this. I happen to be observing the emergence of these flags in beautiful* upper middle class neighborhoods of the city, lined with trees, greystones and classic old brick two flats. In these areas, I have regularly observed multitudes of mainly white children gleefully penning “black lives matter” into the sidewalk in chalk, warmly encouraged by their parents, many of whom are adorning their yards and windows with BLM signage.

*By beautiful, I mean currently beautiful. We shall have to see what the situation is in ten years, then reassess accordingly, I am sure.

Chanda Prescott Weinstein definitely comes to mind here.

Is Denver even a black city? I only visited once, briefly, this winter before the virus situation commenced. It seemed okay. I stopped into a neat art gallery and surveyed a few of the historical spots. On the whole it struck me as a poor man’s version of Seattle, with some pretension towards ‘up and coming’ trendiness and growing general relevance, but with fewer prestigious big name businesses, fewer Asian immigrants, fewer accompanying social pathologies, and a more modest pace of life. What imbued me with hope was its relative dearth of dindus. Sure, on one or two occasions I noticed some brothers on the corner, leering at me as I passed by, but to my perception, Denver seemed to have vastly less of a dysfunctional negro problem than the midwestern cities from which I come. Compared to being in Chicago, where you need to walk around with a swivel on your head, jaunting down the streets of Denver seemed like an easy breeze. But maybe I am underestimating the dark forces that there lurk.

Though I don’t agree with the reasons for which he got fired, I am frankly glad that this ‘David Shore’ fellow did indeed get fired, as I am generally rooting for all ‘political data analyst’ types to be fired, so that they can get booted from the consultants grifter class and forced to find a real line of work. These people are a drag upon our society, a superfluous scourge upon the firmament of what really matters. Why do we need these David Shore / Nate Silver sort of folk? The dubious data analyses and research that the David Shores of the world produce is riddled with contingencies, pertains to horse race issues of transient pertinence, and offers nothing of lasting value to the universe. This line of work is neither beautiful enough to be considered art nor definite enough to be considered science. I am saying this as someone who used to work for a political data based research firm for a spell myself, which was filled with smug, pseudo talented ‘political science PHDs’ from institutions like U Chicago, and the IVY leagues, whose pedigrees typically exceeded their actual ability.

You write “Highly creative people in arts, sciences, … don’t care about metropolises.” Balderdash! One could readily produce myriads of creatives whose work was uniquely stimulated by the zeitgeist of particular cities and / or which was nourished by the conception of certain cities as motherland/fatherland. As a merely desultory off the cuff sampling of such cases, one could point to the importance of Chicago to luminous writers like Carl Sandberg, Saul Bellow or Nelson Algren, the inspiration of the NYC urban milieu upon brilliant ‘New York School’ composers like Morton Feldman, the impression London made on Rimbaud and Verlaine during their sojourns there, the palpable sensibility Thomas Mann’s literature evinces for Hamburg over Munich or Berlin, or the Saint Petersburg vs Moscow dialectics which manifest variously in Russian literature. Of course, one could produce a great many artists and such for whom an intense nexis with a particular city is neither here nor there, but those who tendentiously spurn the urban (EG, Bela Bartok) are distinctly less numerous than those whose cultural context is ineluctably intertwined with that of certain cities.

Paul writes “So of course an extra tax should be mandated and required for whites to pay if they dare encroach on property owned by people of color via the free market and exchange of ownership of property.” One interesting thing to consider here is how colored peoples have generally obtained the neighborhoods which whites are now supposedly ‘gentrifying’. Did they do so, as Paul would put it, “via the free market and exchange of ownership of property”? I aver not. I fact, I aver that blacks, and to a lesser but still relevant extent, Latinos, have taken over the neighborhoods which whites are now ‘gentrifying’ by means of violent force. For instance, when I did a stint in Grand Rapids MI a few years back, I befriended a somewhat elderly Ukrainian immigrant couple. They lamented that while Detroit used to have a vibrant Ukrainian community, the crack epidemic of the 80’s and its attendant black violence constitutes a major driver of what engendered this community’s dissipation and of what drove this particular couple into the westward reaches of MI. As Detroit slowly improves (it will never return to its former glory, but is gradually acquiring coffee shops, restaurants, and clubs which are attracting more upper brow white folk), I have read much grumbling about how this ‘gentrification’ is inconsiderate to the incumbent black populations, as it is white in cultural character, prices out the blacks, etc. But do these criticisms consider that blacks took over many neighborhoods by acting like violent thugs to begin with? A similar case could be had about Pilsen Chicago, a former Czech neighborhood turned Mexican. Threads on Reddit/Chicago and articles in the city’s left wing rag “Chicago Reader” harp endlessly about how white affluent people are starting to price out the poor Mexicans. But do they consider how Mexicans abrogated the neighborhood to begin with? Partly, there are elements off deracination which diluted the Czech identity in America. But also significantly, gangs like the Latin Kings came along and made the neighborhoods cesspits of drug related crime. Bottom line: colored people are allowed to overtake white urban neighborhoods by means of violence, and that gets generally ignored, but if white people take back these neighborhoods by the lawful exchange of property, that’s heinous and criticizable.

Kaija Saariaho, Sofia Gubaidulina, Germaine Tailleferre, Helena Tulve, Chaya Czernowin, Galina Ustvolskaya, Olga Neuwirth, etc. To be fair, there are some quite capable and interesting female composers who have emerged over the past century, mainly in its more recent half. Tis philistine to disacknowledge this.

Great observation; I was just talking about this with a Lithuanian guy I drink with on Chicago’s south side. East of the Elbe, a lot of surnames and ethnic backgrounds that are on the surface for all immediate intents and purposes German actually have significant Baltic or Slavic or perhaps even, to a lesser extent, Finno Ugric, genealogical linkages. Recently rereading Mann’s Buddenbrooks made me think about this as well

I don’t disbelieve that Latinos litter, but in my experience, blacks are the chief culprits. For instance, last time I went to the Chicago Art Institute, I decided to walk north up Michigan Avenue to Millennium Park when I was done. Michigan Avenue. Millennium Park. Some of the nicest urban scapes and urban architecture in the world. And in front of me waddled this rather rotund black chick who was plodding forward in a one step, two step manner. Before I was about to pass her (which didn’t take long, given her heavyset physique and pathetic weezing pace), she crumpled up her Mcdonald’s bag and just chucked it into the middle of the sidewalk, flippantly tossing her XL soda over her shoulder to boot. “Dat was goood yo” I heard her mouthing as I traversed past. I then thought: should I pick up her trash? She had just desecrated one of the nicest areas of one of my favorite cities. But surely, I figured, it is beneath my dignity to play the garbage man of some raggedy black. So I just continued walking by. In retrospect, I think I might have done to pick up the trash shove it into her outsized bosom, and to inform her that she’d dropped something. But I am not convinced I could have pulled that off in an appropriately shaming manner. How to to effectively shame the litterers is the pressing question.

Houston1992, though your cynicism is appreciated, and though what you intimate may well become the reality under the course of two decades of further degeneration, quite honestly, what you describe is excessively pessimistic and doesn’t happen yet, to the optimum of my discernment. At current, the intersection of education related graduate curriculum and actual science PHD program curriculum (in fields like physics and mathematics) transpires sort of like this. Bonafide science PHDs usually must spend their first 1-2 years enrolling in standardized courses and taking weed out exams in advanced undergraduate / basic graduate level subjects which attempt to inculcate students with the basic lexicon with which every scientist in these fields must be a little bit acquainted. They might take 3 Fall semester and 3 spring semester courses, and then might be expected to complete dept standardized qualifying exams in each of these 6 courses within their first to third year of studenthood. Now, at high caliber public state schools (EG, Indiana University, University of Wisconsin, and such), education PHDs in math and physics might be required to undertake a watered down version of this. EG, they might be required to take 2 / 6 such courses/tests, and their bars of completion are lower. Whereas a math/phyics PHD might be required to answer 3/5 or 4/5 questions right to attain completion on any single test, an education student might only have to answer 2/5 questions correctly. The conferral of science PHDs to education students, though, really doesn’t happen yet at top 100 type university institutions.

Having a PHD doesn’t mean that she’s a particularly intelligent or accomplished scientist. Tellingly, Chanda’s Wikipedia page doesn’t attribute to her any notably significant scientific discoveries, just tidbits like the fact that she got an NSF Fellowship to go to graduate school. This specific item isn’t trivial, but mainly just means that she was an organized go-getter, earned decent grades in perhaps quite easy undergraduate classes, netted a recommendation or two from professors to whom she cozied up, and, of course, was likely propelled over the top by means of the minority boost. In fact, generally, from my own experiences interacting with graduate and research departments in the formal sciences in a previous stage of life, my impression is that a fair number of people who obtain PHDs in fields like physics and mathematics fail to qualify as being exceptionally intelligent or accomplished. My impression is that at an absolutely top tier graduate school for physics or mathematics, say, Princeton or MIT, the distribution of talent among graduate students approximately breaks down as follows. About 25% of the people there are bonafide prodigies, who may have excelled at math olympiads, single authored non trivial research as undergraduates, fully assimilated a foreboding breadth of scientific theories before entering graduate school, etc. About 50% of graduate students qualify as serious, genuine, very smart people who still fail decisively short of being true geniuses. Some small cut of folks in this category, maybe 10%, will go on to produce first rate research and ascertain tenure at fancy places, but they stand close to zero chance of ever winning the highest accolades, getting the fields medal, retiring into history in the same light as Hilbert and company. And then you have the bottom 25%, who might be sufficiently serious and capable to make it through a PHD program, but who won’t amount to a whole lot and probably fall below the quality of many students at decent state school graduate departments. Their PHD thesis was likely primarily fed to them by their adviser with heavy and pervasive hints. Of these, some cut will suffer through futile post doc / associate professorships upon gaining their PHD, but they will never produce original non trivial thoughts, and their best hope is to become professional co-authors who leech as minor co-contributors off of their adviser’s research circle, and maybe get a job in a podunk, non influential department, like UNH physics. And, of course, I’ve mentioned her before on Sailer’s blog, but there is also a very small tranche of singularly atrocious graduate students of the Piper Harron variety (look her up), whose advisers write the entirety of their thesis and do whatever they can to graduate / dispense with them in the least frictional manner. It’s entirely possible that Chanda is a Piper Harron.

I thought that was Ibram Kendi!

I’d be happy to print out some paper form, to write my unz username / unz email on the said form, then to send the form in with some yearly subscription value appended in the envelope as dollar bills. Quite, frankly, however, I don’t want my real name, as revealed by credit card or check, to be associated with the Unz review in any way, or to have my name sitting in some database on some server in a way that could potentially link the real me with my Unz comments. Even the email I type in to the comment form is an idiosyncratic fake, which I utilize as a password each time I comment. I hope this doesn’t seem pusillanimous, but the sorts of conversations we have at Unz could easily be career destroying for many of us, if publicly revealed. I’m proud to read and contribute to Unz, and to work towards actuating my political beliefs in private but tangible ways in real life, but I prefer to be anal about concealing my identity.

Honestly, I tend to somewhat gloss over Steve’s black hair postings relative to the attention I afford to his other postings, because the topic generally strikes me as more diversionary, less central. I have to say, however, that I might be tuning in more now after having experienced my first ever black hair incident while commuting home this Thanksgiving. The context was the Newark Airport Air Train, which I hopped on because I had to switch from Terminal C to Terminal A. When I got in, I took stock that the other passengers consisted of a wheel-chair ridden middle eastern guy, I’d guess maybe an Egyptian (not my area of expertise), a black airport worker gal with Black Hair escorting the handicapped Egyptian, a young black woman traveler with Black Hair, and two thuggish early thirties black males who most certainly weren’t getting on any planes (what business they had there and why they’re allowed onto the air train is another topic entirely). Well, deftly, the Egyptian notices the black traveler’s hair and politely implores if he can touch it, to which she accedes, whereupon 20 seconds of indulgent hair rubbing ensue. But, when the Egyptian tells her he’s the expert on this type of hair, she snappily replies “So, What’z it called then?”. When the Egyptian fumbles to produce an answer, she suddenly pulls back her hair and erupts “Why you sayin’ you was duh expert if’n you don’ even know what dis iz called!” The handicapped Egyptian then asks to initiate a second bout of hair rubbing. Permission denied.

But the hair saga continues. While the black female airport worker was offboarding the Egyptian at Terminal A, one of the vagrant black thugs starts to get antsy. “Yo wheelchair man gedda fuck off, gedda fuck off the fuckin’ train, I needa gedda fuck off here wheelchair man”. When the black female wheelchair escort has wheeled the Egyptian right outside the doorway, the thug then outstretches his hand over the woman’s Black Hair, in the manner of palming a basketball and asks her in a mocking voice “Can I touch your hair, mz?”, prompting a shark rebuke, and threats to call security. Part of me wanted to stick around and defend her, but she seemed to have some innate ghetto sensibility for standing her ground with black males, and this seemed like mainly black-on-black sort of business, so I just abruptly hauled myself to security at maximum stride. Anyways….

The high performances of non Indo-European Estonia and Finland on these sorts of tests always pique my interest. The lesser but still relatively high scores of Latvia (Latvians tend to consistently outscore Indo-European Lithuania, for instance, as well as culturally prominent Mediterranean nationalities on IQ-esque measures ) are also of note. Even though Latvians have Indo-European origins and Latvian is regarded as an Indo-European language, it contains many borrowings from the extinct but essentially Finno-Ugric language Livonian and (my main point), genetically, many Latvians bred with Livonians for many years. There must be something about that Finno-Ugric DNA.

I detect a scintilla of sardonicism in the question you pose. My bland reply is that while I fail to concur with Gessen’s politics and activism, I would mainly positively appraise Gessen’s characterizations of the Poincare conjecture, of Russian paradigms of mathematics, of Jewish Russians in mathematics, and of mathematical academic politics, which are about as cogent as one could hope from a journalist who isn’t a technical expert.

Although, at the time of writing this comment, one passage from the book in question summons to my mind which I had slightly glossed over on first reading years back, an excerpt in which Gessen insinuates homosexual overtones in the mannerisms and behaviors of Andrei Kolmogorov. In particular, she describes some sort of math boot camp type program in which Kolmogorov would participate with Russia’s high school mathematics olympiad team, the atmosphere of which I believe she describes as ‘homoerotically charged’ or something similar ( I believe she uses this term but I would have to dig up the specific passage to doublecheck). I have never taken the time to vet rumors of Kolmogorov’s potential homosexuality, or whether this alleged homosexuality influenced his relations with his high school students, though in light of what I understand about Gessen now, I would be inclined to give these passages a more exacting scrutiny.

I happen to have read that book of Gessen’s. There is this one character chronicled therein, Aleksandr Dugin, who starts off, circa the early eighties, as an idealistic young intellectual, an opponent of the oppressive tendencies of the Soviet Union, a champion of liberalism, and so forth, but who has become, more recently, a philosopher of Russian nationalism, and to some extent, an apologist of Putin’s regime. This transition is portrayed as a devolution, a corruption of the intellectual will towards the justification of despotic power, which somehow represents broader trajectories in Russian culture since the fall of the Soviet Union. I, however found myself quite titillated of Dugin’s change of thought. Crudely, Dugin comes to sketch out a morally relativistic vision in which each culture/ethnicity commands its own sphere of sovereignty and its own right towards national self determination. He accuses Western European and American liberalism of posing as a universal system, and trying to inflict itself on other cultures, even though it is really a contingently situated, culturally specific ideology unto itself. He says that western liberalism is fine, as long as western Europe and America don’t try to force it upon other peoples, and that Russia’s modus operandi is fine too, as long as it operates within its natural national sphere. Reading Gessen’s tract actually made me quite sympathetic to Dugin’s strand of thinking.

I read Gessen’s biography of Grisha Perelman a few years ago and was quite impressed by it, particularly its depictions of Soviet mathematics culture. Sad to see her churn out this kind of penny dreadful twaddle.

I honestly fail to comprehend the repugnant impressions which Houllebecq’s looks are so engendering. I personally find the recent Houllebecq to be rather handsome and submit in good faith that his wrinkled countenance makes him appear battleworn in such a way that makes him seem dashing, one might even say a touch swashbuckling. Indeed, his profile merits comparisons with later photographs of Baudelaire.

The works of Delillo, most notably White Noise and Underworld, have always been highly topical, not to mention witty and highly lyrical too. I quite enjoyed his relatively recent Zero K, which I regard as a contemporary and also germane to the present masterpiece. One might mention Murakami as well, and much else. I invite you to enter the twenty first century.

Didn’t they try to do this to Renoir a month or so ago? (Google search “Renoir Quillette”). And didn’t that Hannah Gadsby hag try to upbraid Picasso a bit before that? Any bets on who’s next?

Personally, I think musical composers constitute a relatively unexplored frontier here ( aside from the Richard Wagner business which is really old hat). I remember reading the Jewish music critic Richard Taruskin trying to make a ridiculous case that Stravinsky was antisemitic, and occasionally I read some tut-tutting about Richard Strauss, but this remains mostly academic and little musical composer criticism has made it to the NYT/Atlantic echelon.

I wish your daughter luck in any compositional endeavors.

One interesting facet of this topic is that the Japs have indeed had some success in musical composition in the post war period. If you are unfamiliar with Toru Takemitsu, just google search him to find one example of a composer who, even without the Stravinsky bump, would have achieved international prominence. And there are a few others, Samei Satoh, being one, who, while somewhat more provincial, are still very good, and ring familiar in certain American conservatory circles. It is also interesting to note that some of France’s most influential 20th century composers were keenly interested in Japanese art and music. How these considerations associate with differences in East Asian cultures, and the manner in which these differences map to creative output …. is something I haven’t quite thought through.

Well then, plaudits to this particular creative Chinese doctor. Notice that in my response I never claimed that Chinese people are categorically uncreative or that they are categorically intelligent but uncreative, or any similar such pejorative. I simply posited that the “preponderance” are. Here the word “preponderance” denotes “the quality or fact of being greater in number, quantity, or importance”, or in lay person’s terms, “majority”. While I have no particular racist vendetta against the Chinese, I submit that most Americans who interact with Chinese – whether these Chinese are grade grubbing high schoolers or college students, competitive graduate students or postdocs, or tech professionals – will find that a striking proportion of these Chinamen exhibit the property of being high in processing power but low in originality and low in commitment towards higher outside-the-box principles of innovation. I feel no need to scrupulously document this claim here. As one instantiation, I recall reading an Unz comment a month or so back which compared the synthetic, creative astronomical innovations of Ole Rømer to the more rote measurement oriented astronomical contributions of the Chinese in a similar period.

Note also that everything I have hither adumbrated is perfectly compatible with the possibility that a higher proportion of Chinese people are likely to be intelligent and creative as compared to the proportion of such Caucasian people. I am simply submitting that given the volume of intelligent / literate / competent Chinese people one experiences in American life, and given the subset of these one experiences who lack creative gifts, one can therefore infer a certain wedge of différance between the concepts of intelligence and creativity. I will underscore, one could indeed maintain that Chinese people are the most supremely creative / creative-and-intelligent race while still granting my contentions.

Incidentally, I don’t necessarily agree with the thesis of the foregoing paragraph. As evidence, one can point to the reality that while multitudinous Chinese musicians are dominating positions in prestigious professional orchestras, high school all state and all regional orchestras, etc, the Chinese still lag behind the west in musical composition. For instance, Magnus Lindberg, Thomas Ades, Wolfgang Rihm, Sofia Gubaidulina, Salvatore Sciarrino, Tristan Murail, or Kaija Saariaho all comprise living composers who easily blow away any of China’s composers, now or ever (there aren’t many and I’ve looked). It would seem to me that compared to Caucasians, Chinese fit more naturally into the role of performers and technicians of music than as creators of music.

Much to comment upon here, but on the quick, I might chime in that I too have always found the under-pressure, mysterious milieu of the film’s first 20-30 minutes (before the prison transformation) endlessly captivating and I could rewatch this segment infinitely many times. I find The Opera version of lost highway quite interesting too, especially the musical soundtrack by Olga neuwirth, even though I have mixed opinions of the writer and Nobelist Jelinek. Separately, I’d be curious to read your review sometime of what I consider to be Lynch’s most elaborate magnum opus, Inland Empire.

The preponderance of Chinese people I’ve ever met testify to the distinction between these traits.

I think that this is an apposite characterization, though if I had to quibble, I’d say that some of the southwestern suburbs are decent. Naperville is high end. And Lemont, the home of the Argonne lab, somewhat interestingly houses fairly sizable Polish and Lithuanian communities, which were pushed out of the Marquette Park area of Chicago when the blacks took over and got violent.

One thing which baffles me about the city’s imminent financial collapse – which is essentially guaranteed – is the insouciance which businesses, real estate investors and such have exhibited towards its inevitability. For one example, many businesses in very recent history have continued to expand in Chicago by opening up new offices there. This includes sexier tech companies like Google, Salesforce, or Uber, as well as corporate stalwarts like Coors and McDonalds. As another example, Chicago has undergone a recent and continuing building boom which has produced several 800 foot + skyscrapers such as one Bennet Park, the NEMA tower, or the wonderful 1200 foot Wanda Vista tower. Indeed, a coming 1420 foot Tribune Tower East just went (I think) through one of its final stages of legal authorization this week. I don’t get why this is happening in a metropolis of ever draining population and soon to be fiscal cataclysm.

Another baffling feature of all of this is: what will happen when the bankruptcy comes? Unlike Detroit, whose bankruptcy was the result of long standing structural economic problems, Chicago remains a highly diversified economy, whose financial implosion will have been rather artificially caused by grossly unrealistic pension overpromises rather than by some organic and structurally inevitable decline of economic output. With several decently credentialed universities in its vicinity, and a decent stock of living spaces, office buildings, and infrastructure, what’s going to happen when the bubble bursts? Will residents and businesses leave overnight or will the reset somehow be more forgiving? Has there ever been a comparable scenario in recent Western history?

I think you’re dead wrong here, and that you even mention the prime counterexample yourself, Chicago, which, in spite of its criminal / financial problems, is quite a handsome city. The basic story here is that after the great Chicago fire burned the whole place down, the redevelopment was thoughtfully and carefully devised by burgeoning urban planners. Chicago’s rationally oriented grid street system, for instance, constitutes one product of this phenomenon. It’s well reputed ubiquity of alleyways (of which New York suffers from a comparative paucity) comprises another, affording sanitary and convenient isolation of waste as well as providing for space in between structures in the case of fires. One might also mention Chicago developers’ general choice of building materials in the aftermath of the great fire. And there is much more to be said about all of this. For just a taste.
https://www.chipublib.org/blogs/post/from-chaos-chicagos-street-system/

I might add as an afterthought that I am mainly confining my remarks to Chicago here, and would perhaps grant what you say of many other American cities. One possible exception here might be Pittsburgh, which, on by brief visits seemed to me beautifully laid out, in the way that the city integrates with the surrounding ravines, river, the topography of the streets, and so forth .

Kind of reminds me of how a particular Irish Times article I dug up on the internet conveys Houellebecq’s advocacy for surviving in modern society. An excerpt from the article:

‘ In a text that was first published in French in 1997, Michel Houellebecq offers some advice to those pursuing the writer’s vocation: “All societies have their points of least resistance. Put your finger on the wound, and press down hard.” He also recommends hitting the bottle as you are “tossed back and forth between bitterness and anguish”, and milking the welfare state in order to thrive like a parasite “upon the body of wealthy societies in a state of decay” ‘

I think there could be some wisdom in that final prescription.

I can’t vouch for Andean food one way or the other, but vis a vis your contention regarding mountainous cultures, I do find Himalayan food to be quite decent. The momo dumpling and thukpa noodle staples are of a welcome and noticeably different variety than analogous items in the cuisines of India or China. And the fennel, cumin, mustard, etc which spice these dishes lends them a nice liveliness.

Per the scenario of your starting question, it’s called Chicago. Look up Kim Fox.

How the hell did you enter the ranks of engineering without a degree? I don’t disbelieve you, but I submit that becoming an engineer without an engineering degree is a non option for even some of the most high IQ, well studied, well motivated individuals who would like to do so. As a nonengineer with a STEM background, who currently practices in the rather over-hyped field of data science, I’ve looked into this possibility myself. The problem is, in the vast majority of US states, getting your PE license requires that you have an engineering degree. Not physics. Not mathematics. Not computer science. But strictly engineering. Even if one is capable of acing the PE exams, which I frankly think could do blindfolded, this point is moot since one is not allowed under most jurisdictions to even enroll in the tests without an engineering degree. The entire setup is overseen by a guild, which has used arbitrary licensing restrictions to restrict competition. Which is really a tragedy, given the number of physics, math, and computer science graduates who would like to contribute to something more material than, for example, selling targeted advertisements.

As an aside, I would like to here dissuade any potential takers from pursuing ‘data science’ as a career path. If one is truly talented, one could hack one’s way in this area. But there are lots of poseurs and imposters, whose expertise consists of having taken some three week Python bootcamp, to compete with. And much of data science work pertains to rather immaterial subject material (eg, as mentioned above, selling advertisements) without which the earth would remain spinning on its axis just fine. And many firms where one may end up working indulge woke HR policies which artificially enforce equality and cap compensation for white / Asian males. As well, there transpires a frustrating asymmetry between the depth of one’s knowledge and the depth required to perform practical applications. EG, one may have studied three proofs of the Central Limit Theorem, or one may be able to prove the algorithmic preferability of some approach towards implementing a decision tree, or one may be able to couch properties of neural nets in terms of axiomatic proofs involving real analysis, but at the end of the day that doesn’t make one that much more effective at implementing these things than a charlatan who can deploy these gadgets by pressing the Python button out of the box.With one minute left to edit this comment, I realize that the final point of this paragraph is slightly in tension with the first point of this paragraph, but of course these contentions must be construed in their proper measure.

I wonder how Western Society will respond when Chinese scientists commence with the ethically suspect portions of human experimentation. Will it adjust its ethics and compete, or will it let them pull ahead?

Forsooth, AnonFromTN? Not even the top 100? I would have thought that it’d at least make, say, 87th place. Since I’ll be off of the computer for a few days, my comments here are pretty much done and over. The main contention I’d like to sign off with is that the smaller cultures in the approximate orbit of Europe – be they Basque, Mordvinic, Lithuanian, Estonian, Georgian, or other- while more provincial than the cultures of the mainstream powerhouses, do admit some occasionally brilliant representatives whose work tends to be nursed from a perspective exterior to this mainstream. Deep dives therein may well remunerate. Happy listening / reading.

AnonFromTN. I don’t quite concur with your ideas regarding translation; I happen to enjoy Sándor Weöres just fine even though I do not speak Hungarian and George Trakl just fine even though I do not speak German. Unfortunately, I’ve only ever read Tamsaare’s “Truth and Justice” in my semi-native (well, I did grew up in America) Estonian, though I’ve heard that Lisa Trei’s English translation does the trick. Actually, I’m not really sure off the cuff how many translations there even are or if there is even more than one broadly available. If you’re seeking well translated prose, and a trip, I would also commend Elizabeth Novickas’s translation of Ricardas Gavelis’s masterful Lithuanian novel ‘Vilnius Poker’.

As Baltic musical recommendations go, Peteris Vasks and Arvo Part are quite popular but I personally find them to be tiresomely bland. Simply by means of Youtube search one can access a variety of alternatives. Hence, I might recommend from the adventurous Latvian composer Andris Dzenitis “Duality. Liepaja Concerto No.1”. From Estonian Helena Tulve, a student of Ligeti’s, who bears at least a little bit of resemblance to her vastly more popular Finnish counterpart Kaija Saariaho, I might recommend “Extinction des choses vues” and “Anastatica”. From Sarunas Nakas, I might recommend “Merz Machine”. From the polyphonic minimalist Bronius Kutavicius I might recommend “Clocks of the Past”. From Onute Narbutaite I might recommend “Vijoklis” or “Was there a Butterfly”. From the Messiaen influenced Balakakauskas I might recommend “Ostrobothnian Symphony”. If you’re allergic to any musical modernism and can only handle Tchaikovskyesque sweetness, I might recommend Balys Dvarionas’s folksy romantic ‘Violin Concerto’.

Not all of the above pieces are masterpieces on par with Messiaen’s “Quartet for the end of Time” or Bartok’s “String Quartet IV” (though I think Tulve at her best is quite formidable), but I do submit that there some unique and at times finely expressed ideas to be found therein, which are not copying those of anyone else.

Jesse, on point 1. I still disagree. Yes, I understand that there is a major social proscription on broaching the notion that certain races might have lower IQs, but I think you underestimate the extent to which non-engagement with this topic from would be engagers stems from them not being threatened by the prospect of excessive affirmative-action-induced black inundation of higher institutions. If science graduate departments or tech companies were to mandate that 20% of their admissions / hiring classes were to consist of colored students and if they were to gloat about the necessity and justice of this reparations measure, then I would certainly bet that some prominent race focused analogs of Damore or Summers would step forward. Indeed, with some of the recent Asians vs blacks school admissions type conflicts (NY public schools polemics, Harvard admissions, the Seattle r88 which is being voted upon today), I have noticed AA opponents flirting with the acknowledgement of lower black / hispanic IQ more than I have noticed previously. Commentators react most vociferously to the most imminent threat, and at current, that role is generally constituted by gender based AA, not race based AA.

As for your points 2 and 3, which admit little substance, I would agree with you that “normal men and women like each other” which is indeed an implicit tenet of my original post. I like women too, and am married to one. I also oppose the moral panic ongoing over supposed tyrannical patriarchy in the sciences; I oppose the manner of treatment described by anonymous[154] in post 120 of this forum, to which I feel I have been subjected in the past; I oppose Oxford University’s decision to give female students more time than men on math tests as part of a women in stem directive; I oppose the Eindhoven University of Technology’s moratorium on the hiring of male STEM professors. These oppositions by no means inherently qualify me in the caricature of a woman hating, basement dwelling troglodyte as you seem to crudely allege. I also, for the record, oppose sexual harassment of women, dismissal of female talent, etc. when these phenomena do manifest and I welcome the participation of talented women in science. A civil and social demeanor is by no means at contradiction with a rejection of female boosterism which obliterates considerations of individual dessert in how people are treated.

I think you’re getting this one wrong, Jesse. I have for some time maintained the thesis, and sometimes commented on it here at Unz, that race hustling has always been distinctly less succesul than feminist hustling in the science academy. Of course, this seems evident to me, having once been in the science academy myself. The trope of “women in stem” is simply more popular than the trope of “Mestizos in STEM” or “blacks in STEM” as a matter of simple observation. Nobody is advocating for statistically commenssurate proportion of black scientists the way they are for women scientists. And there are well grounded reasons for this. For one, there simply aren’t enough semi talented blacks, for instance, to make racial equality anything close to a reality and I think at at a latent level everyone knows that trying to implement this would only embarrass the cause. To boot, I’ve long argued that women activate a symptathy instinct from males that, for instance, blacks don’t, which they have succesfully manipulated to their advantage in soliciting male allies to their cause.

As well, I simply reject your proposition that it is morally passe to discuss race and IQ in a way that it isn’t for sex and IQ. What about Richard Lynn? Charles Murray? Why do you think Angela Saini felt compelled to release her book if she hasn’t feared that certain race realist attitudes are coalescing into a conventional wisdom in certain quarters? Anecdotally, I generally hear grumbling about affirmative action for unqualified color people at least as much and probably more than I do in the case of women. I also might add that I think Larry Summers discussed sex diferences because he is aware that sex based affirmative action has been more succesful and poses a greater threat to the integrity of science institutions.

I would put forth Henrikas Radauskas as a highly underrated modernist lyrical poet, capable of throwing punches with the likes of Rilke and Mallarme, and of whom Joseph Brodsky was mightily impressed. I would easily rank him above any of Russia’s highly overrated silver age poets. I might also put in a plug for the prose of Tammsaare, which in my view compares favorably with that of Thomas Mann, Lev Tolstoy or Jospeh Roth. I might also mention the composers Helena Tulve and Onute Narbutaite, to whom I was first acquainted by means of a glowing review from the esteemed critic Richard Taruskin ( who is in some sense the Harold Bloom of American academic musicology over the past half century).

And there remain many other treasures for the curiously inclined. Your philistinism will not do!

I don’t know, the one car accident I was ever involved with was a hit and run collision with a black driver / passenger that occurred when I made an unintended detour through a seedy negro area of a city at which I was making a pit stop ( the sort of detour I vow never to repeat, but, eh I was but an amateur at the time). The blacks immediately skipped town, leaving their crashed (they were crashers) car parked in the middle of the somewhat busy intersection and fleeing the premises on foot (a passerby informed the cops that they were hiding in some bushes but they managed to sprint further before the cops could apprehend them at the scene). Although the perpetrators did attempt to reclaim their vehicle from the police impound some weeks later, the sort of behavior you describe I encountered not.

Sure, and I mainly agree with that. But one wildcard I’m still curious about is how intraeuropean emigration impacts the long term demographic outlook. Baltic folk who emigrated to, say, Chicago in 1910 could essentially be crossed off of the list. Returning wouldn’t have been practical even without wars / communism and their grandchildren were essentially destined to become Coca Cola slurping, football watching Americans. But consider today an educated Balt who becomes a software engineer in Berlin or gets a white collar corporate job in London. Can we permanently write this person off? Might he eventually retire to his homeland? Even returning for vacations and short spells is eminently feasible. Ergo there might be hundreds of thousands of Baltic people living in Western Europe who still might ultimately end up transmitting their national culture to the next generation in a real sense.

That’s, incidentally, also my favorite part of the It’s-Native-American-not-Indian diatribe (no pun intended on the word ‘tribe’). Instead of naming America’s Indians after an honest and reasonable geographical mistake, or after a people whose skin color bears a non trivial similarity of shade to them (at least for Pakistanis, Punjabis, those in the north of the Asian Indian land mass) , let’s declare the only morally permissible, non appalling appellation for them to refer to an Italian explorer who helped facilitate the whole new world takeover.

As a factual correction, Estonia’s population growth, miraculously, seems to have recently reversed itself. It is not, I think, too quixotic to believe that urban centers like Riga, Kaunas and Vilnius might in due time hold as bulwarks against population decline too. It is telling, for instance to pit the general population decline in Lithuania over the past thirty years against the population decline of Vilnius/Kaunas and to note the distinctly flatter slopes of the latter. Same thing for Latvia / Riga.

But to your main question, one answer might be: because these places possess interesting/unique languages and cultures which enhance the broader firmament of European heritage. The highly archaic Lithuanian Language, for instance, is by various metrics the most conservative of living Indo European tongues, sharing myriads of cognates with Sanskrit and revealing deep clues into the origins of proto Indo European. Why wouldn’t we want to preserve it?

Lithuania also accounts for the largest mass suicide ever recorded (or probably something close to that, depending on how one measures), at Pilėnai. Suicide is an integral part of its culture.

JackD, I agree that the prospect of Americans flocking to Russian universities is quite slim, almost ridiculous, and that the prospect of salaries rising enough at Russian universities to hire back top Russian talent is also probably quite optimistic.

What I think you underestimate is the extent to which wokeness has corrupted and threatens to continue to corrupt American STEM institutions. At least at the student undergraduate and student graduate level, supposedly oppressed groups already get great precedence in getting special REU’s, minority outreach programs, grant money,and admissions preferences because they’re oppressed. The general uptick in ideological fervor over the past five years has to my observations amplified this. As well, I’ve on noticed on social media that a non trivial subset of highly successful non oppressed ( that is, white / Jewish male) professors support this trend and will make a point to flaunt their virtue signalling by doing things like confess their implicit bias. What incentive do they have to make an opposing stand? In other words, the coalitions which would guarantee an unstoppable upward rising spiral of wokeness are amassing. Once the tenets of SJW activism become procedurally crystallized at the hiring level, we’ll have reached a whole new level.

As a cautionary case, consider the none too shabby Eindhoven University of Technology in Netherlands, which has recently declared a moratorium on hiring in Men in various disciplines of the hard sciences.

Worthy considerations.

Minus the part about retaining Western Civilization courses, the criteria you describe would seem to be satisfied by certain lesser distinguished but still reasonably formidable technical institutions such as Worcester Polytechnic, Illinois Institute of Technology, Clarkson University, Stevens Institute of Technology, Rochester Institute of Technology, or the New Jersey Institute of Technology, all of which offer practically oriented, unpretentious environments which are rather indifferent to wokeness. The Peter Thiels of the universe, instead of ridiculously cajoling people to drop out of college, might better contribute to the universe by luring the cohort of students who would apply to the above to attend slightly cheaper competing alternatives.

A few comments.
– Certainly, Russia, doesn’t maintain a university system commensurate with its national /cultural clout or which competes with that of the West.
– Russia does maintain several top notch or not too far from top notch institutions, EG, Moscow State University, The University of Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk State University, Tomsk State University, or Southern Federal University at which one could obtain a genuinely high quality education. It also hosts several respected post graduate level institutions of the Steklov Institute variety, where one could continue with advanced studies.
– In the subdiscipline of mathematics which I studied in graduate school, Russia produces a healthy volume of ace researchers a fair share of which could be described as young and burgeoning. While many get their PHDs (not uncommonly with Russian advisors) in the West, then proceed to apply for post docs at Western Universities, many receive their gymnasium level education or undergraduate level education (which is really conducted at a graduate level of intensity) over there. From all that I’ve perceived, the culture of Andrei Kolmogorov and Vladimir Arnold still survives quite vitally, at least in the pure mathematics realm, even in light of countervailing factors such as post Soviet Jewish exodus. My impression is that this still holds for other branches of the sciences, such as physics, computer science, and engineering too.
– As western universities become more obnoxiously woke, it remains to be seen whether Russian educated academics who hold Western academic positions won’t migrate back. If their salaries and grant money must be arbitrarily capped so as not to exceed those of women researchers, or if allegations of sexism become more rampant, a reverse migration might indeed become quite tempting.
– Per the humanities, Russia probably maintains enough scholarship at some of the universities I mentioned above, and at institutions like the Pushkin Institute, to keep certain cultural torches burning. The fact that Russian society doesn’t heavily invest in propagating corruptible institutions of the humanities (or social sciences), and doesn’t compel a sizable contingent of unqualified students to study at them is probably a good thing.

When I attended university, I experienced a very similar sort of “culture” myself. It was concentrated in a very specific wing of the library. This location included a computer lab / printing station (the main reason I went there) but also featured stacks of desks purposed for individual study. The rules, both as explicitly articulated by the library, as well as implicitly understood by most, were that this was supposed to be a semi silent section; one was allowed to speak or collaborate (since maybe there was no where else to discuss a computer assignment) but one was to do so in reserved, lowly audible, professional tones; and if one wanted to engage in openly social library use, there was an entirely separate, open section of the library in which one was permitted to indulge some guffawing and socialization.

Well, no matter. As soon as the professional adult librarians would depart for the day at 5:00 PM, leaving timorous, work-for-pay scholarship undergraduates to man the ship, the blacks would take over, and transform the area into a jungle. Rap music would get blasted. McDonald’s runs would occur. One might very well find burger wrappers lying around or sloshes of milk shake on the keyboard the next morning. Various manner of clowning around would ensue, at which my third grade self would have been sufficiently well behaved to thumb my nose. In fact, even during mid day, when some sense of order and decorum still held in preserve, the blacks would blast the rap music through their headphones with sufficiently stentorian volume that they may as well have just brought their boom box. I never once heard one of these students say, “I was reading Plato the other day and … ” or “I was trying to calculate the angular velocity of this object and …”. I did, however, hear: “‘I’m tired uhh studyiiin.” ; “When we gunna go get tsum McDonaaaldz.” And so forth.

Alas.

If you haven’t read Unz blogger Paul Kersey’s recent, Oct 25 dated post concerning South Africa, I would check it out. Recent South African history is hardly my domain of expertise, but I suspect that the increasingly state supported assertion of often violent negro vengeance which is being there enacted furnishes the paradigm case which the US is starting to follow.

Moses: get better? Get better! You panglossian fool, it will not get better. Plan your escape route.

Commendable choice for your children, RadicalCenter, by all means expose them to as much Russian as possible from the earliest age possible. I would recommend exposing them to computer programming at an earlier stage of neural plasticity as well. I completely agree with you about Germany. The country of  vanguard scientists, deep metaphysical thinkers, cutting edge composers and trenchant lyrical poets has become today … well I think we both have the same idea in mind without needing to say it. I occasionally listen to Wolfgang Rihm, or read about Habermas, but I can’t claim that very much about contemporary Germany impresses me. On my brief visit to Deustcheland, Berlin repulsed me with its degeneracy, though cleaner, more austere, more mature Hamburg left a more endearing impression. 

As it transpires for me, I’m ancestrally Estonian, and though my fluency isn’t perfect, I picked up a fair bit from hearing it spoken in the family since infancy. Thankfully there are good opportunities in the tech industry there, the country which produced Skype, and the sister society of Finland. Also, the country’s post Soviet-break-up demographic decline has seemingly begun to reverse itself. Russian I’ve picked up  on the side since high school, and from studying for a year in Moscow during college.  It’s a challenging language to assimilate, but it’s not Hungarian, it is learnable. Cultivating a passion for Russian literature and a zeal for comparing here and there translated paragraphs of Dostoyevsky to the original has abetted the process. 

Moscow / Saint Petersburg – though a bit rough around the edges to western newcomers – are gems of cities, and not withstanding certain problematics and social pathologies of Russian life, would be, in my opinion. enriching places in which to live and contribute. The topic of what Russia’s future resembles in terms of demographics, civilizational improvement, etc is too vast and off topic to broach here, but I do think there is potential. A future wherein academics, and tech and corporate employees have to undergo privilege reprogramming sessions and be held back by demographic equality quotas (this is rapidly becoming a present)  very well might have people considering the country which locked up the Pussy Riot. Importantly, if any of your children happen to possess both x and y chromosomes, they might just find ample romantic opportunities in a society beleaguered by male alcoholism. I would rather have my son dating and mating there than wilting as an incel (while being mocked and berated for it) here.

If you’re looking for a particularly humorous instantiation of this, I might point you to the “Badass Motha Functor” Piper Herron who is highlighted on Posttenuretourrettes (incidentally, great blog if you’ve never heard of it) blogpost. And she apparently received her dissertation under Bhargava, a Fields Medalist. LOL. The link is:
https://posttenuretourettes.wordpress.com/2017/05/19/shes-a-bad-ass-motha-functor/ .

Now, aside from providing some comic fodder vis a vis the sentiment you espouse, I think this woman’s Princeton math PHD ought to be publicly mocked at every available opportunity. Princeton and Bhargava should be ashamed. Their reputation should e diminished by their having given Herron a Princeton math graduate degree.

As a STEM graduate, and someone who is serious, but by no means a Feynman level talent, I couldn’t be more glad that I cashed out of academia and entered the private sector. When I have accumulated a sufficient financial buffer after a few more years of applied work, I will happily check out of the SJW dystopia that is America and relocate to Eastern Europe.

But in spite of what this country is manifestly devolving into, I find myself modestly surprised whenever I encounter a “negroes in STEM” story which manages to make it to a WAPO/NYT article. Mainly, it tends to be women who have cornered the dominant market share in the oppressed-minority-in-STEM storyline. For one, people simply sympathize with women more than they sympathize with blacks. Moreover, it has become fairly common for even many accomplished scientists to profess as feminists and indulge in the corollary virtue signalling in a way they don’t do for blacks. I believe that there is a primitive instinct to curry favor with females at play in this phenomenon and that feminist male professors will disregard the interests of blacks in favor of the interests of women in a manner vaguely suggestive of how the head of a lion pride will disregard the interests of lesser male lions in favor of the interests of his lioness harem.

As well with women, there are enough of them that at least a small number of them command the talent to achieve and do achieve sufficiently to deserve to be taken seriously. EG, there are certainly woman IMO gold medalists although they are a statistical minority. With blacks this is not the case.

One thing I don’t understand about this whole ‘incel’ business is how the sexlessness / singletude / celibacy which is attributed to afflict males doesn’t ultimately engender an equal and opposite reaction from females which should force the problem to be self resolving. There are, in western countries, slightly more females than there are males,though the ratio is approximately equal. When one accounts for the relatively greater share of males as compared to females who suffer genetic illnesses, become incarcerated, become disqualified from the dating market perforce of extreme behaviors, this ratio evens out even more. Most women, like most men, I so submit, do not want to die alone. And while most women, unlike most men, can effortlessly attract a partner in their youth, or, as some allege, partake of ‘hypergamy’, or attract a ‘hot guy’ at the bar on a Saturday night, the preponderance of women, by simple mathematical necessity, cannot all settle down with the top 10% of men (assuming that polygamy is not operative, which it largely isn’t). Doesn’t this mean that women will have to settle down with the surplus of hitherto sexless men at some point if they wish to undertake their middle age and elderly periods of their lives with a partner (which I assume, most do). Under this construal, perhaps many men will have to endure sexlessness in their twenties / early thirties, but most should be able to find a woman by about age 40.

Preach it!

The shift in urban tawdriness , density, and squalor which one experiences when driving on route 10 east bound from the relatively nice stretches of Randolph/Denville/Morristown going into Parsippany is surely a spectacle to behold.

And in the occasional event that my father would drive me to the Dover train station in the early morning for me to attend some high school academic tournament in NYC, he would always make sure to have his loaded pistol and a baseball bat ready while we waited for the train.

I don’t know, when I attended college (a ‘not ivy league but ivy grows on the walls’ caliber institution), I, a mathematics major, routinely entertained spirited discussions with the Chinese immigrant students concerning favorite theorems, alternative routes of proof, ways to attack a problem set, nonstandard problem solving heuristics and strategies, etc. With the exception of two or three spare math-olympiad credentialed, full scholarship, high-octane, high iq performing oddballs (who were better than the Asians but were outnumbered by them), most of the whites could barely eek out basic difference of cubes identities, trigonometric identities, u-substitutions, and elementary reasoning about number theory which the East Asians had clearly internalized from around the age of 14 or 15. As well, many of the Chinese maintained, on the side, a healthy disdain for China’s communist past, a disdain for the cultural destructiveness of Chinese communism, a curiosity concerning market oriented free societies. They were way more interesting than the median mediocre inept white! Even the more intellectually oriented whites tended to squander their energies on social justice warrior studies or kitsch dadaist art projects.

Oh, and I would recommend Kelefa Sanneh’s New Yorker article on Ibram for some humorous relief. It’s one of the only mainstream pieces which dares to take Kendi down a peg. Curiously, the article insinuates that, before Ibram Rogers changed is name to Ibram Kendi, in reference to an east African culture of which he likely shares minimal if any meaningful ancestral heritage, he wrote for his school newspaper columns which charged that whites are aliens who deliberately spread AIDS to exterminate blacks. I haven’t been able to dredge up the original sources myself though.

I concur. I have variously spent a Saturday afternoon here, a Sunday evening there burrowing myself in with copies of DuBois, Baldwin, Malcolm X, etc. hoping to get some kick of intellectual firepower out of the experience, hoping to extract some kernel of greatness which reveals the potential of America’s downtrodden caste. I really have. And each time, these endeavors leave me affectless and disappointed, wondering why these figures get lionized as Black classics.

Separately, has anyone bothered to watch any of Kendi’s videos on Youtube? It is something to witness the deference his hosts afford him, the gratuitous compliments they lavish upon him (“Wow your idea is so profound, Dr. Kendi”). I wish just one MC at one colloquium series would expose the emperor for having no clothes, and would take Kendi to task for his vacuity.

As a white guy, I can’t help but be incredibly embarrassed by this, especially if, as Charles Murray seems to have suggested in one of his recent tweets, the test has been made drastically easier since some changes in 2016 / 2017. Of course, I haven’t examined what these changes are; perhaps, they have downgraded the verbal and written portions on the basis of ‘cultural bias’ (eg, google search ‘SAT regattas’) and instead prioritized strictly logical and quantitative elements which favor the Asian mind.

One feature of the data which attests to the hypothesis that Asians are better at gaming /cramming for / over preparing for standardized tests is the brief but sharp and highly curious downturn in Asian scores around 2017 before they shoot upwards again. This trend suggests that Asians floundered in the brief burn in period when the newly revised SAT couldn’t be studied for on the basis of accumulated materials but regained their advantage when a sufficient stock of prep materials began to accumulate.

My domain has always been that of the formal sciences rather than that of those which pertain to human life, but as an off thought, one random (and probably refutable) hypothesis I’ve sometimes entertained is whether the reverse Flynn effect which seems to be causing stagnating / regressing IQ among Caucasians owes to the increasingly elderly age at which this demographic is producing children.

One interesting feature of the tweet to which Altai links in the #1 response is the inclusion of the specific diction “anti-racist”, for which it is dubious that this represents a simple colloquial cobbling together of words intended to convey opposition to racism. Rather, this seems like a direct invocation of Ibram Kendi’s slogan. Ever since Kendi’s risible penny dreadful “How to be an Anti-Racist” was published to fawning reviews from The Guardian, NY Times, etc, I’ve experienced that the term “Anti-Racist” has tremendously proliferated throughout SJW internet sphere, with the implicit associated expectations that we are to understand that the utterance of this locution comprises a specific nod to Kendi and that we are to construe Kendi’s ideas with sincere gravitas.

Oops, I just meant to write *technical inner workings *.

I think your assessment is a bit off. Bloom sometimes gets associated with the paradigm that intrinsic aesthetics is the criterion of a literary work. This is not wholly incongruent. But Bloom’s criticism typically avoids deep diving into the specific lyricism or symbolism of poems, or exploring the technical explorations of their figurative devices. Its shtick is to construe the genealogical lineages of literature, the weight of inherited tradition on the psychology of literary figures, and how specific literary figures carry the torch forward within these traditions. Consult for instance, Bloom’s obsession with Kabbalah or his most anthologized work, The Anxiety of Influence.

The point I hasten to underscore is that not believing that literature should be evaluated on the basis of commercial qualities, SJW related qualities, or whatever other absurd criterion is not tantamount to believing that literature should be evaluated on its intrinsic merits.

As one representative example, I might refer you to the article “POETIC CROSSING, II: AMERICAN STANCES”, which strikes me as a decent instantiation of the self indulgence and inattentiveness to language towards which I aver Bloom’s criticism inclines. I might also refer you to the 1976 NY Times Article (which, I assure you, bears NO resemblance to any recent NY Times columns) “Poetry and Repression” by Christopher Ricks (which you should be able to freely google search), which performs with an apposite sense of humor certain necessary deeds of deflation.

As somewhat of a side matter, I also profess my surprise that in a somewhat antisemite leaning forum like UNZ Review, nobody here takes issue with Bloom’s attempt to put TS Eliot / Ezra Pound in their places by demoting their stature within the cannon.

I admire Harold Bloom and certainly I appraise him as one of undeniable stalwarts of America’s ever diminishing literary ranks, and all that. But to be honest, I must digress that I admire the idea of Harold Bloom, eg, his significance in the cultural wars, more than I admire the actual criticism he wrote, which suffers from some several serious shortcomings.
– For one, Bloom’s apotheosis of intellectual lightweights like Wordsworth, Shelley, Thoreau, and Emerson is difficult to take seriously. These sentimental nonentities simply lack the depth of the continental European soul.
– His coverage of European literature (particularly more modern European literature) outside of the Anglosphere is rather paltry.
– His journal articles (try sampling 5 or 6 from JSTOR) exhibit an alternately densely referential and pontificatory manner which tends to elide elucidating the local aesthetics and details which underwrite the greatness of the literature at hand. There are exceptions (“On the Necessity of Misreading” is one article I admire very much) but while I sympathize with Bloom’s paradigm, I very seldom come away from him feeling that I’ve been enlightened with magical insights I haven’t already gathered of my own volition. I can’t help but feel that a scholar like A.R. Ammons implements the type of critic for whom Bloom is the political sword.

Having said that, Bloom had his moments, and of course I still like the guy. RIP.

Ye “Rabblement of lemmings” be damned!

This take is horseshit. For one, it is directly contradicted by explicit selection of multiple recent awardees on the basis of their popular rather than their literary contributions. Bob Dylan, for instance, holds more clout as a pop culture figure than as a bonafide doer of literature. Likewise, Svetlana Alexievich, quality journalist though she may be, fails to meet the literary bar. As well, even many of the recent ‘pure literature’ recipients fail to merit high artistic acclaim among serious literary critics. For instance, Doris Lessing coheres to my thinking with the banal contemporary British middlebrow of Martin Amis, Ian Mckewan, AS Byatt, Salman Rushdie, etc. And when JM. Le Clezio won the prize, many NY-Review-of-Books caliber periodicals had to scrape the barrel with great exertion to find scholars of credentials (even among Francophiles) who had so much as heard of him. Among those who had, one astutely compared his work to a ‘UNICEF documentary’.

Of course, a few of the recent recipients constitute first rate and most worthy talents. Here the lyrical poet Tomas Transtromer and the Kafkaesque novelists Herta Mueller / Mo Yan summon to mind.

Nevermind whether states, the Fed, etc. force businesses to operate in the ghetto. What if, more gratuitously, cities decided apropos of their own volition that subsidizing high end outlets in the slums perforce of their own tax money would be a fantastic idea? It might here be germane to note, for instance, that in my esteemed city of Chicago, 10 million $ of city subsidies have been recently afforded to underwrite the existence of a Whole Foods in the Englewood neighborhood, one of the nadirs of the city’s infamous south side.

Not since Suketu Mehta held America to account for the colonization of India have I witnessed a call to national reckoning like this.

More seriously, I’ve heard through grapevine (maybe somewhere on this blog), though I haven’t confirmed the details, that the Tate’s ongoing Blake exhibit has been bowdlerized by plenteous interjections of social justice warrior balderdash. William Blake! An opponent of slavery!

I happen to live in a somewhat global city which hosts a bona fide globally competitive art museum. Thankfully it has hitherto resisted being infected with such delirium.

I’d never heard of the ‘Knoxville Horror’ until reading your comment just now, and google searching accordingly. While doing so, I couldn’t help but notice that this incident smacks redolent to my memory of the Hi-Fi / Draino killings, another black-on-white torture-robbery brutality the sordid details of which I ascertained in the course of some desultory internet search a while back. We all need to be cognizant as well as communicative of as many such infamies as we can!