If Mort Divine ruled the world

[rms]

This video speaks volumes

 

[Mort Divine]

For what it's worth to you guys even school faculty were complaining of an atmosphere of racism at Missouri.

 

[rms]

How can racism be an atmosphere if its institutionalized?

 

[CiG]

What does an atmosphere of racism actually mean though?

I would never deny that racism doesn't exist in America, but that's such an indirect, murky critique.

 

[rms]

I actually don't even know why I questioned that aspect. I have no interest if the students of Mizzou are prejudice or not. I don't like how that group acted and the video clearly shows that. #blacklivesmatter didn't want to "listen" to the critiques of their movement and from what I understand are trying hard to unify, establish a group message, and vocalize what they want to change.

This group? 1st ammendment rights for certain things but not all. And asking the President to apologize for his white privilege is so ridiculous

 

[Dak]

I'm so sick of the term/word right/rights.ITS MUH RIGHT U HAFF NO RIGHT HERPDERP

 

[Dak]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/

Might be the best article ever to grace the generally dismal pages of the Atlantic. It would do Mort some good (This is the article that was referenced by Reason).

 

[SentinelSlain]

Basically there has to be a decline in the power of the White male because of some reason/ muh feels/ "imperialism" / das racis/ holocaust/ "slavery" / because white women are the product of massive selective breeding for attractiveness = jealous feels / muh entitlement / paranoid inferiority complex = breaking good things to feel better about your own shittyness.

So the exact details are an irrelevance, especially seeing as THEY can always utilize wells like Marxism and Post-Modernism to find or create explanations for anything they do, so long as it somehow fits into an anti-white male narrative. This is because neither of those wells are falsifiable.

 

[Dak]

I read a quote somewhere that said something along the lines of "Men get jealous over women, and women get jealous over everything else", or something to that effect. Seems pretty accurate amongst all the "cishets" (you know, 90+% of the planet). Jealousy(envy) is incredibly corrosive - that "breaking good things to feel better" problem.

 

[CiG]

All I hear is a bunch of interest groups huffing and puffing about strength and self-empowerment yet acting like a bunch of pathetic victims while they demand that those they consider privileged be the tools for their own empowerment.

Empower yourselves.

 

[Dak]

Pat and I have been around a bit on the empowerment thing. Responsibility and empowerment go hand in hand - and responsibility is something those mental children want nothing to do with.

 

[CiG]

It's why I think something really needs to be done about welfare-reliance.

 

[Mort Divine]

There is very little "welfare reliance." At least in the US more than 50 percent of welfare recipients stay on it for less than 2 years and if you add in those that are on it for 2 years+ it still ends up being more than 80 percent of recipients being on it less than 5 years.

Sure, some might 'abuse' it, but it isn't some widespread problem.

 

[Matt]

People opposed to it like to make it seem as if there are tons of people perpetually using it and not working, and while there is obviously some abuse, it's been shown to do a huge amount of good

 

[CiG]

I was speaking from an Australian perspective, but I'd appreciate the proof of your claims here, definitely something I'd be interested in reading.

 

[Dak]

I am also interested in such studies.

 

[SentinelSlain]

People abuse it in the UK but people doing the worst jobs tend to justify themselves by comparison to those on the dole.

 

[Dak]

AT LEAST I SHOWED UP TO WORK. Have a cookie.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/09/looking-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth/

But there’s another common thread to the mass-media criticism: they’re all about things that happen on colleges and inconvenience college professors. Compare the recent bullying of a fan-artist to the point of suicide because she drew a cartoon character too thin and so was “erasing fat people” – to the recent students at Yale getting angry at an administrator who said she wasn’t going to enforce cultural sensitivity on Halloween costumes and so yelling and throwing stuff at her and her family.

I feel for anybody who gets yelled at and has stuff thrown at them, but the first of these two stories seems by far the most important; lots of teenagers commit suicide every year because of bullying, the idea that somebody deserves to die because they picture a cartoon character differently is abominable, and anyone who’s been on the relevant parts of the Internet knows this kind of thing is common as dirt. If I were a news editor, I’d consider the first study a much bigger deal. Instead, the second has gone viral in the national media, and the first remains stuck among the same few second-tier sites and SJ-critical nobody bloggers whom these kinds of things are always stuck among. Why?

I worry that the media, especially the online thinkpiece media, overrepresents an insular demographic of Ivy League academics and their friends who spend most of their time on college campuses and don’t notice things that don’t affect them personally. When people on Tumblr are being bullied to suicide or told that they’re garbage or outed or getting death threats, that’s the commoners. When a Contemporary Perspectives On American Literature professor is inconvenienced, AAAAAAAAH SOCIAL JUSTICE HAS GONE TOO FAR! SOMEBODY WARN SALON.COM!

Or to be even more cynical: social justice was supposed to be Yale’s weapon against Caltech and Podunk. But now Yale students are using it against Yale professors and administrators, and now it’s a problem. It’s like the police beating up city council members with the truncheons they usually reserve for poor ghetto-dwellers; you can bet there will be a newfound concern about police brutality at city council meetings.
-------
Finally, I think this might be a wake-up call to worry about the role of academia in media more generally. A friend on Tumblr pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s official list of campaign priorities include “ending sexual assault on campus”? Why not just “ending sexual assault”? Studies find that women are less likely to be assaulted on college campuses than off them. Isn’t “ending sexual assault on campus” the same kind of priority as “ending murder in gated communities?” Every murder is a tragedy, and murders in gated communities are no exception. But wouldn’t it reveal a lot about who mattered in a society if “end murder in gated communities” was how they framed their anti-murder initiatives?

I worry recent criticism of social justice is revealing the same thing.

 

[CiG]

I feel like this person is probably the same kind of person that derided the Belgian cartoonists that drew Muhammad.

Am I being too cynical?

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

HP Lovecraft biographer rages against ditching of author as fantasy prize emblem

From Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi's website:

November 10, 2015 — The World Fantasy Award

It has come to my attention that the World Fantasy Convention has decided to replace the bust of H. P. Lovecraft that constitutes the World Fantasy Award with some other figure. Evidently this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a “vicious racist” like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award. (Let it pass that analogous accusations could be made about Bram Stoker and John W. Campbell, Jr., who also have awards named after them. These figures do not seem to elicit the outrage of the SJWs.) Accordingly, I have returned my two World Fantasy Awards to the co-chairman of the WFC board, David G. Hartwell. Here is my letter to him:


Mr. David G. Hartwell
Tor Books
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

Dear Mr. Hartwell:

I was deeply disappointed with the decision of the World Fantasy Convention to discard the bust of H. P. Lovecraft as the emblem of the World Fantasy Award. The decision seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant, and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.

I feel I have no alternative but to return my two World Fantasy Awards, as they now strike me as irremediably tainted. Please find them enclosed. You can dispose of them as you see fit.

Please make sure that I am not nominated for any future World Fantasy Award. I will not accept the award if it is bestowed upon me.

I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott of the World Fantasy Convention among my many friends and colleagues.

Yours,
S. T. Joshi

And that is all I will have to say on this ridiculous matter. If anyone feels that Lovecraft’s perennially ascending celebrity, reputation, and influence will suffer the slightest diminution as a result of this silly kerfuffle, they are very much mistaken.

Should anyone care to express an opinion on this matter to Mr. Hartwell, feel free to write to him at the above address or to his email address: dgh@tor.com.