They grow up so fast!

If you’ve been missing Tariq Ramadan – update on this Oxford U professor here – there’s always the latest pride of Cambridge (they had to let Jason Arday go), Farah Ahmed.

Unlike the innocuous idiot Arday, Ahmed’s the real thing, a real intellectual who likes terrorists and hates democrats. I mean to say she’s an authentic radical Islamist, promoting veiled enchainment of little girls, along with the death of the liberal state.

In short, she’s a stunner! It don’t get more titillating than a real live Sharia firecracker to give a pop of color to the old place.

Yes, it’s another visit with UD’s guru (who desperately doesn’t want to be anyone’s guru, and is very insulting toward anyone pathetic enough to want a guru), British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. He has an awful lot in common with UD’s other guru, Richard Rorty.

Hint: It’s about pragmatism.

*******************

The thing I’m most wary of is one’s wish to be controlled. I’m interested in how ingenious people are at finding ways of being controlled, either by people or ideas, or whatever.

Wanting a guru is wanting to be controlled, says Phillips; but I think the observation also gets us back to the academic story of the day (of the month? It keeps going.), Jason Arday. Tyler Austin Harper is describing Bates (and Cambridge) professors absolutely controlled by, suffocatingly in the grip of, a maniac’s understanding of white supremacy. This understanding makes them a joke. It makes them hire Jason Arday.

They have given themselves over to a turgid universalism, to Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies. They bow before it the way Pyongyang robots bow to Kim Jong Un. They seek dehumanizing and debraining control by a viselike idea.

********************

The thing I least like is people having inner superiority. That’s the death of sociability, really. In psychoanalysis, I want to free people to lose interest in themselves—not entirely, but enough to be able to be absorbed in other people and things in the world.

So this is why rabid social justice warriors seem – ironically – narcissistic: Much more than improving the world (this is Harper’s point about the Bates people’s lack of interest in actual progressive activism, like militating for campus unions), they are about feeling superior to you, and displaying that superiority in more and more melodramatic ways. The death of sociality here means everyone retreating in disgust, fear, and incredulity from the Self-Regarding Robot show.

*******************

I’m really uninterested in self-knowledge. This is not the sort of thing I should be saying as a psychoanalyst, but I’ve never found self-knowledge very interesting or engaging. It doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts about myself, but I don’t find it fascinating. I don’t find it very useful. Self-knowledge is very useful if you want to vote, but it’s not really useful if you want to fall in love or write a poem. So it’s really a question of what you want to do. Self-knowledge is a decoy. The thing is to have experiences, and the risk is that knowing oneself becomes a way of preempting experience. I think it’s the wrong project.

I went through New York University when Avital Ronell was there. I had watched a lot of supposedly leftist professors line up to defend somebody I knew to be rather credibly accused of serious wrongdoing.

You recall Ronell? Mes petites, if you have the stomach for it…

Me? Nah. But, please, go ahead and read it all. From a series of 2018 posts.

**************

Other excerpts from Harper’s interview:

[Many Bates (College) faculty and administrators were] committed to an ontological claim that white supremacy is a mystical force that suffuses every aspect of society.

One thing that makes my head fucking explode is hearing from people with tenure saying, “Thank you for speaking up. I could never do so.” My reaction: ‘What the fuck are you talking about? You have tenure. You have the most secure job in the American economy…”

[Jason] Arday is a serial fabulist who seems quite unwell, who had no business being at [Cambridge.] But the whole scandal was allowed to unfold because of the racial neuroses of largely white progressive academics…

This shit’s a dime a dozen. Has been for a long time. University Diaries stopped bothering with it years ago.

But it’s timely because of the Jason Arday story. (See below.)

John McWhorter never minces words.

In what sense? Memphis is the most dangerous city in America, so after, say, any mass shooting in Memphis, it makes little sense for the police to assure us it was isolated. It took its place as part of incessant local warfare.

“Police said a fight broke out [at a graduation party] just after 11:15 p.m. in the 1700 block of Brookins Street before multiple people opened fire.”

At least a hundred people had gathered at the party, which is Memphis for “Ten heavily armed teenagers did what they rather often do when there’s a party.” That ain’t isolated. That’s a pattern.

$102 million. You read that right. How pleasing.

In the slough of Sunday in an August despond, when the gilded NYT reader (NY is by far the richest city in the world — over $3 trillion in private total wealth) pauses on the deck of her summer home to note the infinite recurrence of her personal sadness, an opinion piece about psychotherapy rises into view.

Though generous in its acknowledgement of the basic nothing/everythingness of this lucrative, universal practice (universal here means that everyone UD knows is and has long been engaged in it, with a few exceptions), and though willing to admit that psychotherapy seems to do nothing that a wise and intuitive friend or two can’t, the writer still aches after what he calls a “unified field theory” of the dealie. He insists it be empirical and organized into One Thing rather than everything everywhere all at once.

In short, the absolute mess of it, the desperation of sad Americans for it, and the inevitable overtaking of the … field? … by ever-new, ever-bogus, approaches, bothers the guy.

Excitedly, he announces yet another New Theory, and this one does the trick! It’s called predictive something, and is demonstrably, scientifically, good for what ails you!

Whew. It’s about time.

🌑

🌑

🌑

Northwest ISD, Texas

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a former constitutional law professor, said that Mr. Paul had already tainted a prosecution by asserting he wanted to see Dr. Fauci in prison, while at the same time trying to force him to testify.

“I do have some sense of the ethics of a legislative investigation,” Mr. Raskin said. “It just would never occur to me to go around saying a witness should be in prison and then try to prevent them from invoking their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination over the very matter I’m claiming is criminal.”

*************

Ugh.

‘[I]nvestigators said they found two firearms in a 10-month-old child’s bedroom. They said one of the firearms was found in the closet while the other was found inside the child’s crib…

[B]oth firearms were modified consistent with Glock switch installation…

[More writing here.]

[Final sentence:]

[The suspect] already had an ankle monitor as a bond condition related to a homicide.’

Another suicide – attempted suicide? – at a gun range. Wotta shocker.

Babe, do you really have to ask?

Defund the police? Many supporters of Arday call for it. But who are you going to turn to when you’re trying to intimidate a free press?