Can you imagine being in the shoes of the one who feels his power slipping away? Who can find nothing stable to believe in? Who feels himself becoming unnecessary? That powerlessness and fear ties a dark knot in his stomach. As this knot thickens, a centripetal hatred moves inward toward the self as a centrifugal hatred is cast outward at others: his parents, his girlfriend, his boss, his classmates, society, life....More post-Newtown cogitation at The Stone, the NYT "forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." This one is from Princeton French prof Christy Wampole.
December 17, 2012
"From the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and onward, young men – and young white men in particular – have increasingly been asked to yield what they’d believed was securely theirs."
"This underlying fact, compounded by the backdrop of violent entertainment and easy access to weapons, creates the conditions for thousands of young men to consider their future prospects and decide they would rather destroy than create."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
80 comments:
No way. NFW.
"Christy Wampole" is porn name.
In fact, a damn good one.
Stupidity is no longer a peril to the left.
Cheers
God but academics are a hoot! There you are, year after year teaching to kids the same age while you are suddenly thirty, then forty then fifty still teaching the twenty year olds still listening to their ideas, identical year after year after year. No wonder you fill up with stupid "insights". Trapped there with ageless stupid youth while your brain grows ever more tired.
This professors chakra is way off the charts.
This is so common that it happens one time in 100 million.
James Taranto hit the nail on the head today with his column in the WSJ. (http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324907204578185263341273952-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNzExNDcyWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email) It's not about alienation and loss of power; it's about publicity and notoriety. Our mainstream media milks these tragedies shamelessly, and goofy forums like this one at the NYT are prime examples. The media's unrestrained exercise of its First Amendment rights as it wallows in these sorts of tragedies is more to blame than the public's exercise of its Second Amendment rights.
Yeah, except that millions of put upon young men don't centripetal at all, they stifle...like Edith.
Christy Wampole's bio on the Princeton website avers that "she illustrates the extent to which the root metaphor becomes erroneously literalized and used as a justification for everything from ultra-conservative nationalism to claims of hereditary inferiority of certain class and ethnic groups"
Got it? Deconstruct your tits loose. In any language on any scrap of paper, poem or novel or laundry list it comes down to right wing racists. Handy theories.
I love the intro to the linked article: "2:05 p.m. | Updated This post originally contained an article that was not ready for publication. The correct version appears below."
What the hell did she say before?!
Good to be assured that this is "ready for publication."
Ah, yet another opportunity for gratuitous white male bashing, the sport of choice for the in crowd. How awful "those people" are!
I'm sure typing up this essay warmed her feminist heart to no end.
It's always fun to see a professor in French try to use terms from physics. Centripetal force is the force which keeps an object in circular motion around a center point. In its absence, the object would fly off on whatever tangent it was following at the moment of release.
All this spinning hatred...
Why, it's a vortex!
"higher education" makes you stupid
A vortex of white man hate.
She does have a point assuming Adam Lanza was sane to begin with. Remember he shot his own mother in the face 4x.
Damn right, I grew up with this certainty about what was securely mine.
Being born in a shotgun shack in the middle of the cornfields in Illinois to parents who were both non-union factory workers instilled that "certainty" in me.
So, the theory is that this mass murder should be blamed on white men as a class?
Why do I get the feeling that Ms. Wampole (and, yes that is a stripper name) creams her panties at the prospect that white men feel like they are being displaced and rendered useless?
Racist hatred is now almost solely the province of the left.
Maybe I did not read the same (admittedly insipid) Stone post, but I thought she was saying that our nation is somehow failing a significant percentage of young men.
or maybe they were just fucking nuts....like this professor. Hey maybe she's the next Amy Bishop!
And, yet, it is not young white men who commit the vast majority of violent crime, including murder.
No, that would be black and hispanic men.
So, she's wrong... completely.
Despite their white nationalist, racist tendencies, young white men are demonstrably peaceable.
What can you call this women, except a deliberate liar?
Wasn't the event prior to this one committed by a non white male. Wasn't there a female microbiologist involved in another shooting? What about the Asian guy at Virginia Tech?....These murderers are sui generis.....These killings do generate a lot of hate. I'm pretty sure that in coming days all that hate will be projected onto the NRA.
what BS!
I'm pretty sure that in coming days all that hate will be projected onto the NRA.
The NRA has gone dark since Friday. I wonder why?
I, for one, am grateful for Professor Wampole's essay.
Tonight, I shall masturbate until I achieve an earth-shattering kaboom.
Afterwards, it will take hours before I feel myself become unnecessary and powerless, with fear tying a dark balloon knot in my stomach, thickening.
An idée fixe meets a news hook.
The NRA site is up and running, garage.
What are you talking about?
I just checked it out.
When exactly did these young men, who were born after the 1980s, ever get the idea they had this privilege thing they now are losing. They grew up with feminism, and civil rights pretty much the way they are today. They aren't old farts like the guys doing the mental masturbation over there. This is projection pure and simple.
The young men may be angry and feel like they are treated as second class citizens because they are white and male, but they have had that status all their lives. These leftist philosophers are just not able to see that they themselves are the racists and sexists of the modern era, and that can cause some anger and has consequences just like they use to love to acknowledge, when someone else was to blame.
garage mahal said...
The NRA has gone dark since Friday. I wonder why?
LOL. Remember when you unfollowed me on Twitter, sua sponte? I reciprocated, but what was that first move of yours all about?
Not wanting to hear certain things?
What are you talking about?
They shut down Facebook and social media sites. No comments from them either, unless I missed that part.
Oh, I see what you mean, garage.
The NRA has had nothing to say about this incident.
It would be a good idea if more people followed their lead.
How did you manage to twist that into something sinister? You're always trying to pull that stunt.
Where are these "thousands" of young white men who are apparently deciding to "destroy rather than create"?
Not wanting to hear certain things?
The NRA doesn't want to hear certain things? Plausible.
That answer is non-responsive, garage. Please continue.
There is anger involved and it's based on sexism much more than racism. I'm not excusing the assholes doing the shooting, but a young man's very nature as a male human being is currently considered a disease, and that's gonna cause some push back, and some people don't handle their ranger well.
If you strike down the NRA something else will rise up in place of it, 10x more powerful.
I wish that all my FB friends who are ranting for and against gun control would "go dark" for a while.
That would only be decent and respectful.
Not to mention sane.
Making law in a haste in response to a single incident is an extraordinarily bad idea.
Young black men kill more people, right?
But I don't necessarily disagree, other than the illusion that young white men have any sort of concept of what is securely theirs, with the notion that people, all people, who feel powerless are more likely to be violent.
In that sense, and Historically, it makes sense that a true mark of citizenship is the right to be armed.
Where are these "thousands" of young white men who are apparently deciding to "destroy rather than create"?
According to Wampole of Bailey*, TX , a good many of them are in her family.
__________________________________________
*or a town w/in 100 or so miles of there
Young single childfree men are totally screwed by our society.
As civilians, they earn less than married folks, especially breeders, once benefits are taken into account.
They support breeders, especially women, especially single breeding women, through family leave, child credits, EITC, Medicare, Medicaid and SS--- in all of them the single man works more, dies younger, and gets far fewer benefits.
The military is just as bad: the single childfree man is denied housing allowance, $250 separation allowance, meal allowances, and moving allowance given for families.
If he is killed in action, no spouse gets the lump-sum $100,000 death benefit that the marrieds' spouses get and he has no kids to get survivors benefits. Nobody compensates him for the family health the military provides married breeders. Unlike the single woman he fights beside, he can't an honorable discharge by getting pregnant.
Consider what happened in the WTC settlements: single childfree men and sterile women were royally screwed.
Young, single, childfree men, just like John Brown, have every reason to take up arms to free themselves; one just wishes they'd target the Congressmen who inflicted their second-class status on them, instead of young children.
This idiot sounds like shilol on one of his "old Repubs, be very afraid" rants.
A Frawg with his parts removed.
Yeah, i can see it.
"The young men may be angry and feel like they are treated as second class citizens because they are white and male, but they have had that status all their lives."
When my son was 16 he was expelled from the children's section of the library where I'd sent him to find his younger sisters, for the crime of being male.
We treat boys and men like criminals.
We reap what we sow.
ST - the morlocks protesting the NRA office couldn't even wait a week.
Seriously... how twisted a message is that for a 16 year old?
@Chip S: The author's bio reminds me of the rising country star in "Country Star" -- the one whom Paltrow surmised had half her family was in jail and that she grew up in trailer park. I think she probably knows of what she speaks.
Synova - you surely do exaggerate the plight of young white males.
One of the points Christy Wampole left out of her essay, is how we overvalue the opinions of ill-informed "educators" who are overpaid to teach stupid things like French and Italian at overpriced colleges for elite thinkers who live in a environment that is based on virtual thinking and analysis.
Do away with those positions and put people like Christy Wampole in the trenches without a guaranteed income with great fringe benefits, and see if her attitude changes.
chicklit,
Then again, you might be wrong.
A syndrome I've observed repeatedly... the leftist who ran away from home to the blue coastal areas.
Bad mouthing the folks back home as violent racists is par for the course, and probably, mostly fantasized.
This act is intended to provide proof that the runaway isn't a racist, as the rednecks back home are presumed to be in the runaway's new home base.
All men, Alex.
Assumed guilt. Assume that any young man in the children's section of the library is a predator.
Exaggerate?
Black boys and men, too. Certainly. All men and all boys. But we've trained them not to even help, when help is needed, because they'll, at the least, get the stink-eye if a woman or child is involved.
Don't normal people ever get asked to write essays based on knowledge and experience, rather than wishful thinking and conjecture?
What the hell does Christy Wampole know about young (white) men? Lord.
The Stone is 2 for 2!
@Chip S: I meant "Country Strong" of course.
@ST: Acceptance may be her reason for writing it, but I don't detect derision or disrespect on her part regarding her "origins."
More probable reason for Wampole's diatribe against her home boys in TX.
They hated her because she was an asshole.
She is an asshole, right?
I hate myself for Googling Christy-but there it is. I did.
What I found is that there are more than one of them.
There's a Christy Wampole in California who works for Allstate Insurance.
Why can't she write an essay on the young white male in today's America?
I'd bet a hundred bucks it would be more accurate and insightful.
God, what fucking horses hit.
Empirical data never matters to theorists. Every event confirms the theory even if it doesn't. Marx is the paradigm for this: as capitalism takes off he argues for its utter failure. Now she argues white males are being left behind. I think she has a point but for most white males the ideal of parity is all they ever wanted. I doubt of any of these ideas went through Loughner's mind or Lanza's. Maybe that Norwegian guy though. But why did Lanza shoot boys as well as girls? I like that has at least tried to reach out but I think mental health is the issue. She's a French theorist so she has to think of race and gender and class. Foucault said the mad were the same as us. Are they? We need to bring back the idea of NORMAL.
"Christy Wampole"
I knew she sounded familiar...
This lady was brilliant one minute...
and then she apparently wrote this dribble... (reminds me of another professor we love and admire)
Let the beast arise!
Cut from our own flesh, behold it groan about not race, but class. See it wallow unsure, adrift in the meaningless of life, French literature, feminist jurisprudence and gay fashion. Hear its sad lament of the coming secular doomsday, carbon credits, social justice and assorted limousine-liberal claptrap.
Listen to its anti-capitalist creed echo in the alleyways of new, New York. Watch it stumble over the flaws in its own logic and prop up politicians of its choosing, celebrating diversity. Beware its limbs swinging honest men down under quotas, taxation, and the latest intellectual trend.
Religious, bitter clingers, and uncivilized rural simpletons, tremble at its might! Patriarchs, patricians and suburban dissenters...lovers of Mcmansions, repent and kneel before its multicultural wrath!
Avast ye lovers of liberty and reasonable souls, skeptics and questioners of the new faith...
Let the beast arise!
Jesus Christ on a Cracker!
Could someone from the NYT please send me an email so I can point them to some philosophy people who aren't flaming assholes?
Believe it or not, they do exist. Some of them can actually write some interesting stuff for a literate audience.
Where are they finding these people?
Are you questioning the expert philosophical opinion of Theramin DeBranderZander in the wake of the Newtown massacre?
The pivotal moment of a transformation of society and culture into a tolerant, advanced, gunless utopia?
@Chrisnavin 7:12
Yes.
Ok.
But you, of all people, should know that we are shaped by forces larger than ourselves, that history is progress, and freedom is unfolding according to the guiding light of Reason, my friend.
Get on board!
History is right now, and the future is in view with Obama in office.
B.S. does this prof actually believe this or is slinging the BS? What a crock!
Why can't those young white men just become the nice little serfs we want them to be? Why?! OH, WHHHYYYYYYYY?!
What the hell did she say before?!
Good to be assured that this is "ready for publication."
LOL!
@Chris,
History is right now, and the future is in view with Obama in office.
Naw, that bus passed by with the Prussian state.
Dontcha read the papers or nuthin'?
@YoungHegelian
Old dreams die hard.
Shouting Tom-
Being born in a shotgun shack in the middle of the cornfields in Illinois to parents who were both non-union factory workers instilled that "certainty" in me.
I grew up a lower middle class child of two union parents.
Dad was a Steelworker(USWA Local #2173) Three strikes during the 70's at the Timken bearing plant that closed in the early 80's. (Google "Fifth Ave. and Cleveland Ave.- Columbus OH")- It's still a wasteland.
Mom was union cashier at Kroger after my parents separated in 1976.(UFCW Local #1159). They went on strike in the late 70's. This was the "beginning of the end" of union representation for grocery employees in Columbus.
There was one similarity... Both unions agreed to "two-tiered compensation"- where new employees did not get the same deal as existing workers.
That is the certainty I've always remembered about the "solidarity" of unions.
Madmen the TV show should be banned. It makes the mad men madmen.
synova-
Young black men kill more people, right?
Black males between 16-30 comprise less than 4% of Columbus OH population.
They commit more than 50% of murders every year.
(Shhh!)
This is why, before women were empowered by feminism, they were such murderous assassins.
The thing is... if someone is going to be so stupid as to take away from this tragic school shooting some larger Truth about how young white men are reacting with violence to their loss of power within society, then it has to apply to young black men as well... and while I think that the connection to a school shooting is asinine in all regards, the basic notion that people are more violent when they have less power may have merit.
And the answer is not to diminish men even more and think that the outcome will change. Violence among young black men is most probably socio-economic and *probably* would be similar to violence among young white men and young Hispanic men and young Asian men of similar upbringing... no jobs, few strong male role models, single parent female-led homes, and one of two choices... be a gang banger or be a wuss. And "civilized" society demands that men be wusses and then treats them like predators, pedophiles and rapists until they prove different *anyway*.
What "feminism" did was utterly destroy the male role of protector and provider *on purpose*. And the wealthy ladies pushing this aren't the ones hurt by men who no longer have a positive outlet for masculinity. It's always the poor who find themselves paying for what those upper-middle-class social meddlers craft.
A few days ago there was a few links floating around to an article promoting chivalry... and in the comments one lady said... if it helps him feel good about himself, helps him feel manly, then it's a good thing. And of course there was the comment responses that... if it is about a man feeling *manly* that it was stupid and bogus and wrong to play along with that.
You give young men no *power* in society as *men* and you get hoodlums. Race is irrelevant.
But that's not what this shooting was about and the person making a connection is a moron.
Typically these mass school murders are by kids who did not fit in and were tormented by some of their classmates, kids can really be cruel. Most of these poor kids endure the abuse, counting the days until they can get away from their tormenters but some of them snap and either harm themselves or others.
The idea that social change that occurred before they were born is the primary cause of these mass murders by very young men is not accurate.
I do think that men naturally tend to be more violent than women and I wouldn't be surprised if a culture drenched in violence tends to desensitize some people, making them less sensitive to violence and making it easier for them to do violence.
This was funny. The humanities at the Ivy League jumped the shark awhile ago, but as this column shows, they still can amuse. I'm sure this column on white boys will be helpful in gaining her full tenure in the romance languages department. I was disappointed she didn't put an epigrram from Rimbaud in the column. Sacre Bleu!
"I do think that men naturally tend to be more violent than women and I wouldn't be surprised if a culture drenched in violence tends to desensitize some people, making them less sensitive to violence and making it easier for them to do violence."
I could argue, persuasively, that a culture that denied violence would have just as much of it. Children don't need to be taught to hit or bite, they need to be taught not to. They need to either be kept from doing so until they can reason that it hurts other people, or they need to learn that doing so hurts *them*. Someone who commits a crime for gain or kills a rival or has some other unsocial but *rational* motivation might be deterred by better socialization, but serial rapists or murderers or someone who acts out by mass murdering children is *trying* to hurt people. They haven't convinced themselves that it's not bad, or doesn't hurt, or... whatever. The whole POINT of it is how horrible it is.
Desensitizing would, logically, reduce rather than add to that motivation.
Synova
I bow to you. You have stated it so well.
Also, Ambienis evil,
You are also correct.
I think what infuriates me more than anything is these evil vipers of women categorizing all of these young men as evil because of what THEY have perpetrated, and blaming the young men.
The young men growing up just now do not know they are supposed to have some "magical" power in their lives. They have not been taught that. They have been taught that everyone is equal, but this bint is trying to blame them for the "alleged" sins of their fathers.
all this sounds like a bunch of Norma Desmonds searching for *their* 15 minutes at the expense of people's lives. They are just an extension of the MSM
Alex said...
If you strike down the NRA something else will rise up in place of it, 10x more powerful.
"Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership"
JPFO for short.
They're based in Milwaukee.
Rabbi's with gats.
Never Again means Never Again
ambienisevil said...
Oh boo hoo. You only know the generation you are born into. I don't even have much of a memory of this previous time. Yeah, that's why he shot all those kids.
For fuck sake's, do you need to step on the other gender or another race to find meaning? Go out there and invent something, build something, help someone.
Christ. And what about all the people, races, gender, that were stepped on for years? Do they get a license to kill too?
The left isn't happy unless they can bathe in blood. Preferabley somebody else's blood.
chrisnavin.com said...
Ok.
But you, of all people, should know that we are shaped by forces larger than ourselves, that history is progress, and freedom is unfolding according to the guiding light of Reason, my friend.
Get on board!
History is right now, and the future is in view with Obama in office.
Well, except for the part about freedom unfolding. History does seem to be in progress.
History shows cycles of government increasingly confiscatory of the people's freedom, power increasingly concentrated into a smaller number of people. And then...?
Yep, we definitely need more laws today to solve our problems, and the President should be the one making the laws.
Post a Comment