davidthompson

Narrow Escape

Captain Brian Bews ejects from his CF-18 fighter jet during a practice flight at the Lethbridge County Airport, Alberta, on July 23.

Video. Via Instapundit.

Elsewhere (24)

David Horowitz on Christopher Hitchens and political second thoughts.

Writing of his participation in a “vast demonstration” in London in front of the American Embassy to protest the war, [Hitchens] recalls “the way in which my throat and heart seemed to swell as the police were temporarily driven back and the advancing allies of the Vietnamese began to sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’” He then comments: “I added to my police record for arrests, of all of which I am still reasonably proud.” But why? Hitchens’s antiwar comrades, the International Socialists among them, were not “allies of the Vietnamese” but of the Vietnamese Communists and, as Peter Hitchens correctly points out, of the Soviet empire behind them. What these leftists - and their allies in America and Europe - actually achieved in Indo-China was one of the largest genocides on record and a totalitarian future for the Cambodians and Vietnamese.

Norm Geras on the Guardian’s urge to hand our lunch money to bullies.

If radicalizing those susceptible to being radicalized is the end of the argumentative story, something one simply must not do and nothing more needs to be added, then that is equivalent to saying that should British foreign policy have the effect that some of our fellow citizens will take to murdering other of our fellow citizens or aiding and abetting in this enterprise or giving their approval to it, then such a foreign policy must be eschewed. And this in turn is equivalent to saying that the threat of murder should be allowed a decisive voice in the determination of foreign policy.

And Greg Lukianoff on knowing why you think what you think.

One of the great harms of speech codes and campus censorship is that it leaves students with the false impression that censorship is what good, compassionate people do.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Friday Ephemera

Jerboa. // Sculpted pencil tips. // How to pet your porcupine. // Robot butterfly. // The Rex exoskeleton. // MRI scans of oranges, mushrooms and other foodstuffs. // Beef lolly. // Abandoned couches. // A brief history of computer icons. // “Communist authorities suspected that Wittenburg’s photos amounted to a critique of the regime.” // Penn & Teller on the hijacking of environmentalism. // Simulated physics. // Pondering Inception. // Ode to Newport. // Tesseract 101. // Turntable kitsch. // Floating Point. // Bioluminescent algae. // Niagara Street, 1908. Spot the window cleaner. // Zoom trees. // A must for Elvis fans.

Prosthetic

Most of her face was gone. There was just this gaping hole where her eyes and nose and most of her mouth had been. I thought she was dead. I just figured this was going to be another homicide scene. Then I saw her fingers start to move – ever so slightly. And it looked like she was trying to breathe through the wound in her face.

The story of Chrissy Steltz, whose face is held on by magnets. Via Metafilter.

Bikini Ideology

A Guardian reader asks,

Do some women really suffer angst over such mind numbing trivia, or were you just pressured to write a piece on this subject?

The piece in question, by the chronically unhappy Laurie Penny, concerns the socio-political ramifications of ladies’ swimsuits. Specifically, the bikini. Ms Penny’s approach to this crushing social issue is a tad presumptuous and long on assertion. Among its gems is this:

The bikini itself has a sinister semiotic history.

See, you just don’t get that kind of thing in the Times.

Those with a stake in the mythology of the garment now focus on its namesake island as a tropical paradise, but bikini ideology is poisoned with the cultural fallout of the mid-20th century in more ways than one.

Bikini “mythology” is something of a stretch and the word “marketing” might have been less grandiose. But bikini ideology? A whole ideology? Such a thing exists? Alas, Ms Penny is much too rushed to elaborate, beyond stating her belief that,

Wearing a bikini is no longer associated with pleasure and daring, but with anxiety, dieting rituals and joyless physical performance... The bikini body is not supposed to be naturally occurring: it is a quasi-religious state of myth and artifice to which only the truly virtuous can aspire.

Curse those Special K adverts. Is there nothing they can’t ruin? Thankfully, there’s time for plenty of earnest disapproval:

This summer, women of all ages are once more being exhorted to get the perfect “bikini body” by every tabloid, gossip circular and glossy magazine. Singer Katy Perry and heiresses the Kardashian sisters are among this week’s “best bikini body” celebrities, and ordinary women everywhere are trying to emulate their fairytale lifestyles by purchasing a particular cellulite-busting body scrub or embarking on a bizarre starvation diet.

I somehow doubt that Guardian readers spend too much time following the exhortations and “cultural edicts” of Grazia or Heat magazine, as if they could hold the secret to eternal contentedness. Nor, I should think, does Ms Penny or her elevated colleagues. Perhaps the effect is limited to those ordinary women, who, one might suppose, have no minds of their own to make choices of their own, and who exist as mere flotsam on a sea of social pressures. 

Friday Ephemera

No corkscrew? No problem. Use a shoe. // What astronauts see. // Curtains made of slides. // Ant megalopolis. // Pulsate, a diversion. // Petri dish paintings. // Portraits by Tom Hoops. // Awkward family pet photos. // Wigs of note. // Crowd scene, Chicago 2010. // Critters of the deep. // David Horowitz on the one-party classroom. // The crushing tedium of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. // Escher in Lego. // 8-bit Gary. // Exploitation tat. // Bugatti Veyron Super Sport. // Bacterial fashion. // Bowerbird nests. // Attention Xbox users. // Tonight you’ll dream of cow spiders.

Refreshments

During New York’s twelve-day heat wave, August and September 1953.

Note the combination of ice lolly and gloves. That’s classy, that is.

It Pays To Be Unobvious

A while ago, in a post on Professor Jere Surber and his prodigious self-regard, I noted a feature of academia’s less reputable corners:

In many arts subjects, especially those tethered only loosely to evidence, logic or practical verification, there’s often pressure to avoid the obvious and prosaic, even when the obvious and prosaic is true. The obligation to be unobvious, if only for the benefit of one’s academic peers, may help explain the more fanciful assertions from some practitioners of the liberal arts. Consider, for instance, Duke’s professor miriam cooke, who refuses to capitalise her name, thus drawing attention to her egalitarian radicalism and immense creativity. Professor cooke’s subtlety of mind is evident in her claim that the oppression and misogyny found in the Islamic world is actually the fault of globalisation and Western colonialism, despite the effects predating their alleged causes by several centuries. Professor cooke also tells us that “polygamy can be liberating and empowering” – a statement that may strike readers as somewhat dubious. It does, however, meet the key criteria of being both edgy and unobvious.

In a review of Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, Theodore Dalrymple touches on a similar point: 

Intellectuals, like everyone else, live and work in a marketplace. In order to get noticed they must say things which have not been said before, or at least say them in a different manner. No one is likely to obtain many plaudits for the rather obvious, indeed self-evident, thought that a street robber cannot commit street robberies while he is in prison. But an intellectual who first demonstrates that the cause of an increase in street robbery is the increase in the amount of property that law-abiding pedestrians have on them as they walk in the streets is likely to be hailed, at least until the next idea comes along. Thus, while there are no penalties for being foolish, there are severe penalties (at least in career terms) for being obvious.

As Dalrymple notes, the obligation to be unobvious can lead some to make claims that are original only insofar as more realistic people would not be inclined to take them seriously. Or as Sowell puts it elsewhere, 

If you’ve mastered the writings of William Shakespeare and convey that to the next generation, who have obviously not mastered it, you’re performing a valuable service. But, that’s not going to advance your academic career. You’ve got to come out with some new theory of Shakespeare. You’ve got to go through and show how there is gender bias or the secret gay message somewhere coded in Shakespeare. You’ve just got to come up with something.

Thus, Dr Sandra Harding, a “feminist philosopher of science,” can claim that it’s both “illuminating and honest” to refer to Newton’s Principia as a “rape manual,” while insisting that rape and torture metaphors can usefully describe its contents. Likewise, Professor Judith Butler – a high priestess of the ponderous and opaque – can dismiss clarity and common sense as inhibiting radicalism. (Sentiments shared by, among others, Ralph Hexter, Daniel Selden and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, who disdains “clarity of presentation” and “unproblematic prose” as “the conceptual tools of conservatism.”)

Occasionally, Judith Butler’s politics are aired relatively free of question-begging jargon, thus revealing her radicalism to the lower, uninitiated castes. As, for instance, at a 2006 UC Berkeley “Teach-In Against America’s Wars,” during which the professor claimed that it’s “extremely important” to “understand” Hamas and Hizballah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left” and so, by implication, deserving of support. Readers may find it odd that students are being encouraged to express solidarity with totalitarian terrorist movements that set booby traps in schools and boast of using children as human shields, and whose stated goals include the Islamic “conquest” of the free world, the “obliteration” of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. However, such statements achieve a facsimile of sense if one understands that the object is to be both politically radical and morally unobvious.

Thomas Sowell discusses his book with Peter Robinson here. Parts 2, 3, 4, 5.

Irregular

The images were taken via satellite and they show the rather oddly shaped football pitches that seem to be built wherever possible – the desire for playing the game has clearly surpassed and ignored the limitations of natural topography and FIFA’s laws of the game. According to the official rules, you would not be allowed to play football on any of these fields. However, the careers of many of the world’s best football players began on these very same fields despite their askew angles, odd proportions, misshapen border lines and pitch markings.

From Joachim Schmid’s book O Campo: Brazilian Football Fields. Via Anna.

Friday Ephemera

You too can look like a handsome guy. // Polar mesospheric clouds. // Drum light. // Captured lightning. // Nuclear explosions, 1945-1998. (1958 was a busy year.) // Noodle restaurant, Tokyo. // Spider-Man and Elvis are coming to Roswell. // Transparent specimens. // Coldest ever antimatter. // Defrosted dinosaur leg. // The frog dissection app. // Fighter planes as art. // If the Earth stood still. // During the London blackout, 1944. // Woodbots. // Cheescake of yore. // Coma, a game. // Magnetic vuzzle chair. // A car called “mindset.” Really? Mindset? // As driven by Bond. // A door for children. // And speaking of Spider-Man...

Reheated (11)

For newcomers, three more items from the archives. 

Postmodernism Unpeeled. 

A discussion with Stephen Hicks, author of Explaining Postmodernism.

Writing in Innovations of Antiquity, Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden dismissed “transparent prose” as “the approved mode of expression for the society and values of the newly empowered middle class.” In the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh denounced “unproblematic prose and clarity of presentation” as “the conceptual tools of conservatism.” The rejection of transparency as “conservative” is particularly odd, since transparency makes a claim amenable to broad critical enquiry, and thus public correction. Without transparency, what do we have? A private language shared only by likeminded peers in which one is free to assert largely unopposed? [...] Presumably, if you prefer arguments that are comprehensible and open to scrutiny, this signals some reactionary tendency and deep moral failing. On the other hand, if you sneer at such bourgeois trifles, you’re radical, clever and very, very sexy.

Blunting the Senses in the Name of Fairness. 

The Dalai Lama gets it wrong. Cultural equivalence debunked at length.

Rosie O’Donnell was happy to assert that, “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.” But while red-faced evangelists may say, for instance, that gay people are wicked, damned to hellfire, etc, I don’t know of any internationally renowned Christian leaders who are calling for the imprisonment and killing of gay people. Unlike the supposedly “moderate” Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who insists that gay men and lesbians should be “killed in the worst manner possible.” Not condemned, ‘corrected,’ prayed for or pitied, or any of the usual nonsense spouted by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson et al; but murdered - as brutally as possible.

The Flow of Ideas. 

Professor Sharra Vostral exposes the humble tampon as an “artefact of control.”

Note the professor’s confidence as she rushes to the podium on Mount Grievance. She is righteous and wise, and apparently telepathic. Non-literal uses of the term “patchwork” must assume whatever sequence of ideas suits Professor Vostral’s worldview. Used metaphorically, the word “patchwork” must signal disdain for quilt making, quilt makers and, by implication, an entire gender too. There can be no doubt about it. “Patchwork” simply is a “gendered insult” - one “based in derogatory understandings” of a “woman-based art form.” It’s “embedded,” apparently.

Excavate the greatest hits.

Infantilised

All facets of a person’s life - including employment, education, place of residence, access to medical facilities, and access to stores - are determined by a semi-hereditary system of social discrimination that classifies citizens into 53 subgroups based on their family’s perceived loyalty to the regime.

Kim Jong Il’s utopian North Korea, as described in The Least Free Places on Earth: 2010. From the Freedom in the World 2010 survey. 

Friday Ephemera

Electrons over Chicago. // Cardboard speakers. // Conan the Barbarian: the Musical. // A brief guide to boogers. // The hipster fashion cycle. // Ankle pony boots. // Eyeborg. // Bear rug. // Mandelbox. // Glenn Beck on lost American history. (h/t, dicentra) // “It wasn’t peace activists who liberated Auschwitz.” // Puffer fish. // Ventricle vase. // A collection of miniature heads. // Surfers and swimmers, seen from below. (h/t, Coudal) // Serendipity. // Going down, going up. // For people with partial hands. // At last, waffle lollies. // Shatner does War of the Worlds. 

Just Thwarted Sperm

Readers will recall Amanda Marcotte, a popular leftwing feminist whose wisdom has entertained us more than once. Not least with her famous publishing blunder and subsequent, rather competitive, displays of  racial consciousness. Nor should we forget Amanda’s belief that the inclination to reproduce is a dastardly social construct “preserved” by unnamed villains solely to ensure that women without children aren’t recognised as “complete individuals.” Some may treasure memories of Amanda’s evidence-free claim that critics of academic feminism, among them Daphne Patai and Christina Hoff Sommers, are “trying to oppress women.”

Ms Marcotte’s recent ruminations involve sympathy cards for men and women affected by abortion. Of particular interest to Amanda is the sympathy card for men whose partners have chosen to abort their child-to-be:  

 

The card is question is produced by the Fatherhood Forever Foundation, a religious organisation opposed to current abortion law. Now one might disagree with the motives of the organisation and one might find the cards grimly cheesy and a dubious commercial prospect, but that isn’t what caught my eye. What’s interesting are the reactions of Ms Marcotte and her readers in a post titled Thwarted Sperm Finally Have An Advocate. It goes without saying the Sisterhood isn’t thrilled:

Anti-choicers [are] pretending that they just discovered they oppose abortion because it violates men’s rights over their uterine property (established by the “poke it/own it” law laid down in beer commercials).

Apparently abortion must be – can only be – an issue of “uterine property” and patriarchal control. After all, what other considerations could possibly be in play?

If he cares about the embryo so much then he should get to work on inventing a way to transfer the pregnancy into his own body. Oh, you don’t want this thing to leech off your body for several months? Well, I don’t either.”

Won’t someone think of the Man-Child?

Your sperm is in our thoughts and prayers.

And,

The special sort of douchebag who would get all butthurt because his sperm was rejected is probably likely to have behaved like a complete and utter cock before the decision to abort.

Because if a woman chooses abortion and her male partner isn’t entirely happy at this outcome, even if he agreed with it and would defend it in principal, he must be a douchebag, a deadbeat or a dick. Such things are simply known by the ladies at Team Pandagon, where righteousness prevails, prejudice is unheard of and telepathy is commonplace.

Bestiary

Saving Us from Capitalism

With big sticks.

Elsewhere (23)

Michael Moynihan on doctrinaire feminists versus The Non-Leftist Other™. 

Strip it of its lame humour and we are left with gender studies Stalinism; feminism is the radical idea that women are people - with political views identical to my own. If you like to “kill stuff” - and I assume, with the Palin hunting reference, that also means animals - one cannot claim the feminist mantle. Do real feminists offer indulgences for those in remote parts of the world, where access to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s is limited and killing stuff is normal? What about impoverished and oppressed women in, say, Afghanistan who haven’t the time for weekly meetings on anti-racism and criticism/self-criticism sessions on how to be a Bay Area humanitarian?

Charlotte Gore on stupid expectations. 

I invested a lot of time and effort in becoming a bit of a JavaScript Ninja. I could (and still can) make extremely advanced and graphically awesome User Interface widgets for websites. What I discovered is that however worthy this skill might be, there’s no bloody market for it… It turns out what is in demand are people with WordPress expertise, who can write plugins and customise themes to a professional standard. So, hey, I moved into that instead… Should I be entitled to claim unemployment benefit simply because no-one wants a JavaScript Ninja?

And, via Samizdata, Squander Two on asymmetrical warfare.  

Of course fighting out of uniform gives you a huge advantage; of course hiding amongst non-combatants gives you a huge advantage. Such tactics would give anyone — the British, the Israelis, the Americans — the same advantages, yet they don’t use them. There’s a reason why civilised people disallow such behaviour, and that is that every single time you step into battle disguised as just another member of the public, you make Bloody Sunday more likely.

Feel free to add your own.

Work in Progress

Construction of the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, or Hoover Dam Bypass.

Photographed by Jamey Stillings.

Friday Ephemera

Watch your enemies flee from the mighty robochair. // Bee. // Coloured bacon. // Mobile bush. // A festival of facial hair. // The Butch Clothing Company, for ladies who like waistcoats. // How to stick your hand into molten lead. // Assorted bowling scoreboards. // Amputee cat gets bionic feet. // The photographs of Stuart Hall. // Honolulu, August 14, 1945. (h/t, Coudal) // ‘Shroom lamps. // Cellmate of note. // New York, 1910. // Unicorn meat. // Stop-motion drawing. // Secure parking. // Sci-fi airshow. // “The balloon reached an altitude of 125,ooo feet, recording video along the way.” 

Great Minds

[Cough] Classic sentence. [Cough]

Terry Eagleton has been one of the great minds of the European left seemingly since Cromwell.

This addition to our ongoing series comes from the author and Nation columnist Dave Zirin. It’s his opening line. The second line, however, notes Eagleton’s “absence of understanding” and subsequent sentences explain why the professor’s most recent article, discussed here, is a dusty old trope and “elitist hogwash” - a polemic that’s “more about Eagleton’s alienation than our own.”

I’m sure Professor Eagleton would have some achingly clever reply, given his ability to compare suicide bombing with “avant-garde theatre.” And bearing in mind our recent discussion, it’s perhaps worth noting the professor’s belief that, “being a champagne socialist is better than being no socialist at all.” This was said while gushing over the “great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid,” a man who wrote a series of Hymns To Lenin, who renewed his party membership in 1956, and whose death, according to Eagleton, spared him from the “dark night of Thatcherism.” An elected Conservative government being so much worse than, say, Soviet tanks in Budapest and hundreds of thousands of fleeing dissidents.

Those who’ve followed Eagleton’s pronouncements will have spotted that the professor is often hostile to dissent, in particular to those whose thinking and experiences take them away from the boneyards of the left. According to the professor, the knighting of Salman Rushdie was “the establishment’s reward for a man who moved from being a remorseless satirist of the west to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.” No evidence for this dastardly conspiracy was deemed necessary and Rushdie’s supposed “fondness for the Pentagon’s politics” is apparently all that needs to be said, signalling as it must the man’s innate wickedness.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eagleton’s umbrage on the subject was shared by Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini, who told the world that the decision to praise “the apostate” had “insulted Islamic sanctities” and was “a blatant example of anti-Islamism.” While the Guardian’s Priyamvada Gopal railed against Rushdie’s apostasy as only a lecturer in postcolonial studies can. Rushdie’s divergence from Ms Gopal’s own cartoon worldview - including his dislike of tyranny and his defence of such heresies as intellectual freedom - had apparently reduced the author to “a giggling hack corralled into attacking his ruler’s enemies.” 

Eagleton also hissed at Christopher Hitchens, denouncing him as an “establishment groupie” who has “made his peace... with capitalism” and “learned how to stop worrying about imperialism and love Paul Wolfowitz.” Like his Guardian colleague Bidisha, our esteemed literary theorist imagines he has some proprietary claim on proper, radical thought. Such that radical thought must entail “questioning the foundations of the western way of life,” which in turn must entail having opinions almost exactly like his own. Norm Geras, a lefty in an altogether different league, took apart Eagleton’s assumptions with admirable patience. A venture for which Norm will no doubt be condemned and cast out in due course. 

Overlords

In the comments following this, a reader, Rich Rostrom, notes my use of the term “egalitarian superiors.”

Isn’t that an oxymoronic construction? They can’t be both ‘superior’ and ‘egalitarian.’

If the idea is unfamiliar, perhaps I should elaborate. In my experience, the more egalitarian a person says he is, the more superior he wishes to be, or assumes he already is. Egalitarian sentiment is, and generally has been, a license for hypocrisy, double standards and exerting power over others. Much as a professed disdain for inequality is a way to signal one’s own moral, intellectual and social superiority.

A rummage through the archives reveals no shortage of illustrations.

The Observer’s Kevin McKenna displayed his egalitarian credentials by calling for a ban on private education: “The ultimate iniquity is that independent, fee-paying schools are allowed to exist at all.” Picture the big, generous heart behind those sentiments. It offends Mr McKenna that private education should be allowed to exist - even when those who pay for it also pay again via taxes for the state system. How dare some parents want the best for their children when the best is something not everyone can have, or indeed benefit from? According to Mr McKenna’s moral calculus, parents who view the comprehensive system as inadequate – perhaps because of their own first-hand experiences – are by implication wicked. And so they should be stopped. Therefore Mr McKenna or his ideological proxy must have power over others to stop all those evil people who work hard and save to pay for their kids’ tuition.

In a similar vein, the Fabian Society’s Sunder Katwala wants to “make life chances more equal” by minimising the role of conscientious parents and discussing “the impact of private education.” Mr Katwala seems very interested in the implicitly negative “impact” of private education on those who don’t experience it. The impact of state education and egalitarian sentiment on those who do experience such things – say, the curious and able - doesn’t seem quite so pressing.

Then there’s the socialist actress Arabella Weir, who deceived Guardian readers about her own education in order to display her egalitarian piety as a “good, responsible citizen.” So egalitarian is Ms Weir, she seems to view children not as ends in themselves but as instruments for the advancement of a socialist worldview. As formulated by Ms Weir, “the right thing to do” has a sacrificial air and entails mingling conspicuously with those deemed “disadvantaged.” By Ms Weir’s thinking, even if you had a grim and frustrating experience at a state comprehensive you should still want to inflict that same experience on your children. Ideally, by sending them to a disreputable school with plenty of rough council estate kids and people for whom English is at best a second language. Ms Weir tells us the advantages of this approach include, “learning street sense, who to be wary of, who to avoid,” and teaching clever children “how to keep their heads down.”

Zoe Williams went further, signalling her sense of fairness by conjuring scenarios in which parents would be humiliated and punished for trying to do the best for their offspring. (“As for vindictive, ha! Good.”) The Guardian’s advocate of “social justice” delighted in the idea of parents’ access to their preferred school being dependent on displaying a leftwing outlook and inversely proportional to the value of their car: “Do they have a 4x4? Can the parents provide a letter from any local leftwing organisation, attesting to their commitment to open-access state education?” In a move echoing Soviet educational policy of the 1920s, our embittered class warrior then went on to formulate her own punitive hierarchy: “At the very bottom of the waiting list, put the kids who have been removed from a private school, since the intentions of their parents are the most transparent: somewhat above them, but below everybody else, put the kids who have siblings at private schools.” And Ms Williams did all this while carefully omitting any mention of her own education at a school where extracurricular activities include visits to the Sinai Desert.

Togs

Lifted from Mick and today’s ephemera, some eye-catching apparel. 

The imposing gentleman is Mohammed Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara and supposedly a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. As photographed in 1911 by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, whose pioneering colour images deserve investigation.

Friday Ephemera

Small child + rocket = home dentistry. // Rock-paper-scissors world championships. // The Russian Empire, 1909-1915. (h/t, Mick) // Boeing 720 controlled impact demonstration, in stills and video. (h/t, Things) // Itty bitty cars. // Enclosed electric motorbike. // Magnetic tape fondling. // Working Lego firearms. // Tone of voice reveals upper body strength. // Because everyone should have a sling for their axe. // 1,172 NASA images. // A blog about the whiteboards in the Big Bang Theory. // Scale. (h/t, TDK) // How to make a Chicago-style hot dog. // Hitchens on the Prince of Piffle. // The x-ray pin-up calendar. // Augmented shadow. 

Dupes and Opium

I fear it’s time for more classic sentences from the Guardian, this time care of Professor Terry Eagleton, who obliges with a volley of inadvertent nuggets:

If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse.

This bold declaration is followed by,

If every rightwing think-tank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same - football.

And,

No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.

Ba-dum. Tissshh.

The article in question, Football: A Dear Friend to Capitalism, bears a typically presumptuous subheading:

The World Cup is another setback to any radical change. The opium of the people is now football.

It’s strange how readily the professor assumes that an enthusiasm for football is a “distraction” that’s “holding back” some “radical change” that would otherwise be embraced by enthusiasts of the game. Yes, that must be why the working man still hasn’t recognised radical socialism as the glorious thing it is. Isn’t it terrible when your revolution beckons and yet people would rather do something else, something they like? But football fans just don’t know their own minds, see, being mere dupes of the capitalist machine and its dastardly overlords. Thankfully, our esteemed literary critic knows what the people really want, secretly, deep down inside those dim and hoodwinked brains. Professor Eagleton spies some variation of false consciousness whenever the proletariat dares to see things differently from its egalitarian superiors - an enlightened caste of ageing, embittered Marxists whose keenness of vision shows them, and only them, how things really are.

Readers may recall the professor is also fond of the Unargued Assertion. And so we get some of this:

Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium.

Quite how the experience of solidarity can be “denied” by modern societies remains oddly unspecified. Perhaps dear bewildered Terry imagines common interest is something that people can no longer experience - serendipitously or voluntarily - say, via the global communication tools made possible and ubiquitous by... oh yes, capitalism.

Reheated (10)

For newcomers, three more items from the archives. 

Fringe Theatre. 

Vegan advocate of “militant action” is victim of “militant action” and gets terribly upset.

“The whole thing was designed for social humiliation,” said Keith, speaking Tuesday from her sister’s home in Kansas. “We’re supposed to be against sadism and cruelty and domination, and these people were willing to do this to me.”

Is That Your Hand In My Pocket? 

Playwright Jonathan Holmes thinks he’s radical and heroic. And so you owe him money.

Note how the prospect of reducing coercive taxpayer subsidy is framed rather grandly as “censorship” of artists - and by implication an attack on democracy itself. No other genuine motive could possibly exist. Those who would rather keep a little more of their own earnings and choose for themselves which art forms they indulge are clearly monsters. We’ve heard this pompous guff before of course, as when Hanif Kureishi and the Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington conjured a world in which artistic “dissent” was being “suppressed” by suggestions that artists might actually consider earning a living.

Unlearning Whiteness.

Evidence be damned. Pretentious self-contempt is where it’s at.

Among the teachings on offer are, “racism is an outgrowth of capitalism” and “to ignore race is to be more racist than to acknowledge race. I call it neo-racism.” Ah, very clever. Guilt in all directions. It almost sounds like a trap. And the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology.

There’s more, of course, in the greatest hits.