Culture Wars – Page 4 – Splendid Isolation

In an otherwise good article, Naomi Wolf (or maybe her editor) falls prey to the regrettable sin of using dashes to purge “objectionable” words of their, well, objectionableness. It’s in the headline, even:

I’m Not “Brave”; You’re Just A P—y

If one were even less of a pussy, one might use the word “pussy” (or insist on its use, rather than the removal of sufficient letters to readers to play the “what does that spell?” game). What’s really interesting about this particular bowdlerization is that “pussy” in this context is short for “pussycat”, i.e. small, skittish and fearful, rather than referring to a “vagina” — which it does not mean here, for obvious reasons, but the word is doomed by its dual meaning.

If we were talking about a farmyard rooster, would we refer to it as a “c*ck”? Of course not. We would only insert the asterisk if we were talking about Willie Brown inserting his c*ck into Kamala Harris’s c*nt. (Well, I wouldn’t, but you get my drift.)

If you really want to be “brave”, write the word “nigger” instead of “the n-word” — the other night, I read that Joseph Conrad’s excellent novel is now called “The N-Word of the Narcissis”, and my howls of enraged laughter woke up the neighbor’s dog and got him barking.

When I do the News Roundup feature, I spend an inordinate amount of time editing the headlines by removing “a**hole”, for instance, and replacing it with its proper spelling. (No small feat, because of the multitude of fonts and backgrounds used, by the way.)

Note to the editors of all the rags I link to: if you’re quoting someone who called someone else a dickhead, for example, you’re allowed to use the actual word instead of Mrs. Bowdler’s dashes or asterisks.

I know, I know, people are going to complain about the foul language. Then use different words, or don’t quote them at all.

But to be honest, “wimp” just does not have the same scornful impact as “pussy”.

Honking

February 23, 2022 Kim du Toit Marxists, Politics, Resistance

An interesting piece sent from Loyal Reader Bill V arrived in my email. For the first time, it gives a name for the two groups facing off against each other all over the world — the Physicals and the Virtuals. Read it, it’s all good, but this is especially noteworthy:

The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.

Hence their hatred of the working classes — the “Physicals”. (By the way, you may recall the predicament of Manhattanites about a decade or so ago, when told they needed to seal off their apartment windows with duct tape against aerial contamination — and learning that these twinks not only didn’t know what duct tape was, they had no idea where to buy it. It was funny back then; it’s a fact of life for them now.)

We are heading for interesting times.

Quote Of The Day

February 9, 2022 Kim du Toit QOTD

“Sexual politics have done to literature what Bomber Command did to Dresden’s architecture.” — Taki

I wish to take issue with the old Greek bastard on this one. Bomber Command might have destroyed Dresden’s architecture, but it didn’t emasculate it.