An occasional UD feature, tipping our hat to people who cleared his path to victory.
In an Instagram story that went viral this week, Julia Alekseyeva, an assistant professor of English and media studies [at U Penn], appears to refer to Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Penn grad, as the “icon we all need and deserve.”
Just as the “Killing Fields” leader of Cambodia went from an innocent lad on his father’s farm to a vicious degenerate under the influence of university intellectuals in Paris, so vp-designate Vance traveled as an innocent from Y’all Land to Yale, where intellectuals corrupted him with ideas like the therapeutic society.
Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is drawing renewed scrutiny over his past remarks that the American gymnast Simone Biles, who won another Olympic all-around gold medal on Thursday, showed weakness when she withdrew from the previous Games because of a mental health issue.
Mr. Vance, during an appearance on Fox News in 2021, questioned why Ms. Biles was receiving acclaim for stepping away from the competition at the Tokyo games.
“I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people, not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments,” Mr. Vance, who was running for the Senate, said at the time.
Go back to the Fox transcript and note that Vance – chillingly – called Simone Biles commie Simone Weil; and toward the end of the interview he even called her Simone Veil. You can take the boy out of Bumpkin, but once an intellectual, always an intellectual.
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What the Trump campaign doesn’t want you to see!
[Click on image to open.]
Young, bearded, black turtlenecked, cafe intellectual JD poses for intellectual book cover while in intense debate with female intellectuals.
Oppenheimer’s life story is relevant to our current political predicaments. Oppenheimer was destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues. The witch-hunters of that season are the direct ancestors of our current political actors of a certain paranoid style. I’m thinking of Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, who tried to subpoena Oppenheimer in 1954, only to be warned that this could interfere with the impending security hearing against Oppenheimer. Yes, that Roy Cohn, who taught former President Donald Trump his brash, wholly deranged style of politics. Just recall the former president’s fact-challenged comments on the pandemic or climate change. This is a worldview proudly scornful of science.
… shuttering the University of Kansas. Inspired by their leader Viktor Orban’s shuttering of one of Europe’s best universities because it was educating Hungarians, Kansas Republicans will argue that as the epicenter of independent thought in the state, KU must shoulder significant blame for the recent landslide electoral victory for individual rights.
“Something has to happen here,” said Republican legislator Patrice O’Neill. “We have footage of zygotes screaming in agony, and you’re never going to be exposed to that at KU.”
“We know that support for abortion rights correlates closely with level of education,” commented representative Mike Walsh, “and it’s a no-brainer – haha – that tertiary schooling is the core of the problem here.”
“We’d be killing two birds with one stone,” added another legislator, Marnie McCoy. “KU’s curriculum is a toxic stew of gender studies and devil worship. It’s time to pull the plug.”
[I]f we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time…
Democrats have gone to extraordinary lengths to discredit Putin. Why? There really is such a thing as a Zeitgeist or spirit of the times [and Putin embodies it for Russia]…
[W]e say the Russians don’t believe in democracy. But as the great journalist and historian Walter Laqueur put it, “Most Russians have come to believe that democracy is what happened in their country between 1990 and 2000, and they do not want any more of it.”…
So why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he has become a symbol of national self-determination.
Christopher Caldwell
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UPDATE: Comrades! If you really want a bellyful of this sort of thing, there’s a whole new journal full of Caldwell and his fellow travelers. Name: THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY: A USER’S MANUAL.
… in which the student is brought into personal contact with, is made vulnerable to, the aura and the threat of the first-class. In the most direct sense, this is a matter of proximity, of sight and hearing. The institution, particularly in the humanities, should not be too large. The scholar, the significant teacher ought to be readily visible. We cross his or her daily path. The consequence, as in the Periclean polis, in medieval Bologna, or nineteenth-century Tubingen, is one of implosive and cumulative contamination. The whole is energized beyond its eminent parts…
What could, by the lights of the utilitarian or hedonistic commonwealth, be more irrational, more against the grain of common sense, than to devote one’s existence to, say, the conservation and classification of archaic Chinese bronzes, or to the solution of Fermat’s last theorem…
In the critical mass of a successful academic community, the orbits of individual obsessions will cross and re-cross. Once he has collided with them, the student will forget neither their luminosity nor their menace to complacency…”
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Appraisals of the late philosopher Roger Scruton keep appearing. Some people dismiss him as a reactionary; others, like Robert George, see things differently.
The kiss of death for longtime UD favorite, Elizabeth Warren. It’s going to be close to impossible for her to dig herself out of the “she’s an intellectual” hole.
Was Julia Kristeva a spy for the Bulgarian communists?
Who cares. This is what we should care about – that a serious intellectual, in an early version of similar defenses today of the burqa, was capable of writing that forced female foot-binding in China was, you know, fine for them, and even empowering.
Reflecting on [the radical journal] Tel Quel’s delusional infatuation with Cultural Revolutionary China, the French-American essayist Guy Sorman faults them for having succumbed to the temptations of a “boundless amoralism”: an “amoralism” that is inseparable from a distinctively French tradition of “revolutionary romanticism.” He continues: “What links the French intelligentsia to tyrants such as Stalin, Mao, Castro has very little to do with the quest for liberty, justice, and democracy. Such values were dismissed as suitable for dopes and stooges. … Our intelligentsia adored revolutionary violence and the aesthetics of violence. Was it not this spectacle of revolution that attracted Sartre, Barthes, and company?”
Anyone who has read Richard Rorty’s shattering attacks on radical theorists knows what happened next for Kristeva. Richard Wolin writes:
Kristeva … responded to her [earlier] political excesses by renouncing politics in toto — including feminism — as inherently totalitarian: as a sphere that perpetually sacrifices individuals to the injustices and repressions of the “collective superego.” As she explained in a 1989 interview: “We must try not to propose global models. I think that we, then, risk making politics into a sort of religion. … Of the political there is already too much.” Instead of striving for political solutions, Kristeva recommended that everyone who could afford it should enter into psychoanalysis — her new field of professional expertise.
Rorty spent his life preaching against radically transformative “global models” and in favor of pragmatic incremental change within particular countries. Even with the catastrophe of Bulgaria and other revolutionary states in front of her, Kristeva opted to go global — until she didn’t. Until in a kind of reverse-thrust globalism – one of absolute withdrawal rather than absolute embrace – she took her toys and went home.
In the late 1980s, crusading against pornography was a top priority for evangelicals. Mr. Hybels told Ms. Baranowski that he had been told to educate himself on the issue by James Dobson, founder of the ministry Focus on the Family, who had been appointed by President Ronald Reagan to an anti-pornography commission.
Calling it research, Mr. Hybels once instructed Ms. Baranowski to go out and rent several pornographic videos, she said, to her great embarrassment. He insisted on watching them with her, she said, while he was dressed in a bathrobe.
Hereafter known as The Lewd Republic.
As for [Leon] Wieseltier, the longtime New Republic literary editor who lost funding for a magazine startup, he “simply did not consider women to be public intellectuals,” wrote Clio Chang in Splinter.
He harassed women, according to credible accusations, but he rarely published them or chose for review books written by women: “The lowest points were in 2012 — when there were only nine female reviewers compared to 79 male reviewers — and in 2013, when Wieseltier’s section published four reviews written by women.”
… it.
I am the very model of a modern major predator
I squeeze the tits of everyone from copy girl to editor
When I attack I’m confident that no one else will credit her
And if they do then I consult a first-rate lawsuit settler
From Weseltier to Ramadan we’re very ecumenical
In public we are sober, wise, and rather homiletical
But privately we turn out to be somewhat less ascetical
For we must not forget that we have penises and testicles
I’m very good at hiding out behind a piece of shrubbery
Then jumping out and treating you to genitalia rub-ery
And now that my behavior is a matter of discovery
I’m getting very penitent and sorrowful and blubbery.
Leon Wieseltier stayed true to his obsessions, even up to his mid-sixties.
Then they caught up with him.
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His partner uses the withdrawal method.
In honor of its last generation of leaders, Baylor has announced that it has changed both its mascot (a bear) and its motto (Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana).
New mascot is here.
New motto: Magnae Parvum Nuces Cerebrum (Big Nuts Small Brain)
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UD thanks Dame Eleanor Hull for correcting her Latin.
