Category Archives: Cultural

NPC

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From the New York Times: What Is NPC, the Pro-Trump Internet’s New Favorite Insult? Excerpts:

NPC means “nonplayable character” or “nonplayer character.” It’s a term, borrowed from the world of video games, for a character that is controlled by the computer rather than by a player. An NPC often advances the game’s plot by saying scripted lines, or assisting the playable characters in some way….

It’s a long story, but the short version is that a group of young, extremely pro-Trump internet trolls have spent the past several years mocking anti-Trump people as whiny, easily triggered snowflakes who are primarily motivated by social acceptance rather than by logic and critical thinking….

Late last week, a group of users on r/the_donald, Reddit’s largest pro-Trump forum, decided to take the NPC meme to a wider audience. They created dozens of Twitter accounts using fictional NPC personalities, the NPC Wojak avatar and bios like “fighting against Nazi Racist Drumpf Fascist Cheetofinger.” They used these accounts to follow and tweet at one another, as well as at liberals, creating the semblance of an army of resisters mindlessly repeating anti-Trump talking points….

The campaign began as a joke. But a few of the accounts started posting misleading information about the midterm elections, including encouraging liberals to vote on Nov. 7. (Election Day is Nov. 6.)

Evidence suggests that these are mostly just attention-starved gamers looking to impress one another by “triggering the libs” with edgy memes. But not everyone gets the joke. State officials are already worried that voters will be fooled by deliberate social media campaigns that contain incorrect voting information. Similar types of disinformation spread on social media in 2016, which makes companies like Twitter nervous….

Twitter has therefore barred hundreds of right-wing accounts for posing as soulless, “nonplayable” liberal activists.

Apparently there were 1500 of them.

And now this video explains it even more clearly:

AND NOW HERE’S SOME MORE:

The ideological bent of those overseeing collegiate life

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From Instapundit and about America, but fits right into Australia as well.

I’VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR A WHILE NOW: Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators: The ideological bent of those overseeing collegiate life is having the biggest impact on campus culture.

I soon learned that the Office of Student Affairs, which oversees a wide array of issues including student diversity and residence life, was organizing many overtly progressive events — programs with names like “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Microaggressions” and “Understanding White Privilege” — without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative. These events were conducted outside the classroom, in the students’ social and recreational spaces.

The problem is not limited to my college. While considerable focus has been placed in recent decades on the impact of the ideological bent of college professors, when it comes to collegiate life — living in dorms, participating in extracurricular organizations — the ever growing ranks of administrators have the biggest influence on students and campus life across the country. . . .

Intrigued by this phenomenon, I recently surveyed a nationally representative sample of roughly 900 “student-facing” administrators — those whose work concerns the quality and character of a student’s experience on campus. I found that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one. Only 6 percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal. It’s no wonder so much of the nonacademic programming on college campuses is politically one-sided.

The 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. Incoming first-year students, by contrast, reported less than a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives, according to a 2016 finding by the Higher Education Research Institute. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.

All subsidized — whether at public or private institutions — by taxpayers who are much less liberal, but have no say.

32Posted at 9:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 

It’s not what what happened but who it happened to that counts

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A Rape Survivor Just Won the Nobel Peace Prize. ‘Feminists’ Are Nowhere to Be Found.

As feminists were busy peddling their “War on Women” narrative in the U.S., Yazidi sex slave survivor Nadia Murad was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting a real War on Women in the Middle East.

Nadia was honored for her efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, together with Dr. Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who has been a relentless healer and advocate for women.

Their stories serve as an important reminder that as American women debate what constitutes enough evidence to block a nominee from taking a seat on the Supreme Court, corroboration and evidence are abundant in places such as northern Iraq, where hundreds of women and girls are still enslaved and routinely subjected to rape.

The left doesn’t care about you at all unless your story can be used against first world white men.

Mad as a meat axe

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By Sarah Hoyt: The Misandrist Editorial the Washington Post Should Be Ashamed Of. A must read, but here is a bit to get the flavour.

Her article starts with a confession of spousal abuse:

I yelled at my husband last night. Not pick-up-your-socks yell. Not how-could-you-ignore-that-red-light yell. This was real yelling. This was 30 minutes of from-the-gut yelling. Triggered by a small, thoughtless, dismissive, annoyed, patronizing comment. Really small. A micro-wave that triggered a hurricane. I blew. Hard and fast.

The question I often ask myself is whether I could survive a marriage with a women on the left side of politics. Well, if that is what it would be like, the answer is an absolute no, not because I would leave, but because she would. I would not sit quietly and take it in as her husband did.

And here is the original article from the WP: Thanks for not raping us, all you ‘good men.’ But it’s not enough. The author is described as “a retired history professor at Grinnell College”. As noted by Ron Dreher, she is married to “Mr. Brown, America’s Most Miserable Man”.

Jordan Peterson and Brett Kavanaugh

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One of the major major flaws on the right is the reluctance to the point of refusal to back its side in a fight. Donald Trump is almost unique in his willingness to contest on every patch of disputed territory. On the left, no position is ever abandoned. McCarthyism, an entirely leftist meme when it began, is now used by everyone as a synonym for smearing the blameless as part of a partisan attack more than seventy years since the left began the savaging of his character. The reality is that McCarthy was 100% right about the existence of communist agents in the State Department, and yet, even now, only a handful will say a good word about one of the bravest statesmen who has ever lived.

Jordan Peterson is on our side. He hates the left and he hates their dishonesty and the ruin their march through the institutions has brought. He understands that wherever the left are in control they cause massive harm and destruction. And till now he has not put a foot wrong in fighting our fights and defending, and even extending, our positions. And even before now I have listened to no end of people without one one-hundredth of the influence for good he has had look down on him and his efforts to preserve our Western way of life.

What has now made many dismiss Peterson was his off-the-top-of-his-head comment – now retracted – that perhaps Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed but then resign and allow someone less divisive be appointed in his place. He didn’t come out in favour of the Democrat position. He didn’t argue that Christine Blasey Ford had made her case. He didn’t suggest that Trump should find some compromise candidate who would be more amenable to his enemies. He just thought that once the confirmation was completed, then perhaps Kavanaugh might resign as a means of bringing the two sides closer together.

When I heard he had said this, I did roll my eyes. But it reminded me, as if I needed to be reminded, how difficult it is to understand politics. I did notice that no one on the Democrat side picked up this suggestion since it really has no potential. There is no possibility for compromise. And it is an oddity that even after all he has been through, that Peterson still thinks there is an ounce of good will on the left side of politics, that there are people who would understand such a compromise and work with the Republicans to find a candidate that would satisfy the aims of both sides at one and the same time.

But you know what? I don’t look to Peterson for his political judgement. His is better than almost anyone I know, but it’s not perfect (and neither is mine nor yours). But what I do know is that ninety percent of everything he says and does is working to roll back the left, from our institutions and from the mind-set of the young. This is hard work which I not only admire him for, but wish that he may long continue his work in these fields.

But to his critics on “the right” I feel only an anger at their wanton stupidity in not backing him to the hilt, and for trying to pull him down and in this way helping to advance the agendas of the left. Look at this:

Typical on the right, and how does this help our side in anything? What a smug jerk this chap is! Infuriating and far far more politically ignorant than anything Jordan Peterson has ever said or done.

Satire is absolutely forbidden until further notice

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Lifted from Instapundit.

NEO: WOMEN LIED, BLACK MEN DIED.

Why didn’t it occur to Democrats that their approach to Kavanaugh might bother black men as well as white ones? My theory is that Democrats now think so completely along racial lines that it probably wouldn’t occur to them that a black man could identify with something happening to a white man, and a preppy white man at that. That must be why writer Jemele Hill of the Atlantic could write something like this [emphasis mine]:

On Tuesday night, I was in an auditorium with 100 black men in the city of Baltimore, when the subject pivoted to Brett Kavanaugh. I expected to hear frustration that the sexual-assault allegations against him had failed to derail his Supreme Court appointment. Instead, I encountered sympathy. One man stood up and asked, passionately, “What happened to due process?” He was met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods.

Hill, who is a black woman (formerly a sportswriter), assumed that these black men would identify with the woman’s story of sexual assault, rather than the man’s story of false accusation. She thought they would accept and perhaps join in with the Democrats’ ridicule and demonizing of Kavanaugh’s rage at being falsely accused.

On a related topic, note that the bill is coming due for American literature’s most celebrated rape apologist. A week ago, Steven Crowder posted this parody video:

And proving out Muggeridge’s Law, which as the late Tom Wolfe wrote, postulated that “We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known,” on Thursday, Milwaukee’s Fox affiliate posted this headline: “Shorewood School District cancels ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ play due to potential protests.”

The stated reason was the school district getting last-minute jitters over the play’s use of the N-word, but it’s still memory holing what was an American classic. “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches,” Ray Bradbury wrote in the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451.

Gone dark from end to end

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It’s by David Solway and about The Canadian Mind. We’re not there yet but enough of it applies to Australia to make you worry. It may only be a matter of time. A sample, but needs to be read through.

Any nation the preponderance of whose citizens regularly elects left-wing political parties; accepts single-payer healthcare; believes in the efficacy of the welfare state; endorses the hoax of global warming; accommodates swarms of third-world immigrants and refugees who have no love for or understanding of a country becoming an open-to-all multicultural tombola with the highest proportionate rate of immigrants in the Western world; has allowed its educational industry, from pre-school to graduate school, to be corrupted possibly beyond retrieval by lockstep Leftism, “diversity and inclusion,” and “social justice” claptrap; has caved to the feminist and campus-rape fable; dutifully takes CBC Leftist propaganda as gospel; has fallen for the 16th Century meme of the “Noble Savage” in its dealings with the aboriginal peoples; extravagantly celebrates a second-rate rock band like The Tragically Hip and names a street after it; reads (when it does read) tedious scribblers like the acclaimed Joseph Boyden and Ann-Marie MacDonald; and gives a complete ignoramus like Justin Trudeau a majority government on the strength of name and coiffure, cannot be regarded as informed, well-educated or in any way distinguished. Unlike the U.S., there are no cracks, to quote Leonard Cohen, where the light gets in. The Canadian political, cultural and academic spectrum has gone dark from end to end.

Safe for now breeds a cheap sentimentality and a lack of cautious good sense, but the way we are going, we wont’t be safe for long.

If only logic had anything to do with it

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Something to read and ponder: Four Reasons “Gender Theory” Is Ridiculous. Actually it’s a test: can you believe six impossible things before breakfast. And on the left they all can. Just one bit, but as funny as it is, a very depressing article when you think about it.

Never mind that any culture we could visit on a class field trip at any time in history would only present to us the binary male/female system we have in our own communities. And we will not have any difficulty determining the males from the females as they both have an unmistakable essence, even apart from body parts. Few things in nature are so obvious. So, as serious students, we must raise our hand and ask how all the diverse cultures of the world have just happened to “construct” the same exact two sexes, in the generally same ways. While it’s a totally legitimate question, your professor is starting to see you as a trouble-maker.

There really is a memory hole

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This is a quite astonishing paper: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole. Anyway, in regard to the paper in question, is what it argues true? If it is true, should it matter? And even if it isn’t true, can we not discuss it? Here’s the first para.

In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Here then is the last para along with the closing quotation that comes at the very end:

Educators must practice what we preach and lead by example. In this way, we can help to foster intellectual curiosity and the discovery of fresh reasoning so compelling that it causes even the most sceptical to change their minds. But this necessarily requires us to reject censorship and open ourselves to the civil discussion of sensitive topics such as gender differences, and the variability hypothesis in particular. In 2015, the University of Chicago’s Committee on Freedom of Expression summarized the importance of this principle beautifully in a report commissioned by none other than Professor Robert Zimmer:

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.

You can read for yourself what comes in between. And the fact is, there are some things that cannot be said, but these are entirely restricted to religious truths. When you read this, you will know more about the times in which you live and the kinds of beliefs you are absolutely forbidden either to have or discuss.