Thursday, May 30, 2024

Jane Austen, Bridgerton, and Facebook Censorship. The people, the fear, and the websites, that shut us up


 

Jane Austen, Bridgerton, and Facebook Censorship
The people, the fear, and the websites, that shut us up

 

The other night, without trying, I managed to say something so forbidden, so taboo, so radioactive, that Facebook felt it necessary to, without so much as a warning, instantaneously and permanently erase a discussion thread of dozens of posts. I didn't swear or threaten or even type in all caps. Women from all over the world were saying thought-provoking things about Jane Austen novels, and the new Netflix series, Bridgerton. I was in the middle of responding to a complete stranger telling me that my post had made her day. Facebook waved its magic censorship wand and the entire thread went POOF.

 

Does this matter? Yes, because people getting together and having frank and civil conversations about culture is one of the activities that keeps civilization going. And it matters because it was women making sure that other women didn't say anything that they didn't want "uppity" women to say. Harrison Butker didn't shut down this exchange. Women did.

Thursday, May 23, 2024

A Professor Remembers. Thoughts on the College Enrollment Crash





 A Professor Remembers

 Thoughts on the college enrollment crash

 

The campus sprawls over hundreds of acres and includes a quaint waterfall, a hike into bear territory, and Manhattan skyline views. When she is going for a walk, university lawns, bridges, and ponds intrude into her route. 

 

After Professor Josephine K. lost her teaching job, she would avert her eyes when skirting the campus' ragged border. She feared memories burning like a thorn in her heart. Instead something else happened. Rather than a pang, new awarenesses rose to the surface like the ugly head of long-suppressed boil.

 

A year after she lost her job, she stopped averting her eyes. Her eyes raked the parking lots mercilessly.

Thursday, May 9, 2024

George Takei, Candace Owens, and the Keffiyeh

 


George Takei, Candace Owens, and the Keffiyeh
Social media reveals the power of the West's new religion

The West has retreated from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Atheists and Marxists demonize that tradition. Their new worldview is not an absence of religion; humans cannot live without religion. All humans believe in dogma; practice rituals; quote scripture; embrace a tribe; elevate teachers, healers, and saviors; model themselves after saints; interpret patterns from apparent chaos; and insist on a larger meaning.

A new religion practiced by many in the West is distinguished by several features. Genesis and Talmudic commentary insist that we are all equally made in the image of God; and we all equally descend, literally or spiritually, from the first couple, Adam and Eve. That is, the Judeo-Christian God did not create better or worse versions of humanity. In Christianity, all humans are flawed because all humans have free will and use that free will to choose away from God. Thus, we are all responsible for the problem of evil. All humans are in need of the salvation offered by Jesus. All humans benefit from humble self-reflection, confession, and repentance. Through God's grace, we are all capable of manifesting God's love in a broken world, no matter how low we have fallen.

In the West's new religion, equality is rejected. Some are good and some are bad based on their ethnicity, sex, or skin color. Guilt, shame, and the problem of evil are assigned to the West. Beneficence is found as far from the West as possible. Non-whites are better than whites. Jews are better than Christians and Muslims are better than both. Human value is relative and depends on context. A black Christian is of greater value than a white Christian and of less value than a white Muslim. Islam is prioritized because it is recognized as a greater threat to the West.

Those influenced by this new faith view moral questions through the lens of relativism. Relativism is applied selectively. Relativism is used, for example through whataboutism, to excuse atrocities committed by Muslims. "Sure, the Muslim Conquest of India is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of eighty million people, but what about the Europeans killing Native Americans?" Leftist relativism, which appears to be a flexible system that encourages open-minded tolerance of human failing, is in fact rigidly intolerant. Leftist Atheists never use relativism to relativize the West's failings. Followers of the Church of the Anti-West never say, "Sure, the arrival of Europeans in the Americas resulted in the deaths of Native Americans, but what about the Muslim Conquest of India that is estimated to have killed eighty million people?"

Atrocities committed by non-whites are often attributed to whites. The Rwandan genocide is all the fault of the white man. "The Rwandan Genocide must first be seen as the product of Belgian colonialism," insists the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In contrast, the same institution's page devoted to the Armenian Genocide never mentions the word "Muslim" and mentions "Islam" only once – as a great monotheistic religion, but not as a factor in the genocide of Christian Armenians, as well as Christian Greeks and Assyrians, by Turkish Muslims.

The Hindu caste system, one of the worst human rights abuses in history, is rooted in the myth of Purusha in the Rig Veda, composed over three thousand years ago. Anti-Western voices, though, blame the Hindu caste system on British colonialism. Again, the reverse process never takes place. No one points out that, for example, whites in North America committed atrocities against Native Americans after the whites' loved ones were kidnapped, killed, or tortured by Native Americans. Similarly, if you mention antisemitism, you must pair it with "Islamophobia." You can, though, mention Islamophobia without mentioning antisemitism.

The Church of the Anti-West renders judgment taboo. One must not judge – non-Westerners. Cannibalism, clitoridectomy, tribal warfare, child marriage, honor killing, and, perhaps most ironic of all, unquestioning adherence to irrational dogma, are all excused with "don't judge," and, of course, with relativism. I've been told numerous times that clitoridectomy is comparable to the Catholic confirmation ceremony.

The Judeo-Christian tradition addresses the problem of evil with the process of confession, repentance, and reintegration. The Old Testament king David sinned grievously, murdering Uriah to gain sexual access to Uriah's wife, Bathsheba. God sent the prophet Nathan to confront David. David confessed, was punished, repented, and was reintegrated. The new religion rejects confession, repentance, and reintegration for whites and for the West. Muslim terrorists can be received back into society. White men must always remain outside the circle of community.

I had three encounters recently on social media that demonstrated these features of the West's new religion. I title these encounters "The Keffiyeh and the Rainbow," "George Takei and Japanese Internment," and "Candace Owens and Catholicism."

Thursday, May 2, 2024

Fleabag BBC and Amazon. Review

 

Fleabag

 

Is the BBC series the feminist masterpiece critics claim it to be?

 

Back when I was a grad student I thought someday I'd have a tenure-track job and I'd be teaching popular culture courses so I need to keep up. I was so dedicated to this mythical tenure-track job that I sat through films that bored me silly. I'm talking to you, Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. I never got that tenure-track job and, furthermore, popular culture splintered like a dropped mirror. When I was a kid, families watched movies together. Suddenly pop culture was a prison; each inmate occupied his own cell sealed off from society. Two people could live in the same home and dance to different music, laugh at different jokes, fear different monsters, and never have any idea what the other person is feeling.

 

The splintering of pop culture coincided with the West's increasing rejection of traditional beliefs like Judeo-Christian morality. A newly Paganizing, newly splintered pop culture knew it could break all the rules. I remember the first time I heard the F-word in a broadcast, and the first time I saw the F-word in print. Do I say all these bad words? Sure. Do I want them in my cultural products? Not unless they are needed. Somehow Sophocles, Shakespeare, O'Neill and the Marx Brothers never needed any of them . Movies like Saw include scenes that I do not want inside my head, or anybody's head for that matter. Splintered media now includes niche markets for the death-to-America demographic, the school-shooter-wannabe demographic, the torture-porn demographic.  

 

I would insist to my students that studying film, fairy tales, and internet memes is every bit as important as studying physics. The movie someone watches, and the internet memes someone shares, are a "royal road to the unconscious." Have you ever lost a friend because of the meme she shares? I have. I liked Gert a lot. Then I saw her social media memes. So sexually graphic they could illustrate an anatomy lecture, but always sadistic and always disseminating some deadly conspiracy theory. I learned more about Gert from her memes than from eating lunch with her. Goodbye, Gert.

 

Do cultural products create reality or do they reflect reality? Does a TV show become popular because it is telling audiences who they are, or do media puppet masters jerk the audience's strings and manipulate behavior? It's a feedback loop.  

 

A few years ago I began to hear of something called Fleabag; Fleabag is a groundbreaking feminist masterpiece, cultural arbiters wanted me to know. Fleabag was telling women who they are, who they should want to be, and who they should become. The sources telling me this are sources that are hostile to women like me, and they are sources that promote art that I find worthless. So I avoided Fleabag during its run, 2016-2019.

 

The other day, 47-year-old Irish actor Andrew Scott appeared on the NPR talk show Fresh Air. He mentioned that he'd played a character named "Hot Priest" on Fleabag. And I thought, okay, I have to watch this show. I'll never get that tenure-track job, but I'm still interested in how popular culture depicts Catholicism.