WP: The newest excuse for shutting down campus speech: ‘Security’

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Luke Ford

I wish colleges would tell the truth and say that they do not permit the public airing of certain opinions.

Catherine Rampell writes: Around the country, colleges have found a new excuse for shutting down free speech: safety.

Just as “national security” has periodically served as a pretext for robbing Americans of civil liberties, so too has “campus security” newly become a convenient rationale for discarding commitments to free speech. Unwilling to either defend controversial speech or cop to censoring it, college administrators are instead increasingly invoking public “safety” when they cancel events.

Ben Shapiro, a young conservative firebrand who has criticized Black Lives Matter, has recently been disinvited from two college campuses due to “security” concerns. In February, his scheduled talk at California State University at Los Angeles was canceled — or rather, indefinitely delayed — so that administrators could “arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity.”

The university president said the decision “was made in the interest of safety and security.” (Shapiro showed up on campus anyway; security indeed had to smuggle him through a back entrance to protect him from protesters, one of whom pulled a fire alarm to disrupt the event.)

Then, last month, a student group at DePaul University in Chicago had to revoke its invitation to Shapiro after administrators barred him from campus over “security concerns.”

A month earlier, DePaul had barred Milo Yiannopoulos, a sort of professional troll and informal spokesman for the racist, anti-feminist alt-right, from returning to campus. An earlier visit resulted in student protesters storming the stage, with one protester allegedly assaulting Yiannopoulos; security hired for the event did not intervene. When the College Republicans invited him back, an administrator said a review of video footage of the previous event revealed “it is clear that it would not be possible for DePaul to provide the security that would be required for such an event.”

Last week Yiannopoulos was also disinvited from an event at the University of Miami, again because of unspecified “security concerns.”

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WP: You’re at the final exam and never attended class. It’s that dream again.

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

I have this recurring nightmare. I’ve had it since high school.

I’m somebody who rarely is late or misses an appointment. I once forgot a lunch with a friend back in 2001. I don’t think I’ve done that since. I do not react well when I suffer from other people’s carelessness. I have never borrowed a book or other object without returning it.

UPDATE: After writing this blog post, I had a nightmare that I showed up to a bar mitzvah on Shabbos morning wearing old shorts and a ratty t-shirt and had to say stay outside and look stupid the whole time.

Washington Post:

“I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students,” says Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and who wrote about the dream in a 2009 Psychology Today blog post. “These are people who have demanded a high performance from themselves. The recurrence of the dream correlates with times of stress and pressure, when people feel they have a challenge to achieve.’’

Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, an Austin psychoanalyst, agrees. The final exam, she says, “is likely representative of an occasion when the dreamer feels he or she will be tested or measured, and the anxiety is about not measuring up. The dreamer’s task in ‘awake life’ is to translate the final exam to a situation he or she is facing that stirs up concerns about potential failure.”

But why school? Why don’t we dream about current pressures — grant proposals that are due, impending legal briefs or oral arguments, or newspaper deadlines?

“Emotional memories and impressions made during high-stress experiences are particularly strong, and are further strengthened each time they are recalled and become the place the brain goes when the emotion is evoked,” Willis wrote in an email. “Since each new stress in the current day is ‘new,’ there is not a strong memory circuit that would hook to it in a dream. But there is that strong neural network of previous, similar ‘achievement’ stress. Since tests are the highest stressors. . . [it] makes sense as the ‘go-to’ memory when stressed about something equally high stakes in the ‘now.’ ’’

Ainslie theorizes that most of us have these dreams “as an attempt to disguise what it’s really about,” she says. “The part of yourself that is distressed wants to disguise it, and the easiest way to disguise it is to move backwards.”

Ainslie says the school dream is a common one, although it’s not the only one that reflects anxiety. “Another common one is being in a car and not being able to put the brakes on,” she says. “This one isn’t about not measuring up. It’s about not being in control, a matter of not being the driver in your life.”

Alma Bond, a retired New York psychoanalyst and writer, describes the school dream as a response to “an unconscious memory of an experience for which we were totally unprepared,” adding that it’s possible “we unconsciously remember a time when we did fail some test or other, and are afraid we will repeat the failure.”

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What Forms Of Protest Are Allowed ToThe Palestinians?

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Obviously violence is not permitted. And BDS is not permitted. Encouraging boycotts of Israel is not permitted. It is a hate crime (even though it is a normal process in democracies, such as the boycott of apartheid South Africa, but hey, you can’t use that normal process against my group, because we’re powerless, because Holocaust).

For decades, Jewish organizations complained that Palestinians did not pursue their cause through peaceful means. Then the Palestinians seized on BDS but now we find out that is illegitimate. So what are Palestinians allowed to do to further their cause? Asking for a friend.

If people want to advance the interests of Palestinians as against the Jewish state, what means are allowed to them in polite society?

Obviously, I find these questions ridiculous. Just as Jews used every possible means to establish the Jewish state, I expect Palestinians and every other people to use every means they find useful to pursue their own group interests.

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Who’s The Real Donald Trump?

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Unlike Barack Obama in 2008, for whom we had a vast public record comprised of his hundreds of scholarly and popular articles on all topics imaginable, Donald Trump is a blank screen.

Where did Trump come from? What has he been doing for the last 35 years? What have been his views on the issues of his time? Why hasn’t he shared them with the public? Why haven’t late night comedians ever made any jokes about Trump?

We’ve only been allowed to see a few carefully scripted and focus tested glimpses of Trump under the most contrived circumstances, in which every single word he allows to escape from his mouth has first been run by teams of marketers, psychologists, and lawyers.

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Ben Shapiro Shifting Towards Trump?

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Vox Day writes:

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Ah, so “never” for varying values of the term. Well, rats only swarm a winning ship. This is just an early sign of the coming Trumpslide. Let’s all welcome (((Ben))) aboard the #TrumpTrain!

COMMENTS:

* “Typical Jew making his living as an ideologue on the “conservative” side.”

The only one I trust is Michael Savage. He’s been beating the Nationalist drum long before it was popular. I can remember him ranting about language,borders and culture all the ay back in 2003. Whether it was popular or not he’s remained surprisingly consistent these many years.

* Dummy Ben Shapiro. He threw away a Breitbart gig for #NeverTrump. What a dummy. Didn’t it occur to him that reason Breitbart was getting all the clicks is because that’s where the voters were?

Ah well, let’s see how it goes. I hope he doesn’t turn out like other johnny-come-latelies who used be #NeverTrump such as Mark Levin. Levin will say “Vote Trump” then spend the next 3 hours bitching about him. That’s not helping, and this is war.

* While I’m annoyed with his earlier behavior, if his apparent change of heart helps keep Clinton from being elected, I’m perfectly willing to welcome Ben Shapiro aboard for the duration of the campaign.

* Looks like he gets more retweets and likes with this new strategy. So I think he’ll stay the course for a good while.

Whatever it takes to keep crooked Hillary off the levers of power – so yeah, welcome back Mr. Shapiro.

* Who’s going to be surprised when Trump helps facilitate the rebuilding of the temple?

* His ethnicity alone should preclude him from having a public platform for his views. I guess he saw the polls and realized there wouldn’t be much audience for an anti-Trump pundit who will spend four years arguing for open borders, foreign wars and anti-racism while still pretending to be right wing. I suppose MSNBC will need token (((conservatives))) to come on and bash Trump. Otherwise, Benji may want to look into learning a respectable trade.

* Michael Savage was manning the barricades, taking heavy artillery, and keeping America’s flame alive while many on this blog were potty training. He routinely pays homage to the men he calls “Eddys,” who fought the wars and protected the country. He is unassailable in his love for America first, in my opinion.

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Excluding The High IQ

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Polymath writes: “The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%! In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions. This benefits neither the excluded group nor society in general. For society, it is a horrendous waste of a very valuable resource. For the high IQ person it is a personal tragedy, commonly resulting in unrealized social, educational and productive potential.”

Vox Day comments: In other words, more than a few PhDs at elite universities are more than two standard deviations below me in IQ terms. And here I am supposed to be impressed by a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy of Language from a second-tier Midwestern university? In fact, given the ability of the Ilk and my Vile Faceless Minions to not only follow my lead in a disciplined manner but also correctly anticipate my intentions without having them explained, the evidence would tend to suggest that the mean intelligence of the regulars here is higher than the Cambridge faculty.

Based on my interactions with “intellectually elite professionals” this doesn’t shock me, although I’m a little surprised that both the mean and the ceiling as as low as they are.

So it should be no surprise that I’ve been “systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded” from the science fiction community, as its mean is probably around 1.5 standard deviations below the university professors. (Although in my estimation there are a few SF people with whom I have interacted who clearly have IQs over 139.) But in most instances, the intellectual gulf is simply too great.

Garth Zietsman has said, referring to people with D15IQs over 152, ‘A common experience with people in this category or higher is that they are not wanted – the masses (including the professional classes) find them an affront of some sort.’ While true, it is more likely a symptom than a cause of the exclusion. We need to understand why they are an affront.

I can tell him that. People who work very hard and spend years in order to climb to what they regard as the pinnacle of achievement actively resent those who can simply leap up to the peak. And because their knowledge is hard won, they tend to cling to it much more tenaciously than the more intelligent individual who is no more tied to one piece of information than the next. What makes it worse is that they cannot fathom that the more intelligent individuals do not think like they do.

Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above 145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different thinking emerges. By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally different intellectual processes.

I’ve been pointing this out for years, if you recall. But because I don’t think like the less intelligent, I am regularly labeled everything from stupid to racist. In my experience, the 150 IQ individual does not resent the individual with the 160 or the 175 IQ, and this may be because being above 145, we all tend to engage in similar thought processes, albeit with different capabilities. The 135 IQ individual dislikes and fears the 150+ individuals, while the 115 IQ individual either doesn’t believe the 150+ individuals exist or blithely insists that they are crazy.

That’s why I despise midwits. You simply can’t talk to them. They don’t even try to understand you, but instead move to disqualify you as fast as they can. I have much more sensible conversations with people in the 75 to 100 range than I do with most in the 105 to 120 range. The 125 to 140 crowd is okay as long as they don’t have an inferiority complex, but when they do, they’re the biggest annoyances of all.

People with D15IQs over 150 are effectively ‘The Excluded’, routinely finding their thoughts to be unconvincing in the public discourse and in productive environments. If placed in a leadership position, they will not succeed.

Now you know why I have such an allergy to being asked to lead in any way, shape, or form. In any event, this may be one of the more interesting aspects of Brainstorm (a reminder, there are 20 places left for the Wednesday session at 7:30 PM Eastern), as even those who aren’t +3SD or higher are, at least, open in principle to the wild and crazy thoughts being expressed by the higher intelligences. If we can figure out how to best harness a community of High IQ Excluded, we should be able to come up with more than a few interesting projects.

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The New Paradigm

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

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KM: S&M, transgenderism and Jewish holidays: Transparent is “the most Jewish show on television.”

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Amy Klein writes for Hadassah Magazine:

There’s a scene in the upcoming third season of Transparent—Jill Soloway’s hit show on Amazon about a father’s transgender transition and its effect on his family—where daughter Sarah Pfefferman is bound and getting flogged by a dominatrix. But Sarah is bored, distracted by her own neurotic train of thought.

“You know there’s this whole Jewish concept that if you do charity work you’re not supposed to tell anyone about it cuz if you tell anyone it voids the work,” Sarah says, the camera on her face in the vise, a whipping sound in the background. “It’s more about ego than charity…. If that’s true I haven’t done a single charitable action in my entire life.”

It’s typical Soloway: so, so irreverent and so, so Jewish at the same time.

But that’s Transparent, for you—”The most Jewish show on television,” says Soloway, the show’s writer and director. On September 18, Soloway, who based the series on her own experience—her father had transitioned to a woman, was awarded the 2016 Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series for Transparent. Actor Jeffrey Tambor, who plays father Mort Pfefferman, now Maura, also won an Emmy, for Best Actor in a Comedy Series. And the show—its third season premieres on September 23—won a 2016 Golden Globe award for best television series.

“I’ve always wanted to be part of a movement,” said Soloway in her Emmy-acceptance speech. “This TV show allows me to take my dreams about unlikable Jewish people, queer folk, trans folk and make them heroes. Thank you to the trans community for your lived lives.”

This season Sarah—played by Amy Landecker—gets kicked off the synagogue board and starts an organization called Hineni with brother Joshie’s ex-fiancée, Rabbi Raquel Fein. “Hilarity ensues: They gather in their kids’ school gymnasium and try to reinvent havdalah,” Soloway, 50, says in a recent interview with Hadassah Magazine. “Just like ‘East Side Jews,’” she adds, referring to the community of L.A. Jews—“An irreverent, upstart, nondenominational collective” Soloway founded 10 years ago.

The new season also has Rabbi Raquel jogging in the woods, with her voiceover discussing themes of redemption. “Each season has one big Jewish holiday in the center,” Soloway explains. The first was Shabbat, the second was the High Holidays and, this time, it revolves around Passover—“Seder stuff, liberation…the whole season’s a Hagaddah, if you will.” Soloway can’t help but joke: “Season 4 will be about Succot, by Season 8 we’ll be big into Lag B’omer, I guess, and season 11, Shemini Atzeret.”

Where does she get all her Jewish knowledge?

Soloway has three rabbinical advisors. Rabbi Susan Goldberg of Wilshire Boulevard Temple serves as a consultant for the show. “She comes in and sometimes we do Torah study,” Soloway says.

She also speaks daily to New York-based Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, “a God-optional patriarchy-toppling Jewish modern mind. There’s a mandate among religious and spiritual thinkers to be thinking about the binary, the gendered, the feminist, the goddess, and Amichai reminds me of that every day.”

Her own personal rabbi, Mordecai Finley, of Ohr HaTorah synagogue in Los Angeles, “uses Torah as a way to understand brokenness,” she says. “He defines God as an energy hovering between love, justice, truth and beauty—somewhere between those four qualities is our search for spirituality.” That exact quote is also uttered by the new charismatic cantor working with Rabbi Raquel.

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Decoding an Anti-Semitic Meme Donald Trump Supporters Took From Anime

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jay Michaelson writes:

It turns out, the image is of Asuka, a character in the controversial, critically heralded anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, created by Hideaki Anno in 1995. Evangelion created a mythology that makes Lost look like Candy-Land, blending together gnostic, Kabbalistic, Christian, and conspiracy theory themes and incorporating many of Anno’s own struggles with mental illness.

One of those themes concerns a shadowy organization called SEELE, which is essentially a mythologized blend of the world Zionist conspiracy (a la Protocols of the Elders of Zion), Illuminati, and United Nations. According to the Evangelion wiki, SEELE is “a secret and mysterious organization with influence over the world’s governments and organizations.” Its name comes from the German word for soul.

The United Nations is a participant in this secret organization, which has among its goal the uniting of all humanity and the erasure of national boundaries. Their ultimate motives are sinister, however, culminating in SEELE’s own control of the world (to greatly oversimplify). SEELE also has some specifically Jewish elements, in particular its knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which in Evangelion are prophetic, gnostic texts.

Asuka (full name: Asuka Langley Soryu) is a fighter pilot who becomes the great enemy of SEELE. A fourteen year old girl, she is the love interest of Evangelion’s tormented hero, Shinji. But she is also a warrior in her own right, destroying SEELE’s weapons, giant humanoid robots called Evangelions. (Fittingly for the dark series, these efforts are ultimately unsuccessful and catastrophe rains upon Earth.)

In other words, and again oversimplifying somewhat, Asuka is the warrior against the secret Illuminati/Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. And in the meme posted on my Twitter thread, she is Trump, wearing his signature hat.

Having decoded the meaning of the image, I then set about trying to document how and where it entered the employ of the white supremacist fringe.

I didn’t find much — but I did find something. On a reddit-like thread from January, 2016, I found a different image of Asuka-as-Trump as well as one post saying “If elected, Trump will bomb the shit out of SELEE [sic] and take their oil.” While this would seem to align SEELE with Arab states rather than Jews, if one takes the conspiratorial worldview that, in fact, the great conspiracy (Jewish, UN, Masonic, whatever) controls everything, then of course they also orchestrate the world’s wars over scarce resources. SEELE is as much behind Saudi Arabia and Iran as it is behind Israel.

As for where the exact meme originated, or whether white supremacists know any of this history, I don’t know. I’m certainly not going to engage with any of them in order to ask.

It’s also unclear how much all of this is really in Evangelion itself. Certainly, Anno incorporated conspiratorial themes into the series, and SEELE in particular. It’s also well-known that Japanese society often displays a curious blend of philo- and anti-Semitism, often admiring Jews for our disproportionate impact on society, media, and politics. This is true both in the mainstream of Japanese society (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has often been a bestseller) and on the fringes (radical, conspiratorial antisemitism was part of the ideology of the murderous Aum Shinrikyo cult.

Japanese anti-Semitism experienced a surge in the 1980s and 1990s, with several books alleging that the United States was controlled by Jews and was plotting to destroy Japan. Aum Shinrikyo in particular developed fantastic myths in which the world would be destroyed and replaced with another one — myths quite similar to the plot of Evangelion, which appeared around the same time.

At the same time, Evangelion was deliberately constructed by Anno as a complex multi-narrative in which different viewers could see what they wanted to see. It is filled with dark sexual imagery and paranoid imaginings of all kinds. SEELE is part of that, but certainly not the sum of it. There is no trace of anti-Semitism in Anno’s political beliefs or other work. It seems more likely that the cultural familiarity of conspiracy theories provided a rich basis for Evangelion’s paranoid tapestry, without any particular animus or ideology.

Somehow, though, the obscure mythology of a 1990s Japanese animated series has found its way into the 2016 presidential election, with Donald Trump himself cast in the role of warrior against the international Jewish conspiracy.

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Peter Beinart: The Death of ‘He Said, She Said’ Journalism

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

From The Atlantic:

Last Saturday, The New York Times published an extraordinary story. What made the story extraordinary wasn’t the event the Times covered. What made it extraordinary was the way the Times covered it.

On its front page, top right—the most precious space in American print journalism—the Times wrote about Friday’s press conference in which Donald Trump declared that a) he now believed Barack Obama was a US citizen, b) he deserved credit for having established that fact despite rumors to the contrary and c) Hillary Clinton was to blame for the rumors. Traditionally, when a political candidate assembles facts so as to aggrandize himself and belittle his opponent, “objective” journalists like those at the Times respond with a “he said, she said” story…

But the Times, once a champion practitioner of the “he said, she said” campaign story, discarded it with astonishing bluntness. The Times responded to Trump’s press conference by running a “News Analysis,” a genre that gives reporters more freedom to explain a story’s significance. But “News Analysis” pieces generally supplement traditional news stories. On Saturday, by contrast, the Times ran its “News Analysis” atop Page One while relegating its news story on Trump’s press conference to page A10. Moreover, “News Analysis” stories generally offer context. They don’t offer thundering condemnation.

Yet thundering condemnation is exactly what the Times story provided. Its headline read, “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.” Not “falsehood,” which leaves open the possibility that Trump was merely mistaken, but “lie,” which suggests, accurately, that Trump had every reason to know that what he was saying about Obama’s citizenship was false.

The article’s text was even more striking. It read like an opinion column. It began by reciting the history of Trump’s campaign to discredit Obama’s citizenship. “It was not true in 2011,” began the first paragraph. “It was not true in 2012,” began the second paragraph. “It was not true in 2014,” began the third paragraph. Then, in the fourth paragraph: “It was not true, any of it.” The article called Trump’s claim that he had put to rest rumors about Obama’s citizenship “a bizarre new deception” and his allegation that Clinton had fomented them “another falsehood.” Then, in summation, it declared that while Trump has “exhausted an army of fact checkers with his mischaracterizations, exaggerations and fabrications,” the birther lie was particularly “insidious” because it “sought to undo the embrace of an African American president by the 69 million voters who elected him.”

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The amazing thing to me was that the CNN panel which followed that event were so furious that they had been “played” (their word) by Trump in such a fashion. And then to see in the NYT that Trump’s questioning Obama’s birth place, after Obama had sold his books on the basis of his having been born in Kenya and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, was considered by the esteemed editors a “lie.” I never knew that one could “lie” by asking a question.

* I think Trump is deliberately and naturally very funny.

His comment to the effect that Hillary probably paid PR guys $2 million but he came up with “Crooked Hillary” all by himself for free tickled me no end.

I thought SPY Magazine’s characterization of him as the “short-fingered vulgarian was funny. But he’s much funnier than they were.

And as adaptable and resilient as he’s proven himself to be under the relentless, unfair and dishonest onslaught by the left, I bet he’s pretty healthy psychologically. Certainly healthy enough to be POTUS.

* The left always marched humorously in lockstep. The pranks those guys pulled seemed mean-spirited whereas Trump’s stunts are more good-natured. They wouldn’t have called their followers “deplorables”–that’s what they would have called the squares or straights. They laughed at the Establishment but they didn’t laugh at themselves. They were full of righteous indignation thinly overlaid with smug humor. It was obvious to me as a teenager that in the left’s eyes, all people were equal but some people were more equal than others.

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