Category Archives: Cultural

Killing men for art

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Victorian Opera's Salome, Vida Miknevičiūtė

From The Age today: Killing women for art? Opera’s 2020 death toll might surprise. Comes with the picture above. This is how it starts.

At the Palais this week Salome looked like she was doing so well. Singing her heart out, John the Baptist’s head in her arms, Herod humiliated, mum proud. Suddenly the king bellowed the command “Man töte dieses Weib” – “kill this woman”. Slain. Final curtain.

A debate gathering steam in the opera world questions whether the art form is at core misogynistic, patriarchal and oppressive, and in need of reform. So The Age decided to check the body count on Melbourne opera stages in 2020 to see if women come off worse than men. The result (spoiler alert) may surprise.

First, the case for the prosecution. Take a roll call of some of the greatest and most-performed masterpieces. Tosca: jumps off a castle, dead. Carmen: stabbed by a jealous lover, dead. Butterfly: humiliated, stabs herself, dead. Violetta (La Traviata) and Mimi (La Boheme): dead, both by tuberculosis. Liu in Turandot: stabs herself after being tortured, dead. Gilda in Rigoletto: stabbed and stuffed in a sack, dead. Salome: dead. Norma: dead. Lucia di Lammermoor: dead.

So just have a closer look at the picture. Why it’s none other than the head of John the Baptist held aloft by Salome having herself sought his death from the king for having undertaken the Dance of the Seven Veils as her side of the bargain. Mere background detail, there just to move the plot along.

The sentimentality of all forms of art, best expressed by the line-up for the lifeboats on a sinking ship, women and children first, means the death of men is just so it goes. It’s their lot in life. The final stat in the column is that this year eleven men have died on stage but only three women. But no story line I know of makes the death of some male the emotional centre of the plot. As for women, that’s a different story altogether.

Ilhan Omar personifies and leads a Progressive-Islamist alliance against the West

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MANCHESTER, UNITED STATES - 2019/12/13: Vermont Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar embrace each other during the campaigns at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester.

I tend to think of Ilhan Omar as relatively unrepresentative of the trends on the left in the US. She is an Islamist, anti-semitic, anti-American, generally stupid and hardly a leader. Yet there are some very serious and highly insightful people who think this is a very bad mis-reading of what she stands or who she is, and is a particularly bad misunderstanding of what her presence in the midst of the American political system actually means. Scott Johnson has a post today – AMERICAN INGRATE: ILHAN OMAR – in which he discusses a book that has just been released: American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party in which the sub-title provides a more sinister take on what she represents. This is all the more so given who have written detailed cover quotes for the book. First, though, the description of the book at Amazon:

In American Ingrate, Federalist Senior Contributor Benjamin Weingarten exposes Ilhan Omar’s radical and revolutionary Left-Islamist agenda, her seminal role in the progressive takeover of the Democratic Party, and the dire threat she poses to U.S. national security by way of her collusion with subversive anti-American forces.

She says that America was “founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves,” and that “ignorance really is pervasive” among Americans today.

She says America must “dismantle” capitalism and “demilitarize” U.S. foreign policy, which she sees “from the perspective of a foreigner,” tweeting “thousands of Somalis [were] killed by…American forces…#NotTodaySatan.”

She says American support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby;” and that American Jews disloyally pledge “allegiance” to Israel’s “apartheid…regime,” which has “hypnotized the world.”

She says of the 9/11 attacks: “some people did something.”

Shockingly, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) words merely scratch the surface of her hatred of America—and the West—and divert our gaze from the nefarious actions she is taking to sabotage it from within.

American Ingrate is the defining book on the size, scope, and nature of the threat posed by Representative Omar—the personification of the anti-American Left-Islamist nexus—heightened by her hidden collusion with like-minded adversaries foreign and domestic, and alleged criminality and corruption.

This is a clarion wakeup call to the dangers epitomized by Rep. Omar. For she is not merely a lone radical in Congress, but the archetype of the new Democratic Party—and a uniquely dangerous figure at the heart of a uniquely dangerous challenge to America.

I will provide a single sentence from each of the distinguished authors who have taken the time to read the book and offer their own perspective.

Victor Davis Hanson: “She is a metaphor for a larger American pathology of progressive virtue-signaling, and, ultimately, self-loathing.”

Dennis Prager: “Rep. Ilhan Omar is the new face of the Democratic Party; she not only personifies but leads a Progressive-Islamist alliance held together by the glue of hatred of America, of Judeo-Christian values, of Western civilization, and of Israel.”

Newt Gingrich: “It has become clear that left-wing ideology and extreme identity politics have cultivated a dangerous strain of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party that is part and parcel of its increasingly anti-Judeo Christian and anti-Western orientation.”

Scott Johnson: “Omar is a leading indicator of the direction of the Democratic Party.”

Lee Smith: “The Democratic party’s inability, or unwillingness, to censure or even criticize the Minnesota congresswoman for her hateful remarks about other Americans, American Jews, is evidence that one of the country’s two major political parties is trending in a dangerous direction—not progressivism but Middle East-style sectarianism.”

Caroline Glick: “Ilhan Omar is no mere “symbol” of diversity. She is a hardcore, radical, ideologue who went into politics to advance her goal of weakening America while making the United States an inhospitable place for Jews and for everyone who doesn’t share her bigoted, hatred for Americans, America, and everything it stands for.”

Ingratitude seems the least of it. She is on a mission with our destruction her ambition.

You should read Scott’s entire column.

There’s a lot of madness out there

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And if you don’t believe the first part, you can read this.

There is then also this California Bill Would Require Occupational Licenses for Porn Actors, Strippers, Cam Girls just in time for this, Steven Spielberg’s daughter Mikaela has launched a new career as an adult entertainer.

Of her childhood, Mlle Spielberg, 23, says, “I was spoiled, but responsibly.” Which is about the most rich-girl thing anyone can say these days, I guess.

The American dream, 2020. She calls her new life as a porn star “empowering,” and says that when she broke the news to her parents last weekend, they were “intrigued” but “not upset.”

If they’re really not upset they are weirder than their daughter, but I’m sure they are.

Finally this: Sanders names daughter of Muslim Brotherhood leader as Virginia campaign co-chair.

On her own merits, the 24 year-old Abrar Omeish is of little political consequence. She is the youngest person to ever hold office in the state, having been elected in 2019 to the Fairfax County School Board. Her role on the campaign appears to be a Sanders gesture to a more powerful political constituency: the well-organized radical Sunni Islamist networks across the United States.  Abrar Omeish’s father is former president of the Muslim American Society, a group identified by federal prosecutors as the “overt arm” of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.
 

The Sheryl Sanders role model meets Captain Capitalism

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Feminism has its mighty grip on our culture and will not let go any time soon. This began from an Instapundit post on Sheryl Sandberg gives awful advice to women. Follow it at your peril and the following, from Captain Capitalism, was quoted in one of the comments.

Dear Ms. Venker,

I skimmed your piece in the Washington Examiner because I already knew what it was going to say; just wanted to make sure.  And sure enough it said what I thought it would.

Women are not men.
We’re supposed to compliment each other.
We are not adversaries.
Leave the proposing to men.
Feminism has ruined women and made them miserable.
Insert examples of miserable women here.

Blah blah blah.

But may I ask you to entertain a new approach?  One that might be more effective in convincing future women that feminism is not the way?  And one that will be less frustrating than merely saying “Sheryl Sandberg bad.”

Leave Sheryl Sandberg alone.
Leave the women who follow her advice alone.
Matter of fact encourage them, or just not bother with them at all.

And the reasons for this approach are many.

First, you are not going to convince any woman today to abandon feminism and go with traditionalism.  You yourself provided several examples of what I can only imagine to be middle aged women with children and careers who are facing problems in their marriages.  Do you think at that age and with that much infrastructure invested in a non-traditional life they can just uproot all of that midstride and in a flip of a switch go to a traditional 1950’s nuclear family?  Additionally, it doesn’t sound like they’re abandoning their roles, just complaining about them.  And these are women who have a receptive ear to traditionalism.  Traditionalism just not powerful enough to override their entire life’s investment they’ve made in feminism or the buyer’s remorse they most certainly have.  You’ve cured no one (or at least very few).

Second, do you think your article, along with every traditionalist argument made in the past 30 years even holds a candle to the trillions of dollars and billions of human hours that have been invested in now-three generations of women to follow a feminist life philosophy?  This isn’t to say you’re wrong.  You are factually right.  But did you have all young women’s ears from K-thru-college?  Did you control the media?  Do you have a best selling book like Ms. Sandberg?  And do you control academia?  For every hour (if an hour at all) a mom taught her daughter about being a good mother or wife, supporting her man, staying svelte and beautiful, etc., there were at least a thousand hours of feminist counter-propaganda installed in young women’s minds.  And to give you an example of how out gunned and out-spent traditionalists are compared to feminists I’ve provided an infographic below.

Third, do you really think women are going to listen to you?  I can completely sympathize with you and your goal to offer women an alternative to the feminist lifestyle they’ve had forced on them.  I understand the moral, noble intention you have to provide a solution or at least an option to women who are not happy with their love lives.  But take it from me dear, they won’t listen.  Humans are programmable automatons, not the “independent minded” sentient beings they fancy themselves to be.  And though I’m willing (and hopeful) to be proven wrong, I’m going to guess the success rate you’ve had of convincing women to become traditionalists are about the same as mine to get people to spend less than they make, eat less calories than they expend, and get young people to stop majoring in stupid shit.  Zero. Which then behooves the question for you as to whether or not you want to put yourself through this banging-your-head-against-the-wall-torture.

Finally, there is also a nuanced, esoteric argument to be made about balance, karma, and universal equilibrium.  Do these women, after decades of feminism, outsourcing their kids to daycare, putting their careers above humans, things above love, deserve to “be saved?”  Do they deserve to find “happiness” and “love?”  I personally don’t believe any of them will be convinced of the merits of a traditional life/relationship, making this question moot.  But what I am trying to do is make you question your own (albeit moral, noble, and well-intended) incentives.  How many of these women simply loved their careers more than their children or husbands?  How many of these women valued a corner office or a fancy title more than human interaction?  How many of these women in the past probably turned down perfectly good men that would have otherwise made great husbands, all for an unanchored religion like feminism?  And how many of them were just plain mean and unfeminine in the past to men?

Though noble, your goal is not only impractical, but is getting in the way of universal karma that is going to be delivered anyway.  There is nothing you can do to stop it.  The only person you can save is yourself.  So please, let women have what they want.  Let women have what they choose.  Treat women as equals and let them make their own choices in life.  But above all else, truly treat them as equals in letting them reap the costs and consequences of those choices.  And perhaps then you may find some solace in learning to “Enjoy the Decline.”

Sincerely,

Aaron Clarey

The Marriage of Figaro at Glyndebourne

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A live recording from the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1973 with Kiri Te Kanawa, Frederica Von Stade, Ilieana Contrubas, Benjamin Luxon & Knut Skram, and with me sitting in the trombone section of the orchestra as a personal guest of the principal oboist. My personal most ecstatic moment in all my musical listening over my entire life. Well, maybe listening to Pete Seeger on the banjo in 1955 was more memorable and thrilling. Of course, there was also Madame Butterfly which was the first opera I went to with my wife when we were just courting. It was such a magical night that I have never listened to the opera ever since.

“False at every conceivable scale of resolution”

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To characterise this line of reasoning as having no basis in real­ity would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.

And just what is so unquestionably false? This is:

The categories male and female exist on a spectrum, and are therefore no more than social constructs. If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favour of a new bespoke “gender identity”.

And where was such a statement made? In The Australian today, in an article titled, There’s no question of our biological sex. You may be amazed to find such a statement made anywhere in the Western world at the present time, but not only was this said, but was said in the middle of the paper in a joint-authored article by a man, Colin Wright, who is an evolutionary biologist at Penn State University and a woman, Emma Hilton, who is a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester. Are their careers not now in tatters or are we at the dawn of a new era of free speech?

And on the same day I also found something else: Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably. Surely that’s unsayable in the world today. Lots there to read, but will just choose the following two quotes as an invitation for you to read the rest. First:

In order to calmly debate all ideas, you need to put emotion aside. But females are simply less able to do that than males because they are higher in Neuroticism—feeling negative feelings strongly. Thus, they more easily become overwhelmed by negative feelings, precluding them from logical thought.

Then this:

Ed Dutton, in a video entitled “Do Females Reduce Male Per Capita Genius?” takes this critique of feminism even further. He argues that geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness. This means they are clever enough to solve a difficult problem, but being low in rule-following, can also “think outside the box.” And, being low in Agreeableness, they don’t care about offending people, which original ideas always do.

An aspect of Agreeableness is empathy—being concerned with the feelings of others and being able to guess what they might be. Dutton shows that people who are high in “systematizing” (which males typically are compared to females, with systematizing being vital to problem solving) tend to be low in empathy. Thus, Dutton argues, you don’t get many women geniuses because their IQ range is more bunched towards the mean; and also because they are too high in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.

Universities, traditionally dominated by males, have in essence been about giving geniuses a place in which they can attempt to solve their problems, working at their chosen problems for years on end. But Dutton argues that female academics tend to be the “Head Girl Type” (chief prefect at all-girls schools in the UK) with “normal range” high IQ and high in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness—the exact opposite of a typical genius. Accordingly, once you allow females into academia, they will be promoted over genius males because they come across as better people to work with—more conscientious, easier to be around and more socially skilled. But this will tend to deny geniuses the place of nurture they need.

Unbelievable. Not the text, but that either could be published anywhere in the West in a respectable newspaper at this moment in time.

Dealing with the most important issue of our times

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It’s not the first time I’ve brought this up. The first time was in 2014: Airplane etiquette. There in part I wrote:

I can understand the fury of anyone already crammed into an economy seat having what room there is taken from them. I think of it as the same as talking on the mobile in a loud voice while sitting on the train (and soon on the plane as well).

My own rule:

No pushing seats back until after the evening meal

I understand that on airplanes people have woken early to catch the 8:00 a.m. flight, and others are connecting from flights where whatever it might say on the local clock, it is still past midnight to them. But it is more than courtesy and a kind of etiquette needs to be developed so that at least we can work out who is in the right before the fights break out.

There was a time you could smoke on airplanes as well. Let us hope for a day in the future when people remember the time when you could put your seat back in the middle of the afternoon which by then they will no longer be permitted to do.

Anyway, it now seems to have become a more general issue: We Need To Come To A National Consensus On Airplane Seat Reclining. And in this contribution to the debate, five rules are proposed. These are the headings of the proposed rules but read the full extension at the link. In fact, read the link, with these as the solution.

1) Seriously Consider Not Reclining

2) If You Feel Compelled To Recline, Be Respectful

3) Sometimes It’s Totally Fine To Recline

4) Balance Health Issues

5) Know The Limits

But there is also civil disobedience as discussed in this post: American Airlines threatened to arrest me, says woman whose seat was continuously punched by man sitting behind her.

As the space between seats becomes smaller and smaller, this will become an issue that grows larger and larger. Beyond everything else, with computer technology as it is, flight time can be productive, but with the seat in front reclining, one can no longer see the screen and the ability to do serious work compromised.

These are my revised rules:

1) Before the trays from the evening meal have been cleared away, passengers must seek approval from the passengers behind them before they recline their seats.

2) The person in the seat behind has the absolute right to refuse.

3) Once the evening meal has been served and the trays have been taken away, passengers have an absolute right to recline their seats until the morning meal is served.

It seems to be a property-rights issue: who has possession of the space between the back of one’s own seat where one is sitting and the back of the seat of the passenger in front at the moment the plane is about to take off? This is not an issue in which spontaneous order seems able to provide a solution.

Cultural cluelessness but very representative

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From Ace of Spades.

British TV Star in Bikini Discovers Sharia Law

Arrested for walking around in a bikini in The Maldives. She’s screaming she’s being “sexually assaulted” (I didn’t see that in the video, it just looked like getting arrested to me). Sweetie, they’re Islamist. To them your outfits invite sexual assault. I always wonder what these leftists think is going to happen to them if they successfully import sharia to the west. The Tolkien Trust Uses Lord of the Rings Income to Fund Muslim Migrants and Terrorists. None of their pet causes-not gays, not trans, not sexual freedom, not female equality, not abortion, none of them-will survive. If they think they’re living in The Handmaiden’s Tale because some Christian tells them, just tells them, mind you, doesn’t do anything to them, that they believe homosexuality is a sin or abortion is murder, what are they going to do when the real thing shows up on their doorstep? How fucking stupid are they? Pretty fucking stupid:

The mystery of Titania McGrath

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Titania McGrath is the name of a parody twitter account hosted by one Andrew Doyle, as discussed by me here at Quadrant Online: Titania McGrath, Meet George Orwell which is itself a discussion of an interview with Doyle. At one level, the account is just as it is described:

Titania, an imaginary amalgam of all the worst excesses in the modern social justice movement, fancies herself a voice for minorities of all kinds (whether they know they agree with her or not). What she lacks in self-awareness, she makes up for in conviction.

Doyle is therefore a man on the right making fun of people on the left. Well, not so fast. This, however, is how he describes himself.

I think if you were to write down all of my political views on various things I would come out more left-wing than right.

So he is then a man of the left who makes fun of people on the left who go too far. Maybe, but he also says this about himself as well.

I’d say I’m quite culturally conservative, however. I believe in high standards of education, because I think that adult autonomy depends on effective socialization in youth. So you need to have a rigorous school system, and children need to have an awareness of the classics and be taught the classics. I think art history, for instance, should be embedded at a primary-school level: not “let’s see what you can create with these paints”; I think you need to learn the classics. That’s a more traditionally right-wing viewpoint. I also believe in politeness, and decorum, and high standards and that kind of thing, which I think might be more associated with the Right.

There’s no “might be” about it. If that’s what you believe, then you are one of us and not one of them.

But then let me look at this, which is the example of a Titania tweet put up at QoL.

That is funny, but which side is Andrew Doyle actually on? It may well be that he believes that both are bad, that the point he is trying to make is that it is just as wrong for a baker not to bake the cake as it is to prevent children from learning about gay rights. The tweet may really be saying, a plague on both your houses.

But no matter how you slice it, Titania is a creation of genius. So perhaps we should just take his final advice:

I think the Left and Right should agree on the basic liberal principles of free expression, free discourse, and free thought. But also we need a shared social contract of how we address each other and how we tackle these issues. It doesn’t work if one side of the debate is just screaming and covering their ears. Nothing can be achieved that way.

I’m all in with that, but how realistic is it? In regard to the screaming and covering of ears, let me draw your attention to this post put up today: REBELLION IN THE KNITTING COMMUNITY. It’s about a woman who in the past had associated with Democrats only but went to a Trump rally the other day in New Hampshire. First there is what she was told by before she went:

In chatting with the folks at the [MSNBC] taping, I casually said that I was thinking about going over to the Trump rally. The first reaction they had was a genuine fear for my safety. I had never seen people I didn’t know so passionately urge me to avoid all those people. One woman told me that those people were the lowest of the low. Another man told me that he had gone to one of Trump’s rallies in the past and had been the target of harassment by large muscle-bound men. Another woman offered me her pepper spray. I assured them all that I thought I would be fine and that I would get the heck out of dodge if I got nervous.

A kind of over-the-top Titania-like reaction. But then she went along to the rally and found this:

As I waited, I chatted with the folks around me. And contrary to all the fears expressed, they were so nice. I was not harassed or intimidated, and I was never in fear of my safety even for a moment. These were average, everyday people. They were veterans, schoolteachers, and small business owners who had come from all over the place for the thrill of attending this rally. They were upbeat and excited. In chatting, I even let it slip that I was a Democrat. The reaction: “Good for you! Welcome!”

“The right” are just normal people. It is the left who are doing the screaming and covering their ears. Doyle knows that as well as anyone. Seriously, which side is he really on? Surely he is not really, as he describes himself, more left-wing than right.