The attacks are everywhere now. Here’s William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

[These fields are] intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”

(The best attack on “Theory” remains Richard Rorty’s.)

For years, many of this blog’s posts were variations on this observation; and now, with the withering results of the election, we can go further than Deresiewicz and note the historical irony of a ridiculously, coercively, hyper-politicized academy (“ideological positions” trump, as it were, everything, including the aesthetic values that are, after all, the distinguishing characteristic of what we call literature) getting slapped upside the head by none other than the actual politics of this country.

Hence Deresiewicz’s stress on the unreality from which many professors continue to suffer: They just don’t get it that most people have rather conservative and traditional dispositions, and that this reality does not make people shitty reactionaries. The university is supposed to be the place where people’s traditional, inherited perceptions and beliefs are put into question (college is where you read Blake and Nietzsche); but as Todd Gitlin, a man of the left, pointed out in a defense of Allan Bloom, the academy went apeshit radical rather than humanely subversive.

Matty We Hardly Knew Ye

It’ll be a cold day in hell when Rand Paul says something that makes sense.

If we’re lucky.

Named after the anti-fascist martyr.

Red chairs are in; red tables on their way.

Wind chime from Sedona, AZ, a place Les UDs love.

Probably long dead red azalea I found discarded in the woods.

Article.

“We have some radical people in our neighborhood that just don’t know how to act with guns. These neighbors continue to shoot anytime. My grandchildren cannot stay in the yard and play. Have to come in the house because these shots being fired and not knowing where these bullets go.”

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It’s gotten so bad that neighbors – who can’t go outside – have complained to the Board of Commissioners, who of course don’t give a shit but have managed to eke out a lil statement about how gun safety is definitely a good thing.

Interesting that one of the complainants uses the word “radical.” How radical, though, is it in a country of four hundred million privately owned guns and virtually no gun control in much of our territory – hell, gun encouragement in a lot of places – for some people to take out their guns every day and shoot them off in random directions? We can all identify with the glee they must feel at knowing they’re scaring the shit out of their neighbors; and making endless explosive noises in heavily populated areas is also a universal delight.

Guns mean to frighten people, and if you don’t like feeling fear, you should get out of NC and move to some squishy state like Massachusetts where they don’t let people shoot ARs into nearby homes and yards.

So you’re a lesbian couple and your next door neighbor hates lesbians.

Now add the arsenal in my headline and wait for the madman’s mood to darken about the two of you until he starts pointing one of those guns at you and your children.

See, when this guy gets – what – a suspended sentence for terroristic threatening, let’s say, he goes right back home to his AR even more pissed, cuz you called the cops on him and almost made him go to prison and, you know, he buys more big guns and more ammo and you just get snug and prepare for his next assault on your family.

Trying to help keep you safe, Toms River NJ and environs: Today’s coverage of Randolph Tashman, a local dude who dropped his gun IN CHURCH (which prompted a call to police), fails to mention another newsy incident featuring RT. He was fired from his city job couple years back for posting truly vile racist vileness; and he offered this caption for a pic of people waiting in line:

“A line at the gun range! Silent majority won’t always be silent be careful libs”

And the guy in favor of conceal carry on the U Wyoming campus then cited what study in response to the pushback? What study told him that more guns, in any setting, do not in fact increase suicide rates? UD would dearly love to see it.

UW alumnus Sandy Rees received a less [than] enthusiastic response when she spoke out in favor of allowing concealed carry firearms on campus.

“You need to follow the statutes and the laws, not squishy feelings and surveys,” she said.

Okay, first about that favorite word of gunnies, ‘squishy.’ UD’s been reading about this subject forever, and she’s noticed that gunnies LOVE this word, which designates people who… uh… read surveys?

Yeah cuz the problem there is that when you survey the UW community a vast majority opposes campus conceal carry. So don’t get all squishy on me and listen to what people say when you ask them!

And then of course mainly squishy designates anyone who goes all damp and feely after suicides and massacres and for fuck sake man MAN UP. Remember what State Sen. Dahm said – EVERYONE DIES THAT’S LIFE. Maybe you’re five and you die clinging in perplexity and terror to your elementary school teacher as a man’s bullets tear through your organs. Tough titties. Saddle up, cowboy, life’s a bumpy ride, and those “events” are just staged to make us go squishy.

But UD – without getting too Freudian about it – thinks gunnies reach for squishy so often because the brain thousands of Wyomingites blow out of their heads is famously squishy. Any number of brain-based kids’ toys are called squishy.

For example. You can’t blame these folks for having ‘squishy’ on their minds. In their world, brains are always going squish squish squish.

This H Street burger bar became a right-wing darling during the pandemic for openly defying the city’s vaccine and mask mandates. Rand Paul and Thomas Massie were among the Republican members of Congress who made a point to stop by after the DC health department shut it down for violating Covid rules. 

(WHOA. Says here on Amazon it’s a collectible! Only two copies available, one of which sells for more than $200! The second asks almost $500! Hell – how do I sell my copy? In ‘thesda that’s one excellent dinner out for one.) The meeting concluded with a manifesto, signed by many of the participants, calling for the reconstruction of the Roman colosseum, along with much else of ancient Rome. Once rebuilt, these sites would assimilate into the modern city — they would be libraries, supermarkets, courts, cafes.

Leon Krier loves the idea, feeling only “sad and frustrated” when looking at “expensive to keep up” ruins. “Ruins mean nothing.” O.M. Ungers disagrees and alludes to “memory … romance … [the colosseum’s] patina, its aspect of time,” the continuity of that particular auratic history-charged object over centuries. I.e., ruins of many kinds mean a whole lot to many of us, and the colosseum arguably sits at the top of the world’s ruin-lists.

Of course most people are scandalized by this very idea. You will notice nothing’s come of it.

And indeed the very latest, far more modest, repurposing of the structure also has much of Rome colossally pissed: The city’s agreed to let Airbnb rent out the place to customers who want to pretend to be gladiators in the colosseum: Check-in’s 9 PM; must check out by 1 AM. Details.

[The Who’s] Pete Townshend has said a cup of tea and two digestive biscuits are all he needs to lift himself out of “suicidal” depression every morning.

[Townshend] has eschewed professional help for his crippling “chemical depression”, opting instead to treat his symptoms with home comforts and writing journals.

He told The Sunday Times he wakes up each morning wanting to die, but does not want to talk to “f—–g doctors” about it.

[He] gets up each morning feeling “suicidal, actually suicidal”, and that it will take him half an hour to get out of this mood.

“I have a couple of cups of tea, two digestive biscuits … and I feel happy,” he said.

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UD’s been telling you about tea for years…

This is one of those money can’t buy happiness things too, since Townshend’s worth $150 million.

Body of Missing Man Last Seen Getting Out of Uber in Auburn Found

Preaching State Superintendent Demands Video of 
Himself Praying for Trump be Played to All Students

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The problem with precedents of this sort is that Jeffrey Toobin has demanded equal time.

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Watch me now (work work)!