Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Sunday, May 17. 2009

This is superb: The History of Political Correctness, with "Cultural Terrorism"

All readers should listen to this piece of history, in which a disappointing "proletariat" - which refused revolution - was replaced by a Gramscian program for an intellectual elite-driven neo-Marxism designed to bring down Western civilization to replace it with...whatever...run by them.


(For Marcuse, it seems to have been all about random sex with interesting strangers rather than anything economic, which is fine with me but Mrs. B., who I am quite fond of and to whom I am quite attached and comfortable, would never go along with that idea. Therefore I comply with her wishes and am not a sexual revolutionary despite my many and almost continuous adventurous and curious thoughts about all of the charming females one encounters in life. That was the deal I made with her, and keeping my word is important to me. I guess that makes me a reactionary.)


A big wave of an old Montecristo and a glass of single malt to Thompson for finding this excellent 20-minute piece:


Posted by The Barrister in Best Essays of the Year, History, Politics at 13:24 | Comments (19) | Trackbacks (0)

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Did they even try to find a more ridiculous looking "conservative" narrator down at central casting (kudos on the diction and wide-eyed stare, however), or did they decide that by putting a pipe in his hand and having him bring it to is mouth at just the right moments was comedic enough?
#1 KRW on 2009-05-17 15:15 (Reply)
Thank you for sharing this video! It is excellent. I have linked to it at Google and am sharing it with many of our friends and family. It may even end up on my blog as well.
God bless. :o)
#2 Sparky (Link) on 2009-05-17 16:31 (Reply)
Yeah, that narrator pegs the dorkometer. Shame, because the analysis is spot-on. The 60's revolution and the systematic effort to destroy the family and traditional social institutions (churches, conservative-leaning civic groups) is not accidental.

If I was in an elevator with Stalin, Hitler and Gramsci in 1920, and I had a pistol with two bullets, I'd shoot Gramsci. Twice. He's proven far more damaging to the fabric of western culture, and did far more to advance Stalin's cause than Uncle Joe could have done himself.
#3 Jim on 2009-05-17 16:40 (Reply)
Dorks rule.
#3.1 bd on 2009-05-17 16:57 (Reply)
Liberal dorks maybe. They get to the White House. Conservative dorks get as far as the op-ed page of the WaPo. Though though come to think of it, W did push the dorkometer a little bit. Probably why his daddy picked one for the VP slot, though that one wasn't going far on his own. OK, so my point isn't bullet proof. It still carries some water...in a leaky bucket kind of way.
#3.1.1 KRW on 2009-05-17 17:35 (Reply)
I'm allergic to bow ties. And I don't trust a man with a pipe.
Do I need analysis or tutorials in accepting dorksters? The earnest one with the pipe gave me the creeps.

I read all this stuff and watch clips like this one, and my mind sort of fries on the spot at how much free-thinking is despised by so many. Is there an insecurity gene that thrives in man and beats out the reason gene in huge numbers of the world's population? Save the paramecium: We need to start over.
`
#4 Meta on 2009-05-17 18:54 (Reply)
Thought folks would appreciate this post as much as I did. All I get in comments are comments on clothing fashion. Sheesh, as we say here.
#5 The B on 2009-05-17 21:11 (Reply)
Yes, I'm being shallow. But that's the point. The information presented speaks to what most people here already agree with. This video does nothing to further its cause if even those who agree with it find room for ridicule.

Conservatives can't just sit back and congratulate themselves for being right about something so obvious. They have to take points like this one, in which they are overwhelmingly correct (many left-leaning people that I know loathe PC themselves) and use the point to sell their brand.

BTW, I've done time fighting the PC BS. I've been kept after diversity class. I've objected to lies being distributed as truths in the company where I work(ed). I've argued (or tried to argue) these very points with some people even more conservative than I (10-15 years ago) and not taken seriously. Slowly the problem is being addressed and some of those same people are starting to see the point I was trying to make to them way back then. Funny thing is, they were apparently so dismissive of what I was trying to get across that they don't even recall me pointing it out. Some are even now trying to "educate" me on the same things I was trying to tell them back then.
#5.1 KRW on 2009-05-17 21:31 (Reply)
Oh, and one other thing that I just can't leave out...I couldn't get much further into this thing than where the specter or Sigmund Fruit was raised, but do any of the resident shrinks care to address his role in all of this BS?

Bueller?...Bueller?...Bueller?
#5.1.1 KRW on 2009-05-17 21:34 (Reply)
I understand your chagrin, B. But at the same time appearances do count, whether we care for it or not. The medium is the message and all that.
#6 Luther McLeod on 2009-05-17 21:22 (Reply)
KRW ... it's an unfortunate human condition that other humans never will be convinced about your good ideas until, by some magic transformation, the ideas become their own ideas. So you will never get credit for your own clear thinking. Don't let it matter to you, or feel cheated. Actually, it's a sign of your own success, if folks adopt your ideas as their own. At least, they then act on them. And that's what you meant them to do in the first place.

Some wise person once said, "You can accomplish miracles, if you don't want the credit for them."

Marianne
#7 Marianne Matthews on 2009-05-17 22:44 (Reply)
M,
Not looking for credit. Don't care. I don't personally profit one way or the other. My point is how tiresome it is to listen to someone tell me something I knew before they did whilst they puff themselves up further with their perception of their own perceptiveness. Something I notice occurs somewhat in proportion with how more highly "educated" some people are. Though thinking about this more after I posted the above, maybe this video does serve the purpose to wake up these "smart" people to what poor misguided fools such as myself have been talking about. Perhaps it was serendipitously designed by pompous asses to appeal to pompous asses. Might just be my ignorant opinion...or not.
#7.1 KRW on 2009-05-18 06:04 (Reply)
Anyone who missed the typecasting in that video missed the real point. That it was too subliminal for some makes its point.
`
#8 Meta on 2009-05-17 23:01 (Reply)
The presentation of this video leaves something to be desired, but the facts in it help me understand a lot of strange phenomena in and around American academia. There's a lot of information packed into 20 minutes. I wonder how I lived through the sixties without ever knowing about the Frankfurt School.

Just a couple of examples of ideologies which seem now to have sprung from common roots:

1. The child development professor at Stanford who taught that reading to a child is child abuse. Her theory was that reading to a child violently forces that child into a patriarchal social structure. Children are so traumatized by Mom or Dad reading to them that they pretend to like it, and ask to be read to over and over again.

Harming the futures of children by encouraging her students not to read to their children may have been a small price to pay for challenging the patriarchy.

2. "Queers for Palestine". Zombie pointed out a few months ago that although it seemed strange to most people for a group of gay people to advocate for a political system which murders gays for their sexual orientation, there is a logical explanation. "Queers for Palestine" are anarchists. They think they can destabilize both Western culture and, maybe later, Muslim culture by promoting Palestinian rule. Sacrificing the well-being, even the lives, of gays in the region is a price worth paying.

The video posted here connects the utopian ideology of "Queers for Palestine" to a larger academic and political movement.
#9 Karen on 2009-05-18 00:51 (Reply)
Karen,
Stanford? Amazing...and yet not. Were you studying Psychobabble itself or was this class a requirement for a child education major? When was this? Do you recall what the professor's credentials were? I find this sort of thing strangely fascinating, how ideas like that have to come from people really "smart" enough to be that stupid.

Am reminded of the supposed Lenin quote " Study, study, and study again to learn communism in reality."
#9.1 KRW on 2009-05-18 06:12 (Reply)
I think I read about this child development professor in the Wall Street Journal about 15 years ago. It seemed so bizarre that I though I'd better remember it. I didn't get the idea that her course was required for a degree in child development or child education. But I think she was a full professor. I guess she had to think of a theory to explain why children seemed to like their parents to read to them, when reading is so Western and Patriarchal. If children liked to read, it would challenge her brand of Feminist Theory.

I've also read praise for the vast superiority of learning experiences provided by "wise women" in native cultures compared to a US university, from a professor of ethnic studies at a US university (also part of a team of columnists once carried in the Fresno Bee). She nevertheless exhorted her Ethnic Studies students to get graduate degrees rather than to matriculate through the "wise woman" learning program. I, myself, would prefer the native wise women to an ethnic studies program taught by this professor.
#9.1.1 Karen on 2009-05-18 11:04 (Reply)
"Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left."
(Bill Lind)

That's from the script/essay from which this video was made. The salient part at the end was left out of the video - how PC is coming to America and we are just laughing it off because we don't recognize the danger because we don't recognize the history of it.

But look at the sentence I quoted. In context, it is part of a fairly objective, historical look at the origin of PC. The producers of the video like that part so much, they used typecasting to make it 'real'. It turns the essay into propaganda in a most insidious way as we viewers tend to listen to Martin Jay, who sounds reasonable, looks great, and seems almost apologetic about how this is happening. The 'righties' look like cretins.

KRW, your first instincts were right-on, absolutely. You recoiled from the way the game is being played right under our noses, and I wonder if the writer of the original would approve. No way of knowing, but his article is taken almost verbatim for the video, and at least he remained objective.

Smart work for the producers - the drama, the scenes from the wars, the rallies..... and the 'righties' looking as if they didn't eat their meat so they can't get any pudding.

Anyone can set up a framework for history. It doesn't make it right. What this video does is show just how easy it is to fool people outside of a particular framework.

They depend on people not being smart.
`
#10 Meta on 2009-05-18 10:19 (Reply)
Meta,
How/where did you find the original text? I didn't see anything in the links to indicate (on the surface) that this was an extrapolation.
#10.1 KRW on 2009-05-18 12:17 (Reply)
I Googled 'origin of political correctness'. Top link. I was stunned.

http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html

`
#10.1.1 Meta on 2009-05-18 12:53 (Reply)

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