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From the New York Times:
Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside The Times Won’t Stop
By Ben Smith, Feb. 14, 2021
In 2012, when The New York Times was panicked about its financial future, this newspaper went into the travel business. It began selling “Times Journeys,” on which an expert beat reporter would be your guide to Berlin or the Galápagos Islands.
The trips brought in some money, but were expensive to run and complicated to manage — particularly in the summer of 2019, after The Times began hosting teenagers. …
Nor were the reporters always ready for the confident, hothouse politics of elite American high school students. …
And then there was the trip to Peru that summer. The parents of adventurous young meritocrats paid $5,490 (plus airfare) for two weeks studying “Public Health and Development in the Andes.” On that trip, the reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., got into a series of heated arguments with students, none of them Black, on the charged question of race. Their complaints would ultimately end his career as a high-profile public health reporter for The Times, and again put The Times at the center of the national argument over journalism and racism and labor. …
What happened in Peru, too, was a kind of collision between the old Times and the next generation of its core audience, the educated globally minded elite. The student at the center of this story is Sophie Shepherd, who isn’t among the teenagers who have spoken anonymously to other news organizations. She and two other students said she was the person who spoke the most to Mr. McNeil and spent the most time with him on their “student journey.”
She was 17 at the time, and had just finished her senior year at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school sometimes rated America’s best. She’s the kind of teenager who is excited to talk to a New York Times correspondent about public health, and perhaps to put the adventure on a résumé. She had even done the optional reading Mr. McNeil suggested, Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” a Pulitzer-winning history that argues that environmental and geographic factors produced the global domination of European civilization. The book has drawn criticism for a deterministic view that seems to absolve colonial powers of responsibility for their choices.
As us oldtimers recall, Guns, Germs, and Steel was a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller for seeming to refute The Bell Curve. (Here is my 1997 review of Diamond’s book in National Review.) The book is highly relevant for a trip to Peru since Pizarro’s expeditionary conquest of the large Inca Empire in the 1530s was one of the most spectacular examples of the subject of the book. As I wrote in 1997:
Jared Diamond’s goal is to explain why Eurasians conquered Africans, Australians, and Americans instead of the other way around, even though conventional social scientists shy away from such a fundamental question out of fear of what they might find. Since random accidents of personality and culture appear too trivial to account for the clash of continents’ lopsided outcomes (e.g., a few hundred Conquistadors demolished the grandest empires of the New World), this leaves only two possible underlying causes: either the winners had better homelands or better bodies and brains. Deeming genetic explanations “racist” and “loathsome,” Diamond sets out to reaffirm the equality of humanity by showing the inequality of the continents.
But by now, like in that Borges story “The Theologians” about the Late Antiquity theologian who anathematizes another theologian until God gets them confused and smites the persecutor for his heresies, both books seem pretty much the same to the Youth of Today: crimethink! Back to the NYT:
Ms. Shepherd said she noticed that Mr. McNeil was walking alone as they left their hostel on the first morning of the trip, so she caught up with him. She asked him, she recalled, about the criticism of the book.
“He got very defensive very quickly about it,” she recalled. “It’s just a book, it’s just making this point, it’s very simple, it’s not racist.”
She said she backed down, apologized and “felt terribly guilty — like I must have come off as a crazy liberal.” …
On the walk over, she said, she talked about her favorite class at Andover, a history of American education that covered racial discrimination. He responded, she recalled, that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.”
Ms. Shepherd said she tried to argue, but he talked over her whenever she interjected, their voices getting louder and attracting the attention of other students, two of whom confirmed her account of the conversation.
“This is the thing with these liberal institutions like Andover — they teach you the world should be like this but that’s not how reality is,” she recalled him telling her. …
But the complaints didn’t fall on deaf ears at The Times for a reason that also hasn’t come through clearly in the coverage — because they rang true. Mr. McNeil is known as a difficult character at the paper, a detail that is both irrelevant to the big ideological questions and important to understanding what had happened. A kind of Times-made man who was married for a time to a third-generation Times woman, he started at the newspaper in 1976. He had risen through the ranks from copy boy to become a night rewrite man, a theater columnist and a correspondent in Paris.
To some, he embodied the swagger of the mid-20th century Times man, whose very presence rendered a story news. He could be a generous colleague, and blunt honesty is welcome in a newsroom, but he also sometimes alienated his bosses and colleagues. He asked sharp questions of the former publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., at the company’s annual staff meeting, and was a union activist who attacked management during brutal contract negotiations in the dark years of 2010 and 2011. He was a devoted, effective organizer, others in the News Guild recalled, but also drove his brothers and sisters in labor crazy with his imperiousness, and voted against the union’s 2016 contract, arguing that the union should have held out for more.
His impolitic views were also hardly a secret. When he published a book on the Zika virus in 2016, a puzzled reviewer in The Quarterly Review of Biology noted passages about feminists and gay sex, and wrote that “it is McNeil’s seniority and journalistic experience that makes the occasional misstep, or indelicate deviation from the science, all the more surprising.”
The sorts of views that raised eyebrows in The Quarterly Review of Biology had shocked the teenagers. And when a furious Dean Baquet, the executive editor, read the complaints about the Peru trip in 2019, he said he initially wanted to fire Mr. McNeil. But the union played its traditional role, fighting aggressively to protect him. The union, a person involved in the conversations said, was ready to take The Times to arbitration if the company attempted to terminate Mr. McNeil for his conduct on the trip. Mr. McNeil received a formal reprimand instead.
Mr. McNeil, who was not far from retirement, returned to his role as a reporter on the relatively unglamorous public health beat. He talked openly about taking a buyout the next time The Times offered them, and his career could easily have ended that way.
But then, just over a year ago, a strange new virus began spreading around the world. Mr. McNeil suddenly became a regular guest on The Times’s popular podcast, The Daily. His doomsaying was electrifying — stark, certain, sometimes alarming. He emerged as the voice of The Times’s coverage of the crisis. …
That high profile may have led to the leak of The Times’s internal response to the Peru trip to The Daily Beast. Some employees then organized a letter saying that “our community is outraged and in pain” and asking why Mr. McNeil’s conduct hadn’t prevented him from covering a crucial story with complex racial disparities. The letter didn’t call for him to be fired, but for The Times to review its policies.
Other journalists considered the letter itself unfair, an attack on a veteran reporter’s career over speech that wasn’t directly connected to his journalism. Some Black journalists felt their white colleagues were rallying to Mr. McNeil’s defense rather than worrying about his words’ impact. “You often wonder what your white colleagues who are lovely to your face are actually thinking or saying about you — or people like you — behind your back,” a national reporter, John Eligon, tweeted.
John Eligon, a black anti-white racist, is a major league iSteve Content Generator.
Is it too hard to point out that McNeil is an old white man in a well-paid job, and so the blacks like Eligon and Nikole Hannah-Jones want to fire him and put one of their friends in his position?
… The Times will have to navigate its identity in tandem with the next generation of its audience — people like Ms. Shepherd, who said that she was most surprised by the gap between Mr. McNeil’s views and what she’d read in her favorite news outlet.
“That’s not what I would have expected from The Times,” she said. “You have the 1619 Project. You guys do all this amazing reporting on this, and you can say something like that?”
More of the wisdom of Donald McNeil, this from the Washington Post:
“Right out of the bat he was denigrating the medical traditions of Peru,” one student told The Post. Another described McNeil’s interaction with a local shaman as disrespectful and “cringeworthy.”
It’s almost as if the public health reporter for the Science section of the New York Times doesn’t believe in the healing power of shamanism.
At one point, the reporter allegedly described nepotism as “affirmative action for White people.”
That’s a pretty good line.
Of course, these days, you aren’t supposed to mention even the existence of affirmative action.
This will be the end media financial model. Rich graduates pay $$$ to ruin the career of an ageing journalist. Like a 21st century safari https://t.co/nilzgsYaKm
— Ed West (@edwest) February 15, 2021
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Why did I know that all the students complaining and excited to talk to NYT reporters would be girls?
The kind who:
Lord save us from the Hermione Grangers of the world.
Looking at the dour expression on Donald McNeil’s face in that picture, my first thought was that he’s playing “tough reporter who speaks truth to power”. But after reading further, I think his expression conveys the humiliation of having to tolerate kids like the ones on his Peru trip.
And it’s funny Steve mentions that Guns Germs and Steel was very kosher and didn’t say anything about race and IQ. GG&S is a book that has been read and enjoyed by most Gen Y and below progressive intellectuals. It’s utterly surreal to see a NYT reporter feigning ignorance of this.
Well, this is certainly a story with something for everyone. For better or worse.
OMG, IKR? I saw that movie too. Wypipos be straight up evil.
Wow just wow just wow. What a nasty piece of work this Don McNeil is.
– Thinks there were reasons other than pure evil that whites did better than blacks
– Thinks blacks actually have some agency rather than being completely at the mercy of the prevailing level of white racism
– Not only argues back at females, but talks over them too
Seriously, I hope “student journey” is a euphemism here and he was at least able to get some action out of this. If you’re going to get fired hanging out with some young chicks, it should be for something worthwhile and not for this inane controversy.
This perhaps provides a clue as to how the Chinese economy is growing so quickly. They’re stealing our corporate secrets and technological innovations to an extremely massive extent.
This really is something.
And this parasite thinks that’s a knock on immigration control.
At one point, the reporter allegedly described nepotism as “affirmative action for fellow (((White))) people.”
Canz I haz editor desk @ Noo Yorkie Timez now?
Cue: original picture of Stalin, holding up a copy of Guns, Germs & Steel.
Cue: new picture of Stalin, with GG&S replaced by Anti-Racist Baby.
Cue: original picture of Stalin, holding up a copy of Guns, Germs & Steel.
Cue: new picture of Stalin, with GG&S replaced by Anti-Racist Baby.
Yes, it’s useful in identifying heretics.
Define “nepotism”? There is nothing at all wrong with giving your relatives a leg up in a business you own. None whatsoever.
When it’s using your influence to get your kid a job elsewhere, that may be a different story. But folks in the entertainment industry and mainstream press are especially astute practitioners of it. Megan McCain, Chelsea Clinton, Abby Huntsman, Anderson Cooper, and Chris Cuomo didn’t get jobs in the press because they were particularly profound or had anything interesting to say. Their careers, temporary or permanent, were launched in large part because of who they were related to. Of course in the case of Huntsman and McCain it didn’t hurt that they were willing to say mean things about their fathers’ party.
But plenty of minorities engage in nepotism to further their children’s careers. Will Smith and Edward James Olmos pushed their son’s acting careers for a long time. Quincy Jones has four or five children in showbiz. I do not follow any of them enough to know whether they have real talent, but you can bet that their dad opened a few doors for them.
That book aged poorly but it was all the rage for a couple years. Diamond will go down in the anals as the guy who proposed that subsaharan africans should have domesticated rhinos to ride on for their calvary corps and they would have been invincible.
(I believe the anthropology establishment thought it was pretty sketchy from the gitgo).
And when the history of the Revolution is written, it will be explained that many people were purged because they went to an elite boarding school like Andover.
The climax of Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus is a student on a journey tape recording an unwitting professor so out of context quotes can get him fired.
WSJ interview, worth reading but too long to quote here.
The debates over war elephants that Jared Diamond started are catnip to male intellectuals.
The truly pernicious (and not incidentally widespread) type of nepotism–which Steve has dubbed ‘ethnic nepotism’–is when people in positions of power and prestige favor those of their own tribe, not their own families. Significantly, this is permissible for every single group under the sun with the standout exception of white males (who don’t consider that they have a ‘tribe’ anyway). As usual, mass-media representations are the polar opposite of reality.
The trip sounds like a losing proposition from the beginning. A non-nonsense specialist in public health compelled to show off a witchdoctor (oops, shaman) to a bunch of wealthy and PC teenagers.
McNeil is clearly poles apart from Sophie Shepherd: he worked his way up the ladder, was old enough to be her grandfather, and spoke in a clear idiom that was out of fashion before Shepherd was even born.
The karma is that, at some point in her future career, Shepherd will inevitably be canceled – probably just for being white.
I’m still waiting for David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” book to get tarred and feathered. He had a funny bit on Ebonics and drug use by hoodlums in the projects.
The real question for neoliberal writers is how to get cover under Biden’s SJW deflective shield.
You mean there are still serious anthropologists?
The Bell Curve: IQ is heritable.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The environment made some people more competitive.
Andover “Young Meritocrats”: Both are racist. Anything that says Europeans became dominant for any reason other than their evil, racist rapacity is treason. No more earning a living for you! Grovel, old man, grovel!
Some people keep saying that these young people are the New Red Guards, but that’s an insult to the chi-com Red Guards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Guards
I mean, did these “young meritocrats” of Andover ever have to meet in secret or be accused of being counter-revolutionaries to achieve their aims? Or are they just punching down like plain’ ole’ movie upper crust villains?
That’s old news, man. Even Japan is not a real country anymore. It’s an Economy, with increasingly Woke management.
Well, nepotism is certainly affirmative action for the Jews, but WASPs in their excessive self-abnegation are wont to disdain even the familial and clannish favouritism that other races just take for granted.
Gee, for me the story lost the plot at the line where a Times reporter disparaged a “liberal institution.”
It’s a really good question.
I can’t tell if they’re neo-imperial feudalists (please laugh) in Marxist clothing or constituent a true syntheses of financial capitalism and Marxism to produce cultural Marxism. A true abomination if there ever was one.
You’re overthinking this. It’s just inter-white status competition. “Look at me, look how tolerant and wonderful I am — not like you, you filthy racist!”
Read this
https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure-class-a-status-update/
Of course, it’s something that non-white rich kids can get into as well. For them, it has the added bonus that, even if some of the resulting policies hurt the lower orders of their race, they can comfort themselves knowing that whites across all classes will also be hurt.
Sending an old white guy on an extended field trip with teenage girls. One way or another, that was not going to end well.
A main part of Diamond’s hypothesis was that people in the New World were backward because they didn’t have any animals around that were capable of domestication. I decided that was a load of B.S. when I stopped at a roadside deer farm near Flagstaff AZ and my kids were feeding the pet deer by hand. (They also had a very docile Buffalo hanging out in a pen).
I am sure the Aurachs and wild boars that the Eurasias started out with were no picnic to handle. But they stuck with it and bred them into domesticated animals.
The magnificent power that has been given to mediocrities and crazies to end the careers and destroy the lives of others with gossipy claims of Wrongthink is one of the more sinisterly intoxicating aspects of Marxist tattletale cancel culture.
Snitching, exaggerating, and outright lying not only gets you praised, it also gives you immense influence. And such power unchecked and unrestrained by hard fact-checking and cool-headed adults is going to be rife with abuse among those jealous of others, mentally unbalanced, having an ax to grind, or desperate for 15 minutes of fame. AOC’s recently made-up claim of having her office be besieged by the Capitol protesters is just one example.
One can easily see the parallels in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba, and China.
I think it may be a while before DFW’s magnum opus gets cancelled for a very simple reason: almost nobody’s actually read it.
I finally killed it off a couple of years ago, after several abandoned attempts, but it was a hell of a project.
Was it worth the effort? (Non-sarcastic question)
Hmmm, pretty good piece by Ben Smith. His Andrew Sullivan hatchet job (and his Mickey Kaus hatchet job of a few years ago) made me think Smith’s a dick. but this one is actually pretty ballsy to submit to his editors at the Times itself. I wonder how long Smith has left at the Times? Also Jonathan Chait wrote a defense of Gina Carano at New York Magazine the other day, comparing her firing to the 1950s blacklistings. How soon until he follows Andrew Sullivan over to Substack? He does a few politically correct pieces, then a piece that is a little hmmm, then back to the politically correct stuff. He’s testing his editors.
Or at least to Sailerian intellectuals, who would ask, “Between rhino cavalry and elephant cavalry, who would win in a fight?”
I enjoyed most of it at least. It helps to have a historical study background to help manage all the characters and subplots. I never really took a interest in literature or poetry so it seemed like a great book to earn some snob points. It’s much easier to impress English major chicks with reading Wallace than political or economic history.
“Hey baby, wanna learn how Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. practiced his own tailored version of Keynesianism in the 1930s? I can tell you all about the big beefs between the Federal Reserve Chairman and the Federal Reserve Bank Governors in the 1920s. Wanna know about why it took the Federal Reserve so long to acknowledge the difference between real and nominal interest rates?”
I’d imagine if you said that on a date you’d get a chick wet for sure. But only by inducing a grand mal seizure and having her empty her bowels and bladder in the middle of the fancy French restaurant.
No, these girls were underage. A better gig would have been taking 20-something drug reps, or MBA students, on a tour of Andean shamans.
It’s been ages since I read “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” but wasn’t his argument that – because the New World mammals did not co-evolve with humans as their counterparts in Eurasia did – people who colonized the Americas were able to slaughter them into extinction with ease? And that this later on led to scarcity of social mammals (“pack animals”) that could be domesticated readily? Which in turn deprived the humans in the Americas both easily-obtained animal protein nutrition as well as source of animal power for farming and war?
I thought the job of journalists was to write articles for whatever publication employed them. It’s not to act as tour guides for spoilt teenage pupils of expensive private schools. So McNeil was fired for comments he allegedly made as a tour guide, not as a journalist. As a very experienced hack, you would have thought he would have seen this trap coming. He should have refused to act as a guide, saying it was not part of his contract. As a union man, he would surely have strong backing.
This will never be a problem for Maestro Steve thankfully. I don’t see him ever chaperoning Hollywood High School students around Castle Howard, explaining the intricacies of Evelyn Waugh’s art.
Maybe he wanted a paid trip? How was he to know it would turn out to be an ordeal like Evelyn Waugh’s trip to South America?
DFW has come in for a certain amount of cancelling (cancellation?) due to his status as a heterosexually predatory white male.
For example, he reputedly kept a notebook of pick-up lines which he had used in previous circumstances to good effect. This always struck me as something of a window into his soul, with its studious, OCD, almost comically nerdish approach to seduction, a bit sad but robotically effective. Wallace was famously anxious and perhaps had no idea what to say without falling back on a script of some sort. Of course, he was also somewhat famous, had a reputation as a genius, and was a very good athlete. I guess that helps as well.
Hey, in Peru 17 year old girls are considered middle-aged.. and legal.
And here I was hoping for a negro bites dog story. I’m sure the poor innocent lambs were just sitting on their porch, minding their business when some guy ran past, etc.
Even UNZ limits Alden and Rosie to three comments per hour.
AOC seems just nuts these days. Remember when ‘Chelsea’ Manning was being groomed for great things then ended up tweeting from the ledge of a high rise? Same trajectory.
His Wikipedia page says he taught journalism at Columbia for a spell but that was 40 years ago and pretty young things now carry other dangers.
Wiki links to this Vanity Fair article (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/behind-the-scenes-of-donald-mcneils-new-york-times-exit) whch shows this is what actually happened. He wasn’t fired but evidently took a pay-off in return for a public apology.
Yes I remember when Guns, Germs & Steel was typical lying commie bullshit, now it’s up there on the forbidden shelf next to Mein Kampf!
Steve has his own Jared Diamond story.
I wasn’t surprised to read that McNeil led a Times-branded trip. Writers at well-known publications generally do a lot more than just write. They give interviews and talks, they sit on panels, they do meet ‘n’ greets with advertisers … They’re expected to pitch in and help the publication promote itself, by showing up at events at prestige schools, in other publications and on TV. Plus, as Steve said, maybe McNeil wanted a free (if working) trip. If so: ah, the irony of it.
The creative-writing-school-and-pubishing scene has been heavily PC/SJW for a while, and it dumped David Foster Wallace some time back. He and a few others were scorned mockingly as “great whites” — the kind of hetero, male, striving-for-Western-greatness creatures we’re now understood to be done with. Take a look at the upscale new fiction that’s featured at independent bookstores these days. It’s nearly all multiculti and/or female, with PC themes.
Also Jonathan Chait wrote a defense of Gina Carano at New York Magazine the other day, comparing her firing to the 1950s blacklistings.
It really diminishes what’s going on in America today to compare it to McCarthyism. It’s so much worse, so pervasive, intrusive, and seemingly intractable. It wasn’t that difficult to find a “safe space” outside the purview of the red-hunters. (There were communist professors employed at CCNY, for example.)
We are in more of a Cultural Revolution like that of Red China, that is setting a course that will reduce America to a Third World nation, a democracy in name only, ruled by a unity serving the interests of our oligarchs.
Not “unity,” Uniparty. (Spell check issue.)
Most liberal whites in public life are nepotistic to their families but never miss a chance to sell out their race.
Definitely. You only have to look at what happened in the US in the Sixties to see how lasting an effect the whole “Red Scare” had. The thing about what’s happening in America over the last couple of decades is that there has been no pushback to speak of. Instead, conservatives retreat before the inexorable advance of the Left and end up adopting most of its beliefs and policies.
There is no such thing as a Free Trip, especially if you have to deal with 17 year-old schoolgirls.
In his defense, Manning is a tranny, which has a 40% suicide rate; his mental illness is thus obvious and known.
AOC, meanwhile, is running on a mixture of crazy-Hispanic-slut-bartender, normal-person-vaulted-into-celebrity, and hysterical-female-in-cancel-culture. The latter category involves their sincere belief that every episode of Law and Order: SUV happened to them and that any random fantasy or dream they had is a repressed memory, and , in our culture, instead of dealing with such persons as sick we encourage their delusions.
Purity spirals are always fun to watch from the outside, if only in a black-humor sort of way, e.g. Stalin’s Purges, Cultural Revolution, etc.
Well put–the same ones who crow about being “fiscally conservative but socially liberal”–meaning that they, personally, have a lot of money and aim to keep it, and don’t give a shit about the state of society, fiscally or morally,
Poor Diamond, he thought he was a good white for taking more of a nurture approach to explain black/brown underperformance, only to find himself in the bad white camp for simply acknowledging that they underperform.
Someone should explain that it isn’t really any better to be White and not have to wonder what horrible things your black and brown colleagues are saying about you publicly.
> Wise comment, not diminished by the spellchecker in this case. A “unity” of correct doctrine. Or, slyly, a reference to the Coalition of the Fringes.
> But by now, like in that Borges story “The Theologians” about the Late Antiquity theologian who anathematizes another theologian until God gets them confused and smites the persecutor for his heresies, both books seem pretty much the same to the Youth of Today: crimethink!
That’s a great paragraph (only accessible to me thanks to the link).
What’s the over/under that the Pulitzer-winning author of the McNeil debacle would grasp your point? Her Times comrade Ben Smith? (For whom, like McNeil, n-word use is not permitted.) Phillips Andover hothouse graduate Sophie Shepherd?
A few of the Outer Party authors of the comments that passed moderation seem to be groping towards this idea. Carefully!
Here in the DC area we call all the government contracts that create so many BS jobs….white man’s welfare
Note to Warhol: In the future, everyone will be Emmanuel Goldstein for 15 minutes.
He responded, she recalled, that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.”
About a quarter of the jobs in the economy are low skill service positions. Some people who hold them are supplementing the family income, some are youths starting out in life, and some are held by people who’ve been hors de combat for whatever reason and are now re-entering work life. However, most people holding such jobs do so because with their skill set being what it is and local demand being what it is, that is what work there is for them to do. This will be so in any society with a division of labor more complicated than that of an agricultural village. The trade-offs between space, commuting distances, amenities, and the location of friends and relations mean some people elect to live in wrecked, viperous neighborhoods. You can institute public policies that have a shot at turning wrecked, viperous neighborhoods into shabby cheap seats neighborhoods, but there’s no one employed at Phillips Andover or the Sulzberger Birdcage Liner that has any relevant skill set. There are always going to be people with bad jobs living in shabby neighborhoods.
Instead, conservatives retreat before the inexorable advance of the Left and end up adopting most of its beliefs and policies.
They don’t. The dynamic you’re describing occurs among the political class and the chatterati and it concerns certain social and cultural questions only. Evangelicals are happily casting ballots for a roué like Donald Trump because he treats them more respectfully than the ordinary run of Republican politician.
What’s the argument regarding africa?
And what is the Eurasia argument? Looks to me that Europe conquered Asia as well and that Asia didn’t exactly conquer non Asian places in recent times. Also looks to me that the Middle East and North Africa conquered sub Saharan Africa to the extent they felt like it.
Third generation Times reporter, once married to third generation Times reporter: “Blacks can get out of the ghetto if they want to. ” And Horatio Alger-like, write for the Times?
Self-deprecating: “Nepotism is affirmative action for white people.” More than for other ethnic groups?
An old guy flapping his gums in Peru leads to the career cancellation of a prominent NYT reporter.
The new butterfly effect.
I remember that book as claiming not just animals but also rivers and seeds/plants. He Jared D claimed that White people had navigable rivers and Africans did not. With plants the claim was that east west geographies were more conducive to horticulture than north south geography.
It was all bu**s**t wrapped in ice cream and oh now the gullible white people fell for it.
I think PBS also had a multi part show about GG&S.
Pretty common tactic for the Woke to trick an enemy into saying n***** while being captured on video. Happened to my stepson’s middle school principal. She didn’t get fired , just forced to apologize in public.
New York is now a High School Drama Fanzine, only issued daily. These long, in-depth articles about itself are so rad! OMG!
Why does anyone listen to anything 17-year old girls have to say? Being sexually active (possibly) does not mean that one is capable of rational thought.
I blame the world-saving teenager who can do no wrong trope. I knew it was bad news when adults openly started reading Harry Potter on public transport 20 years ago or so.
George Carlin’s comedy routine needs updating. There’s only one word you can’t say on television.
Ben Smith shows an alarming level of empathy for McNeil, who is really just a racist old white man who deserved to be cancelled long ago. We need to keep a close eye on Mr. Smith, who himself is a white male. Shouldn’t the esteemed position of NY Times media critic be held by a person who reflects the diversitay of NYC?
Mr. Smith should watch his back and in the future write with less ironic detachment and fully embrace the CORRECT point of view. He still has the old white man’s habit of seeing two sides to every question when today we know that there is really only ONE side to every question – the GOOD side.
Ultimately, whatever half-measures Mr. Smith takes will probably prove to be insufficient and he should retire to the countryside where he can engage in the proper self-criticism while his role is filled with a young female person of color who will not repeat his errors. You can be sure that they [their preferred pronoun] will not write with any undeserved sympathy regarding either Cracker McNeil or Cracker Smith.
Below, I show an artist’s conception of the future NY Times reporter’s union meeting at which Mr. Smith will be denounced for his crimes:
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Is it?
Look how the Clinton, Obama, and Biden regimes bent over backwards for China. W wasn’t all that tough on them either.
And all those Confucius Institutes?
They were using those to study the West.
Supposedly, the NYT has made a conscious decision to be more overtly liberal. And this has actually helped their sales. Sort of the MSNBC versus CNN effect. Fox pioneered it first.
NYT hasn’t completely abandoned their Grey Lady cloak. Why give something away, might as well cake and eat, But I’ve heard they actually had an open meeting with employees and described this business strategy. And it’s working, financially.
The writer here was probably more a paleoliberal. Didn’t get the picture.
It seems kind of odd this was allowed in the first place.
You have this wrong. These people bring their own wreckage and viperousness with them like the cloud of dirt that surrounds Pig Pen in Peanuts cartoons. If they were to move to Beverly Hills then Beverly Hills would become wrecked and viperous. Scattering them evenly across the map wouldn’t work – that would just mean that EVERYWHERE would be wrecked and viperous. One teenage viper can terrorize a whole block.
Elite white people have retreated to small enclaves that are in high demand due to their lack of vipers (cough -“good schools” – cough). The high demand leads to high prices which keeps the vipers out – a virtuous circle unless the forces of Section 8 and busing interfere.
If elephants are real Republicans and RINOS are not, apparently the RINOs win after being scattered by a charge from the right flank but then regrouping for a devastating counterattack in conjunction with DINOS.
As for animal cavalry, the elephants have two longer tusks to the rhino’s one, plus the elephants can rear back on their hind legs to stomp from a higher level. But the rhinos do have tougher armor and could attack from underneath at the soft elephant underbellies. Probably it depends on if either cavalry had projectile weapons.
On McNeil’s Wikipedia page, I find this sentence:
where the so-called n-word is actually spelled out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McNeil_Jr.
So it’s a cancelable act to quote or mention the word in conversation, but OK to write it out in a setting as public — and as woke — as Wikipedia?
Show me the man, and I’ll find you the thought-crime.
At genteel (not to mention gentile – the Sulzbergers have been Episcopalians for several generations) institutions like the NY Times, defenestration takes place in a genteel way, at least for now. But it’s still defenestration no matter how cushioned it is. McNeil may be physically intact and even comfortably situated financially but he has still undergone career death – he will never again have a full time job with a leading newspaper. His wisdom and skills in bringing light to the pandemic have been silenced and whoever replaces him will almost certainly be not only browner but also less wise and less skilled. McNeil may not be poorer for this but WE will.
They won’t start literally throwing whitey out the window until a later phase in the Cultural Revolution.
Yeah, Guns, Germs and Steel was always kinda dumb. One hoped that one day it would be replaced by something better. Instead, as is the spirit of the age, it is getting replaced by stuff that is even dumber.
Similarly the New York Times staff was always wrong. Now they’re getting replaced by staff who are even wronger.
The only exit from the fail spiral seems to be total collapse.
“Annals“, perhaps?
There’s a world of difference between going “down in the anals” and going “down in the annals”. To paraphrase Sean Penn, going “down in the anals” sounds positively “satinic“!
Then again, maybe Diamond is so full of it that your original usage is not only appropriate, but inspired!
The NYT increasingly embodies the values of American bipartisanship.
More and more evil, more and more stupid.
https://vdare.com/posts/bipartisanship-and-sam-francis
“IN AMERICA, WE have a two-party system,” a Republican congressional staffer is supposed to have told a visiting group of Russian legislators some years ago.
“There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party.”
He added: “Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called – “bipartisanship.”
Lately the ny post is seeking out journalists that ny times cancels, so maybe he’ll be in luck.
Hannah Jones wrote a thesis about how sub saharan Africans developed oceanic seafaring and trade routes with native Americans and were peacefully trading goods in a globalized economic system until the Europeans colonized them and suppressed record of it.
Only problem with this theory is that it is known that there is no evidence of any indigenous American genetic admixture in Africans prior to European trans Atlantic travel and likewise no evidence of African admixture in native Americans in pre Colombian periods. This is inconvenient to the desired narrative. Expect David Reich to be canceled in the next few years as the woke advance.
Every conversation you’ve ever had anywhere, with anyone, no matter how trivial, can be used against you.
If so, given that evolution has taken millions of years to fashion these mammals, and that humans didn’t settle Eurasia until ~50k years ago, wouldn’t his argument have to be that “the last 0.1% of evolution matters much more than than the previous 99.9% of evolution”? And he wouldn’t want to argue that, since if applied to humans, it might have certain … implications.
In fact, his argument would have to be even squidgier than that, given that the New World was settled ~15k years ago: “the last 0.1% of evolution matters much more than than the previous 99.9% of evolution, except the last 0.03% doesn’t matter at all! I said, ‘AT ALL’, you bigot!”
The Times “will have to navigate its identity”?
Makes The Times sound like a sociopath. By the time they conclude they have to navigate their identity, it’s too far down the wrong path, have to turn around.
It would be more accurate to write: Jared Diamond’s goal is to explain why Eurasians conquered Africans, Australians, and Americans instead of the other way around, in a way that gives no credit whatsoever to Eurasians themselves.
Jared Diamond has ethnic insecurities.
What was communist about it?
I’m a pretty big fan of DFW’s essays, so for me it was. But if you’re just looking to devote some of your valuable time to the pursuit of great literature, I’d say probably not. Read something else equally challenging but ultimately more rewarding, e.g. something by Dostoevsky, who’s not coincidentally an author DFW much admired.
If you do decide to give Infinite Jest a go, I suggest the Kindle version. As you likely know, much of Infinite Jest’s best stuff is in the book’s copious end notes. Trying to go back and forth between main text and notes in a hard copy is infuriating, and makes it very hard to keep making progress through the book. The Kindle allows one to link back and forth relatively conveniently.
You should expect to see highly-paid reporters who are also union reps be positioned so they can be fired. The New York Times wants to destroy its union because it’s too expensive to cater to its demands.
The NYT is hiring a bunch of young female dummies to replace smart old white guys for a very particular reason.
What they’re after is the Huffpo pay model, where female reporters will work for almost nothing if they’re given the opportunity to bitch about their pet peeves.
In the Soviet Union failure to report others for counter-revolutionary ideas made one complicit in their crimes against the state. Perhaps wealthy white girls have no other protection than to throw others under the bus. It won’t work. They’ll come for her soon, too.
“The parents of adventurous young meritocrats paid $5,490 (plus airfare) for two weeks studying “Public Health and Development in the Andes.”
The funniest part!
Yes, as an avid reader I must rely on the massive inventory of stuff written primarily by old, dead white guys. You can barely find a published or reviewed book by even a person with a relatively normal worldview, much less a hetero white male.
What does it take to be orthodox these days? Diamond said New Guinea tribesmen were the smartest people around. Maybe he should have given the title to US blacks.
People think of evolution as something that requires millions of years when in fact selection for traits can take place in a much shorter span of time. Soviet scientists were able to produce a line of genetically tame foxes that exhibit hereditary behaviors we associate with domestic dogs (playful, friendly, attuned to human gestures), in only 4 generations.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160912-a-soviet-scientist-created-the-only-tame-foxes-in-the-world
Similarly, Jews in antiquity were not remarked upon for their intellectual prowess (the Greeks were the heavy hitters of the ancient world). It appears that the IQ shift that we see in Ashkenazi Jews arose in only a few centuries under the selection pressures of the ghettos of Europe.
Here’s a guy who must have gotten lucky leading field trips to Africa with teenage girls. A couple of them complained, but he still has his job. He’s not white, though.
Prof denies wrongdoing in suit, files counter-claim against OU
https://www.athensnews.com/news/campus/prof-denies-wrongdoing-in-suit-files-counter-claim-against-ou/article_7cdf79c6-4e5c-11e9-a2ec-ffd87a0cb241.html
QUOTE:
“The alleged conduct was so insubstantial that even if the allegations were deemed true, the remedial action necessary would have been counseling, education and similar corrective measure,” the suit alleges. “A proper investigation and oversight would have never resulted in an effort to terminate or de-tenure any professor under these facts.”
…
Tess Herman, the graduate student mentioned above, has alleged that Kalyango tried to enter into a romantic relationship with her while he was her work supervisor in the YALI (Young African Leaders Initiative), texting her frequently, complimenting her physical appearance and offering “frequent invitations to late-night dinners, ostensibly so (Herman) could get a ‘break’ from work,” according to the suit filed against Kalyango.
According to Herman’s allegations in the university’s ECRC report, Kalyango’s behavior toward the student became “cold” after she rejected an alleged offer to stay with him in a room at a “resort” hotel in Rwanda after the conclusion of the 2017 summer YALI trip. Specifically, she reported that after that incident, Kalyango severely criticized her for her work recording YALI program participants’ evaluations, and for her tabulation of receipts from the program.
END QUOTE
This is hilarious. The professor claims that inviting the student ( a student for whom he was a supervisor! ) to spend the night with him in his hotel is “so insubstantial that even if the allegations were deemed true, the remedial action necessary would have been counseling, education and similar corrective measure”.
And now he claims he was discriminated against! The normal response by a university to such an accusation would be automatic firing. Yet, somehow, he still has his job.
I’ve heard that there are some schools where sex with students is a perquisite for the teachers. Perhaps the professor thought that OU was one of those schools.
Also:
Ohio University professor found by Title IX office to have sexually harassed two women shouldn’t lose tenure, Faculty Senate says
https://www.athensnews.com/news/campus/ohio-university-professor-found-by-title-ix-office-to-have-sexually-harassed-two-women-shouldn/article_90924985-cbf6-5ddf-b0f5-198f851ca19d.html
QUOTE:
Another woman who testified, Lindsay Boyle, filed her case in 2018 in relation to events that allegedly transpired in 2011 and 2012 on school-sponsored trips abroad when she was a student.
Boyle, who admitted to lying in 2012 about the validity of sexual misconduct allegations against Kalyango because she had several important career opportunities that wouldn’t have happened without her work under programs directed by the professor, came forward after being contacted by a journalism faculty member, according to the report. The Title IX office ultimately substantiated her allegations against Kalyango.
But the committee didn’t find her testimony convincing, saying: “it appears that (Boyle’s) testimony was sought to build a case against Dr. Kalyango outside the normal procedures” of a Title IX investigation, according to the document.
Wow. That Good Little Girl has learned her lessons well. Just as Lt. Cable sang in “South Pacific:”
You’ve got to be carefully taught… to ingest the whole ruling-class conventional wisdom.
Yeah, Guns, Germs and Steel was always kinda dumb.
Worse yet, it gave midwits and clever sillies something to quote from even as they didn’t really understand what they were actually agreeing with. So many discussions / arguments even on private email lists just imploded as soon as good old Bob or very sincere Susan started up with “Jared Diamond says…” in a mostly random way.
Flat out wrong ideas encrusted in a hard shell of “acceptableness” are a real bane sometimes.
One hoped that one day it would be replaced by something better. Instead, as is the spirit of the age, it is getting replaced by stuff that is even dumber.
Who among us ever imagined that Idiocracy was a kind of prophecy?
I read Guns Germs and Steel. It was full of historical inaccuracies and wrong information. One of the worst parts; author’s take on the decline of the Shoshone Indians now in Wyoming. He went on and on about the environment.
But not one word about the real reason the Shoshone declined. For about 150 years the Sioux tribe had pushed them west as the Sioux grew in population and pushed the Shoshone from the east. Another tribe I forget the name advanced south in the Shoshone from what’s now Canada. So they were stuck in smaller and smaller territories. Their population was too small to fight the much more populous Sioux.
That’s the historical inaccuracy I remember best.
Those trips are the only way Whites whose parents can’t afford a 20 million pledge * can get into a prestige school any more. $5,000 plus airfare 5 days 6 nights to putz about pretending to help Africans build huts or Wells. These are kids who’ve never even washed the car, moved a load from the washing machine to the dryer or shoveled snow. The help does all that.
The schools are getting wary of the pledges. A pledge doesn’t necessarily mean the parents can or will come through. Specially if Dad or Grandpa ends up in federal prison for financial fraud ponzi scheme money laundering insider trading etc.
In the 90s, a local paper in a smaller city organized tours. For example, the theater critic hosted a weekend trip to Broadway. Part of the trip included dinner discussions with the critic about the plays at fancy restaurants. There were other similar trips as well.
This has been part of the newspaper business model since before the Internet media apocalypse.
I have no doubt that the Chinese (and the Russians) have been stealing secrets in numerous ways but the Supermicro story seems to consist of a lot of hand waving and smoke. If this infiltration was ongoing for years as the story alleges, at some point either the Federal government or some computer industry security specialist would have made it public and action would have been taken to take the hacked machines out of circulation. Also, since supposedly the hack consisted of extra chips that were added onto the motherboard, it should be possible to provide physical evidence of the hack but none was provided.
Obviously Supermicro is seeking to minimize this but here is their response, which I think had a lot of validity in pointing out the hack job by reporters. Keep in mind that Supermicro is (an American owned) business and that dubious stories like this can destroy your entire business.
https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rCS24lsHxSes/v0
Sorry, isn’t this Bloomberg stuff about 2years old? Did they disinter their old article?
At the time, the consensus was that what Bloomberg was saying was not physically possible. It didn’t help that they gave no details.
Why is it appearing now?
Note that there certainly is a risk of getting compromised hardware on your motherboard, but they won’t SPY (how would they even get the data out, let alone access it out or know what is interesting). They might GRILL your stuff at inopportune moments.
See also:
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/1/249454-the-die-is-cast/
that website currently crashes though.
More witches are confessing than ever. This shows their immense power. Throw her into the moat to see whether she floats.
I’m sure that this was a voluntary arrangement. The Times would have offered him not only a free trip but extra pay. He might have even thought that the opportunity to interact with bright young people would be fun.
He was clearly out of touch with today’s toxic cancel culture and probably thought that his status as an eminent senior journalist allowed him to say curmudgeonly slightly un-PC things that might at least get the young folks thinking out of their smug comfortable groove. How wrong he was. He should have just mouthed a bunch of Leftist pieties to them and left it at that. “These shamans perform an alternative form of medicine that is culturally appropriate. We are in no position to judge whether herbs and incantations are inferior to antibiotics and surgery because the white man brought disease, blah, blah, blah. ” Etc. These kids clearly did not deserve (nor did they want) any better.
1. People are not either vipers or not-vipers. It’s not binary. If young people with viper tendencies have less trouble getting a decent job, not quite as many will become full-on vipers.
2. The damage done by vipers can be reduced some with serious policing.
There’s no way to solve the problem of “these people”, but we could make it a little less bad. Importing low-skill labor and de-policing make the problem worse.
Ryan Faulk went through the very long list of factual errors in Guns, Germs and Steel. It is a long video, because Diamond got so many key claims wrong.
One interesting aspect of his thesis is something that turns up again and again with certain people is the claim the Western Civilization was an accident. Dumb luck. Serendipity. It has nothing to do with the people of Europe. Nope. Could have happened anywhere.
This turns up in Hazony’s writing and Ben Shapiro’s last book. Diamond, of course, basis his thesis on this claim. It is a popular argument in certain circles.
Only if the Good Guys win, my friend.
It’s the fictional equivalent of Piketty Capital. One of the most hilarious things I ever read was the leaked kindle reader statistics on Piketty Capital where something like out of 100 buyers 2 people got past page 20.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10951407/Has-anyone-finished-Thomas-Pikettys-Capital-in-the-21st-Century.html
Come to think of it, the parents should beware of the kids snitching on them too. Then the kids could turn to GoFundMe for their college fees, as we saw happen last month.
‘Nights in White Satin’ – one of the most prominent songs featuring the Mellotron – a weird hybrid beast of an electronic organ/synthesiser which, back in the pre transistor days used ‘endless spools’ of sets of pre recorded magnetic tape, operated by the keyboard to produce exotic sound effects. Perhaps most famously and evocatively used in the opening bar of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ by the Beatles.
Manufactured by Streetly Electronics of Birmingham, England, the home town of the Moody Blues.
Sadly displaced and superseded by electronic pure tone generators.
And the NYT uses the “feelings” of a then 17-year girl dictate the paper’s HR policy…
Hmmm. Using Charles Murray’s bold new defence does not seem to have worked out too work too well for McNeil. Still, it could have been worse
I’m beginning to think the float opinion was just P. R. to make the inevitable drowning bit look more respectable. They just wanted all the bitter shrews in the village to sink and die.
Fox pioneered it first.
They didn’t. They just pitched to an underserved market by reporting the news without the frames PBS and the commercial networks habitually used.
Apparently, another Timesman has touched a third rail and been burned, this time regarding sex and not race. In his confession (totalitarians ALWAYS exact confessions from their victims – they need to make you see the error of your ways BEFORE they execute you – see Kafka’s In the Penal Colony) Andy Mills admits his crime ” Eight years ago during a team meeting, I gave a colleague a back rub.” Yes, ladies and gentleman of the jury – the man gave someone ( someone who identified as female I believe) a backrub. Can you think of a more heinous crime (other than uttering the N-word)?
What is most interesting to me is the way that his colleagues (and perhaps Mills himself) learned of his unpersoning.
Or “resigned”.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/andy-mills-resigns-new-york-times/?itid=lk_inline_manual_39
This reminded me of an anecdote I heard many years ago when I took a course on Russian history taught by a White Russian emigre whose family had fled after the Revolution. He was a very entertaining lecturer with intimate knowledge of Russian history and the course was always oversubscribed. During his lecture on Stalin’s purges, he recounted that if you were a Kremlin official who was about to be arrested, one of the things that would happen is that your phone line would go dead so that you could not warn your friends or appeal to them for protection (the only people in Russia who would have had phones in their apartments in those days were other Party officials). One day at the height of the purges, a Party official picked up the phone in his Moscow apartment and the line was dead. He knew what this meant – he was as good as dead, but first they would torture him and get him to confess to imaginary crimes and implicate his friends. Well that was not going to happen to him – he pulled out his pistol and shot himself in the head. Later that day, the telephone repairman found his body.
Agree.
I’ve only been interested–in any serious way–in intelligent girls. I’m out of touch with a couple, but i don’t think any of my previous serious girlfriends is a woke nut. But then all of them were intelligent STEMy girls. (One of the out-of-touch ones went back to law school years after her PhD, but i doubt very much she’s a “woke mom” either.)
I think there’s this natural dilemma with women’s education:
— Women are naturally much more interested in the verbal/people side of human affairs–the humanities, social science.
— But this is precisely the side that is more subjective and subject to corruption and destruction by women’s emotionalism and conformity.
What women are really, really interested in doing … is also what they are most capable of wrecking.
Suggestion:
If you’ve got an intelligent daughter who really wants to do something academic, encourage her to do something STEMy where there’s actually a hard body of knowledge she has to grapple with that’s impervious to her feelings. If she gets bored with pursuing it, transitions to the peopley side (from say engineering to customer relations) or better yet decides it’s time to be a wife and mother–great. At least, her exposure to all the minoritarian lying is limited and she may escape infection.
We need a Pavlik Morozov for our times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov
You have this wrong. These people bring their own wreckage and viperousness with them like the cloud of dirt that surrounds Pig Pen in Peanuts cartoons.
What’s interesting about you is that you practice law but you apparently never had any clients or co-workers from that section of town (or, maybe, you did and are just unteachable). You’re quite incapable of assessing them except on the level of funhouse caricatures.
The slum population falls into several categories: (1) wage earners who are not distinct in kind from other wage earners but elect to live in the slums due to trade-offs (cost, location of relatives and friends); (2) wage-earners who tend to have latent hostility that emerges in situations where they are not under someone else’s authority – they’re rude and other people move away from them because they generate distasteful drama, but they’re not criminal; (3) a mix of predatory people and highly impetuous people given to emotional spikes – predominantly under 35 and predominantly male. Where it gets fuzzy is that people in category 3 are often close relatives of people in category 1 or category 2, sometimes living in the same house. You can’t do much about the trouble caused by people in category 2 other than to write labor law and landlord-tenant law which allows them to be ejected from the premises with dispatch if they get out of line. In re category 3, you need vigorous imposition of order by paid professionals – deterrence, punishment, and incapacitation.
In some precincts of the well-to-do, they’ve been dressing like slobs for decades in order to blend in with the peasant class. Expensive, well-tailored, fashionable attire is for the red carpet–for photographs, and media exposure. For everyday, the slovenly, unshaven look suffices.
Obviously, all of the so-called virtue-signaling is, in actuality, just vanity–vanity-signaling. It’s an acknowledgement of an affinity to a like-minded social identity group, i.e. belief as a marker of social status.
I’m sure you are right. These morons don’t deserve any better. Long ago and far away, when I was a student, less than 5% of the 18 to 25 age cohort went to study degree courses. Now it’s about 50%. Standards have been drastically lowered to enable most present day students to get a degree.
With lots more morons in universities, indoctrination becomes that much easier. Back in the day, Harold MacMillan, the old British Prime Minister, quoted his old Classics lecturer on the value of true education.
If you realise that the vast majority of present day students are morons, whose mind is full of rot, you don’t interact with them, you avoid them. If you don’t, you end up like McNeil.
That bit of drivel included her (flavor-of-the-day #MeToo) claim as a survivor of sexual assault which, unsurprisingly, no media outfit seems to have followed up with questions regarding a police report and a named perpetrator…
The Times is pretty nepotistic itself, so maybe that comment did not go down too well there. At any rate, I’ll admit I did a double-take when I saw the story was not just about The Times but in The Times. The reader comments also were worthwhile.
I’m thankful I could spend many happy years in the newsroom back when there was general apathy or at least polite reticence among the staff regarding hot-button social issues. Yes there was white guilt over the inability to make black hires, and there was always some big diversity message coming down from corporate — get blacks into nice stories, not just the crime roundup! But there was no internal thought police, and it was a job, not a crusade
The ideas in TBC were controversial, and then taboo. Now the very existence of the book is taboo. You are so old that you have this taboo knowledge, and little can be done sans re-education. For Generation Z and later, they are not even supposed to know that there was a very thoroughly researched and well-argued demolition of diversity. They truly do not know that ‘Continental Alignment did it’ was heresy (because whites are not uniquely evil in GG&S) used against a greater heresy, that is, the results of industrialism and exploration were going to end up in a world much like the way it is now because there are population differences in ability and behavioral tendencies between populations.
How could they know? No older progressives are going to sit younger progressives down and explain the best arguments on the hbd side, and how they have tried to jujutsu-up responses that do not fit into a coherent framework.
Gen alpha, or whatever the bunch after gen z will be called, will not even know that there was a widespread belief, well-supported by facts, that populations differed in innate tendency. They may know that current-day heretics believe it, but they may not know that it was both a fact and a normative belief.
I wonder how they will ever get rid of every digital copy.
She sounds like the type who’d take notes on how not to resemble Tracy Flick.
I’m not the Level-III viperology expert as some of you apparently are, but the kid is definitely a piece of work.
Kennedy’s N-Word book is right up there on Amazon if you google instead for Randall Kennedy and hit a link for the book on his Wiki roundup. So are they playing games at Amazon or is it just some arcane aspect of the search process?
(I wonder if people along the way urged Kennedy to just call it The N-Word and save everybody a lot of trouble)
I have certainly had interactions with folks from “that” section of town in connection with various real estate matters and don’t disagree with y0ur characterization (but OTOH, I don’t think that contradicts what I said either).
I can honestly say that I have never had any clients of my own from “that” section simply because they could not afford me or any other lawyer at hourly rates and I don’t do PI or other contingency fee type work. If I had to sum up what I do in four words it would be “servant of the rich”. Keep in mind that the average net worth of a ghetto dweller is zero.
A similar model is to replace experienced journalists with young interns, often still at college. I occasionally take a peek at American Conservative, to see what they’re up to ( Not Much ! ). Apart from the odious Rod Dreher, they’re now using interns. Surprise, Surprise !
One of these interns looks like he should be still at school. Pathetic.
Many classic novels have something that could get them cancelled. And poetry. Practically the entire canon of Western Lit,
Let’s face it, they don’t actually the books they cancel, anyhow.
Right, you’d expect a heavy phalanx of chaperones to be along for the ride. Maybe once you’re well up in your 6os (with no me-too rapsheet) you’re considered “safe” around teen-agers. I know my own mind is filthier than ever, but I’d also wisely decide, “Eh, not worth all the heavy lifting.”
Thank you for the inside baseball office politics on some shit government propaganda organ nobody reads anymore, if they’re actually plugged in.
Please consider more hard-hitting features about even more powerful and relevant media institutions like Public Restroom Operator.
https://www.promonthly.com/ezine
I hate to break the news to you, but STEM academics nowadays, especially in elite institutions, are almost as Leftist as any other academics. It’s just that they (usually) keep their Leftism compartmentalized and don’t bring it to bear in their work directly. Steve often says that people are most conservative concerning what they know. But if you tap a physics professor and ask him for his opinion concerning BLM or whatever, he is just as likely as any American academic to spout the usual cant.
As far as transitioning to the “peopley side”, almost all STEM types need to do this in order to advance their careers. If you don’t want to spend your life in a cubicle as a low level drone, you have to become a manager of others or learn to interact with clients, etc. If you are an academic, you need to make nice to grant making organizations and donors and interact with students. Etc. The people who never leave their cubicles (or lab benches or whatever) will never get anywhere, at least not financially. Sometimes these people are quite brilliant but people much less brilliant than they are will do far better because they are not anti-social hermits.
AOC says she is of Jewish descent.
For a lot of people, the reaction to O.J.’s aquittal was an eye-opener. Break out the champagne!
I didn’t know what I was getting into with the endnotes. I originally got the audible version and it was a true pain. I quickly got a physical copy and a audible credit refund.
Were it comparable to McCarthyism, it would be Bernie Sanders holding Senate subcommittee hearings regarding the current outrage du jour. Clearly, that’s not what’s going on.
One thing why blacks are losing again is that;
1 despite gazillions if affirmative action jobs were created, there aren’t enough to employ all the blacks in the country.
2 automation bridge and Highway toll collectors used to be a black job. Now it’s all monthly passes paid for online. There’s a big trash can by the bus benches in my city. There’s a grabber thing that grabs the can empties it and puts it back. All the truck needs is one driver. Plenty of other jobs ended by automation. Plus online applications for everything from unemployment to food stamps to dr license renewals and title transfers.
3 immigration of other affirmative action minorities. I love, love it. Instead of snarling vicious hateful black sows the Hispanic women are sweet and nice and efficient . Asian women aren’t sweet and nice but efficient. Whereas the snarling black sows were incompetent and often went out of their way to screw up any and all interaction with a White woman.
Why hire a snarling incompetent black sow when a competent civilized Hispanic asian Philippina any other kind of non White woman can do a better job?
The major affirmative action for blacks job seems to be black Soros district DA women. Not everybody, can get through law school and pass the bar even with affirmative action coddling. Post office and other traditional black jobs are going to other affirmative action groups.
Sophie’s interlocutor missed an opportunity to broaden her outlook. Interview, nod, take notes. Say at the end, What a shameless little narc you are. What are you trying to do, get him fired?
Agree that it was very odd that it was allowed in the first place, for McNeil’s protection as much as theirs. I wonder if some borderline personality participant won’t MeToo him in the future.
Meanwhile, in the world-wide merit hierarchy, White people are as Relevant as they are Awesome:
Hannah Jones wrote a thesis about how sub saharan Africans developed oceanic seafaring and trade routes with native Americans and were peacefully trading goods in a globalized economic system until the Europeans colonized them and suppressed record of it.
If she actually did that, the only sources she could have consulted would have been Leonard Jeffries-type fantasy literature. (Not literature by Jeffries himself, as he never published squat).
Given that she eschewed the state schools in Iowa (one of which was local), and given that her family had to have been fairly impecunious (her father was a bus driver, less skilled than her maternal-side grandfather), and given the trade she went into, you have to figure she’s still carrying student debt or Notre Dame gave her a handsome discount to attend. A local pol where I grew up had a saying, ‘for every patronage job you give away, you create nine enemies and one ingrate’. She’s both.
I have certainly had interactions with folks from “that” section of town in connection with various real estate matters and don’t disagree with y0ur characterization (but OTOH, I don’t think that contradicts what I said either).
You practice law and your reading comprehension is under par as well.
If you just don’t educate them, then there’s no dilemma. Not only that, but the quality of nursing and school-teaching would go way back up. Cue some midwit to say “But you have to be educated to be a nurse/teacher.”
Except he believes Jared Diamond. He’s not your ally just because Moloch happens to be eating him.
Sure, it did. The whole book was about it, indirectly. Directly, he said that people on New Guinea knew which mushrooms were poisonous; therefore, Jensen was a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews, QED.
Agree two of the most PC men I know are a nuclear engineer and a retired Microsoft VP. Everybody is brainwashed K-12 and forced to take the anti White anti heterosexual propaganda general education requirements in college. Some of my tenants are college students. Most believe the Republicans fought in the confederate side in the civil war and other astonishing lies.
When category 1 moves into a new neighborhood sooner or later category 2 and category 3 will be cruising by. Then the new neighbors get to interact with distasteful drama and emotionally violent spikes right in their front yard, sometimes accompanied by stray bullets gently wafting through their window. Younger versions of category 2 and 3 can be relied upon for endless vandalism and theft; as they age this can escalate to burglary, then robbery. Eventually someone gets wounded or killed; this is caused by White Privilege, easy access to guns, and is also a lingering effect of slavery. As soon as possible, Tthe nearest public monument must be toppled and a store or two looted. Unless the killing was category 3 on category 2 or 1, in that case the nearest white person must be blamed.
You can’t do much about the trouble caused by people in category 2 other than to write labor law and landlord-tenant law which allows them to be ejected from the premises with dispatch if they get out of line.
As I’m sure you are aware, any complaint about any behavior by any Holy Black Body is racism, a sin that can never be forgiven or expiated, but that can be punished for the rest of someone’s life….however long or short that may be.
Blacks tend to be involved with either government prosecutors and public defenders or free legal aid civil rights foundation attorneys and personal injury attorneys on contingency.
Evictions and landlord tenant buyer seller disputes are landlords paid attorneys in private practice vs legal aid foundations for the black tenant
How can anyone have a back rub sitting or standing in a work place meeting? Only way a back rub is possible is if the rubbee is lying flat on his her or it’s stomach. Did he she or It lie down on the conference table for the back rub? It probably was a shoulder massage, a favorite trick of work place lechers.
And why didn’t he she or it tell the lecher to take his hands off? Big bad strong women feminazis who don’t have the brains or independence to tell lechers to f’’off. I despise them. When I started working many decades ago men were always pawing. I just told them to leave me alone in a very aggressive rude insulting way. It was astonishing and unheard of at the time. But I did it.
So after 40 years of incessant feminazi propaganda workplace pawing is still going on? And some idiot lets a man give her a back rub in a meeting? Fire them both.
So, this surely nice looking girl is, basically ….. a snitch.
Good to put things into perspective.
Not as subpar as your social skills.
Upon his return, he should’ve written a book entitled Whither Peru.
Harry, I believe that is a profound and original point. It was always waiting to be discovered in the Warhol quote itself: just add the prefix IN to “famous” and it materializes. Indeed, it would seem to follow logically that if a radically egalitarian democracy required that everyone should be equally famous, then its opposite in terms of notoriety should also be required. Yet I’ve never heard anyone make that connection, in all the times I’ve heard Warhol quoted and misquoted.
Perhaps the benighted optimism of Americans is to blame? But with such optimism fading, your new formulation is growing more vivid.
In the future, scholars may not posit that Europeans conquered anything. Neither environment nor genetics nor ideas nor technology were superior. Only evil allowed them to kill and enslave for a while, but praise God the undefeated people of color are now again in charge as they have always been so destined.
Be sure to emphasize the “of knowledge” part, lest she hook up with ice hockey players or sign up for the wrestling team.
Wasn’t that Sam Francis? He wasn’t a Republican, but worked for one.
I believe supermicro is entirely run by overseas chinese “americans”
Considering how many think tanks and small publications are always offering cruises and overseas seminars, this suggests poor management on the part of the NYT. A staff member at the Rockford Institute once recounted that donors would always complain about their frequent trips to Europe. He explained that those excursions brought in more money than anything else they did.
Come for the musings on golf course architecture, stay for the JackD/Art Deco sawed-off glass bottle in an alleyway brawls.
As a fan of both commenters, is it wrong to say part of me sort of looks forward to these brainy but viciously personal intellectual switchblade fights, especially as they seem about as inevitable as bumper organ harvests on a rainy Halloween night? Like when England and Germany go to war you know the amount of total knowledge in the world cannot help but advance, even if the human fallout is going to be horrendous.
Meet the snitch.
Years ago a colleague who had connections to the evangelical missionary community told me that they were having to fend off parents who wanted to send their kids to third world countries to help dig wells, build schoolrooms, distribute food and medicine etc. so they could put it in their college admissions essays. The church wrote a form letter they would send in response to parents’ inquiries asking to please stop. The thousands of dollars spent on each kid, if converted to cash donations would allow the missionaries to procure any amount of materials, food, medicine and local labor to do all that good work. The school kids would be just a drain, getting in the way and having to be taken care of.
To my colleague’s knowledge, the church missionary group never got a dime in donations in response to the letters.
the only acceptable explanation for the underperformance of non-whites is blaming whites. The lower achievements of Africans and Amerindians can only be due to systemic racism and whites behaving badly. It was evil for whites to migrate into the Americas, Africa and Asia. While it is good for non-whites to migrate into Europe and displace the aboriginals because diversity is great for Europe and North America but horrendous for other places because of the innate racism of whites.
You really need to read this (then you can weep):
Sample quote (tip of the hat to JD) —
Math departments have two kinds of professors: The woke and the Asian. Anyone else is left in adjunct professorship or squeezed out completely. This has gutted research in mathematics. Nothing useful or creative comes from the Chinese, who are all in a network trying to steal from each other and everyone else, and the rest of it is social justice nonsense. I am shocked at how quickly the previously prestigious mathematical societies such as the American Mathematical Society became infiltrated to the point that much of the math world was claiming two and two don’t always make four. Just search the term “social justice mathematics” to learn the scale of corruption in math. This nonsense is filtering down into K-12 schools, and filtering up into professional workplaces. Students who believe in “ethnomathematics” become workplace managers who are unable even to conceive of long-term investments in research and development. With Chinese and Indians at the highest levels of corporate leadership, progress stagnates; decision-makers are either desperate to virtue-signal or too busy trying to copy or steal competitors’ work.
https://www.amren.com/commentary/2021/02/squeezed-to-zero-how-the-woke-and-the-chinese-are-destroying-academic-mathematics/
I didn’t have time to comment earlier. I’ll give this McNeil guy more credit than I gave him when all I knew is the part about him mentioning the dreaded word.*. I got a lot out of this bigger excerpt which, perhaps inadvertently, puts him in a better light. He tried to speak just a bit of truth to the know-it-all Phillips Academy student, and she couldn’t handle it. Yes, she wanted to learn from this seasoned reporter from the NY Times family, no less, but, I mean, only if it’s learning the RIGHT things.
Jack Nicholson explains:
* No, I’m not going to click on the NY Times except by accident.
Yep, excuse making for the fact that Western Civilization was built on the higher IQ Yamnaya/Conan the Barbarians who, of course, had flocks of docile animal protein along with horses and carts, and the ruthlessness to supplant all the indigenous hunter gatherer and farmer populations in the Euopean continent, dispensing with the males, and taking all the women.
But yeah, Africans could never tame the Zebra, so they didn’t get around to doing geometry, composing epic poetry, and laying the foundations of rationalist philosophy as the source of Western superiority.
Jared IS a joke.
It’s just 44s to 47s.
(Adam, I tried, I really did. I’ll have to dig into this and copy tags from guys that can do it. Thanks for your best efforts.)
Yeah, I agree. Even one or two generations of breeding can cause a lot of “evolution”. My point though was that Diamond’s elaborate rationalizations on behalf of the New World and Africa against Eurasia were incoherent: 99.9% of the timeline during which key domestications could have happened is irrelevant because of “co-evolution”, while the next 0.07% of the timeline is suddenly and solely relevant, but then the last 0.03% of the timeline is suddenly again irrelevant, because of a complicated set of motte-and-bailey reasons. And he’s not talking about canines or humans, the most famously adaptable of mammals, but about large ungulates: cattle and horses, the most famously stable and steady of creatures, for whom a year or a thousand years is almost as nothing.
The National Review has been doing something similar for years: Cruises (so they’re mostly for middle-aged to old people). You pay National Review a boat-load of money for the opportunity to take a carribean cruise and have breakfast with Rich Lowry or Jay Nordlinger.
Do tell.
Really. I wonder who these two were.
Interesting. Something tells me the oil industry wasn’t the only thing discussed.
Ben Smith is letting his slip show, as we used to say.
I would just love for Sophie to spend a year at a 50% black high school, as one of the 25% white students.
But – at the end of the day, McNeil should have defended himself.
Totally agree with The Last Real Calvinist. I don’t think I could have finished it if I was reading a hard copy. That said, I found it to be a really rewarding read. It was both way funnier and way sadder than I was expecting. And for a book a quarter of a century old it sure made some pretty prescient predictions.
Natural selection is quite different from breeding livestock. There are thousands of variables involved. Most mutations probably die out in one generation.
“I am sure the Aurachs and wild boars that the Eurasias started out with were no picnic to handle. But they stuck with it and bred them into domesticated animals”
Then there’s
*wolves>doggo (followed economical-immigrant Eurasians right across Beringia)
* nasty bitey kicky little pony things that run away more than fast (unless you spear one), which they seem to have found and promptly annihilated in the Americas>Mr Ed
*and “how do you even keep a wild goat confined?”>woolly sheep/milky goats. There are wild sheep in N America.
It’s an Olde Worlde flex. Everybody else just ate what they could see, until it was gone.
I wish mammoths had survived into the early N European neolithic. I wonder what cuddly fuzzy farm equipment we would have by now? A Manitou made of meat.
Is the top photo of a wild aurochs? I don’t believe that wild aurochs were that big, but the story of the domestication of the aurochs is an amazing one. The aurochs was a fearsome beast. Whoever thought of domesticating it was a prehistoric Newton.
“Come for the musings on golf course architecture, stay for the JackD/Art Deco sawed-off glass bottle in an alleyway brawls.
“As a fan of both commenters, is it wrong to say part of me sort of looks forward to these brainy but viciously personal intellectual switchblade fights, especially as they seem about as inevitable as bumper organ harvests on a rainy Halloween night? Like when England and Germany go to war you know the amount of total knowledge in the world cannot help but advance, even if the human fallout is going to be horrendous.”
You gave me my first belly laugh of the day. My only criticism: Leave the phrase “sort of” at home. It never helps, except when used facetiously or ironically.
When I saw Idiocracy a decade or so ago, though I could recognize it was very funny, I couldn’t laugh, becasue I also saw it was all too true. Parody? Yes, but only barely.
And I’ll bet the demeanor of the ox of the midget and the cow of the giantess are basically identical, and hardly different from their aurochs ancestor.
And I’ll bet the demeanor of the ox of the midget and the cow of the giantess are basically identical, and hardly different from their aurochs ancestor.
Well, sure, provided they were raised the same way in the same pasture, how could it possibly be otherwise?
In the future, everyone will be infamous for 15 minutes.
It’s old Field Marshall. Vrom Zummerzet. Charolais, 3200lbs. and then 6-y-o, with his 5’8″ deceased owner. Passed on to new carers and a quiet retirement. You can see the new owner’s tiny daughter feeding the big lad out of a bucket, in a field. They get on rather well together.
Ur-ochs were apparently a lot meaner in temperament but about that size, if Polish back-breeding experiments are valid.
Did the French Alps helicopter pilot have a laser distance measuring tool to help him get the tips of his blades within centimeters of the icy cliff without crashing?
I’ve seen the wreckage at 10,000 feet of a helicopter that tried to airlift out a Boy Scout with appendicitis.
Turnabout is fair play (aka payback’s a bitch).
Y U NO mention Project Rubicon and/or and Crypto AG – the project (and associated CIA front company) wherein the US spent 30 years distributing compromised security hardware to friendlies.
Take your Star Spangled glasses off – they make you look really fucking stupid.
So the woke mob don’t like Jared Diamond anymore. That was news to me.
So if it isn’t biology and it isn’t geography what is that accounts for the five century global dominance of western civilization?
Wizards maybe?
Racism.
White Privilege.
I have a suspicion that the resident males were not so much “displaced” entirely as “demoted”.
And so passed out of the recoverable evidence.
It’s a neat solution to the y-haplo I2 “bounceback” in the (various) local bronze ages. Marriage to local Farmer ladies of quality, albeit against their will or not, will make their younger male kin in-laws eventually, no matter how rigid the initial ‘apartheid’. Helps convince the local yokels that you have title over the territory despite being a damn’ furriner.
The DNA of that LN/EBA unconformity is mostly, in fact almost entirely derived from fairly high status cist/barrow individual inhumations.
In short, the graves of the local “gentry”.
Collective tombs of preceding hybrid EEF/WHG>EHG moieties necessarily had to go out of business. No longer had the clout to organise any Stonehenge- or Newgrange-type extravaganzas, in fact the remnant men would be too busy toiling for The Man. Then cremation became fashionable (the Farmers already practiced it en masse, in many instances). Ancient DNA recovery becomes more than severely compromised.
At present the palaeogenetics crew are pretty much in the position of arguing that (e.g.) Norman-French and Burgundian warriors had utterly extirpated the English race, on the basis of samples recovered from their excavations at Westminster Abbey and other ecclesiastical sites.
In prehistory, 99.99% (if even that) of the dead leave no trace whatsoever. Just the posh people, and the occasional drunk who falls into a garderobe, or a bog. Or shot up the arse on an Alpine glacier.
Or we’d be knee-deep in old bones by now.
State of Oregon education department is imposing a new “correct answer are racist” on K-12 math curriculum. Oregon is one of the Whitest states in the nation.
From McNeil’s Wikipedia page:
2002 – First Place, International Reporting (Over 150,000), National Association of Black Journalists[19]
https://web.archive.org/web/20020803031334/http://www.nabj.org/html/awards.html
Wonder if they’ll revoke it or are they defunct?
Until recently shabby neighborhoods almost didn’t exist in places like Bavaria, even in very poor areas. They do exist now, for the same reason the U.S. has its ghettos and Brazil has its favélas. But for some reason we’re supposed to pretend to be mystified that Africans live like Africans.
Jack–no argument with either of your points.
— Academics are overwhelmingly on the left–even in STEM. (That was true even when i was doing physics back in the 70-80s.) That’s not really remarkable. At root, academics depend on taxes–the establishment funneling cash their way.
— People skills are required to do anything meaningful even in STEM. There really are very few things that can be done by oneself in your garage. Even if you’re all brilliant vision, you have to have the skill to get people–management/money guys/customers/employees–on board with your vision.
My point was simply that STEM is more objective. Even today i assume an organic chemistry class isn’t all about BLM and structural racism … regardless of how PC the professor is.
So if you send your smart daughter off to college to learn something, if it’s STEMy then at least
a) she’s actually working her brain against real knowledge, getting smarter
and
b) she’s not drinking minoritarian lies through a firehose like she’d get in sociology or anthropology or English … without even mentioning “gender studies”.
And then a few years out of school she can decide she doesn’t want to be in the lab or sit at a desk doing STEM and wants to talk to people and can transition … or getting married, have kids and bake cookies. Your “gender studies” grad will be annoying as hell the rest of her life and has a good chance of never getting married or having kids at all.
The American Indians had the greatest river transportation system in the entire world, Gulf of Mexico almost to Canada Mississippi Missouri with Columbia Ohio and other east west river extensions to not far from the oceans.
They didn’t do much with it. But a few thousand French explorers did a lot even before the American settlers arrived. Galena Illinois lead mines begun by the French shipped lead down to New Orleans and then to Europe. Grand European furniture was shipped to Galena in return. Just one example I can think of
And when the Americans bought the territory it boomed.
I have only glanced at Infinite Jest. But descriptions remind me of Gravity’s RAinbow, or Pynchon’s style, also a slog but which I loved 30 years ago. When I mentioned to a younger guy at a bar that it’s kinda like Gravity’s Rainbow he said he hated that comparison, and said they aren’t at all alike. But he had only glanced at Pynchon, me at Foster Wallace. He was a 30 something jazz cellist, so, whatever.
I also liked Guns Germs and Steel. Not necessarily agreeing with the conclusion. My now several years dead uncle, born in 1934, laughed when I told him the premise. But at least it was interesting. The book doesn’t excuse colonialism in any way, of course. It merely tries to have a theory (albeit politically correct) for why one group was better equipped than the other.
Yeah that doesn’t sound too smart, or too likely: that “inches from the snowy slope” thing.
Ann Coulter. The farm years.
But the STEM daughter will have to take numerous liberal crapology courses as part of the general education requirements to graduate.
You should hear my math major computer science minor nieces who went to Lewis & Clark in Oregon. BLM anti fa members, wished they were lesbians or transgenders to be fashionable campaigned for that curry socialist Kashana Sawant in Seattle. Total Marxist’s Sawant’s Socialist Alternative party members College, any kind of college is poison.
Typical children of Microsoft fathers The White children of the White men who built Microsoft and other tech companies can’t get jobs in their fields because they’re White. But education has so brainwashed them they can’t admit it. So they’re anti fa and socialists
I always assumed that the White victims of affirmative action would turn against liberalism. But they haven’t. They’ve turned against other Whites. It’s a sick society.
They’re no different from my STEM college student and looking for a STEM career White tenants. Insanely liberal and anti White
Is this work of scholarship available online? Sounds like fun reading.
Not that its accuracy matters much. Her 1619 propaganda is being taught in thousands of schools now.
Ben Smith’s tortured logic is completely lacking in credibility. If people at the Times found McNeil impossible to deal with, he either would have been fired 40 years ago, or he had such a powerful rabbi that he could never be fired.
A much more likely scenario is that with the sort of overpriced, spoiled, feminist brats like Sophie Shepherd, collecting the scalps of accomplished, White, heterosexual men is a rite of passage. McNeil is lucky she didn’t accuse him of rape!
I seriously doubt that.
In the current zeitgeist NHJ is absolutely getting paid.
I bet she easily grosses $500k a year in the current environment.
Or when 40+ year old men were lining up days in advance to buy tickets to the new Star Wars/Comic book movie while dressed like their favorite character.
The other point in the old Red Guards’ favor is that at least they were conscious of themselves as an anti-intellectual movement. They proudly wore it on their sleeves. The intersectional “young meritocrats” of today are every bit as anti-intellectual as were the Red Guards, yet they see themselves as an enlightened elite.
Still, I think the Red Guard and Maoism is the best historical parallel to we’re dealing with. It is the establishment making war on the historical nation. All the most vicious and totalitarian-minded malcontents are let-off-the-leash, and the anti-human leveling impulse that is at the back of left-wing thought is given free reign. And it’s probably not a coincidence that both movements came in the wake of economic crisis.
The last one I could see when I searched was the 2018 Buckley Legacy Conservative Cruise. They charged $1,999 for a week-long cruise in the Caribbean during which you could talk to people like Rich Lowry and David French. That might explain why the NR ship hasn’t sailed for two years.
If we keep allowing it to go this way, it’ll only get worse–the only way out of this is to stop playing their game. They’ll never get tire of it.
A witch-like jaw pointy enough to split a log and she looks like she is sucking on a lemon. $6,000 worth of orthodontics and you’re afraid to show your teeth? Or would smiling indicate approval and you don’t approve of ANYTHING? She is auditioning for a future position as commissar of something.
150 Times staffers (disproportionately young and minority) wrote a letter to the Times demanding that McNeil be fired. After rumors that the union had saved his job in 2019, the union issued a release saying that their job is not to protect workers from being appropriately punished if they have broken the rules, it’s just to see to it that the procedures set forth in the contract are followed. “Solidarity forever”.
I never want to hear about McCarthyism again. McCarthy was bush league compared to what is going on right now. Each time I think that America has reached a low point, I am proven wrong – it seems that we can (and will) go MUCH lower.
If you’re White and out of pre-school, and you think that you “have a black friend”, you are delusional.
black “comedian” Dick Gregory named his 1960s autbiography “Ni**er” (the actual word). It’s an interesting read.
I imagine NHJ pulls down at least $10k per speech or panel appearance at colleges, and has a mid to high 6 figure book deal.
But the pilot did it, so I’m guessing that the rescue helicopter industry has thought very, very hard about how to safely pull off high altitude extreme terrain rescues in the 50 years since I saw that helicopter wreckage at the 10k elevation of Mt. San Jacinto.
Presumably American Indians exploited the copper on Isle Royale in Lake Superior until they used most of it up. But then they didn’t go on to do much with metals. Weird.
Are you saying that the witch-hunting that’s going on now is less oppressive than McCarthyism, because it’s not conducted in the senate?
Read the comments from the readers (while you still can – lots of newspapers have gotten rid of theirs because they, like the teens on the trip, don’t want to hear anything that disrupts their smug Leftist bubble worldview). The most like comments overwhelmingly call Smith on his BS and display little or no sympathy for the Wokesters of Andover or the NY Times.
When Hitler invaded, Stalin called back those of his purged general who were still alive. McNeil has said that going to be enjoying traveling around America in an RV and hitting his favorite fishing spots and I don’t think he is coming back. He was already due a decent pension but I can guarantee you that the Times bought his resignation (and his silence) with a nice severance package, probably one that has paid for said RV.
Even Stalin thought that Pavel Morozov was a little shit for snitching on his own father.
Tracy Flick, president, Andover Doxing Club.
Even the union got woke, Jack. I’ve seen that before. It seems to be a rule than any large organization will get woke eventually.
I agree with you on McCarthyism. I don’t know if you’ve read Ann Coulter’s book, but from her writings, Joe McCarthy was on the right track. Either way, he didn’t get to near the level of vindictiveness as these creeps of the new Red Guard*.
That girl is just flat-out pretty. Her pretty face has nothing to do with what goes on behind it.
As the man says in his handle “Abolish_Public_Education”. Eliminate school loan guarantees too. These 2 steps would go a long way.
.
* I’ve made this comparison long ago, and Mr. Derbyshire, who probably knows more about Cult-Rev 1.0 than I do (I’ve read ~ 10 books about it), has too.
Oh yeah , watch some reruns of Sanford and Son…….there’re still funny.
I hate the idea of a cruise (especially a themed one where the cruise itself isn’t even important), but can almost see myself doing that (or his Israel tour) with Dennis Prager because Prager is so personable. He’s willing and able to talk about things that aren’t politics. A few others like Derb and VDH fit that. Can there be a selling point to sharing a hypothetical mess table, for weeks, with Ross Douthat, Kevin Williamson, and Byron York? You get what you can from them in any C-Span appearance.
Obviously, they confused Jared Diamond with Jared Taylor. I do it all the time. But I’m not the “newspaper of record.”
One might argue that this explains (at least partly) European dominance in the civilization game.
AA would seem to be the attempt to impose Third World networking on White society, with predictably disasterous results.
Question: what of the Dissident Right claim that “Hey, we should favor our tribe just like they do!”?
Some comedian back when Ike Turner was being pilloried for his treatment of Tina Turner: “Ike’s new biography is out now: Womens Be Talking Too Much.”
“He had risen through the ranks from copy boy to become a night rewrite man, a theater columnist and a correspondent in Paris.”
In a sane world, he’d be the subject of an admiring biopic. I never paid any attention to him but he sounds like he’s had an interesting life that would have made a great film, perhaps starring James Stewart or John Garfield.
You cannot be serious, AD — she’s now one of the USA’s preeminent intellectuals. She must be raking in cash right and left from speaker’s fees, book royalties, etc., in addition to what is now likely a star’s salary at the NYT.
Airbus is a supposedly Euro company, but the reality is that they are dominated by the French.
Airbus makes some really good airliners.
Yes, they are a bit squirrelly on takeoff and landing, but they are far more comfortable in the air than the equivalent Boeing products.
There was a huge surge in going on ‘mission trips’ amongst evangelicals starting maybe 25 years or so ago. Most people involved were extremely well-intentioned, but it finally started dawning on many of them that they would go to some third-world country, do some basic manual labor (usually badly/inefficiently), and get to feeling kind of self-conscious because they were being observed throughout by unemployed locals who could have done the same work for far, far less money, and for exponentially greater benefit to their families and communities.
To the credit of many churches, a lot of assessment of the whole enterprise was done, with the kind of result you describe above.
‘Saving people’ is much more complicated than it usually appears to the confidentally well-intentioned.
If you realise that the vast majority of present day students are morons, whose mind is full of rot, you don’t interact with them, you avoid them. If you don’t, you end up like McNeil.
Very few people are morons.
when I was a student, less than 5% of the 18 to 25 age cohort went to study degree courses. Now it’s about 50%. Standards have been drastically lowered to enable most present day students to get a degree.
Which is to say they expanded tertiary schooling without sorting institutions into strata and sluicing students to appropriate institutions. They could have limited the number of universities founded after WWii to three (Nottingham, Southampton, and Leicester) so each 2d tier city had one, and then founded occupational institutes for post-secondary vocational instruction, leaving the universities to trade in liberal education and (perhaps) fancy professional schooling.
Come off it dude, she’s obviously attractive. I bet if her picture had been posted because she was active in the pro-Israel community, you’d be singing a very different tune.
She’s probably not even that bad of a person. Just an idealistic teenage twit with monumentally unrealistic ideas about the nature of the world she’d like to make a better place. As if you don’t have people in your own family like that.
But conservatives brownnose rich people. They think they “earn” their money. Even if they inherit it. And oppose taking it from them on the basis of either freedom or reasons.
After a couple days on a ship with David French, I’d want to throw myself overboard. After a couple days on a ship with Kevin Williamson, I’d want to throw him overboard.
This is why Plato required knowledge of geometry (and, implicitly, Greek) for admission to his Academy. So did universities when they were any good. A student grounded in math and Greek can be trusted to engage in the liberal arts.
It is a really good book. DFW was extremely intelligent, a great observer, and a talented writer. His essays vary in quality, but some are just tremendous.
His fiction suffered from the terrible influence of his era. He was educated and then started publishing right at the peak of the period of pomo fascination in American academia, and you can see how he struggled with it. He was at heart an earnest Midwestern writer who should never have tried to mimic the ‘sophisticated’ fashions of his day.
If he had felt sufficiently confident to have eschewed all the trendiness, and had just written more straightforward narrative fiction, he might have been one of the greats.
I remember a young woman, not long out of high school exulting in the fact that she had got her poor English teacher fired because he had dared say that the Deep End of the Ocean or something was “chick-lit.” This is a long time before the current cancellation dispensation. I seem to remember her telling me that he did a lot of begging her not to tell anybody before she told somebody.
And the thing was, she made it obvious to me that she had been out to get him, that what he said hadn’t particularly bothered her at all. It was the joy of the hunt, the capture and the kill that was what floated her boat.
So I said later on that the names at the local high school all used to be Fenstermacher or Butz and now they’re all Park or Patel.
And then she told me I was a racist. But she couldn’t get me. Because I was just a person, not a teacher. Oh, I had a little frisson of terror for a minute there. But then I thought, “I got your number, honey. And I bet you are the voice of your generation. And I will be watching my mouth from now on, thank you.”
To the credit of many churches, a lot of assessment of the whole enterprise was done, with the kind of result you describe above.
I think that SARS-2 has put a real crimp in missionary tourism.
They are definitely all morons. Apparently you either don’t know any students or don’t know what a moron is.
JackD should check in here, but I think your refusal to punctuate might some day get you in trouble on a lease.
It’s now Stasi informant culture for thought crimes, but snitches get stitches hood culture for violent crimes.
I do and I do. You don’t and you don’t.
When did that happen, obwandiyag?
Horrible story.
Are you serious? Never heard of steppe nomads? The Turks and Mongols and their predecessors (Scythians, Huns, Avars, etc.) were all Asians who kept invading and conquering (to some extent) Eastern Europe. Until the Russian expansion into Siberia, invasions had always been in the opposite direction.
Western Europe (England, Holland, France, Spain, and Portugal) got into a naval competition on the Atlantic seaboard 500-600 years ago and that spurred them on to wandering all around the world and conquering places, none of whom had similar level of naval power (nor a zest for sea-based adventures). The Chinese had even stupidly disbanded their navy just when it could have started to yield dividends.
Snitches get riches.
I think the tribe from the north was the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Blackfeet, Piegan, and Blood tribes. Hard, no-nonsense peoples. -37 Fahrenheit early morn in Cut Bank, Lincoln’s Birthday.
Hunker down, kid. The storm will blow over.
The more plausible cause was the infusion of European genes as those Jews migrated into northern Italy and up into Germany. Jews have always been xenophobic and insular, forming legal and de facto gated communities (pardon, “ghettos”). What changed was the intermarriage with Europeans.
It didn’t take long.
The only flaw in this plan is if she does STEM she may be distracted from getting married
Telling a girl to go to college AND find a husband is a lot of pressure. So you want her to study as hard as the boys AND cook for her STEM boyfriend too.
I had a genius classmate who is now a professor and he always had so much time. He studied as hard as I did AND…AND…he went camping…went out with family etc etc
I couldn’t figure out how he could do it…until I realized my stupidity…The guy was Christian and had married a housewife type in college who was doing all of the cooking and cleaning and laundry.
At least one night a week during college I spent cleaning my flat…a necessary job. Everyday I made my own dinner…a necessary job. Sunday nights were clothing night…getting all my clothes together for the week ahead. I had certain days that were shopping and bill paying days.
There’s not enough hours in the day.
AND…all of my college buddies including the guy above are Uber-Liberals….Occasionally I visit the twitter page of a semi-arch nemesis white dude and it’s all ‘Sedition…Treason…BLM!’ and the guy is a STEM CEO
Interesting take. I’ve never noticed a consistent pattern like that, but I’ve also never flown in an A380. Takeoffs and landings are important to get right though, if you’re a pilot. Most aircraft are fairly stable once aloft.
ETA: I went just now to look for notes on airspeed vs turbulence. Here’s the first cockpit photo that came up:
It’s the most typical flight crew: Proud Black Man and Proud Latina, chatting about white supremacy while the autopilot (who invented that?) does the work.
Yes, Spergs, I know they’re not in the air.
“150 Times staffers (disproportionately young and minority) wrote a letter to the Times demanding that McNeil be fired.”
McNeil’s most egregious offense was hinting to the audience not to take as gospel every word printed within the holy pages of the “Paper of Record”:
“McNeil initially released a very short statement to The Washington Post, saying “Don’t believe everything you read“, which led to 150 Times employees signing an internal letter on February 3, demanding an apology from McNeil.”
Though McNeil had lived a few years in South Africa, I still find it extremely implausible to imagine, a given he was sober, that he uttered the phrasing Miss Shepherd “recalled”.
In any event, I’m idly curious as to where Miss will study next:
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
or will she’ll go rogue, perhaps Stanford?
What’s that Dylan song? The Times they are a changing?
What needs excusing? Non-Whites did very well under the influence of Whites.
I would agree that very few people are congenital morons. However, the “Education System” and the MSM in the West does not promote honesty and independence of mind, but rather conformity and incuriosity, i. e. moronism. So, to clarify, I find it more convenient to assume the worst. Avoidance or limited interaction is less troublesome that engagement.
In this regard, I remember another regular here saying that, because of where he lived and for whom he worked, he and his wife could only speak freely with a few close friends about the present American political and social situation. His co-workers did not know he voted for Trump, for example.
Now, I’m not in that dire situation, but I would not want to talk freely with modern day students.
It’s a very good suggestion you make. For an Upstate New Yorker, you have an excellent grasp of the situation in England ( I say this, though I’m not English myself !) Limiting the number of new universities would have been an effective way in limiting the numbers in degree courses. Less Mickey Mouse courses, less student debt and less degree students. All beneficial.
The vocational instruction institute is also a very good idea. In fact, it’s very similar to the ideas expressed by my old Classics teacher at school. He regarded the German apprenticeship system as far superior to nearly all degrees, particularly from Italy, America etc. You learned a trade or practical matter, with theory to back it up, and usually a foreign language as well. You were much better prepared for life than your average graduate. As my teacher spoke excellent German and was a regular visitor to Germany and Switzerland, he knew what he was talking about.
But this apprenticeship system only works if you’ve not offshored manufacturing and other industries. It’s not only America that has done this.
Whites invented autopilot just to limit career opportunities for black pilots. Ditto calculators, computers, etc.
Yep, there’s no way anyone who has worked for the NYT, much less for years, would use language like that. But she’s secure in the knowledge that no one can publicly contradict her, especially not in the NYT
Nice photo!
I flew the A380 once from Paris to NYC and I wasn’t impressed.
The top level is the same dimensions and finish quality as a standard A319/320.
The extra time it takes for the tow vehicle to pull it off the runway is annoying.
Even more annoying is the camera in the tail fin the pilot can pipe to the in-cabin screen…the angle makes it look as though the plane will fly into the tarmac, Die Hard 2 style.
I thought better of screaming, “OMG we’re gonna DIE! Pull up! Pull up!”
In many–nay, most –nay, virtually every single case, colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to primitive, third world hellholes. The only real exception may have been the Belgian Congo, and even they came out way ahead in the end.
On the other hand, colonialism turned out to be the worst imaginable thing for the ex-colonial powers. Every single one of them is being completely destroyed.
And the answer, as Wilde knew, is the worst possible answer: Absolutely nothing.
And just what is the interest of the sodomites in Mr Diamond? who, I gather was happily married?
How will that be recorded in the annals?
You’re probably right. Diamond seemed to think the Shoshone had no rivals. One criticism of anthropology is why study obscure primitive societies that were left behind tens of thousands of years ago. Excellent point.
At least he’s not an outright liar like Margaret Mead.
I asked a Canadian Indian what kind of housing his people had before the Europeans came. He said they used those caveman dugout in the ground or side of a hill homes. Sounds a good idea. Everybody crowds together and keeps each other warm.
Nowdays the tribe has a housing complex in a city. Families with school kids move there in September everybody else in October.
Actually it was James Jatras, counsel to the Republican Senate Policy Committee, in the ‘90’s. He explained that, when conducting foreign visitors around Capitol Hill, he was often quizzed about the U.S.’s two political parties, and what was the difference between them. He said he fixed on the simple answer that the U.S. had an evil party (Democrats) and a stupid party (Republicans). Sam Francis was told about this by this writer, and found it so useful he adopted it.
Every young female who is not deformed has a certain youthful attractiveness but I’d say that she is going to hit the Wall sooner than average and once the bloom is off the rose, all that will remain is her hateful personality. For all I know, the girl is Jewish (certainly wouldn’t surprise me if she was) but that does not change my opinion of her one whit.
Idealists with monumentally unrealistic ideas ARE bad people, not despite their “good” intentions but BECAUSE of them. They are all little Procrustes whose attempts to fit all humans into a single ideological mold can in the end only be implemented by means of torture and cruelty. Their “good intentions” give them great moral certainty so that there is no limit to the cruelty that they are willing to inflict in order to bring about their Utopia.
Congo was bad during the rule of King Leopold II, the Congo Free State but even that was better than Arab-Swahili trader Tippu Tip’s Arab-Swahili Sultanates in Eastern Congo with which King Leopold II’s Congo Free State had a war where the Belgians obviously decimated Tippu Tip’s forces. Indeed black Africans were escaping to King Leopold II’s Congo Free State from Tippu Tip’s domain.
Famous Slave trader Tippu Tip, he was so bad that native blacks would escape him to move to King Leopold II’s Congo Free State.
King Leopold II of Belgium attempted to persuade the Belgian government to support colonial expansion around the then-largely unexplored Congo Basin. The Belgian government’s ambivalence and lack of interest had resulted in Leopold’s establishing a colony himself.
Secondly most of the brutality against the natives took place by other natives in higher authority when European officers were not present though there were a few sadistic Belgian officers who enjoyed brutality too.
But international concerns” in (evul” YT countries) especially Britain, led to intense diplomatic pressure on Belgium to take official control of the country from King Leopold II, which it did by creating the Belgian Congo in 1908. Then everything started improving as every thing about the colony was now answerable to Belgium’s Parliament.
The colony was divided into hierarchically organised administrative subdivisions, and run uniformly according to a set “native policy” (politique indigène). This contrasted the practice of British and French colonial policy, which generally favoured systems of indirect rule, retaining traditional leaders in positions of authority under colonial oversight. During the 1940s and 1950s the Belgian Congo experienced extensive urbanisation, and the colonial administration began various development programmes aimed at making the territory into a “model colony”. One result saw the development of a new middle-class of Europeanised African “évolués” in the cities. By the 1950s the Congo had a wage labour force twice as large as that in any other African colony. Patrice Lumumba, who became an anti-colonial agitator only very late, praised Belgian colonial rule in his autobiography of 1962 for ‘restoring our human dignity and turning us into free, happy, vigorous, and civilized men’.
Non ex Colonial countries like Ireland, Switzerland, Norway and Finland are getting destroyed too!!!
Spain might survive due to much less generous welfare and cultural factors. Personal opinion is that all this worrying about the impact of Muslims on welfare is just for the election. As soon as Macron’s re elected back to normal.
Hordes of young men on welfare with nothing to do all day is a recipe for disaster. The men probably had illegal scams going. Paying low IQ young women to have kids is just as bad.
I watched the movie cuties. I don’t think one adult in the movie had a job. When the movie opened father had been in Senegal for months. And the family moved into a bigger apartment. Movie took place over a school year. Father and number 2 wife arrived at the end of the school year. So welfare supported him when he was in Senegal to bring back a new wife to have more benefit babies.
.
Yes. Having good intentions is the easiest thing in the world, and everyone thinks they have them. And yet so much evil somehow gets done.
Many years ago I was on a flight (I don’t recall the details but it wasn’t an A380) where there was a camera in the nose whose output the pilot put up on the entertainment screens during takeoff and landing but it doesn’t seem to have caught on – that was the first and last time for me. I get the feeling that the passengers must not have really liked it, although I thought it was interesting.
I did fly on an A380 once and found it unremarkable – like any other large aircraft. Although the plane is double decked there is no passage between the decks for the passengers so you really don’t have any sense that you are on a double decker.
As far as the passenger experience goes, I don’t think that there is a nickel’s worth of difference in flying on a Boeing vs. an Airbus, not in the air and not on takeoff and landing. The pilot experience is somewhat different in that Boeing (at least before MCAS) actually allows the pilot to take full manual control of the plane for better or for worse whereas on an Airbus all pilot input is mediated by the computer and if the computer decides that you are making an “illegal” input it will refuse to do what you command.
You know that the A320 is a few inches wider than the 737, which enables a half-inch greater seat width per seat?
That too.
While I’m an admirer of the work of George Orwell, his most famous statement missed its mark by about 180 degrees. It’s not seeing what’s in front of one’s face that needs a constant struggle; it’s explaining it away.
What a struggle it must have been to write Guns, Germs and Steel.
I agree. She’s a 6 at best and that’s after getting all made up for this professional photo shoot.
White females in particular have the most to lose in this future they’re creating. Wait till the infrastructure (especially power grid, water supply, etc.) crumbles (and eventually collapses) and the social order breaks down and all the white blue-collar (“redneck”) guys — the most despised and disenfranchised group in America— who kept the power, water, and heat on around the clock are no longer around in significant numbers to keep things in order.
We’ve passed peak blue-collar white male, the demographic who knows how to do shit. (Nb: immigrants of almost-equivalent aptitude with the ability to figure things out and create a fix will not settle for anything less than highly-paid engineering jobs).
The pilot experience is somewhat different in that Boeing (at least before MCAS) actually allows the pilot to take full manual control of the plane for better or for worse whereas on an Airbus all pilot input is mediated by the computer and if the computer decides that you are making an “illegal” input it will refuse to do what you command.
Yes, the “pilot” gets to make suggestions to Airbus flight control software, a lot like the late Space Shuttle. The flight regimes of Shuttle were a lot more demanding than the average airliner, though. However this means that the “pilot” on Airbus is more like a passenger with a great view. There is a little flaw in the ointment.
When the autopilot on an Airbus encounters some flight regime outside of its programming it essentially dumps the entire job onto the pilot. This requires the pilot to transition from being a fancy passenger to a real pilot in about half a second in the middle of an emergency. That’s likely An aeronautical engineer I know immensely prefers riding on Boeing aircraft for that reason, however I haven’t heard much from him since TCAS broke out.
I always wondered if the situation in Belgian Congo was as bad as the propaganda claimed. It was anti Belgian British propaganda remember. GB was a rival colonial power. It was in the interests of GB to trash other colonial powers
We all know the lies the British told to con the US to enter WW 1 using babies for bayonet practice, raping nuns in front of the altar lies after lies.
I’m a skeptic.
Europe was a miserable place; seasons, the plagues, wars, famine. Inspired by Biblical tales they started longing for the lost Eden, for Xanadu and Eldorado. And then they went looking for that, for a way to better their condition, for a life on easy mode. The daily strife and struggle made Europeans supremely suited to conquer the world.
It’s true but I wouldn’t call those groups recent, and the recent dominance of European powers is probably why diamond set out to write his book.
Discovery Channel aired a documentary series on the assembly of the first A380. The components for the plane was manufactured all over Europe, in the spirit of EU co-operation and how they do it in the US. The face and dumbfoundedness of the technician rigging up that camera was amusing, as he found out that the connector cable was made 2 inches too short. There were a lot of that going on for that white elephant.
Is there any other kind?
More plausible is that the few thousand people, supposedly 300 families just happened to be more 105 110 than 90-95IQ. Supposedly the Italian intermarriage was 3,2000 years ago, Another thing I’ve gathered from some of the Malamud Singer etc stories is that non verbal not studious not entrepreneurial men were pushed out. Or left on their own.
Someone with good mechanical and design skills might want to go into construction rather than slaving in father in law’s business and studying Talmud for recreation. Plus the communities were pretty strict about keeping kosher, dress codes, arranged marriages, submission to the in laws and rabbis , arranged jobs, no privacy gossip and snitch culture. . The whole idea was self segregation. Given that so many Europeans have a bit of Ashkenazi DNA I bet a lot of young men left and were lost to the community
So the lawyer talker merchant negotiator Talmud discusser type prevailed. Engineering trades and mechanical ability left.
There’s a town in S America known for blue eyes and fraternal twins. Town was originally settled by Germans. And many of the women were genetically inclined for two eggs in one cycle occasionally.
As far as very short time evolution just look at this nation of immigrants and how so many ethnic groups increase in size in two or three generations. Japanese in the 60s, grandma often the same height as the 9 year olds. Hispanic grandpa 5’5, dad 5’9 grandson 6’.
What about the 1619 Project?
I bet NHJ derives a river of royalty checks from that.
Derek Freeman in his last spate of research on her time in Samoa (which included reviewing her handwritten notes) concluded she was on the level, but made a complete hash of it.
Actually it was James Jatras, counsel to the Republican Senate Policy Committee, in the ‘90’s. He explained that, when conducting foreign visitors around Capitol Hill, he was often quizzed about the U.S.’s two political parties, and what was the difference between them. He said he fixed on the simple answer that the U.S. had an evil party (Democrats) and a stupid party (Republicans). Sam Francis was told about this by this writer, and found it so useful he adopted it.
Another yellow star has appeared at the top of the post on the front page. I can only reiterate – what does it mean?
Yeah, I think it was intended to be anti-racialist although it was arguably an “own goal.” In the beginning he’s trying to argue for why Papuans are equally intelligent as Europeans. As I recall he even goes so far as to suggest that the Papuans are more intelligent. It’s just that their “intelligence” is more calibrated for hunting in the jungle, etc. Okay. But how is that any different than what the “racists” say? He says it’s all about “geography” not “race,” but geography is also highly important in the racialist model. You know, natural selection and all that. The only difference is Diamond wants us to think these geographic factors somehow didn’t cause any selection pressures on the populations.
I understand that McNeil jumped before he was pushed, but it seems he was a canny operator who played the system well. A book on the pandemic – with a few sideswipes at erstwhile colleagues – is probably in the pipeline.
Everyone criticizing Jared Diamond: yes, he wrote some stupid things but he did have some points, like how European diseases hit the natives very hard.
For whatever reason (it’s contentious too), they hadn’t domesticated much in the way of animals. A lot of European diseases jumped from domesticated animals to people. So the unfortunate natives got smallpox but had no equivalent to pass back (syphilis has been proposed, I don’t know the current state of the claim).
Smallpox alone was enough to allow Cortes to win in Mexico. Then more European diseases came, plus some diseases even worse from Africa (they were also fatal to Europeans),
But get this: there is a school of thought amongst the uber-left who will believe none of the above but insist that the Spaniards killed all the natives. To these people, Diamond is a disgraceful apologist with his disease theories.
(Never mind how outnumbered the Europeans were, or that their best weapon was a steel sword…etc)
Just thought you like to know that some people think Diamond is a right wing shill.
Everyone criticizing Jared Diamond: yes, he wrote some stupid things but he did have some points, like how European diseases hit the natives very hard.
The effects of disease on the natives was noticed centuries ago, Diamond was late to that party.
Smallpox alone was enough to allow Cortes to win in Mexico.
No, it was not. Read The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz, who actually fought on the ground as one of the soldiers. He describes in some detail the hand to hand fighting in the streets and causeways of Tenochticlan during the night evacuation. What made the difference was Indian allies who hated the Aztecs.
But get this: there is a school of thought amongst the uber-left who will believe none of the above but insist that the Spaniards killed all the natives. To these people, Diamond is a disgraceful apologist with his disease theories.
Leftists are superstitious, cargo-cult morons who believe all sorts of nonsense.
As his micro reference of racial conquest and exploitation, Jared Diamond cites the Polynesian Maori conquest of the Chatham Islanders. I imagine he was making the subtle point that colonisation was a universal theme. Not due to some evil gene in the white race. In the 1990s, that was generally accepted in educated circles. The blacks could take it in their stride, that African tribes participated in the Atlantic slave trade. However a Caribbean scholar got into huge trouble at an American College by referring also to the Jewish participation. He received the treatment now commonly meted out to elderly liberal white men. Today’s red guards react not on arguments but on trigger responses. They are out to eliminate the old twentieth century elites with their life long tenures and their prominence in media and academia. They have no understanding or even elementary knowledge of context and broad events in history. That would require them to remain focused on something further than chick bait. As an ironical point, those Polynesian invaders later adopted the pacifist culture of their Polynesian Chatham Island slaves. In consequence, the largest land owners in Chathams identify as the original native Chatham Islanders. There is an issue there too that Jared missed.
Well — when I was in College and Law School at the end of the 70s and Early 80s it was well known the Professors slept with the female students, many of which were extremely eager for such hook-ups and advantages there from…. — one in my entering Law School Class nearly immediately hooked up with a well known Professor and everyone knew about it….– it was accepted and widespread behavior of women (men were not hooking up with female profs by the way…)….He’s just harking back to those days perhaps? It’s amazing how far the pendulum has swung now that you can be destroyed for nothing while back then, not too long ago….
She’s not a snitch. Snitches can be heroic. If you knew your neighbor was kidnapping, torturing to death, and burying his victims in his cellar, and you gave him up to the authorities, very few people are going to characterize you as an opportunistic coward. (And the profile of anyone who would is almost sure to yield up an educator with tenure, and popular with the antifa kidz.)
Speaking of the antifa kidz….
What this girl did was far worse than simple ‘snitching’: she knowingly set up this older man, the Times reporter, for the purpose of destroying him. Considering her environs – comes from money, parents are probably liberal ninnies, attends private school, fast tracking her career trajectory in either media or government – I’m sure the notion of blowback never occurred to her because everyone in her immediate orbit is either a similar predator or potential prey, easily cowed – probably McNeil was warier of being MeTooed at the time; he might not have seen the one with his name on it coming, though it was probably accomplished like an Abbott & Costello routine:
HE: Well, how was the word used? Conversationally, pejoratively, as part of a rap lyric….?
SHE: What word do you mean?
HE: Well….”nigger”.
SHE: (gasping, pointing, screeching) OH MY GOD!! YOU SAID IT! YOU SAID THE N WORD!!! You disgusting racist!
Game, set, match. Third base!
I would say the Indians got as good as the gave? Syphilis it seems to be fairly well established came from the “New World” and went from there to Europe….: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-origin-of-syphilis
Also Cigarettes? How many of the evil “whitey” have they taken out? A gift from the “New World” also…. The whole historical blaming thing is so nauseating but the truth is always more nuanced than portrayed by those with political axes to grind….
I was going to say future Karen, but this works too.
Everyone here remembers what the road to Hell is paved with.
The regime in DC? Not so much.
I have to wonder if the fly-by-wire system in Airbus’ planes is why they feel more plush to me when airborne.
I can’t get too worked up about such systems since they have been used for decades in military aircraft and are usually have triple, or even quad redundancy. Eliminating hydraulic components also eliminates a litany of associated issues.
Who knew people would get tired of the Aztecs’ constant kidnapping raids so they could serve as victims in the Aztecs’ regularly scheduled ritual orgies of torture and murder?
Cortes gave the Aztecs what they deserved.
You must admit that Britain left India woefully short of toilets.
Half of then literally crap in the street- worse even than San Francisco.
If they’d been European there’d have been a Berlin style Porcelain Airlift.
And surely you mean 5 centimeters…
I gather that the Spaniards in the conquest of the Inca’s and Aztecs actually constituted only a few percent of the Spanish armies. The Rulers were so brutal that conquered tribes signed up in the thousands.
I meant click bait. That was a Freudian slip. Click bait has an uncanny resemblence to the novel 1984’s Two Minute Hate. In both cases, thought is replaced by a trigger response that lasts sensationally a couple of minutes before reflection can set in.
Not going quietly.
To the contrary, that book has aged well. It is Mr. Sailer’s “review” that one must re-examine given his propensity to make generalizations without citing specific examples, or making false premises, and building his argument around them.
“Similarly, biological disadvantages stopped whites from overrunning the Andes…”
He makes this statement, without offering examples, of how Diamond examined this phenomenon in his book.
“Since random accidents of personality and culture appear too trivial to account for the clash of continents’ lopsided outcomes (e.g., a few hundred Conquistadors demolished the grandest empires of the New World)…”
He makes this assumption, as if Diamond indeed make it a point in his work to gloss over such events or actually label them as being of little value or importance.
“No, but it does imply that a scientific-minded observer like Diamond should not dogmatically denounce genetic explanations, since he is liable to get tarred with his own brush…”
He makes this generalization and characterization without examples.
“Like many, Diamond appears to confuse the concepts of genetic superiorities (plural) and genetic supremacy (singular)”
He offers his own examples here, but neglects to provide exactly how and why Diamond “confuses the concepts”.
“The historian who trumpets the political relevance of his work must consider both the past and the future, which Diamond fails to do.”
Again, a characterization made without support.
“The recent European supremacy in both the arts of war and of peace…”
Here lies the begging the question fallacy.
“Most of world history, however, is Eurasian history, and he’s only sketchy on why the West Eurasians eventually overcame the East and South Eurasians.”
More begging the question.
“But, are indigenous peoples merely not inferior? In truth, on their own turf many ethnic groups appear to be somewhat genetically superior to outsiders.”
Indigenous peoples are viewed by outsiders as being inferior based on their own criteria. Ethnic groups on their own turf may appear to be superior by way of their adaptations to their environment, which may be genetic and behavior driven. Which one is more dominant, of course, depends upon your world view.
“Diamond will go down in the anals as the guy who proposed that subsaharan africans should have domesticated rhinos to ride on for their calvary corps and they would have been invincible.”
Really, he made that reference? OK, please cite in his work the relevant quotation.
“Yep, excuse making for the fact that Western Civilization was built on the higher IQ Yamnaya/Conan the Barbarians who, of course, had flocks of docile animal protein along with horses and carts, and the ruthlessness to supplant all the indigenous hunter gatherer and farmer populations in the Euopean continent, dispensing with the males, and taking all the women.”
Not excuse making, but a cogent argument that even Mr. Sailer had difficulty trying hard not to NOTICE.
“But yeah, Africans could never tame the Zebra, so they didn’t get around to doing geometry, composing epic poetry, and laying the foundations of rationalist philosophy as the source of Western superiority.”
Zebras are not domesticable animals.
https://thomsonsafaris.com/blog/taming-zebras-domestication-attempts/
“Ancient Africans” did epic poetry.
https://africanpoems.net/epic/introduction-to-epics
“Ancient Africans” did geometry.
https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/geometry-from-africa-mathematical-and-educational-explorations
Pages 352-358…
https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/272588/1-s2.0-S0315086000X00298/1-s2.0-S0315086084710299/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEEcaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJGMEQCIA%2BkLws87RGanqQLCFzv25F%2B%2B%2F3BwedxB4N0Wwe8mRIbAiBpXWCZPQmspK0v2u4b48Jw63QK0rGMgUYLS4SexhnTcyq0AwhQEAMaDDA1OTAwMzU0Njg2NSIM2RiTXUAPCG0Wb%2BjyKpEDQbNviAok7pGGwXE3vs0ikKXcIw6X%2FiVwFY2lm7Yej4cMqMVfgbAZbDzpk%2F177udmZrlyHze2V3853VEv5kkE3EkZrj1ru6LJgqIlRBvGl72fHQ5Id1JSoHkdDpH4uk3Kkc3icDoUqyeT%2FTzF4Meux8%2BQ6Dw0s%2B6FboLEow%2BwV12coNVstOR7iUBnuKgRymHOk8lHaH%2Btot8mWGK%2FKjbN5WB%2Btw4xdYsdzmpt0JoVJltCStxkRcHrz3ecipLV4Z2h%2B3xo%2FSHLpFxu0GTEmh70Lw%2BYdMaKU0xhl09BZ3%2Fpp4o7xQIvfVwaQ6V9UldgrW1WMFeILhHu%2FSuiyzptAYtzh6xSc2cg4njn0ml9j8AG%2B3MI1zfLot7fZnUTh%2B13GsJAxV3UVUB1SsDxli75cs%2FouMTbF3%2F0lGBftP%2FWYXV3unaQhS%2F6LJ7J9R7rZvbRbDF3RC9iFa0H9TIlnN2k%2BONASjeRXPf81OfTICSBXdyQbkCaXJ5dpDHA1McSYbD97bDa9Vk8O48tzZxpncQJYgqjCU8wtJmxgQY67AGaEXJxhJsb2Vfk9RwDU84LXqvepaLfOZOPkAwL05s43qW0263xzYFeoHeeqzSJDRUa4T2bqk5mrSNjbiGKiCUs6%2FnLosu%2BhlLfiOS3n%2B9P27B4q3GfrL6zLW1xgmT1nseAd9EBF8MfhmrIPxmRQudEsW5nge93FoIWA8nl6BLaUG3TpIn3CzhjN6uf0jpzc1TKZ1YPeEEeKIQ7gQfMP541BcSLNiI9fnV6SFfLLU7TZ5sSBuyO0EyjNMDlMWqymd1wc0bPox7MoNl85%2BIPYI4Tc36mZtcWU4LoHLjf60LIQQ99IACsvGo6GpRYzQ%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20210217T001104Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTY33S4NGG7%2F20210217%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=850fc3e1398bf889ca638dbb5ececab32229feeceb73c69bb417eb52aae2a1c1&hash=7b709d63d9983244f2b1bc4dc20d03b4abeb547ae69d37ceb2d2ea28a261caaf&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S0315086084710299&tid=spdf-0eab6bb1-ede4-4f52-b051-33243aef9cad&sid=603b89276798b148286a94c531c01c3f16e2gxrqa&type=client
Do you enjoy being historically inept?
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/archaeological-history-ancient-copper-mining.htm
https://lansingcitypulse.com/stories/copper-culture-shapes-ancient-history,12679
I once considered attending an NRO cruise, back before they parted ways with most of their interesting writers, like John Derbyshire. However that all feels like it was so very long ago.
I once considered attending an NRO cruise, back before they parted ways with most of their interesting writers, like John Derbyshire. That all feels like it was so very long ago.
Sounds like a thousand years ago. Imagine Derbyshire regaling the NR crowd with The Talk. They’d be running for the lifeboats.
Both Boeing and Airbus have autopilots and if the autopilot totally doesn’t know what to make of a situation it will dump control onto the humans on both company’s aircraft. This is no different in either brand.
The difference is that Airbus are all “fly by wire” – the joystick on an Airbus is not physically connected to any of the control surfaces. It’s just a computer joystick. The Airbus software specifies a “flight envelope” and the control inputs are check to see if they fall outside of that envelope and if they do the software is not going to allow that input.
Cars do that now too – nowadays if you try to accelerate outside of the level of traction of the tires, the gas pedal is not physically connected to the throttle and the traction control software is not going to let you spin the wheels, it’s only going to give you as much throttle as it thinks is right. I noticed in my latest car (a Genesis) that if you were turning out of say a shopping center onto a busy street (which might require you to give it a lot of gas to insert yourself into an opening in the traffic while at the same time turning), the car lost all power – you would floor it but the car would take it really slow despite the 300 hp engine (while meanwhile the oncoming cars were bearing down upon you). After this happened a few times, I learned to turn off the traction control in such situations so that I could tell the car how much gas I really wanted to give it.
But on an Airbus there’s no override button. If HAL says, I can’t do that Dave, that’s the end of the discussion.
Please let me add some additional features of civilization: the wheel; written language; clean water.
I believe about 80,000 Mayan Indians joined less than 100 Spaniards to conquer the Aztecs. For revenge after what the Aztecs dud to the Mayans. .
Yep, you’re exactly the kind of friend Jared Diamond needs. And wants.
The same thing happened with the British in India and Africa. They easily got allies against the corrupt Muslim Nawabs, Hindu Maratha Empire, Tipu Sultan and the Zulu empire.
No, the Mayans lived too far South and their society devolved centuries earlier.
The Tlaxcala were perhaps the most effective and well known enemies of the Aztecs that joined Cortez.
“Yep, you’re exactly the kind of friend Jared Diamond needs. And wants.”
Instead of smart aleck comments, how about addressing the points I made? And you have so much promise that goes to waste. You should be disappointed in your recent performances on this fine opinion webzine.
It’s a quibble but it was several different groups, not one group, essentially all their neighbors they had taken slaves from.
I have to wonder if the fly-by-wire system in Airbus’ planes is why they feel more plush to me when airborne.
More likely seat width or pitch. Each airline has different standards in such things. American airlines used to be notorious for cramped legroom.
I can’t get too worked up about such systems since they have been used for decades in military aircraft and are usually have triple, or even quad redundancy.
It’s not the fly by wire system that makes some aeronautical engineers dislike Airbuses, it’s their autopilot design approach.
Both Boeing and Airbus have autopilots and if the autopilot totally doesn’t know what to make of a situation it will dump control onto the humans on both company’s aircraft. This is no different in either brand.
That’s not quite what an aeronautical engineer told me a few years ago, partly in reference to the Indonesia AirAsia crash of 2014. There are design philosophy differences between Airbus and Boeing in terms of “pilotage”, although the whole TCAS blunder has obscured that.
As far as I can see from a quick scan of over 300 comments, I’m the only commentator in this thread so far who has the slightest interest in McNeil’s work as medical correspondent.
That’s a shame, because in my humble opinion, his contribution to public debate about the COVID-19 pandemic has been outstanding. A least, it stood out for me, from the first time I encountered him in mid March 2020 discussing the pandemic on Rachel Maddow’s show.
It was the first time I saw anyone in the western mass media discussing the already highly successful Chinese response to “crushing the curve” with anything resembling understanding and respect. For all the purported concern to be “anti-racist”, I found most discourse in Western mass media at the time arrogant, ethnocentric and absurdly committed to the notion of Western (especially US and UK) exceptionalism. McNeil was different. I found it refreshing to be listening, for once, to someone who had studied the topic of COVID from the get-go and who didn’t discuss the Chinese Government’s pandemic response with sneers and put-downs.
I felt then – and still believe – that in early 2020 the Chinese showed the rest of the world how to deal with the pandemic fast and effectively. Most Westerners were too arrogant to pay much attention and assumed their “superior” health care systems would be much more successful, and that we needed no tips from elsewhere. It’s clear now how foolishly wrong-headed that arrogance has been.
Anyhow, McNeil is now free from the editorial constraints imposed upon him by the NYT editors and culture. I hope he will get a book out soon. If so, I’ll certainly be one of the readers.
It would be be interesting to see if, freed from NYT editorial constraints, McNeil reports on what to my mind has become the greatest buried story of the pandemic: the potential of non-patent drugs to curb and even terminate the pandemic – and in particular the astonishingly positive evidence that’s accumulated in recent months that a very safe and cheap drug, Ivermectin, is (1) an effective prophylactic, (2) effective in the early and late stage of the disease (3) effective in reducing the viral load of those who recover, and (4) effective in reducing the incidence of “long COVID” symptoms.
I imagine had McNeil already written an article on that topic, the NYT might have refused to publish it – or it might have got him fired. He is now, at least, able to write what he really thinks. Perhaps he’ll disappoint me? I hope not.
A few references:
1/ MacNeil’s interview on Maddow, March 2020:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/how-a-country-serious-about-coronavirus-does-testing-and-quarantine-80595013902
2/ The FLCCC website – a good place to begin on the topic of prophylaxis and treatment of COVID-19 by non-patent drugs including Ivermectin:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/
3/ Salaam Media’s recent interview with Dr Tess Lawrie discussing her meta analysis of research into the use of Ivermectin in relation to COVID-19:
4/ Trialsite News’ excellent coverage of COVID-19 and Ivermectin:
https://trialsitenews.com/tag/ivermectin/
It is even possible to think in terms of ENDING the pandemic, FAST, using this remarkable gift:
https://trialsitenews.com/news-roundup-belgian-virologist-proposes-plan-to-eradicate-covid-19-in-6-weeks-using-ivermectin/
McNeil’s articles are usually informed by a solid knowledge of history. I often wondered if he was the son of the historian who wrote the landmark 1976 book “Plagues and Peoples.” But William H. McNeill spells his surname differently.
The Thompson Safari post about taming zebras was discussing attempts to domesticate individuals, not the multigenerational breeding techniques used by more advanced agrarians to produce a domesticated breed from repeated selection from a group.
It’s also interesting that this post reminds us that “European animals mostly evolved in the absence of man.” By Diamond’s rationale, Europeans should have been at a disadvantage because the animals would have been so unused to people that they would make for such an easy meal that the incoming humans would gobble them all up before having a chance to domesticate them.
Maybe the harsh European environment, in combination with fortuitous mutations, selected for the self-restraint, cooperation, foresight, and long-term vision that then allowed Europeans to domesticate animals. Black supremacists sometimes like to call whites mutants. Yes, maybe that is true.
There’s no need for a public debate. The epidemic is a hoax. McNeil worked for the NYTimes. Every word in the NYTimes including the and a is a lie. His 40 years of hate Whity liberal lies back fired. The liberals always attack their own.
It seems like a set up To me. It was a trip to Peru to observe the public health system. So why all the discussions about American negros? Could be some White hating liberal teacher at Andover gave Shepherd her talking points. Or her parents did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_W._Crosby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_imperialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_Imperialism_(book)
Thanks for mentioning that one, KPK.
It was one of those things, where Jared becomes so clear about things that only complete morons (such as yourself) would miss the utmost importance of IQ – however he wasn’t talking about the Africans, in that specific example.
OHH. An idiot umbraged parent. Yeah, your sweet little monster is a genius. Check. That makes sense.
It is a documented fact that morons (like you) have trouble identifying morons.
And breed morons.
And trumpet them as geniuses.
Moron.
Unfortunately your provided link for that topic completely dances around the pink elephant in the room.
Fact: “You can’t catch a Zebra with a lasso.”
Some websites try to explain that away as a “reflex”. Wut? The Africans were hunting Zebras for so many millennia with lassos, so they developed a built-in reflex against that??
Bullschiff.
Zebras are so intelligent that they understand what the flying lasso loop might mean, and avoid it by ducking. (Now compare to horses.)
Might their non-domesticability also have something to do with that?
It appears that the IQ shift that we see in Ashkenazi Jews arose in only a few centuries under the selection pressures of the ghettos of Europe.
Then why are Ashkenazi IQs higher than European ? It seems more likely that anti-Semitic persecution was an inadvertent eugenic selection for intelligence. Kind of ironic, for both sides really.
“The epidemic is a hoax”
Idiotic piffle such as that comment has made it easy for the Big Pharma’s vaccine-pushers to get their way.
They just claim anyone who’s sceptical of their approach is another delusional fool who thinks the whole affair is a hoax, masks never work, social distancing makes no difference etc etc.
I’m replying to you now, Alden, to make my position clear about this, but I’ve no intention of participating in an extended debate here about whether or not the pandemic is a hoax. There are not enough hours in the day for me to fix stupid on my own.
You need to appreciate the difference between scepticism and utter bullshit. It is legitimate and useful, for instance, to question what truly happened during World War Two. But someone who genuinely believes that WW2 never happened probably needs psychiatric help.
“The Thompson Safari post about taming zebras was discussing attempts to domesticate individuals, not the multigenerational breeding techniques used by more advanced agrarians to produce a domesticated breed from repeated selection from a group.”
And I was addressing KP’s claim that “Africans could never tame the Zebra”. Had he mentioned something about “multigenerational breeding techniques”, I would have provided a rebuttal.
“By Diamond’s rationale, Europeans should have been at a disadvantage because the animals would have been so unused to people that they would make for such an easy meal that the incoming humans would gobble them all up before having a chance to domesticate them.”
Thanks for the strawman.
We now live in an era so politically correct and anti-white that even books or films that are politically correct in a roundabout way or employ semi-subtle satire are attacked as thought crimes.
For example Guns, Germs and Steel. Let’s see. The influence of geography over millennia heavily influences this, that and the other thing–BUT NOT GENETICS! Or take Spaceship Troopers, a fun film, but obviously aimed at white Nazi tendencies. Paul Verhoeven has said that the ‘bugs’ were innocent. We were the aggressors. And yet his satire, inadvertently or not, ended up presenting a certain somewhat magnetic ascetic of scrubbed wholesome athletic mostly white troops of the West bravely dying to take on ‘The Other,’ that which is savage. This was very frightening to many of our minders and monitors who man their guillotines at-the-ready to lop off careers willy-nilly.
Of course nowadays we learn on US colleges and campuses that all whites are born racist, even devout liberals. So that must mean all books and movies produced by Westmen and Westwomen, or become popular amongst them, also must be tainted.
Back in India, Sawant’s caste (Maratha) has a nasty reputation. From the time of Shivaji (founder of the Maratha empire), they have kept lying repeatedly to all other Hindus that they’re Kshatriya Varna of Rajput descent so that they could freely plunder peasants from the lower castes. But in the last decade, it was confirmed that Marathas are really Shudra Varna of Kunbi descent. Hence they get Affirmative Action (for government jobs, so more free looting) in their native state of Maharashtra.
Did the late Joe Orton, of Blessed Memory, read or hear this?