Will A Trump Indictment Spark Riots? (3-20-23)

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:30 Tucker Carlson on Trump’s looming indictment
24:00 Heterodox Academy: A good idea gone awry?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTTsnozDF20
25:00 Why it took years for Cofnas to publish his critque of Heterodox Academy
26:00 Four Reasons Why Heterodox Academy Failed,
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/35/4/four-reasons-why-heterodox-academy-failed
42:00 Bethany Mandel can’t define woke
56:00 The people who fought the Nazis took race differences for granted
57:00 The Nazis denied the validity of IQ, they rejected Darwinism
1:06:30 Helmet Nyborg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_Nyborg
1:07:30 American Renaissance is not a hate group
1:13:00 Nathan Cofnas was initially excited to join Heterodox Academy
1:14:00 Heterodox Academy won’t defend academics such as Bo Winegard, Amy Wax

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NYR: Adherents to Maria Montessori’s radical methods have extended from progressive parents to Benito Mussolini

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review:

* From her earliest days at the university Montessori identified as a feminist and a socialist. She became secretary of the Association for Women, a group that lobbied for community education, female suffrage, a law for the determination of paternity, and equal pay for men and women, all issues that would come to impinge dramatically on her own life. When she began a relationship with a young psychiatrist named Giuseppe Montesano in 1895, Montessori laid down some nonnegotiable ground rules: her medical career came first, she would never marry, and their attachment must be kept private. It was the type of unsanctioned and voluntary arrangement that the pioneering “new women” of the 1890s were trying out around the world, from Moscow to New York.

Motherhood, however, has a way of disrupting even the most high-minded and equitable arrangements. In the summer of 1897 Montessori became pregnant. In an extraordinary inversion of the usual script, Montesano was happy to offer marriage, while Renilde insisted that her twenty-eight-year-old daughter consider no such thing. A family story repeated as late as the 1990s by Maria’s granddaughter has Renilde declaring, “You have done what no other woman has ever done in Italy. You are a scientist, a doctor, you are everything, now because of a baby you could lose everything.” At her mother’s insistence, Montessori gave birth in great secrecy, with the paperwork stating that both the mother and father of her baby son were “unknown.” In time-honored fashion, the infant, named Mario, was put into the care of a country wet nurse. Montessori, the antithesis of a modern madonna, contented herself with visits to her child whenever her busy working schedule allowed.

* Rita Kramer, who was able to interview Mario for her 1976 biography of Maria:

“Mario Montessori’s memory is of a spring day in 1913 when he was about fifteen, seeing on a school outing the lady whose visits have punctuated his childhood and been explained in his fantasies. A car stopped where he was resting; she got out and he went up to her and said simply, “I know you are my mother,” and told her he wanted to go with her. She made no objection, he got into the car with her.”

* One former elementary school teacher who had always been impressed by the Montessori method, which he had encountered as a member of the Humanitarian Society, was Benito Mussolini. In 1924 he donated 10,000 lire of his own money to help found the Opera Montessori, an agency with public and private funding to promote the system. Il Duce saw the advantage of Montessori’s method for producing industrious, disciplined, and literate future citizens. The Dottoressa was naturally delighted—here at last was the official support that she had long wanted. There would be training courses, a journal, a whole Montessori ecosystem that, with any luck, would provide a living for her beloved Mario, who by now had joined her in the family business.

De Stefano is scrupulous about not underplaying Montessori’s dalliance with Mussolini. In 1931 she wrote to him:

“In sum, my method can collaborate with fascism so that it will realize the possibilities to construct great spiritual energies; create a real mental hygiene that, when applied to our race, can enhance its enormous powers that—I am certain—outstrip the powers of all the other races.”

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Having the Last Word

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review:

* Janet Malcolm made her reputation writing about people who didn’t know when to shut up. Most of us like to talk about ourselves, and given the faintest encouragement will say enough to wind up looking like fools when our words appear on the page. The psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson told her about his many achievements, his sex life included, and then sued her for defamation when he discovered what her New Yorker reporting (republished in 1984 as In the Freud Archives) had made of him, claiming he’d been misquoted. He trusted her; he thought he’d found a sympathetic listener. He hadn’t. Nor had he been misquoted, but it took a decade and two trials to see the case off. A few years later the murderer Jeffrey MacDonald thought that he too had found such a listener in the journalist Joe McGinniss, whose contract for Fatal Vision (1983) was predicated on the access he gained by pretending to believe that MacDonald was innocent. When the killer learned what the writer really thought of him, he sued as well, and Malcolm then turned the case into her The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).

That book’s first sentence once made other writers angry. Now it merely seems true, or true at least of the kind of immersive reporting she practiced herself: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” The writer needs to keep the subject talking, but at the same time that subject “is worriedly striving to keep the writer listening…. He lives in fear of being found uninteresting” and offers a “childish trust” to any remotely willing ear. Which the journalist then promptly betrays. Malcolm knew that, and did that, even though it troubled her; at times she wrote as though writing itself made her uneasy, as though McGinnis’s practice were but an extreme version of her own. Yet that moral calculus also made her angry, first at those fellow practitioners who refused to recognize their predatory relation to their sources, and then at the credulity of those sources themselves. Don’t these people know that writers are always selling someone out?

* Malcolm’s most characteristic material lies in the fight between members of a tightly linked group for control of the narrative that binds them, a fight between people who have come to know each other too well.

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Departments on the Defensive

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review:

* Academic criticism can thus be regarded as an innovation of the 1920s, like the lie detector, water skiing, the timed traffic light, and the bread slicer.

* the pitched battles over curriculum and methodology waged both inside and outside the profession were largely beside the point, given literature’s dwindling share of the cultural pie. As Guillory puts it in the new book, “It does not matter how politically ambitious the aims of literary study might be if literature itself continues to contract in social importance.”

* “By the later 1960s, the literary professoriate had begun to tire of producing ‘readings’ of literary works.” But rather than finding something to do with literature besides interpret it, they simply moved on to producing interpretations of everything: films, works of visual art, philosophical systems, archival documents, feelings, society itself. “A door was opened leading beyond literature to all of culture,” Guillory writes. “But having passed through this magic portal, it was difficult to return to literature, to be content with that object.”

* criticism as “the profession of the unprofessional.”

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Bloody Panico

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Luke Ford

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in the New York Review:

* 2022 will be remembered as the year of two monarchs and three prime ministers, not to mention four chancellors of the exchequer, five education secretaries, and more than thirty resignations from the government.

* When I sent half-ironical congratulations to a don at Lincoln College, Sunak’s Oxford alma mater, on the ascent of their eminent alumnus, he replied, “We’re very proud of Rishi and hope that he lasts at least a year.”

* But what distinguishes the Tories nowadays isn’t marital infidelity or sexual variety so much as sheer squalor. One MP was imprisoned for sexual abuse of minors, one was forced to resign when a woman MP sitting in the chamber of the Commons noticed that he was looking at pornography on his cell phone, and another, Chris Pincher, was seen at a party at the Carlton Club fondling the groins of younger men, to which Johnson initially responded, with his ready wit, “Pincher by name, pincher by nature.” Hancock’s own political career ended when a CCTV camera caught him in a passionate embrace in his ministerial office with a colleague who proved to be also his mistress (transgressing lockdown rules as well as the Seventh Commandment). He has since appeared on a grotesque “reality program” eating the genitals of exotic animals in some distant clime, and he looks more and more like our present-day answer to the Rector of Stiffkey, who was defrocked in the 1930s for devoting excessive pastoral care to chorus girls and ended his days exhibiting himself in a barrel at a circus before, sad to say, he was mauled by a lion.

* While Johnson was mishandling the pandemic he would address the nation on television in his rambling, bumbling manner, which prompted Robert Harris, the political journalist turned novelist, to observe that as we listened to him blathering on with his feeble excuses and totally unconvincing explanations, we all realized what being married to him must be like. And so although Johnson’s fall has been called unexpected, it was surely overdetermined. He always had a transactional relationship with MPs who knew very well that he was a “seedy, treacherous chancer,” in Ferdinand Mount’s phrase, a ruthlessly ambitious, totally unprincipled opportunist who has never believed in anything in his life apart from self-advancement and self-gratification. While they supported him as long as he could win an election, the Tories sensed that he was always a series of accidents waiting to happen.

* The first names of the latest four French finance ministers are Bruno, Michel, Pierre, and François; of their German counterparts, Christian, Olaf, Peter, and Wolfgang; of American secretaries of the Treasury, Janet, Steven, Jack, and Timothy. The four successive chancellors of the exchequer until last October were called Sajid, Rishi, Nadhim, and Kwasi. Bruno Maçães, the Portuguese politician who is now a prolific commentator, has said that there is no other European country where four people with such names could have risen to such an office. Three of the highest offices—the premiership and the two historic secretaryships of state—are now held by people of color: the foreign secretary is James Cleverly, whose mother was from Sierra Leone, and the home secretary is Suella Braverman, whose parents were Indian by way of Mauritius and Kenya.

Veneration of Churchill is a dogma of the Tory Party (with which he had a very checkered relationship over the years) as well as of the American right, although his racism is no secret. He once told a colleague that “the Hindus were a foul race” who deserved to be extirpated, and in 1955, at the last Cabinet meeting over which he presided as prime minister, he said that the Tories should fight the next election on the slogan “Keep England White.” At the Conservative Party Conference the following year, one of the speakers was Captain Charles Waterhouse, a veteran of the Great War, an MP since the 1920s, and a great conference favorite. In his speech he used the phrase “nigger in the woodpile”; added in a stage aside, “Too many of them about anyway”; and brought the house down with raucous laughter—a memory that must make today’s Tories shudder, and not only them.

This was at a time when recently arrived immigrants from the West Indies faced gross discrimination and occasional violence. In a particularly repellent story related in Matthew Engel’s new book The Reign: Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, Carmel Jones arrived in England from Jamaica in 1955. A pious Anglican, like many West Indians, she went to her local parish church, where the vicar told her, “Thank you for coming, but I would be delighted if you didn’t come back. My congregation is uncomfortable in the presence of black people.”

* I’m haunted by the memory of the speech that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha made to his unfortunate people one January long ago: “This year will be harder than last year. On the other hand, it will be easier than next year.”

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