Roll over Ben Franklin. This could possibly cause a few more white men donating big money to schools like Penn to realize that their donations are being used against them. Although if they haven’t figured that out yet, I don’t know what it would take.

I don’t know if Ron Unz reads comments here, but unz.com and unz.com/isteve open in ‘Mobile.’ I’m using a laptop, but it’s not really mobile. How can I see unz.com stuff in the normal window? I’m using Windows 10 and Chrome browser. Any help would be appreciated.

Btw, your Mobile format is not very good. If I gotta be in mobile, I don’t want a long-ass list of Unz contributors, I wanna see Sailer’s posts before all that jazz.

Thankya kindly.

Pfffffff,

Our government just decided to remove our first prime minister from the $10 bill and replace him with a black woman who bought a ticket to the theatre in the 1940’s. You all have some catchin’ up to do.

/sarc

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-banknote-woman-1.3885844

I’m waiting for these children to take down every white man’s modern convenience they depend on.

After all, things like central heat, indoor plumbing, electrification, automobiles, medicine, dentistry…

Aww, you know what I mean.

(The way things are going, at some point after I’m dead, they may succeed in taking it all down and starving in their own filth.)

Problem is, you need to produce something praiseworthy before you expect to be praised. I’m thinking you don’t quite comprehend that.

“The blackest thing ever happened on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.”

Indeed it did.

Jed Esty – your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul. Even now, now, very now, an old black lesbian is replacing your white bard.

“Monique Judge is black,”

Even without the picture the name Monique is a dead giveaway that she is Black. I have never met a White woman named Monique, just like I’ve never met a Black woman named Becky.

"Whiteness" makes it difficult for Black people to feel for the victims of Sandy Hook/Boston marathon bombings. https://t.co/v5bNdKMdbQ pic.twitter.com/VAVCzWoHsU

— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) December 12, 2016

“You’re thinking of George Washington who invented the peanut.”

Didn’t he also invent grills? Of course, back then, they were made of wood.

Damn.

Someone should have made a musical about Shakespeare as a black rapper singing, “To be or not to be, dat be da bomb!!”

Then the students would have spared Willy Chuckspeare and gone after Robert Frost or someone else.

“We invite everyone to join us in the task of critical thinking…”

Critical thinking is quite different from systems thinking. Siskel and Ebert versus Einstein and Feynman I’d say. Thumbs up and thumbs down is the hallmark of critical thinking; “Noticing things” is a feature of systems thinking; . A mon Avis

Also I point to The Times for this unexpected article that is right up iSteve Alley.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/three-year-olds-can-be-identified-as-criminals-of-the-future-5vwwf8lkq

We are at war with Russia; they are running a coup; we are no longer free. POTUS must declassify all information NOW pic.twitter.com/WGAEmSqyiy

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) December 13, 2016

Trump derangement syndrome in action.

What the hell did she say? That was an even tougher read than old Willy.

I think that was Beethoven.

Yessss, Ivy; our Ivy! These fracking, intellectually lazy & challenged students should be fighting like crazy for Otto Warmbier (warm beer, whatever…:)) who did stupid stuff (now must serve 15 years hard labor??????!!!!!) with a flag in N. Korea.

I really hate these Ivy students of today – God, I hate these kids – thank god my sons are not like these epic assholes. They are so full of narcissism that they don’t even know they are losers – haha. They don’t care about rights/freedom/free speech, never did, They have proved to the public that they are ok to ignore a fellow student imprisoned in North Korea – this is national news….oh shit, I am expecting too much from Millennials.

They don’t give a shit about Otto (too Waspy/German and all that) except to talk about their petty “safe space” or “identitarian” shit. Memo to students: Shakespeare is way over your stupid ass; white or black – sorry he was smarter and cooler than you centuries ago – ouch. Go fight for Otto and get him the F out of North Korea! – prove to me that you have balls/c*nt, or are as strong as a Shield Maiden! Forget Trump; this is something all you dumb-ass, privileged Ivy League kids, could actually get your 15 minutes to prove to many that you are not the coddled, weak, spoiled and useless people everyone thinks you are! I love my sons (and their friends I know), I hate so many of their peers because they are useless and give excuses, excuses, excuses. My grandfather’s day: excuses=frozen to death.

You know… I’m for multi-culti humanities from now on.

No more forcing non-whites to study white/Western culture and literature.

Only white kids should be allowed to study white history, western lit, and western art, and etc.

Let blacks only study black stuff… esp in Swahili or some African language since English is European.

Yeah, let different races study different things. And this will be good for white power. The less the non-whites study white history and culture, the less they will be inspired by Human Achievement and Human Genius.

It’d be like a black film student refusing to see movies made by whites and Jews and only sticking with black-made films. OK.

Henceforth, Alt Right should lead a movement.

NO MORE REQUIREMENT FOR NON-WHITES TO STUDY WHITE/WESTERN CULTURE,

“Most People of Color agree with this action. That tells you something right there.”

Why, indeed it does.

I’m only replying to you assuming that you are an actual unironic self-caricature of a stupid lefty, rather than an ironic troll-like caricature of one. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

Some words from the Bard to the Ivies about their future:

Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide.
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick, weary bark.

“I’m waiting for these children to take down every white man’s modern convenience they depend on.

After all, things like central heat, indoor plumbing, electrification, automobiles, medicine, dentistry…”

Invented by White men? Where are you getting your hateful racist fake news from? Breitbart? All of those things were invented by Black Lesbian Muslims you racist White supremacist.

In Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, there is a scene where Cardinal Wolsey is trying to convince Queen Katherine, Henry’s Spanish-born first wife, to abdicate and to go live in a convent so that Henry can marry Anne Boleyn. Katherine refuses and then declares:

Would I had never trod this English earth,
Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it!
Ye have angels’ faces, but heaven knows your hearts.

What will become of me now, wretched lady!
I am the most unhappy woman living.

Alas, poor wenches, where are now your fortunes!
Shipwreck’d upon a kingdom, where no pity,
No friend, no hope; no kindred weep for me;
Almost no grave allow’d me: like the lily,
That once was mistress of the field and flourish’d,
I’ll hang my head and perish.

For comparison, here’s a poem by Audre Lorde, titled “Sisters in Arms”:

The edge of our bed was a wide grid
where your fifteen-year-old daughter was hanging
gut-sprung on police wheels
a cablegram nailed to the wood
next to a map of the Western Reserve
I could not return with you to bury the body
reconstruct your nightly cardboards
against the seeping Transvaal cold
I could not plant the other limpet mine
against a wall at the railroad station
nor carry either of your souls back from the river
in a calabash upon my head
so I bought you a ticket to Durban
on my American Express
and we lay together
in the first light of a new season.

[blah blah blah blah]

Mmanthatisi turns away from the cloth
her daughters-in-law are dyeing
the baby drools milk from her breast
she hands him half-asleep to his sister
dresses again for war
knowing the men will follow.
In the intricate Maseru twilights
quick sad vital
she maps the next day’s battle
dreams of Durban sometimes
visions the deep wry song of beach pebbles
running after the sea.

[the end]

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sisters-in-arms/

Monique Judge is black, so she’s allowed to say things like “The blackest thing ever happened …”

I don’t know. Judge looks fairly light-skinned. Is there a darker-shaded individual available to give a definitive determination as to the exact level of blackness achieved by any given event? If we’re going to burdened with a Progressive Stack, might as well put it to use.

We’ve reached peak leftism.

Can anyone here provide a good, short explanation for why Shakespeare should have been on that wall in the first place?

My sense is that part of the reason such hallmarks of our culture are now vulnerable (in addition, of course, to the malignant forces actually doing the attacking) is that we’ve fallen out of practice at advocating for them (that culture merits more than mere defense).

“And that’s what really matters in Ivy League English Departments, not who is better at English:”

Ebonics is English you racist White supremacist. Ebonics is just English with a different accent just like New York English, New Jersey English, Boston English, Southern U.S English, Australian English, Kiwi English, Scottish English, Jamaican English, etc. Sorry not everybody speaks English with a neutral generic accent like you.

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/807730060774035457

These aren’t Garrison Keillor’s English majors.

Academic English departments have been the primary locus of postmodernism and deconstructionist philosophy in the US.

Audre’ Lorde looks like Obama.

Flush twice. It’s a long way to the English Department.

No, I would have killed them all off on your behalf, before that! haha! Hmmm….so many of my FB friends are really pissing me off these days; so, once again, I am checking my list, checking it twice; who I will allow to my funeral!!! We have this running joke with my cousins when we are together for 2 sublime weeks in the summer: “Fuck yeah, those people/ that woman/that jerk we all hated/that person who screwed us in business/hurt our family… is never coming to my funeral.

Note: iSteve Alley intersects Privilege Place, not far from Race Road. You can find it off the Affordable Family Formation Cul de Sac near the Invade the World/Invite the World Freeway. Oak Hill Country Club is nearby (Jews accepted since 1972).

“Can anyone here provide a good, short explanation for why Shakespeare should have been on that wall in the first place?”

He is the most influential dramatist in the English language. His plays continue to be performed to this day in thier (mostly) original form – even as movies intended for a wider audience. And they serve as the inspiration for much popular culture, such as Broadway musicals (West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate), movies (Ran, Throne of Blood, Forbidden Planet, The Lion King, etc.).

Shakespeare was the greatest single phrase-maker in the English language, save perhaps for the King James Bible; Quotes of his show up everywhere. There were probably half-a-dozen Star Trek episodes, or more, the titles of which were drawn from Shakespeare’s works.

Isaac Asimov (a great Shakespeare fan, and author of Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare) posited that Shakespeare’s corpus of work might have served as a break on the evolution of the English language – that the importance of his work meant that English could not change so much that Shakespeare would become unintelligible or unappreciable to, at least, educated speakers.

Lol, so would the “whitest thing” that could happen on campus be, say, original ground-breaking research in some cutting edge field? Or maybe even just quietly working on coursework in the library??

Because I’d better not say what the “blackest thing” that could happen on campus brings to mind..

I would love it if they tried something similar in a science department. It’s odd that there’s no black lesbian feminists working to use “the masters’ tools” to investigate baryonic dark matter or higher-dimensional topographical manifolds or the like..

Come on, sassy black women! Now’s your chance finally to demonstrate that talent and creativity of yours, which is so often alleged.

As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery…

I googled this womanist’s alleged poems, and none of them appear to employ rhyme or meter. So what sort of technical mastery am I looking for?

While this action was childish, attention-seeking, and mildly disruptive, I hardly think that it qualifies as “the blackest thing ever.” In the contemporary context, the list of contenders for the blackest thing ever would have to be quite a bit more “transgressive” than this.

And yet the Ivies are overwhelmed with applications…. Nevertheless, their students, if this is a typical example, do not seem very impressive at all…. But despite that they seem secure the plum jobs – especially in government.

How does this happen?

No wonder this country is so screwed up.

“All the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players. They have their entrances and exits, and one man in his time plays many parts.”

– William Shakespeare, As You Like It

I can see why Shakespeare was replaced by Lorde.

Pennsylvania also offers another cool example of culture jamming ;

Welcome to lawless Trumpmerica in which Audre Lorde’s innocent brethren gets punished only because she dindu bring into existence three guberment cheese consuming pickaninnies -Thomas, Tomalyia, and Tyreik :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4026790/Pennsylvania-woman-collected-130-000-welfare-benefits-three-children-never-existed.html

I see you’re in the mood to start a fight.

If you can tie the Shakespeare Authorship Conspiracy in with 9/11 Trooferism and Oswald Denialists, this thread will never end.

A suitable prank at this point would be to replace the pic of Lorde with one of the eponymous young white Kiwi songstress.

Academic English departments have been the primary locus of postmodernism and deconstructionist philosophy in the US.

Indeed so.

I contend they pushed on a door too easily opened.

What you know about the college application process/the admitted students is false. Simply false and actually, sad. The Ivies & Co. are the worst offenders…and the first to be losers big league, as the intelligentia is moving on to state “honors colleges,” with no debt. The trailblazers don’t care about corporate labels anymore…if they can the stepping stone degree, the BA, cheap-no debt well, yaaaa. HS students want sun, beach, riding/skiing- Rocky mountains for 4 years…not debt in some boring small, cold town with no satellites from SV. .

Thanks.

That’s a good start.

Off topic, but of interest.

Anna Di Franco’s argument for/against the Electoral college.

http://www.salon.com/2016/12/13/ani-difranco-we-the-people-are-in-charge-and-we-can-insist-the-electoral-college-voters-save-our-democracy/

A functioning media does not simply spread lies or amplify would-be dictators because it’s good for ratings. The media is in many ways complicit in, if not responsible for, the Trump phenomenon. The overwhelming support of him by the media, intentional or not, has driven and will continue to drive our relationship with the man.

[exised]

Enough citizens working in the media must acknowledge the existence of the Electoral College to inspire enough other citizens to call their state assembly members, contact their electors, march on their state capitols and demand that the Electoral College fulfill its suddenly crucial duty of oversight. We need a critical mass of citizens to demand that the Electoral College provide the antidote to the very disease it created.

Then, I believe, we should abolish it once and for all before it can wreak such havoc again. The Electoral College is an undemocratic convolution that stands between us and the concept of one person, one vote that Americans live by. It is the reason that we are in this mess to begin. It is, ironically, the only thing now that can get us out. We should use it to correct its mistake and then we should remove it from obstructing direct democracy in the future.

We’ve reached peak leftism.

They’re just getting warmed up.

It won’t peak until they have to come to terms with real, personal defeat.

eff all you guys, named Joe. My mother (late 80’s now) wrote her Master’s Thesis on the truthiness of Shakespeare in 1951. I will, only, if you all want it posted here (somehow..Steve & Ron will have to help me do that…so yeah, never gonna happen! – cause I’m too ” out there!”) about her conclusion that WS absolutely wrote his own SH*T. My mother, just lately said, “why are people still debating this? Is it so hard for people today to think that people centuries ago weren’t burdened with all the stuff that we are burdened with and confounded with today?” In her own words, she said that there were always people like her son (my brother) who were hell-bent on questioning the status quo. And, Steve, Ron, many others, are the guys who have the very forums where we, the lost/jaded/tired, come and find other people talking about truthiness. Shit, I’m outta time! I’m still…aaw forget it. I have to get up early and be alert.

Lol, so would the “whitest thing” that could happen on campus be, say, original ground-breaking research in some cutting edge field? Or maybe even just quietly working on coursework in the library??

I dunno…

Reporting a violent crime in progress?
Asking someone to turn down his stereo?
Getting a B on a math test and not caring?

Shakespeare looks like colin kaepernick.

A dialect like ebonics (or the regional varieties of English you listed) is not simply a different way of saying the same words, an accent. There are also different words & phrases not found in other dialects. Although Lorde doesn’t appear to actually be writing in ebonics, just writing English in a way intended to repel most readers, as is common in modern poetry.

The idea that Shakespeare is so iconic he doesn’t need portraits is at least novel. Just exactly why Lorde deserves to be made more familiar to students is another story.

I’ve always found that expression about the master’s tools & house odd. You’d expect the tools used on the house would be exactly the sort useful for tearing it down. You’re not going to tear down Trump Tower with a stone axe. And carrying the analogy into the political, revolutionaries tend to come from the same elite class they are supposed to be overthrowing.

“What the hell did she say?”

“Blackety black black blackety black black black I am woman hear me bore blackety black black blackety black black blackety black black black I am woman hear me bore blackety black black black…”

That’s as far as I got.

Well I can believe it as everything I see from the Ivy League (from the news) makes their students look stupid – unintelligent and badly educated. I’m sure the sciences are still very strong but the liberal arts students sound like morons. But it does make sense to me that that they still secure the best government jobs, as everything our government does seems stupid to me as well.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of The Root before, but it’s an interesting convergence point of iSteveish topics:

• Haim Saban: √ (they’re owned by Univision)

• Henry Louis Gates: √ (founded “under his leadership”; I’m assuming some kind of advisory role)

• Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism: √ ( http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/12/is-my-natural-hair-holding-back-my-career/ )

Can anyone here provide a good, short explanation for why Shakespeare should have been on that wall in the first place?

Read I Henry IV, Macbeth , King Lear, The Tempest, etc

If that doesn’t do it, nothing will.

also, govt jobs are so over. Trump will shutter dumb-ass govt wasteful jobs.

““What the hell did she say?”

“Blackety black black blackety black black black I am woman hear me bore blackety black black blackety black black blackety black black black I am woman hear me bore blackety black black black…”

That’s as far as I got.”

These people need to go to an ivy league college to discover that they are Black? They can’t just look at a mirror? It sure would help them avoid thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt over a useless Black studies bachelor’s degree.

Bravo..wonderful.

And wherever you find a bathhouse community organizer, rest assured that Jimmy Savile also can’t be too far away:

They are only accepting 5% of the top 5-10% in the country….accepting 10 % of the top 5% of foreign students (for the $$$).

So, 70- 75% are sooo mediocre..incredibly average in intelligence. In my day 85% were the top 5%; not 20% today. Also, I am not talking about the athletes (20-25%) at all, from all over the world. A very small percentage of the athletes are in the top 5% (worldwide) of academic ability/intelligence/test scores. The Ivy & Co. are gonna be epic-bullshit in a few decades – all the startups will come from state universities…as the elite schools will graduate awesome volumes of SJW’s but, they will be cheap alumni givers. haha. I mean, the Ivies have doubled-down to get the smart football players to come to their school. Weird factoid: Football players are the most generous alumni donors. IRONIC, RIGHT??? My sons didn’t like the zeitgeist at these campuses…and, times are a changing again.

I would be interested in reading up on the evidence of collusion. Can you provide a cite?

I wonder if the tweet was prepared and sitting on Twitter’s server, though not yet published, and some of the people who run Twitter make a habit of spying on this activity (or pass info along to friends or reporters who pay for scoops) and the spies were able to react early. If you were Twitter’s CEO, you could make a killing in your stock portfolio just by keeping an eye on Trump.

What do you like about The Tempest?

they have no debt. They are on full FAFSA scholarship. If they default, one day, we are all paying for that degree! OK, the most disgusting thing, since I am an immigrant and all (American citizen), elite U’s have tons of illegals whose education is also paid by the Federal Govt….and, if they default, we all pay for it. I can’t stand the Ivies and Elite U’s! Why should regular folks pay for Illegals at Ivies & Co’s???? really????

hahhahhh, so funny, Kylie. So agree that this was an article that we all need to take a stab at. With Trump in office, stuff will still be thick with fight and intrigue. It will be a ferocious fight for 4 years.

‘cuz he white, a’ight ?!

Very OT, H&M ad directed by Wes Anderson with Adrien Brody. Typical Wes Anderson–you expect something to happen but it doesn’t really. Yet, pastel colours and fancy decor.

My favorite black wordsmith is Aaron.

Alas, but he is a character conjured by the rascal himself.

I have the good fortune to see Titus Andronicus performed live, and then the good sense to see it performed on the following two consecutive evenings.

http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/titus_5_1.html

What do you like about The Tempest?

Where to start? Where to end? The masterly delineation of character, the beautiful manipulation of language, the brief evocation of utopian speculations in 2.1, the meta-theatrical gestures, the contrast between Ariel and Caliban, etc

*

Was he the greatest phrase maker because he was William Shakespeare, or because he was writing at a time when the language was changing quickly ? Is he so much better than Marlowe and others of his time ?

Occam’s Razor: Trump tweeted at 8:20, then deleted and reposted the tweet because he made a typo. (Which is something he frequently does).

Pet theory: 80% of the Shakespeare authorship conspiracies would disappear if we just knew where he was during the “lost” years—1585 to 1592. Those years are critical, because in 1585 he was nobody but by 1592 he had established himself enough to be a threat to current playwrights/actors and was insulted by Robert Greene as such an upstart.

I think one day we’ll find out Will was apprenticed/schooled at some white-collar job befitting a new father/husband who was also the bright son of a social-climbing mayor, and then drifted away to become a playwright, perhaps by punching up a few scripts for other actors or showing some talent at acting on the stage. Such a white collar job/schooling would give Will enough additional education to make the anti-Will snobs give up the ghost.

Elizabeth’s secret service was vast enough to catch Will’s father illegally dealing in wool, and we found those records recently. I’m sure she kept records of apprentices/new students of white collar jobs, just to see who might be a budding intellectual threat or potential recruit for her intelligensia. I think we’ll find that record somewhere someday.

>>We’ve reached peak leftism.

Nope, there is still a long, long way down, and we will surely get there, sooner or later.

Well, at least we can expect that while a bust of Isaac Newton might be destroyed, no one would ever lay a finger on a photograph of Einstein or Feynman…

Collided with Russia? Ouch, must have hurt.

Come on, admit it, you’re really one of us deplorables.

Also peas. And nuts.

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature’s power,
Fairing the foul with Art’s false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.

You’re probably correct in that…the ‘doing something’ like apprenticing with someone, to pay the bills and all.

My mother’s theory was that he had children whom he had to provide for, so for a couple of years, he did boring stoop labor. However, my mother still believes that WS was profoundly gifted. Her thesis dealt with the authenticity of his work vis a’ vis the other contemporary male writers & the speculation that their work may have been his. My mother called bullshit in 1951. And, I have read her thesis…and it is hard to not notice. My mother referred to envy being a yuge factor. Who the frack really knows, right?, even my mother still says that it is inconclusive. But, what a great one was he, right? How could he be so cool and still be relevant?

I knew someone who knew Audre Lourde’s son. My friend said that her son joined the marines to get away from his mom, was often emotionally shut down and non-communicative, but did volunteer that he hated his mom and her lesbian coven of friends and felt like they had tortured him growing up.

Loved it. He always creates a world I’d like to live in.

F off Sailer. Lorde nailed the subject -verb agreement. Woman ARE powerful and dangerous. Tough to say whose quote was better.

What proof?

Victim lit has always been for mediocre writers who can’t compete

Lorde, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Frantz Fanon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and other oppression narrators all pretty much amount to trash who try really hard to not seem like trash. Seriously, read their stuff. The tryhard is palpable, and almost sad. Reminds me of authors in China who keep pumping out books about what happened to them during the 70’s until people just got tired of them.

“…an African American writer, feminist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist.”

Wait, she’s a “womanist?” That changes everything!

I was thinking that it wasn’t quite enough just her being a feminist, lesbian, and civil right activist. But “womanist?!” I’m now sold. What could top that? Put her on Mt. Rushmore and replace Lennon’s pic on the cover of “Meet the Beatles” with her too.

I’m so sad and embarrassed I watched that guy during the Bush years.

Interesting comment. The pattern goes all the way back to Ovid (if not further). His situation was just like you describe: pushed into law, didn’t like it. Wiki has it:

“His father wanted him to study rhetoric toward the practice of law. According to Seneca the Elder, Ovid tended to the emotional, not the argumentative pole of rhetoric. After the death of his brother at 20 years of age, Ovid renounced law and began travelling to Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily.[6] He held minor public posts, as one of the tresviri capitales,[7] as a member of the Centumviral court[8] and as one of the decemviri litibus iudicandis,[9] but resigned to pursue poetry probably around 29–25 BC, a decision his father apparently disapproved of.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid#Birth.2C_early_life.2C_and_marriage

“Quod temptabam dicere versus erat.”

(Whatever I tried to say came out as poetry.)

And let Bassanio reply to the former:

So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts:
How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars;
Who, inward search’d, have livers white as milk;
And these assume but valour’s excrement
To render them redoubted! Look on beauty,
And you shall see ’tis purchased by the weight;
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it:
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.

My take on the Ivy League grads I’ve encountered in my professional career? Overrated. Soft. Weak. Narcissistic. Pathetic. Breezy. Kick up lots of dust and hot air. Insecure. Loud. Self-centered. Shallow. Rude. Arrogant. Unreliable. Sloppy thinkers and poor writers and analysts. Asspains. Credentialed not educated. Have lived their lives in wealthy urban bubbles and rarely have been off concrete. Zero outdoor skills or talents, wouldn’t rely on them to pitch a tent properly or start a propane cook stove. Never have rolled up their sleeves and have done real work at a crap job. Never have been on a farm or shoveled manure etc. Spoiled and entitled beyond belief. No real world experience in anything. Brainwashed. No sense of humor. Don’t know how to tell a joke. Prickly and intolerant. Would break out in hives if forced to drink beer from a can. Insufferable. Scared of dirt. Lazy. Poor free throw and 3-pt shooters. To be avoided whenever possible. Overwhelmed and bedazzled by their self-perceived importance, and general awesomeness. Got their degree via connections or affirmative action or both. Terrible team players. Bad listeners. Uninteresting. Loud mouthed. Trying way too hard to impress. Lose their cool under pressure. I probably missed a few but those are off the top of my head. Apologies to Ivy Leaguers who aren’t like this, I am generalizing. Not all are like this, I’ve worked with some great ones, but stereotypes exist for a reason. Think obama and his ilk. On reflection, every one of these applies to lightweight obozo the pretender in chief.

The Ivy League profs I’ve worked with generally are not this way, at all. They have impressed me as super smart, down to Earth, mega-reliable, super creative, and top flight analysts writers and thinkers. Powerful intellects. Great team players,and great leaders. Respected and respectable. Modest. Great public speakers. Funny! Great sense of humor. Good people and fun to be with. Interesting. Good listeners and world class conversationalists, definitely very cool people to have a single malt or three with. Maybe the smartest guy in the room (they all have been guys, sorry ladies) but would not care or even think about this, and likely to say “I don’t think so!” if you asked him. Maybe think Larry Summers. I’ve worked with folks in engineering sciences and economics, though, and not ‘creative’ writing or wymyns studies.

I am personally in favour of this move. I want the mainstream universities to completely become SJW, to the very top. Not a single white male in the curriculum. Cut these people off completely, culturally speaking.

That way, we can have a clean separation. They can wallow in their mediocrity while we get the fruits of Western civilisation and carry the torch onwards.

These Ivy League universities still have competitive STEM and econ departments, but for humanities you’d be better off in high-caliber East Asian universities like in Singapore, Hong Kong or parts of Eastern Europe.

I’ll see you your $10 replacement, and raise you the replacement of Old Hickory on the front of the U.S. $20 bill with an illiterate Negresse.

There is a solution to this, simply argue for this theory:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/was-william-shakespeare-a-jewish-woman-in-disguise-1.246717

Is there anything Trump can’t do?

Bother about this Shakespearean comedy going on in Penn?

– Maybe he even could – but I’d guess h e won’t.

Also, Wallace Stevens, who went to law school and then worked at The Hartford insurance company for decades.

Peak hysteria?

We are at war with Russia; they are running a coup; we are no longer free. POTUS must declassify all information NOW pic.twitter.com/WGAEmSqyiy

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) December 13, 2016

>>Victim lit has always been for mediocre writers who can’t compete.

“All art is quite useless”
Oscar Wilde

That is a compliment to art, in fact, it’s greatest tribute.

Could Shakespeare have been an admiralty lawyer, given the many maritime references in his places?

The racial extortion and moral blackmail continue.

http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2016/10/from-moral-blackmail-to-political.html

http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-left-masters-of-extortio.html

No she isn’t.

No no NO Mr. Anon!

You have to respond to those who still believe in the relevancy of the dead white scribblers like this:

Jed Esty – your heart
is burst, you have
lost half your soul.
Even now,
now,
very now,
an old black lesbian
is replacing
your white bard.

Now THAT is delivered in the truest of the blackest! (I believe “technical mastery” is how Lorde’s work is described…)

Rather than get bogged down on Shakespeare (and who wrote what), let’s turn our attention to our own Shakespeare, I mean, Ta Nehisi Coates, and his latest spectacular retrospective on the Obama presidency, entitled — wait for it — “My President Was Black”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/

I enjoyed Stephen Greenblatt’s “Will in the World,” which puts our limited knowledge of his biography alongside more general social history of the time and uses it to analyze the plays. Even if you don’t agree with every argument in the book, you walk away with a better sense of how Shakespeare fit into his time.

As for the U Penn thing, I always wonder about a point Steve has brought up a few times, which is why there’s such a huge market for this stuff. That is, why aren’t there more fancy colleges where “Shakespeare was a great writer,” isn’t really a live source of debate? You’d think that the market would segment out into a SJW-friendly and an SJW unfriendly section, or that some parents would push their kids towards something structured and traditional. But while I’m sure UVA is still different from Oberlin, it’s all one continuum, and the humanities in particular looks equally politicized practically everywhere. (Actually, Penn at least used to have a reputation as fratty and jocky and apolitical relative to its peer schools.)

The obvious answer I guess is that the schools have settled on this kind of thing (the spirit of Audra Lorde hanging over them, benignly or in punishing rage) as the moral justification for the school in the first place. Why does U Penn’s endowment get to have bazillions of dollars in the bank? Because they listen sympathetically to black kids when they do stuff like this rather than punish them or even openly disagree, the way the Princeton President and dean just listened and nodded when kids took over their office to yell at them about Woodrow Wilson last year. Heresy is more of a threat to the medieval church than simony, and so forth. But it still seems odd that there’s not more market segmentation. I guess if you’re a kid with interest and ability in books, there’s just never a point at which its better to go to a lower ranked school offering a more traditional curriculum rather than go to an Ivy where they’re tearing down Shakespeare, and in practice all the straight white males have already left the English department anyways.

…or Harambe if one were feeling particularly puckish.

Very little is known about the life of Shakespeare. There is absolutely no evidence that he ever practised law.
What is known, however, is that Shakespeare was the son of a glove-maker from Stratford-upon-Avon who attended the local grammar school. As an aside, the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s destroyed centuries old grammar schools in the name of Marxist dogma.
Apart from that little ‘upstart crow’ contemporary rant, very little is known about Shakespeare’s London days, and what he did before becoming a major playwright. Many have surmised that he was, himself, an actor. It is also surmised that Shakespeare picked up a great deal of his maritime, geographical etc references by mixing with people in the thriving London tavern life of the day.

I went to the yahoo page for LMT. At the highest resolution a single pixel is 6 minutes. Most likely it’s just a graph drawing bug

What did Shakespeare ever do for the English language? Out, damned spot.

In all seriousness, this really is what separate countries are for. Blacks resent and are uncomfortable with white history, white culture and white heroes, much as I would feel if forced to hear rap everywhere I went, read slam poetry, and pretend I admired Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Blacks chafe constantly under white-run society. They regard it as uptight and pretentious at best, and unjust and oppressive at worst. There are probably not two more immiscible races on Earth than African-descended and Anglo-European-descended. Unfortunately we’re all trapped in a bubble of liberal delusion at this point, and the more it becomes obvious that the two cultures need to go their separate ways, the more frantic the efforts to make this misbegotten marriage work. And as if that weren’t enough, we insist on importing millions more browner, cheaper, resentful people on which to lavish our affections.

In the demotic State, this conciliatory process only goes in one direction. White high culture is disappearing, withdrawing into high-IQ redoubts. We are now in the Christmas season, and getting our perennial dose of every song and sacred hymn rendered into R & B or Gospel.

I’ve read every book Ms. Lorde has ever written. If you’re into subliterate black lesbian commies, Audre’s your girl! Er, non-binary genderqueer womyn…

“Was he the greatest phrase maker because he was William Shakespeare, or because he was writing at a time when the language was changing quickly ?”

You could ask the same question about the advances that The Beatles had in rock music and recording techniques and the answer is the same: it doesn’t matter, because Shakespeare and The Beatles are the ones who were creative enough to make the advance happen when and how they happened. It’s their fingerprints all over them, not someone eles’s.

Is Penn Ivy League? (ha ha)

“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffers very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence…. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.” — Abraham Lincoln, speech to a group of black freedmen in Washington D.C., August 1862

Shakespeare would have been an AMAZING rapper if he was born in this era. Shame he wasn’t….

” Shakespeare is lauded everywhere so I don’t get the big deal”

You don’t get the big deal because you are not endowed with the intelligence required to comprehend his works.

“People of color have been overlooked for far too long”.

BS, I am sure that you have never heard a recording of Charlie Parker or John Coltrane in your entire existance, these being great artists which have been ” Overlooked” by yourself.

You are a charlatan, and everything you post is unadulterated nonsense.

Authenticjazzman, “Mensa” society member of forty-plus years and pro jazz artist.

“It is a cool example of culture jamming,”

English major eh?

And who, pray tell, is “Andre Lorde”?

Thanks for this. I was wondering where Genius Coates was hiding.

” Ebonics is English you racist White supremacist.”

Yeah sure it is, only difference is that it is English reduced down to a maximum of fifty words.

Authenticjazzman, “Mensa” Society member of forty-plus years and pro jazz artist.

They’ve been out of the Shakespeare business for a long time. They’re now feeling their oats enough to let it be widely known. It’s is at least somewhat on us that it wasn’t already.

The business they are in is impeding the traditional means of social mobility (such as liberal education – there is a reason Shakespeare drew huge crowds in both the pit and the box) in order to enhance the value of the illegitimate means of advancement they exclusively sell.

Is Penn Ivy League?

Yes, too much so.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

That doesn’t even make sense as a metaphor.

That is, why aren’t there more fancy colleges where “Shakespeare was a great writer,” isn’t really a live source of debate?

It’s not really at Penn either, it’s just that it’s beside the point.

Great writing is superfluous shading toward inimical to what they are in fact about.

When a Black produces something comparable to Shakespeare, then he can receive equal reverence.

A mediocre diversity-checkbox-er does not compare.

I went and looked up possible worthy Black authors for this post and, wow, the pickings are pretty thin. The most cited — Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas, etc. — are all pretty much still in the ghetto — famous for being Black and/or writing about the Black experience.

You’re really not ready for the canon until your race is incidental to the quality of your work, not integral to it.

Women did it — we have many women who are simply famous for being good writers not “good female writers.”

I was thinking that the appropriate portrait would be a boot coming down on a human face…

“I have never met a White woman named Monique, just like I’ve never met a Black woman named Becky.”

Among American women maybe. Monique is a fairly common name among Dutch, Belgian and French women.

How the hell does Putin keep doing it?!

Same difference.

As Sam Francis, following up on the views of many predecessors, wrote repeatedly: hatred for, even tolerance of hatred for, things Confederate and white Southern would eventually be exposed as war against all things white.

If you lack the brains and/or balls to defend Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis; the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and John C. Calhoun – then you lack what it takes to defend Davy Crockett and the men who died at the Alamo, as well as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk.

When you cannot defend, and promote, Southern literature, then you help the subsequent war to remove even Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, who the F cares? Did the BBC really chuck Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear crew? Over political correctness?

I say he is the greatest phrase maker, because quotes of his permeate our culture, even to this day.

You’re channeling Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a timeless movie classic.

Of the 4 black girls in my high school graduating class, one was named “Heather”, another “Monica”. A third was named “Garry Lynn”, she was round as wide as she was tall. I don’t remember the 4th’s name.

Uh oh! That’s the Olberman serious face……shit’s getting real now!

“A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else
only the color”. And
there are tapes to prove that, too.”

Audre Lorde, Power

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53918

Either there are tapes to prove it or this is straightforward blood libel.

Pat smart/dumb aleck comment upon meeting a grad of Columbia, Harvard, etc. — “Isn’t that an Ivy League school?”

Both Martin Luther and John Calvin studied and prepared for a career in law as well before turning to theological pursuits.

The blackest thing ever happened on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania

No, the blackest thing was when some grad student didn’t give up his wallet fast enough and his mugger shot and killed him. Ever since then, Penn has security guards posted on every street corner on the campus and 5 blocks out into the surrounding “community” (ghetto). This costs them millions of $ every year but moving out of the city or becoming a school that whites and Asians are afraid to attend would have cost them billions.

Notice that she doesn’t say that this is the best thing, just the blackest. Even she doesn’t have the balls to claim that Lorde is a better poet than Shakespeare.

The problem with playing “the blackest” game is that Monique and these “black” Penn students ain’t very black – on any street corner in W. Philly you could find ten brothas who are blacker than they are, inside and out. In fact, they pull these stunts BECAUSE they are insecure about their own blackness – even with affirmative action, in order to make it into the Penn English Dept. you have to use a lot of the “master’s tools” and Monique looks like she is a good 50% white (there is enough Monique to make two reasonable size women, one white and one black). So if the criteria for canonization is “who is the blackest” then someone is going to tear down Lorde’s picture and put up cop killer Abu Jamal’s. Contests like these quickly turn into races to the bottom and those who start the contest rarely make it to the finish line. The revolution always eats its own.

there is still a long, long way down

Indeed.

Such self-annihilating doomsday cults like nothing better than to signal their virtue by giving it all for the cause.

or this is straightforward blood libel.

She will no doubt claim artistic license.

That disgusting poem is nothing but psychological projection: she is upset because she thinks White people can kill without consequence, and that is the Power she desires.

What do you like about The Tempest?

The play teaches us to make what we can from our brief, mystical existence.

Prospero, born a duke, has been overthrown and exiled with his child-daughter to an island. There, Prospero develops magical powers and develops a kingdom populated by a few strange creatures. Eventually Prospero manages to marry his daughter to a nice young man who has been shipwrecked to the same island. Finally, Prospero is satisfied by his daughter’s happiness, and so he retires from his magical kingship. He sums up his acquired philosophy as follows:

Our revels now are ended.
These our actors, as I foretold you,
Were all spirits and are melted into air,
Into thin air.

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve.

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Life is an illusion, but it includes moments of happiness — such as helping our children to succeed us.

I happened to catch NPR’s breathless interview with Genius this morning. He said something like, “until this election, I had no idea the depth of White supremacy in this country.”

Yeah, a guy who has spent his career observing and chronicling, is caught flat footed, so, surprise surprise, we have to root and hack even harder until the warm glow of racial happiness descends on us all.

Our comedians and actors have failed us as well so perhaps this attack on Shakespeare is fitting. In a healthy non-fearful society they would be the first line of defense against such silly assertions. Public chiding and gentle humiliations should be enough to discourage this type of stupidity and give heart to the school administrators to prevent themselves from being pissed all over by their students. But like some autoimmune dysfunction, our national joke and story tellers are the most heavily infected with the disorder to the point that they would rather not be funny than say something that puts them at risk. They are the last one’s to get the joke.

Apparently, Clarkson punched an Irish BBC staffer in the face and called him an opprobious name because his dinner, after a hard day’s shooting, was late.

You can be sure that if Hillary had won in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote that this same writer would be defending to the death this valuable Constitutional check on the rabble as a cornerstone of our freedom. It’s all who-whom with them. They are all still in various stages of grief and keep imagining various ways to cheat the Grim Reaper – they will demand a recount, they will convince the electors to become faithless, they will amend the Constitution so this won’t happen again, etc. After Jan. 20 they will demand that Trump be impeached every time he sneezes or tweets. It will all go nowhere. Feel free to ignore them.

Thanks for that The Times link!

The full paper behind that The Times article is available at http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0005

Here is an iSteve article from two years ago about the Dunedin Study: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-dunedin-study-nature-nurture-over-40-years/

And here is a link to James Thompson’s blog (mentioned by Steve) calling out an early keynote speech about this paper: http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2014/12/attending-conferences-test-of.html

Hopefully Dr. Thompson and/or Steve will comment on the current paper.

More about the Dunedin Study and its members: http://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/studies/assessment-phases/the-study-members

Regarding the paper:

I thought Figure 4 did a good job of showing the dramatic cost differences between the high cost (22% of subjects) and the low cost (30%) groups.

There is more detail in the supplementary materials PDF including this:

The dataset reported in the current article is not publicly available due to lack of informed consent and ethical approval, but is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request by qualified scientists.

Page 9 of the SM had an interesting table of social cost category burden by sex. Not surprising that men dominated (~75%) crime and injury claims, but I was a bit surprised by how much women dominated hospital stays and prescription fills (by 71/63%).

Page 7 of the SM has details of the age 3 test(s) they used.

Yep. It’s hard to believe that these idiots, er, uh, college presidents, did not notice what happened to enrollment, alumni giving, etc. at U Missouri.

A few high profile student expulsions and faculty firings would nip this in the bud. Start with cuck Jed Esty. What kind of name is that?

Shakespeare was popular in his own time, although it wasn’t a high prestige field.

It’s a little more complicated than than. Yes, actors were considered little better than criminals, but on the other hand Shakespeare’s company appeared regularly before Queen Elizabeth and then King James. They were called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and then the King’s Men, and it wasn’t just a figure of speech.

A number of books gathering examples of fine writing were published in London around 1600. Non-dramatic poets got the most citations, but playwrights also got plenty of quotes, and Shakespeare by far the most among playwrights (of course Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece got cited too). Plays (especially Shakespeare’s) were a staple in the bookshops.

But it took about 150+ years for Shakespeare to ascend to the top of the heap. He wasn’t hugely in sync with the subsequent Enlightenment. They admired him, but found him old-fashioned. But when the Romantic age came along at the end of the 18th Century, the young Romantics like Goethe and Hazlitt recognized Shakespeare as the guy who had been where they wanted to go long ahead of them.

That’s fair. His reputation in the 17th century is hard to get a handle on. Bentley wrote a book arguing that Jonson had a better reputation among writers, but the publication data indicates pretty clearly that Shakespeare remained much more popular among readers. Different critics had different favorites, but my sense is that there was no consensus that Shakespeare was better than Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. Interestingly, Dryden said that Beaumont and Fletcher were better at portraying gentlemen, evidently because they came from a higher social class.

For most of the “might haves” or “must haves” we have for William Shakspere (or Shagsper, or other variations of the spelling on his six extant signatures, none of them “Shakespeare”) of Stratford, we have “definitely did” for Edward DeVere. Intimate knowledge of the language of law is one of them, requiring Stratfordians to include “service as a law clerk” as one of the many things he “must have” or at least “might have” done during the lost years.

If you really want to get a feel for how deeply the language of the law is ingrained into the speech of Shakespeare’s characters, check out the work Sir George Greenwood.

As a salient example, I quote Mistress Page from The Merry Wives of Windsor:

The spirit of wantonness is, sure, scared out of
him: if the devil have him not in fee-simple, with
fine and recovery, he will never, I think, in the
way of waste, attempt us again.

Here is Shakespeare placing in the mouth of a housewife (indeed, a commoner) “fine and recovery,” a term for obscure legal proceeding, which she tosses out during a casual conversation.

Shakespeare studied law, alright.

What other writers have contributions on the order of:
http://shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/phrases-sayings-shakespeare.html

As Mr. Anon noted in his wonderful summary, the King James Bible is a worthy contender:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/feb/18/phrases-king-james-bible
but coined fewer new words (if you only follow one link here make it this one):
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12205084
a good summary from that article:

He also found that the Bible coined few new words. Shakespeare by comparison, introduced about 100 phrases into our idiom, to the Bible’s 257, but something like 1,000 new words. The English Bible introduced only 40 or so, including “battering ram” and “backsliding”.

“This reflects their different jobs,” says Crystal. “The whole point of being a dramatist is to be original in your language. The Bible translators, in contrast, were under strict instructions not to be innovative but to look backwards to what earlier translators had done.” Earlier translators whose only concern was to translate the Bible literally.

Also worth noting:

“Only 18 (res: of the 257 phrases) of that total were unique to the King James Bible. It didn’t originate these usages, it acted as a kind of conduit through which they became popular. Tyndale was the number one influence.”

P.S. You make a good point about English changing quickly at the time, but it’s hard to be sure about the direction of causality and I think a good case can be made for Shakespeare and the King James Bible solidifying the English language.

The University of Pennsylvania really needs to clear up this confusion.

Have one degree course in English literature and another degree course in Lesbian Feminist & Multicultural literature and have each awarded degree clearly marked.

Then the students can choose which degree they want, and employers know what they are getting. Traditional employers will probably go for English literature and PC LGBT employers for the Lesbian Feminist & Multicultural variant.

Tennessee Overcoat will be hung up in the closet soon after January 20. The primary reason for his presence was the election of Obama. They both had their 15 minutes of fame.

Now that that lamentable O period is ending, normal people will be more free to move and think about the country.

It’s kind of like if in the future, funny drive time DJs become recognized as the greatest figures in our cultural history, so English departments have portraits of Howard Stern.

Ha ha ha. And then future Ivy Leaguers will claim he appropriated his shtick from Piolín.

The revolution won’t be televised, but it might be Snapchatted, Instagrammed or otherwise mediaized.

I guess if you’re a kid with interest and ability in books, there’s just never a point at which its better to go to a lower ranked school offering a more traditional curriculum rather than go to an Ivy where they’re tearing down Shakespeare, and in practice all the straight white males have already left the English department anyways.

I’ve never me someone who chosen to matriculate into a college other than the most prestigious school he has been admitted to. Things like political climate are negligible; what matters far more than anything else is how elite the school is. For instance, in high school I knew a girl who got into Duke (#8 on US News) and Brown (#14 on US News), and she chose Duke. But, when Yale let her via wait-list, she changed to Yale (#3 on US News).

The Nobel Prize-winning author, V. S. Naipaul, from Trinidad would have been a better choice than Andre Lorde if the issue was simply finding a non-White writer-of-note to replace Shakespeare.

Naipaul “mainlined” a classical British education, including matriculating at Oxford. As I recall from reading his works years ago, Naipaul was in love with all things European — especially what was British — as the epitome of high culture and civilization. I guess that disqualified him. It had to be someone who was “colored” and unknown and detested Western Civilization as the world’s single source of “intersectional oppression” imposed on everyone who is non-White.

I’m pessimistic that the Millennials can get an education that can equal Naipaul’s in the current atmosphere in academia … especially at Ivy League schools.

Lagertha, babe, don’t post under the influence. This is the voice of experience talking.

LOL. Thanks, Steve.

Speaking of the Left’s mental and emotional implosion, I just heard, via Rush Limbaugh, that someone on a late-night TV show said Trump is susceptible to praise and flattery and that he’s influenced especially by the last person he spoke with. More fake news, more public masturbation, telling themselves fake news, giving themselves hope via self-delusion. Delish.

Excuse me:

PRESIDENT Trump — my bad.

Lord God Emperor Trump — my better.

Womanists = black feminists who are even uglier than white and ((( white ))) feminists and who kvetch about it

Yes. And peak fake news.

It’s also because English intellectuals went looking for a Shakespeare, and found him.

In the 18th Century, England was battling France for domination of the Western world. They of course battled militarily, but also culturally. England had long ceded to France the crown of most cultured (it was a mark of high class in England to speak and read French), but in the 18th Century England tried to assert its own culture as superior to that of France. In searching its history, its cultural propagandists found Shakespeare and held him up as the example of the world’s greatest playwright.

Academia is a foreign country to those of us who have never been there. Not even a country. More like a castle in the air. We can only wounder why it takes itself so seriously. The blaxx I know don’t speak the white man’s language among themselves. What are black students even doing in an English department. Are they there to appropriate white culture?

Law clerk sounds like a great idea. But perhaps it was law student?

From my (basic) research, it seems England of the time didn’t train lawyers via becoming law clerks, but instead sent kids to law school in London—the famous Inns of Court.

Some English king (probably Henry II or Edward II) way back in medieval times had made it a requirement that if you wanted to practice non-ecclesiastical law in England, you had to study at the Inns of Court—no apprenticeships.

And all the Inns of Court were in London, right under the King’s nose.

Probably this requirement was made so the King could have an army of lawyers trained by people loyal to him and kept under his watchful eyes. The Church’s lawyers threatened his powers and were well trained, but were limited to ecclesiastical courts. Local lords could have had their own lawyers if apprenticeships were allowed, and they could threaten him. By making all non-Church lawyers train under his watch and by his men in his town, the King kept local lords from amassing legal eagles to become hostile to him, and also allowed for a more polished lawyer loyal to him to take on the Church’s canon lawyers.

Anyway, perhaps Shakespeare and his Dad, worried about his growing family with no income, sent him off to London to the Inns of Court. There, he studied, got bored, watched the plays performed in the law schools (law schools would sponsor plays to entertain the students), went to the theater, and got recruited to the stage.

When you cannot defend, and promote, Southern literature, then you help the subsequent war to remove even Shakespeare.

True and well said Mr. Jake.

Why do they call it an English Department?

Why not something more inclusive?

How about “The Department of Vibrant and Diverse Language Arts “?

We can build it, but we lack the tricknology of the sons of Yakub.

So what’s the difference between a feminist and a “womanist?” Is that a dig at “humanist”? Is it a dig at “feminist”…

scholars of color

Nice one, I like how they diligently signal that they aren’t real scholars but “scholars of color”.

This coincidence becomes less of a miracle if you consider, that there wasn’t much that they could have studied instead.

The history of language eh?

They sound almost like that lunatic who shot Rep. iffords in Tucson.

He kept talking about the meaning of words and their political connotations

That was the message of God and Man at Yale, published more than 60 years ago. We still haven’t learned.

Jews and blacks have a profound desire to appropriate white gentile geniuses and creations as their own.

Lorde, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Frantz Fanon, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Morrison doesn’t really belong on that list, she has talent and writes amusing red-pilled books. I think she is the only writer who managed to insert an antisemitic barb into a novel and get a Nobel Prize for it.

In other words, you’ve got nothing or can’t be bothered.

Not good enough.

Jesus! I cannot BELIEVE the conglomeration of soulless pussies at that school. I know for a fact, if I were a student there, that new SJW picture wouldn’t survive the following night. That picture would be ripped down, and any following copies would be ripped down until the dean employed an armed guard to sit under that stupid picture, 24/7.

If I lived in that city NOW, I’d figure out a way to get it down myself. What the hell is wrong with the students? Nobody disagrees with this?!

What’s wrong with the students there? This isn’t even about the school! It’s about extremely shitty parents sucking the life force out of their kids!

I recall a few years ago, I’d seen millennials commenting on YouTube videos of sixties happenings, and they’d say, “the sixties rocked! I wish I were alive back then!”

Kids… you’re trying to be the sixties, I was there, and you SUCK at it!

You’re shitty at being liberals, because you’re shitty people. Being a liberal in the sixties used to have a point. You have no point. You’re awful people. You’re shallow. You’re cowards. You’re followers. You’re mean. You’re anti-intellectuals. You’re liars.

Everything sixties libs used to hate… you are.

They are not at home.

Fool:

“He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health,
a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.”

King Lear (III, vi, 19-21)

And in SJWs…

With the spread of English around the world, Shakespeare has stayed on top ever since.

Shakespeare is a not inconsiderable reason why English spread around the globe, and certainly why such a field as English exists to pay Prof. Esty’s considerable salary.

Bach likewise took awhile to catch on.

Gentle Anthropoid American literary giants fully back this inquest into the changing nature of authorship.

Shakespeare is a not inconsiderable reason why English spread around the globe,

That is moronic. That’s like arguing that Shaikh Zubair’s authorship of Al-Kitab is why Arabic spread ’round the globe.

“With Trump in office, stuff will still be thick with fight and intrigue. It will be a ferocious fight for 4 years.”

Definitely. What’s so hilarious is the leftists (especially the distaff did) aren’t digging in their heels as a matter of principle but simply because for the first time in ages, they’ve been thwarted.

For your viewing pleasure:

My academic line on all things Shakespeare descends from Penn’s Matthew Black and Albert Croll Baugh, so last night I had plenty of things to say on this topic. Mostly around why people should bother with Shakespeare.

Instead of writing I hunkered down with Henry V and a glass of water.

Today I’ll fasten the onion to my belt and recall the time, in a graduate class about propaganda–excuse me, persuasion in information campaigns–we were shown the 1915 Birth of a Nation.

It was as an illustration of I don’t recall what, maybe camera angles and editing in silent movies/documentaries. The next day was Leni R., which the prof called Birth of a Reich.

The scene from BOAN that most infuriated my classmates was the one that showed a statehouse full of Africans engaging in, by today’s standards, tame and childish behavior.

That scene occurred to me as my brain scripted the moment where the portrait was replaced.

It now appears that Penn is tied with Yale on proving Griffith right to a degree that would have been unthinkable in the 1980s.

And the calculated, intentional, well-funded degradation and destruction of the Ivy League universities is approaching singularity…as many of the Sailertariat themselves prove Useful Idiots in that agenda, rather than fighting back.

Okey dokey.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more….”

Kingsley Amis in the posthumously published “The King’s English” stated the obvious:

Shakespeare

It is fair, though hardly very important, that to say or imply that the man of this name is not our greatest writer marks a second-rate person at best.

Esty has that “please don’t hate me and PLEASE don’t think I’m a racist even though if you call me one I’ll nod my head guiltily and beg forgiveness” expression of a true GoodWhite jellyfish. (…Goofish?)

The Left is actively making themselves stupid.

Well, they’ve got to catch up with Trump.

I think Shakespeare tends to be over-rated relative to his contemporaries (which include Marlowe, Bacon, and many others) but he’s a totem for the the efflorescence of English literature under Elizabeth, which is the earliest form of English that has maintained some level of comprehensibility with our own = before that, they still relied on Latin (as a matter of fact, a lot of Bacon was originally in Latin, IIRC). That period — which within 20 years would give us John Donne and the King James Bible, and which had already given us the Book of Common Prayer and many other foundational texts in history, philosophy, literature, and poetry (via translations, often) is, like it or not, our “cradle” for English literature. Everything subsequent looks back to it (if not to WS, personally) and therefore you can’t really understand the subsequent evolution of English literature without a thorough grounding in Elizabethan=Renaissance literature, that includes Shakespeare (and many others, of course.)
This is not only the case in terms of verse (prosody), and vocabulary, but also in terms of ideas, since the Elizabethan-Jacobean Renaissance also involved a working over — again, in comprehensible English — all the great ideas of Classical Antiquity.

Substituting politics for literature, it would be sort of like removing a portrait of George Washington and replacing it with one of Barack Obama. It involves a substitution of something ephemeral, recent, and not yet tried by history or tradition, in place of something that represents the basic foundation of our verbal culture. In other words, it was and is profoundly ignorant. But that’s college kids for you.

“We’ve reached peak leftism.”

There is no bottom with these people, or no “peak,” if you prefer.

Can anyone here provide a good, short explanation for why Shakespeare should have been on that wall in the first place?

My sense is that part of the reason such hallmarks of our culture are now vulnerable (in addition, of course, to the malignant forces actually doing the attacking) is that we’ve fallen out of practice at advocating for them (that culture merits more than mere defense).

I will weep for thee,
for this revolt of thine methinks
is like another fall of man…

Sometimes I just come here to watch Tiny Duck step on his Tiny D*ck. With cleats. 🙂

That parody of leftists is indistinguishable from actual leftists these days is quite amusing.

I think Shakespeare tends to be over-rated relative to his contemporaries (which include Marlowe, Bacon, and many others) but he’s a totem for the the efflorescence of English literature under Elizabeth, which is the earliest form of English that has maintained some level of comprehensibility with our own = before that, they still relied on Latin (as a matter of fact, a lot of Bacon was originally in Latin, IIRC).

Intellectual virtue signaling is the price essential douchebags pay to virtue.

In fact, Ebonics (the true language of the street Africans, not the “Ebonics” of the black Marxist self-parodies in university English departments) is a form of creole dialect. It is indeed a sort of pidgin tongue.

Robert Schumann was sent by his widowed mother and his guardian to study law to fulfill the terms of his inheritance.

He was intent on a career in music, though, and finally wrote his mother that, “My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law.” Schumann, as eloquent a writer as he was taciturn in conversation, managed to prevail and began studying piano under the master teacher, Friedrich Wieck. Luckily an injured finger ended his dream if becoming a virtuoso pianist and he turned to composing music instead.

The self-made billionaire who just came from nowhere to pull off the greatest political upset since “Dewey Defeats Truman”?

You’re calling that guy stupid?

Please, continue to make these errors, I’m loving it, and it only contributes to his victories.

Keith Olberman has fallen from a cable network job to… “GQ Pundit”?

In a world of “golden parachutes,” all Keith got was a whoopee cushion.

Biggest question for me is, what job does Keith have to be offered before he figures out that broadcasting just isn’t his bag? It must be a devastating existential blow to love something, devote your life to it, and wind up discovering very late that you’re bad at it. I guess that happens to a lot of entertainers. It almost broke David Hasselhoff.

I guess in that scenario then, if you lack grit, railing at the dying of the light is the only option except resigning to insanity. The bitter irony is that committing to the first option ensures the other option.

The tragedy of Keith Olberman could be averted, if he just resigned, and took a painting class.

I don’t doubt that what you are saying is true, but I’ve lived on both sides of the continental divide, and I think the obsession with going to the very highest school that picked you, as opposed to the one that offers the best scholarship, or is closest to home, or has a great football team, is more of an East Coast than a West Coast thing. Or maybe it’s an upper class as opposed to middle or UMC thing. Because there are lots of very very smart middle class kids in the Midwest, South, Southwest, or Mountain West, who could get into some lesser Ivy or Near Ivy, but go to the flagship State U. because it’s plenty good, is close (but not too close) to home, costs a fraction as much, and is a helluva lot more fun.

I think it was partially a revolt against French cultural domination. France had such cultural sway in Europe that everyone was bowing to them, but the emergence of 19th Century nationalism, the horrors of the French revolution, and the anger/fear of Napoleon made everyone start rejecting French culture.

The Russian aristocracy, as Tolstoy demonstrated in War and Peace, spoke French as their language. The German nation was just emerging as a cohesive whole after being a confederation for centuries, and having had to deal with French (and Italian) hegemony in the arts. Even the Ottomon Empire, declining as it was, had close cultural ties with the French. Spain, Portugal, and the Dutch had dropped off the map culturally, so England became a good place to reach to for a breath of cultural fresh air.

And the British success in the 18th and 19th Centuries at conquering the world—but of course, avoiding conquering Europe—made them admirable to many Europeans wanting to emulate them. And the Brits made it a mission to popularize their culture.

And then Napoleon came storming through Europe and was the terror of the land. After that, the popularity of French culture declined in hatred of his conquering.

This is similar to how up until WW2, German culture was held in high regard by most of the west. The German film industry was a true rival to Hollywood. German industriousness, inventions, and ability were prized as the greatest flowering of the time. Freud and Nietsche were the intellectual vanguard. No less than Mark Twain was trying to learn German, and American academics developed their academic theories in response to German ones (Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, wrote law review articles in response to German academic theories about the law). German academies were considered the place to go for intellectuals—this is why Hollywood movies stereotyped scientists with German accents.

The WW2 happened, and Hitler’s threat pretty much soured everyone on German culture.

“But when I tell him he hates flatterers, he says he does, being then most flattered.”

Casio on Caesar

No, no, you are doing Ducklet an injustice. He said Trump collided with Russia. It was at night and snowing hard. Trump apologized, then asked, “Excuse me, is this the way to the White House?”

Read this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

in order to understand the level of incompetence of future America (present day America in Democrat hands).

These folks are whining like crazy about Russian hacking now but they did nothing to stop the hackers, even after the FBI warned them. They fell for dumb spear fishing attacks (emails telling them to “click here to change your Google password”) that should only work on clueless senior citizens like Hillary.

Do a google image search on “Yared Tamene” – this is who the DNC put up against Russian hackers.

On good days, I worry that Orwell was prophetic with his 1984, but on bad days I worry that Idiocracy is really our future. When I read the story I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Oh yeah:

JUST IN: Trump taps Stephen Miller to run White House policy shop https://t.co/vTT3Bpwemb pic.twitter.com/KpxrvzOqX5

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 13, 2016

“In all seriousness, this really is what separate countries are for.”

America since it’s inception has never been a “one racial horse” town. It is separated by race, religion, and political ideology, but bound by an unnerving resolve by its citizens to remain as one.

“Blacks resent and are uncomfortable with white history, white culture and white heroes, much as I would feel if forced to hear rap everywhere I went, read slam poetry, and pretend I admired Mumia Abu-Jamal.”

Some blacks feel this way, as demonstrated by this cultural appropriation by a group that represents the Coalition of the Left Fringe group.

“There are probably not two more immiscible races on Earth than African-descended and Anglo-European-descended.”

I applaud your tendency to wildly exaggerate matters. Remember, however, you invaded and invited the darkies to the party in the first place for their labor.

“Unfortunately we’re all trapped in a bubble of liberal delusion at this point, and the more it becomes obvious that the two cultures need to go their separate ways, the more frantic the efforts to make this misbegotten marriage work.”

It’s delusion all right, one of epic proportions on your part to keep insisting that blacks and whites remain separate.

“White high culture is disappearing, withdrawing into high-IQ redoubts.”

White high culture is actually flourishing. Go read Vox Day’s blog for a preview.

After he finished college, Naipaul was only back in Trinidad for 2 months. I suppose he could have substitute taught during this brief window but otherwise it doesn’t really fit his timeline.

This time of day, throughout the West behold
Fair Phoebus’ fire engage in swift decline
And gloom to darkest red, which ‘ere was gold,
And soon to Night return this world of thine.
A most faire Knight, who dreams the great reborn,
Sets out with divers men upon his quest;
And pray this don shall find his golden morn,
And spread his Dawn throughout a wokening West.
But I, poore drybone poet I,
Do feare for thee when thinking on thy schooles;
And from my bed in Holy Trinity,
I dreame thy dawn be but for Feast of Fooles.
My face is gone; my name shall follow soon;
Mayhap Knight’s Dawn shall be but rise of moon.

Yes, if I had a nickel for every time the boys at Temple Beth-El whined, “You know, just between you and me, William Shakespeare was really Jewish”…..

And I thought that it was only the idiot left that whined about cultural appropriation…

Anyway, you haven’t really seen Hamlet unless you’ve seen it in the original Yiddish.