Sunday, June 19, 2011

'I'm also very aware why very masculine men are not represented in academe. Very masculine men cannot sit still long enough. And so all the ideology of feminism is coming out of these women who are married to wordsmith men, who are not that combative or confrontational to begin with, because the really masculine men, the high-testosterone men, are so restless they can hardly sit still in class.

'People of the white upper-middle-class professional elite have very little direct contact with working-class men, even though the working-class men are everywhere around them and are keeping everything going. They are the ones who are the janitors, the construction workers, the plumbers, the police and firemen, and so on. It's everywhere.
But the world that those men have created works so well, they maintain it so assiduously, that there has been a contempt on the part of these complacent, pampered, coddled upper-middle-class people who are spouting a lot of this rhetoric. There's this arrogance that masculinity isn't something that we need anymore--this is the Gloria Steinem line: Masculinity is something that is pernicious and is the cause of all wars and destruction and violence and battering against women, and slowly we're going to be programming it out of our youth.

'I said it in the Playboy interview: All it takes is one natural disaster for that entire artificial world to come crumbling down, and suddenly everyone will be screaming and yelling for the plumbers and the construction workers. Only masculine men of the working class will hold the civilization together.

'I'm very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk.'
Camille Paglia
'Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began. Instead, what it has become in the last 20 years is a white upper-middle-class elitism which preaches to the people and says, "Oh, you don't agree with us? You're homophobic, you're so uneducated. You're in the darkness. You need us to bring light and truth to you."'

Camille Paglia

Friday, June 10, 2011

The Greens

The Green instruction to 'lower your carbon footprint' is an exhortation to heat less, consume less, travel less, spend less. This is how the poor live. Green exhortations therefore are for wealthy people to live like the poor - by choice.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it will catch on. Jesus preached something like this, as did Buddha. Confucius did too. Religions have, for millennia, tried to get humans to live within limits - moral limits, limits to hubris, to ego, to extravagance. Considering all the effort that went into these religions, holding back natural human impulses is clearly hard work, like a child trying to hold back a 600 pound rhino.