May 4, 2024

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Woke God.

The writer James Lindsay said in a talk (here available on YouTube) before the European Parliament that ‘Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian’. Lindsay, described in Wikipedia as a promoter of right-wing conspiracy theories, goes on to describe how 20th-century Marxists, disheartened by the failure of the abolition of economic property to create wealth, expanded their evangelical model to include other types of properties. Race, civilization, and even sexual normalcy were all regarded as oppressive advantages that had to be mocked, abolished, and otherwise scattered for “equity” — the great leveling — to be achieved. This expanded their audience considerably and allowed them to expand beyond the traditional working class.

The James Lindsay talk explains why radical politics and Wokism in particular always involve God, or at least universals, whether Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, or in the negative sense of militant atheism. That is because it deals with the eternal issues, the nature of humanity, the origin of civilization, and the meaning of social relations. Hence Lindsay’s remark that “Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian.”

Indirect proof of this assertion can be seen in the traction of the Woke message in historical, parochial, or ethnic contexts where they were alien. Examples include anti-colonial movements in Ireland, which never had a colony; Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Europe and perhaps this most curious of imitations:

“Palestine wasn’t initially their thing, but now they are doing more than we are, and [we] felt ashamed and that we should do more,” Ali Tayyar, a student organizer at Lebanon’s American University of Beirut, said at a protest Tuesday. “We needed to at least show some support for our friends in the U.S.”

The message is nothing to do with the facts, just the feelings. Will it last? If Marx’s thesis, as Lindsay argues, was fundamentally erroneous in the domain of economics, the mistake cannot be fixed by expanding the flawed analysis to explain race, culture, sexuality and history after its original failure. Mistakes just get bigger by expanding their scope. Wokism as enlarged Marxist economics doesn’t get better, it gets worse.

Also from Lindsay: Marx was “a privileged white European male.”

Flashback: Berkeley students angry that they have to read Marx, not because he was, well, a Marxist, but because he was yet another dead white European male: “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.”

As James Lileks wrote in response, “Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate. By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.”

Related: Karl Marx Calls Mexicans Lazy. Will Social Justice Warriors Demand Noted Racist Karl Marx Be Banned From Study on Campus?

 

Posted at 4:43 pm by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED: Are You More Annoyed Than You Were Four Years Ago?

What Biden’s government should do, more broadly, is resist the self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism*. Noah Rothman’s magazine piece last year on “the war on things that work” is a useful reference point, cataloguing the ways activists have been “waging a crusade against convenience.” This includes, especially at the state level, fulminating against gas stoves, fighting the scourge of gas-powered lawn equipment, and banning single-use packaging in grocery stores. On that New Jersey bag measure, Noah wrote that the environmental benefits are unclear given that reusable bags take more energy and resources to make (read this; it’s priceless) — and “the only observable effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and noticeably more annoying.”

Democrats, do you ever look at Trump’s Truth Social feed and feel like Jon Lovitz? Maybe stuff like this is why.

Speaking of: The administration’s persistent efforts to wipe away (transfer to taxpayers) college-student debt, especially while struggling to process present-day financial-aid applications, are yet another way to alienate voters. If the policy wasn’t invidious enough, one has to suspect more than a few (million) people saw the images this week of college students camping out, vandalizing property, occupying school facilities, and getting justifiably arrested and thought, perhaps while making their monthly car payment: So let me get this straight . . .

Reagan once asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The 2024 version might be: Are you more or less annoyed?

Google are doing their best to shield voters from the issues that frustrate them, and yet they all of all people should know about how the Streisand Effect works: Google Removes Trump PAC Ad Targeting Black Men and it is Very Suspicious.

* Well, “self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism” is a pretty good definition of the Luddite left these days: QED: Hillary Clinton group wired $500,000 to climate activists behind disruptive protests. “‘Anyone who cares about public safety and preventing vandalism should be deeply concerned that money connected to Hillary Clinton is propping up these radicalized eco activists,’ said Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of the Power the Future energy advocacy group.”

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE COULD DO A LOT WORSE, AND PROBABLY WILL: Is Winsome Sears on Trump’s Short List for a Running Mate? “She’s a rising star in Republican politics. Like Trump, she is known for delivering unfiltered opinions on controversial topics. At a time when college campuses are being disrupted by pro-Hamas demonstrations, the Trump campaign may be thinking about a strong show of support for law and order to contrast with Biden’s cowardice in addressing the problem. And, she is a black woman. Sears would provide a sharp contrast to Kamala Harris on a debate stage.” Well, yes, she can speak in coherent sentences and everything. Plus she has actual experience and substantive knowledge.

The born in Jamaica thing is an issue, though. You can’t be VP if you’re ineligible to be President. But the story just says her father is Jamaican. I don’t know if her mother is a U.S. citizen but if so she’s good no matter where she was born.

Posted at 2:16 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JACK DUNPHY: On the Violent Left, Eternal Recurrence.

Have we learned nothing from the past? It’s not as though we need to explore antiquity for lessons in how to confront today’s issues. While such an exploration would no doubt be helpful, any effort in that direction is beyond – far, far beyond – the stunted intellectual capacities of our current crop of ruling elites, certainly to include our degreed betters running our so-called institutions of higher learning.

But is 2020 so shrouded in the mists of history as to be inaccessible to the people who hold themselves out as arbiters of all that is good and just? Apparently so. Consider: it was a mere four years ago that every major city in America was convulsed in the paroxysms of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. We must, said these lettered sophisticates, allow the oppressed to vent their outrage at the death of one of their own at the hands of state oppressors. To deter them in any way would only deepen their pain. And never mind that our hero of the moment had lived a life of depredation and was found to have consumed a fatal dose of fentanyl. Such trivial details need not dim the luster of the man’s memory.

A result of the ensuing anti-police hysteria, one that was easily foreseeable in nature if not necessarily in its horrifying scale, was that the number of homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 5,000 from 2019 to 2020, and that nearly 3,400 of these added victims, 68 percent, were black. But there must be martyrs to the cause, after all, and who is to say how many of those 5,000 people wouldn’t willingly have sacrificed themselves in the name of a more just society? Eggs and omelets, right, comrades?

Still, one prays for more wisdom in those we’ve entrusted with authority. For the most part, we pray in vain. Witness the  chaos this week on display on college campuses across the country, where we find that the protesters who brought so much death and disorder in 2020 have swapped their BLM T-shirts for kaffiyehs and adopted the Gazans as their Cause of the Season. Same clowns, different circus.

Not surprisingly, the AP isn’t willing to connect the dots:

Or as Jon Gabriel recently noted: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

Because, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DON’T GET COCKY:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT: Mark Hamill Makes Cringey Appearance at White House Press Briefing, Lame Jokes Fall Flat.

Hamill made an appearance at the White House on Friday but did not provide the powerful celebrity endorsement that Joe Biden may have hoped for.

Sporting a pair of aviator sunglasses, Hamill was introduced to the podium by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre but did not show the same stage presence as in his famous role as Luke Skywalker.

“How many of you had Mark Hamill will lead the press briefing on your bingo cards?” Hamill remarked. “I just got to meet the president and he gave me these aviator glasses.”

Some are questioning the timing:

But, perhaps the time is right! Is Biden embracing the “Genocide Joe” sobriquet foisted upon him by (ironically enough) the bloodthirstiest members of his constituency? Why else would he bring in an actor who made his living playing Luke Skywalker and in the Batman cartoon series, the Joker, each of whom are mass-murdering terrorists — and in Skywalker’s case a communist-inspired slave-owning religious fanatic to boot.

Exit question: Did Hamill and Joe commiserate about the synchronicity of each being manipulated by their handlers into ill-advised homages to Leni Riefenstahl?

UPDATE: Treat May the Fourth as the holiday it deserves to be!

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: This Video of Biden’s Chief Economic Adviser Is Making the Rounds (Yeah, It Explains a LOT).

Jared Bernstein is the chair of the Biden White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, where one of his chief duties is to put frosting on crappy news with regular somewhat laughable attempts to put a positive spin on what “Bidenomics” has brought.

* * * * * * * *

Bernstein often dials the gaslighting up to eleven to try and convince everybody to believe the White House instead of their own lying eyes and grocery/energy bills.

There’s a video featuring Bernstein making the rounds in which he tries to explain how things work, and it’ll just pump you full of confidence.

Wait, no it won’t:

Biden warned voters on the 2020 campaign trail that if he’s elected president, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” (Sadly, not that he ever was in America.) But nobody in the MSM-DNC deigned to ask who would be replacing him.

Related: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHRONOLOGICAL SNOBBERY STRIKES AGAIN AT THE BBC: Acclaimed BBC series Civilisation is given a warning over outdated attitudes.

Lord [Kenneth] Clark’s 1969 television series Civilisation has been given a warning note by the BBC for reflecting the “standards and attitudes” of its time.

The art historian’s groundbreaking series is being broadcast by the BBC for the first time in more than a decade.

The broadcaster has said that it may be forced to edit such programmes to align with its current editorial standards but it has not done so for Civilisation.

However, as well as adding the note, the corporation has released a video in which Dame Mary Beard critiques the principally “European story” told in Civilisation. The historian has previously criticised the series in print for its omission of female historical figures.

Beard really seems to have it in for Clark’s landmark series, which was created in 1969 to highlight the BBC then-recent switch to color broadcasts. In 2018, Andrew Ferguson recorded “The End of ‘Civilisation’” for the late, lamented Weekly Standard. Note this passage:

In the closing moments of the final episode of Civilisation, Clark intended to strike a note of optimism. “When I look at the world about me in the light of these programs, I don’t at all feel as though we are entering on a new period of barbarism,” he said. He shows us the campus of the then-new University of East Anglia. Apple-cheeked college students pop in and out of classrooms, labor over books—the baby boomers as Clark hoped they were in 1969. “These inheritors of all our catastrophes look cheerful enough. . . . In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious, and as critical as the young are today.”

Watching at home, we can assume, was the 14-year-old Mary Beard, all a-tingle and raring to go to college herself, where she could use her curiosity and reading and bright-mindedness to prove the great man and his theory wrong.

Back in 2013, I described watching Kenneth Clark’s seminal program as akin to reading “Notes from Atlantis” – the postwar British culture that made it simply no longer exists. Its successor culture continually demonstrates what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” which is particularly alive and well at the Beeb:

It is defined as the belief that ‘the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.’ If we add, ‘and therefore wrong and also racist’ to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs. Historian Larry Taunton defines it as ‘imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.’

As Ferguson wrote, from the title onward, the BBC’s sequel, Civilisations (note the title was of course, switched to plural), “pokes us in the ribs” repeatedly with its successor intellectual culture – a queasy mélange of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Exit quote from Beard, one of the hosts of who attempted a would-be successor series:

‘We’ know that ‘we’ are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised. . . . The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called ‘barbarians’ may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person’s barbarity is another person’s civilisation.

No. (Nice paraphrase of the motto at Reuters that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” though.) As Saul Bellow famously said in the early 1990s, eternally angering the left, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

REMAKE ALL THE MOVIES! Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer To Star In Robin Hood Reimagining ‘The Death Of Robin Hood’ For ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Director Michael Sarnoski — Cannes Market Hot Project.

Here’s a buzzy one. Oscar nominee Hugh Jackman (Les Misérables) and Emmy winner Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) are attached to star in new movie The Death Of Robin Hood, we can reveal.

Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One director Michael Sarnoski is writer-director on the project, which will be among the hot titles on sale at this month’s Cannes market via WME Independent. Arrival and The Prestige producer Aaron Ryder is among the producing team.

The film is a darker reimagining of the classic Robin Hood tale. Set of its time, the film will see the title character grappling with his past after a life of crime and murder, a battleworn loner who finds himself gravely injured and in the hands of a mysterious woman who offers him a chance at salvation. Production is due to begin in February 2025.

Lyrical Media (Elevation) is fully financing. Ryder and Andrew Swett will produce under their Ryder Picture Company banner alongside Alexander Black for Lyrical Media. Lyrical’s Jon Rosenberg and Natalie Sellers will executive-produce with Rama Gottumukkala, Sarnoski, and Jackman.

“It has been an incredible opportunity to reinvent and freshly innovate the story we all know of Robin Hood,” reflected Sarnoski. “Securing the perfect cast to transform the script to screen was essential. I could not be more thrilled and trusting in Hugh and Jodie to bring this story to life in a powerful and meaningful way.”

“This is not the story of Robin Hood we’ve all come to know,” said Aaron Ryder and Andrew Swett of RPC. “Instead, Michael has crafted something far more grounded and visceral. Thanks to Alexander Black and our friends at Lyrical along with Rama and Michael, the world is going to love seeing Hugh and Jodie together in this epic.”

I understand that Hollywood is all about reworking existing public domain or otherwise dormant intellectual properties, but didn’t Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, directed by Richard Lester, do a “darker reimagining of the classic Robin Hood tale” way back in 1976?

Found via Christian Toto, who tweets, “How many more ‘reimagining’ projects can we take???“

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll