This was in the link list post at Marginal Revolution. It is a wonderful example of authentic new age gibberish. It is all emotive, synthetic language that is popular with the managerial class these days. It’s the sort of therapeutic language that is supposed to both validate the people using it and establish them as insiders in whatever it is they are promoting. This sort of gobbledygook is common now in corporate America, to the point where there are websites fro generating it.

Astra Taylor is the author of “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age,” a new book on how information technology and market changes are reshaping art and culture.

Here is the bio of Astra Taylor:

Astra Taylor is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, and musician, best known for her 2005 film, Zizek!, about the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and for her 2008 film, Examined Life.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Taylor grew up in Athens, Georgia,^[1] and was unschooled until age 13.^[2] She attended Brown University for a year and holds an MA in Liberal Studies from the New School. She has taught sociology at the University of Georgia and SUNY New Paltz. Her writings have appeared in numerous magazines, and in 2006 Filmmaker Magazine listed her as one of “25 new faces to watch.” She is the sister of painter and disability activist Sunny Taylor,^[3] and is married to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel.^[4] Taylor performed with Neutral Milk Hotel during the band’s reunion tour of 2013/2014. She is the author of the book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, published by Metropolitan Books.

The “unschooled” bit is amusing, as it could only come Astra Taylor or maybe fellow feminists. they like the pseudo-language stuff.  If you are going to make up a nonsense biography, calling yourself “unschooled” is a good start. The links in her Wiki page go nowhere so a little search reveals this video. Mostly third-wave feminist nonsense, bit we learn that “unschooled” means home schooled. In her circles, “home schooled” is equated with Walmart and gay bashing so they use a neologism.

Right out of the shoot, the interview takes on the vibe of a couple of hens yapping at one another while waiting for their kids at the Montessori school.

HF – At many points in the book you suggest that new technologies, far from leveling the playing field, are creating their own forms of inequality. How can open technologies lead to very unequal outcomes?

AT – It’s true that our new communicative technologies can create space for many voices, but the Internet also reflects and often amplifies real-world inequities. It is open but also unequal.

Contrary to all the hype about the “long tail,” the cultural playing field hasn’t been leveled so much as rearranged. What we are seeing is the emergence of the “missing middle” (a phrase I’ve taken from the political scientist Matthew Hindman). Online the bandwagon effect intensifies: the big can get bigger than ever before, and there are lots of tiny interesting things on the margin, but the in-between is hollowing out. The Internet is a global distribution medium.

Now, the Interwebs has been with us for two decades. The first browser was dropped in the early 1990’s. Not many people were on-line back then compared to now, but it was not a tiny community. When Astra was discovering middle-school, adults were discovering the Internet. Now she is “educating” the rest of us about how the Internet is changing the world. This is a hilarious phenomenon that is popular with feminists for some reason. maybe it is empowering.

I try to highlight a contradiction in the contemporary media ecology. On the one hand, a handful of businesses are rising to become new info-monopolies. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are now among the biggest companies in the world, siphoning revenue away from other local economies to Silicon Valley or Seattle or wherever, concentrating wealth in the process.

On the other, even as this remarkable concentration is playing out, our relationship with media is becoming more personalized. No one can tell you what to click on, Web sites reflect your preferences, and everyone has a glowing screen of their own. Yet these catered services generally rely on centralized vendors and services, like Amazon or Apple, that control the hardware we are using and the content we consume. This creates a kind of vertical integration behind the scenes. Certain barriers to cultural participation have been removed, and we can all post on social media or comment on articles, but massive asymmetries of power persist. Individually we glean benefits that are orders of magnitude smaller than the benefits for the platform owners who can collect and harness the “big data” generated by our communications.

There are certain buzzwords that are popular with these new age hustlers. One of them is “ecology.” The reason is it conjures images in the mind of plants and fuzzy cute animals. People like plants and fuzzy animals. Then there’s the old standby, the false dilemma. The specter of the global mega-corporation versus granny viewing pics of her grandkids on Facebook.

Of course, we see the liberal use of neutralizing words. A “kind of” vertical integration is, logically, no vertical integration, but the point is to have it both ways. It is a way of taking both sides while allowing the listener to assume whatever ever they find pleasing or validating. Obama speeches are full of this sort of language. The text is largely meaningless, so the listener can make it about themselves.

Within living memory, a normal person could have a civil conversation about politics with someone identifying as liberal. It was not that everyone got along. It was that everyone seemed to agree on the value of civil debate. Only far out wackos thought you were evil for voting for Reagan or favoring tax cuts. Liberals did not like conservatives, but they did not hate them and they did not treat them like lepers. It was still possible for people to disagree without despising one another.

In the 1990’s that began to change. The vulgarity of the Clinton crowd made civility difficult. The culture gap became a chasm in the 1990’s. If you voted Republican it was not just because you happened to like their positions or the candidate. Party affiliation became tribal identification and the debates, therefore, were not about facts and reason. They were about which side you were on in the culture war. The roots of the great divide between use them started in the 1990’s.

On television, the public affairs shows turned into shouting matches. The liberal would talk over everyone, ignore the questions and just chant the slogans the Left was embracing at the moment. They called it spin, but it infected everything. This filtered into daily life and it became impossible to maintain a friendship with a lefty, because who they were was now defined by their hatred of normal people. The Left became an identity cult based on hatred of normal white people.

These days, the only way to maintain a civil relationship with a lefty is to avoid anything but sports and weather.  Anything that bumps up against the tenets of the faith, even tangentially, has to be avoided. Everywhere you turn a lunatic is preaching at you about gay marriage, the war on women, racism, white privilege and on and on. It often feels like the book I am Legend. Instead of raging vampires, we’re surrounded by lunatic liberals shaking their piety bracelets at us.

This post over at The Spectator does a good job analyzing the ratcheting lunacy we see around us.

It has long been clear that expressing certain views has been a form of social signaling, although social media has made this far more explicit. Holding what might be loosely called politically correct opinions on a range of issues suggests that the holder is more likely to be well-educated, wealthy, young, probably attractive, and possessing social nous (ie in touch with social trends).

But Kristian’s theory also explains one aspect of political correctness: the speed at which the accepted and acceptable view moves, heading in an ever-more extreme direction.

It goes further. Ever notice the speed with which buzzwords and catchphrases get popular among the Left? Obama used the word “shellacked” after the 2010 election and every lefty in America was littering their language with it. Another example was “gravitas” after that idiot Biden was picked to be Obama’s running mate. Language no longer has the same meaning for them as the rest of us. instead, it works like incantations signifying membership in the faith.

He uses the analogy of the music fan who, once the band he’s into has been discovered by everyone else, must find some other obscure outfit as a positional good. Once a wacky idea becomes accepted, the high-status politically correct brigadier must stand out with some new area of concern; this he or she does with one of those articles or blogs in which it is argued that, while progress has been made in one particular battle against prejudice or bigotry, the real war is now against racism in food labeling or the lack of transgender dolls for my children. It doesn’t matter if the issue at hand is inconsequential or, more likely, impossible to overcome; in fact the more so, the better.

Unlike with music, however, the trend is always in one direction and there is no re-centering; it would be as if the mainstream of elite taste in music went from Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath to Metallica to Slayer and onto Napalm Death. Politically that’s what much of the commentary in places like Slate sounds like to me – just some guy atonally screaming in my ear about some micro-injustice.

Not a bad example. Thatcher called it the ratchet effect.

Another aspect of this mindset is the desire to punish people who have insufficiently correct views on doctrine, even if the beliefs they hold were orthodoxy ten or five years ago. I’d really like to conduct a Stanford Prison-style experiment in which people were rewarded (perhaps with a dopamine hit) for punishing those with heretical views, and to see where it led. To make it more interesting, only people with unorthodox views on only one side of the political spectrum would be punished, to see how extreme a group would become towards the other direction in a short space of time. Soon they’d be sacking people for disagreeing with an idea that didn’t exist anywhere in the world before 2001 – oh whoops, sorry, that was real life.

There are examples of the public simply going mad. Athens leading up to the Sicilian expedition is an example. The Athenians appear to have lost their minds and threw away their advantage on a crazy idea cooked up by a conman. The Abolitionist Movement is something closer to home. Large numbers of whites in the north wanted to murder the whites in the South and would not be deterred. Prohibition is another example from the American past. Maybe there is something wrong with our grain.

The Progressives insist that the only people capable of bigotry are white and those that can be lumped in with them when convenient. The bigotry of white people can only be directed at non-white people. The pale face is the forever villain, in the morality play that is multiculturalism. Words like “diversity” and “pluralism” don’t really mean what they appear to mean. Instead, they are code for anti-white. It’s why the Left find it perfectly reasonable to exclude the white people from a diversity event.

South Puget Sound Community College says it was a mistake for an employee group to invite only people of color to a diversity “happy hour.”

The group that sent out the email last week apologized the next day and canceled the event, said Kellie Purce Braseth, dean of college relations.

The college believes the best way to celebrate and discuss diversity is to include everyone, Braseth told KING (http://bit.ly/1qvHzjW ).

“If you want to come you should be able to come; that just makes a richer conversation,” she said.

The invitation to all 300 staffers said the “Staff, Faculty and Administrators of Color” encouraged employees to reply to the invitation to find out the confidential date and time of what was being called a “happy hour” to “build support and community” for people of color.

The invite made it clear white people were not welcome.

“If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy, and white privilege to better our campus community and yourselves, please feel free to do just that,” the email read.

Karama Blackhorn, program coordinator for the school’s Diversity and Equity Center, helped write the invitation.

It could have been worded differently, but she maintains the staff members of color would have a more honest discussion about race without white employees.

Explicitly talking about race “can be a really difficult conversation for a lot of people,” Blackhorn said.

Now, diversity meetings are about as fun as spending a week in an asylum, so most people would not be offended by this sort of thing. As long as this stuff is voluntary, these people can be whatever type of bigot floats their boat. That’s the thing though, they are bigots. They hold negative opinions about specific people based on what they see as differences of opinion. They naturally root for and support their side against the side they see holding an opinion or belief that most threatens their authority.

For example, Paul Krugman is a bigot and a flamboyant one. He seems to have some mental health issues, but he could simply be a fanatic. The bug-eyed look and drooling sneer are very creepy. Maybe he thinks that serial killer stare is handsome or maybe what you see is what you get. Either way, he has the look of someone who is struggling to keep it all together. His latest screed offers a good example of the left-wing bigotry.

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.

Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

There you have it. The bigot just assumes “those people” all think as he imagines because, you know, it is how those people are. Again, there is nothing intrinsically immoral about bigotry. It can be immoral, but not necessarily so. In a modern state like America, having a ruling class that hates the people over whom they rule, because the subjects hold the wrong opinions, is a problem. At some point, one side or both decide they cannot live with the morality of the other and hell quickly follows.

For those interested in the demographic struggle, Japan is the place to watch for clues about what comes next. From time to time, the news will report that the Japanese are no longer having sex. By that they mean the young people are no long reporting a high interest in sex. The Japanese stopped having children in the 1970’s. Their total fertility rate fell below replacement in that decade and has remained well below replacement for going on five decades now.

That does not mean they stopped having sex in the 1970’s. It’s juts a good starting point for exploiting why it is they are apparently the first asexual population. According the story, young Japanese have moved from not having children to not getting married to now not bothering with sex. Of course, this corresponds with the explosion of pornography and a porn culture in Japan. The causal relationship between the two may or may not exist, but the bet is they are connected.

Anyway, the West may be headed down the same path. At least the European portion of the Occident. You have moves to ban sex in states like California. The point is justice or vengeance, it is hard tell the difference, for male privilege. The University of California has raced ahead with a policy of their own requiring affirmative consent, not just for sex, but to every form of “physical sexual activity.” The goal is to invert the normal sexual relationship, which will make normal sex criminal.

This is lunacy, of course, but it is related, most likely, to what is happening in Japan. The collapse of maleness, probably due to a collapse in testosterone, has upset the normal balance. Women, like dogs, need to be on a leash held firmly by a confident male. Off the leash, the women go crazy. The low-T males respond by investing their time into porn and video games, thus making themselves less attractive to women. The result is a world where all sex is either porn or rape.

Looks like everyone over at the NY Times is ready to celebrate the first openly homosexual football player. The Left has been using homosexuals as a proxy in their war in white men for a couple of decades now. Football, which is popular with white men, is hated by the Left. That’s why they are peddling the concussion stuff. Now that can make it gay. The NFL will no doubt have Pride Day and maybe make the players wear rainbow outfits.

The weird thing about the homosexual stuff is it borders on self-mockery. Much of what constitutes the gay lifestyle and the gay aesthetic is self-denigrating. Homosexuals are full of self-loathing due to their affliction, so their public expression is often a mockery of the gay lifestyle. Liberace is a good example. Elton John is another. There’s nothing about the gay stuff that is ennobling or respectable. At bets it is campy and silly. At worse it is degenerate.

There was never a time when homosexuals were discriminated against on the scale of blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians and Catholics. There are some make believe times, like the Stonewall Riots, but they are mostly imaginary. Stonewall was not a riot in any sense of the word. It was a protest, for sure, that put attention on the cop’s habit of raiding Mafia owned gay clubs. The fact that the Mafia was exploiting homosexual males and the cops were primarily targeting the mob gets lost in the phony narrative.

The point being, harassment of homosexuals has never been much of an issue in America. A black guy in 1990 probably faced more hostility than the typical gay guy in the worst of times. We’re talking about rude jokes, not anything that would alter one’s life. The gay lifestyle killed more gay men in a weekend than straights have in a century. Most people get this, so casting gays as sympathetic victims is a loser’s gambit.

As with all cults and subcultures, defining who is in and who is out of the group is the primary focus of the group. For the Left, being a member of the anointed mean embracing the homosexual stuff. It’s not about the homosexuals themselves. The Left does not care about them any more than they care about blacks. Homosexuals are just another charm of the progressive charm bracelet, to be shown off at the next cocktail party. The gay man is just another totem.

I admit to being a fan of Jay Leno. By fan I mean I have been recording his program for years and watching when I feel like watching some television. I don’t watch much TV, other than sports. While eating dinner, I like to watch something for an hour that will not piss me off or make me crazy. Leno is the perfect choice. His brand of humor is broad based and well within the bounds of common decency and middle-class respectability.

Leno’s jokes are PG-13, his political humor sticks to the obvious from the headlines and it is not particularly ideological. He makes fun of whoever is in the news, regardless of party or status. His bits after his monologue are similarly tame, mostly letting regular people do silly things for the camera. The first 30 minutes make for a good dinner time show. I rarely watch his guests as I don’t follow pop culture.

All that said, I therefore took note of the fact he was being forced out by his employers in favor of a person named Jimmy Fallon. A quick search tells me Leno was dominating his counterparts, including the man-boy favorite, Jimmy Kimmel. The old Marxist David Letterman stagers on in third place. As Leno’s forced exit grew closer, his rating soared to the point where he was becoming a cultural phenomenon.

His final show scored huge numbers. According to the people who care about these things, his final show was one of the most watched in decades. As an empirically minded person, 14 million viewers in a nation of 300 million looks tiny to me, but people who make millions to know about this stuff say otherwise. It is just a reminder that culture is not rational in the linear sense of the term.

If a major company decided to retire its top selling and most profitable product, for a new product that is obviously inferior, it could be excusable. Even the best and brightest get wild ideas in their head about what lies around the corner. Front running, or attempts at it, is what gets investors in the most trouble. Sticking with the tried and true is boring, especially for young people, so change for the sake of change is common.

Television is a different thing, in that the nature is short term. The whole point is to get a hit, ride it until it dies and then jump out the window with a suitcase and the cigar box full of cash. NBC tried this a few years back and it was a costly and embarrassing disaster. To do it again when Leno is riding even higher than the last time raises the question. Why does NBC hate him?

What we’re see is the work of fanatics. I first bumped into this when I was a kid working in Washington. I worked for a Congressman doing nonsense work. Back in the old days, this was common. I’m sure it is a rigid process these days, but three decades ago it was not, so you got a fun mix of personalities. The law student in charge of the young staff was a nice girl, but a hard thumping liberal feminist.

Inevitably she set her sights on me as someone who had to be run out of the office as a trouble maker. Her reason, which she told me when I confronted her, was that I was not “very liberal.” That’s all that mattered to her. So much so she did not note that I was the favorite of the congressman’s wife, driving her around town. The result was they found a new person to supervise the kids and volunteers.

It was my first experience with a fanatic. The second experience was talking with an Iranian exile. He was a student when the Shah fell, but he was not a fanatic or even religious, as far as I could tell. He thought the Islamists were nuts and was one of the first people I heard talk about the danger of Islamic fundamentalism. He told me a story about his time in the army during the Iraq war to illustrate his point.

His unit was near the front lines and they were preparing for an offensive. Between them and the Iraqi army was a minefield. Saddam’s army was trained and developed by Soviet advisers, so it relied about Soviet tactics. That mean they used a lot of mine fields. The Iranian commander asked for volunteers to clear a minefield. About two dozen Revolutionary Guards volunteered for the job.

After some prayer, they ran across the minefield, blowing up the mines with their feet. A second wave of volunteers followed showing that the mines had been cleared. That’s the definition of a fanatic. The object of their fanaticism changes, but everything else is the same. The true believer gives up his identity for that of the group, so sacrifice is the ultimate expression of faith. The act counts for more than the result.

The point of this diversion is that NBC is run by fanatics. A night watching MSNBC, for example, is a descent into madness. Within living memory, liberal members of the press would have mocked these people as the aluminum foil hat crowd. Today they run the news division of NBC. Inside the building is a daily competition between fanatics to see who is the most committed to the cause. Leno is not one of them.

In such an asylum, a non-believer like Leno would be suspect. In a weird way, his popularity is confirmation of his heresy.  Because normal people like him and he gets along with normal people, it is assumed he is an enemy of the cause, so they will do what must be done to run him off. That’s not to say his replacement is a fanatic. He’s just not the guy they see as the enemy. So, the change will be made.

If there was ever any doubt that the cult of diversity was, in fact, a cult, this should dispel those doubts.

A popular gifted program will get the axe after Ditmas Park school officials chose diversity over exclusivity.

Citing a lack of diversity, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald informed parents in a letter that the Students of Academic Rigor and two other in-house programs would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners.

“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” McDonald told parents in a letter posted on the photo-sharing site flickr and obtained by Ditmas Park Corner.

The benefit of diversity, however it is defined, has never been established, beyond some wild claims by people in the diversity rackets. History, on the other hand, shows humans have been against diversity since the dawn of time. In fact, diversity is most likely bad for human communities. The evidence thus far shows that the greater the diversity, the weaker the community, as fewer people volunteer and participate in the running of the community.

We are tribal animals and that means being around people like us. 100,000 years or so of evolution is not going to yield to wishful thinking from people who tend not to live the diverse lifestyle. That’s the thing with the cult of diversity. The preachers tend to live in homogeneous communities, which means white communities. You never hear black people in the ghetto talking about diversity. The only time blacks use the word is as code to mean lots of black people, which is how white people are now using it.

This particular school is in a gentrifying neighborhood, which means loads of middle-class white women pretending to be artists as they live like June Cleaver. That’s the other thing about the diversity cult. The women all pretend to be artsy feminists, but they live like a 1950’s house wife, including the husband with the good job. All of their progressive posturing is intended to conceal the very real fact they live a very homogeneous life. Multiculturalism is a burka they throw over their life.

This story is getting the usual suspects very upset for all the usual reasons, but the really interesting part is the guy is called Hispanic. Most people think of Hispanics as the little brown guys riding the leaf blower. The guy in the picture looks like he could be auditioning for a show about World War II. Then again, our elites like their Hispanics the same way they like their black guys. That is superficially diverse, but otherwise white.

Barak Obama is the quintessential black guy because he looks black, but is otherwise a typical white guy from upper class white culture. In the case of Hispanics, the archetype is a Caucasian with three names and a Spanish accent. Juan Pablo fits the bill and that’s most likely why he was selected. It is a terribly shallow and fundamentally inhuman way to view people, but American elites are not too concerned about the feelings of the people.

The weirdness of left-wing identity politics is that it strips people of their identity in order to affirm the identity of liberal elites. They declared this guy non-white, despite the fact he was super-white. Put another way, he has to deny himself in order to properly actualize his full identity within the framework of multiculturalism. The whole thing is insane, of course, but nothing about multiculturalism makes any sense when you examine it.