THE TAOS TATLER.

From the Telegraph:

Irrespective this silly little man’s needless slamming of our country’s two most stalwart allies, it takes a special kind of brazenness for someone excommunicated latae sententiae, owing to his enthusiastic support of abortion, to express empathy with Catholics past. He also displays ignorance of history, as the Palestinians have time after time rejected opportunities having their own state, preferring instead maintaining their state of war with Israel. This writer has no knowledge of England acting similarly with Ireland.

There are many reasons to abhor the 1970s and its gross excesses, theological, political, and cultural, but there are those of a certain age who actually wax nostalgic over that awful decade. One of them was your Tatler’s former superior in the music industry, who understandably, as a student of the Frankfurt School of Economics and the likes of George Soros, embraced decay with a passion.

Then again, it’s difficult to imagine anyone waxing nostalgic over the above. Let it serve therefore as warning: it happened once, it can happen again.

With thanks to James Likeks.

“No foundation, anywhere. Whole world. No foundation. All the way down the line.“

–William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life.

Social sciences are in a perilous state and have been for some time. Half-a-century ago the Bostonian historian Walter Muir Whitehill derided them as “the fraudulent disciplines,” singling out psychology and sociology, and saying he would much prefer the company of an Egyptologist. Things have gotten far worse since then and worst of all is the alleged discipline which didn’t even exist in Whitehill’s time, so-called gender studies.

As a case in point, For What It’s Worth reports the supposedly science-based World Health Organization, architect of the brilliantly managed COVID (née Wu Han Flu) outbreak, has just announced its latest triumph, the updating of its coveted gender-mainstreaming manual, which now reads gender goes “beyond non-binary and that “highlighting and expanding on the concept of intersectionality, which looks at how gender power dynamics interact with other hierarchies of privilege or disadvantage, resulting in inequality and differential health outcomes for different people.” 

In the odd chance readers can’t quite grasp the meaning of the above, the WHO provides further clarification on its website.

• Harmonize a common intersectional feminist lens for WHO programme activities and deliverables across all three levels of the Organization;

• strengthen the integration of intersectionality and gender diversity aspects across the training content and materials with practical examples;

• update existing gender integration tools and frameworks and introduce new ones to further strengthen learning outcomes for staff and health outcomes at country level, supported by a practical “how-to” guide;

• ensure that the principles of ethics, gender, equity and human rights are embedded in public health activities and systems to optimize the achievement of the triple billion goals set out in
GPW13.

All sarcasm (reluctantly) aside, there is a commonality to writings in the social sciences, their utter opaqueness. Endless strings of cumbersome latinate words and neologisms (deliverables?) obscure–deliberately–one simple fact. There is nothing there.

Consider this single wordy paragraph from an accepted dissertation entitled A Queer and Crip Grotesque, which your Tatler chose at random from a website for such things. The topic is somewhat removed from that the WHO writes of, but it doesn’t matter. All dissertations, theses, books, newspaper and magazine articles pertaining to gender studies read alike.

Carnivalesque and Cosmic Terror

The co-presence of horror and humor is central to understanding the ways in which the positive and negative grotesque interact. It functions as more than a literary trope and begins to denote relations of power through the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque cannot, however, exist without cosmic terror. Cosmic terror is the fear of the infinitely powerful, that which cannot be overcome by force (Dentith 241). For religion it is a higher being, for nature it is the elemental catastrophe, for humans it is the governing institution. These terrors are a means for control, an omniscient presence to guide human behavior through fear of punishment. True to the grotesque, the terror of the cosmos is countered by the carnivalesque. It is a time of blasphemy, of masquerade and merry making, of feasting and fools. The carnivalesque is suspended in time and removed from the trepidations of reality (McWilliam 220). It often involves colorful and ornate clothing, protruding masks, and satire. Kings become fools and fools kings! Carnivale occurs in a liminal space, one that is temporary and peripheral to the lived world: It is a simulacrum (McWilliam 220, Russo 5). The carnivale flips the social script, makes the world topsy-turvy. It is a means to relieve the pressure of terror, to remove, if even for a moment, the weight of authoritative control by disarming it through farcicality. The dualistic world of the carnivalesque, both terror and laughter, expresses a distinct social commentary and subversive political tool, giving the grotesque critical implications in its application.

There is not one single fact in all that verbiage, just lots and lots of opinions. The author provides links to some of them (your correspondent assumes links are the 21st-Century equivalent of footnotes), presumably to add weight to her baseless arguments, but lo, those links simply lead one to the opinions of others higher up the academic latter.

Such is the state of the social sciences these days, scholarship without facts. With murmurings in this country growing louder and louder concerning the state of all our institutions, including the academy, it seems to your Tatler the fraudulent disciplines will eventually collapse as they grow ever bigger without foundation.

The British engineering genius Isambard Kindom Brunel (1806-59) when just a schoolboy, predicted to his classmates a building they could see going up outside the classroom window would collapse, owing to a fault he had detected in the foundation. It did, shortly afterward.

It takes no genius to predict the collapse of academic disciplines with no foundation at all.

Still awaiting flowers, teddy bears, and votive candles.

Pilgrimages led by Doctor Jill Biden to be announced soon.

Honing patronization to a fine art.

Compounding Doctor Jill’s error, the faux pas occurred at an event patronizingly titled LatinX for IncluXion (isn’t that clever?). If the White House staffer who put this thing together had done even two minutes research, Xe would have learned a great many Latin Americans find the neologism “LatinX” repulsive, just as they would Doctor Jill’s proclaiming the breakfast taco one of the things that makes Hispanics great. We may assume should Doctor Jill ever address an NAACP convention, she’ll credit black Americans’ greatness to ham hocks and chitlins.

Is it any wonder Latin Americans are fleeing the Democrat party in droves?

More  “mostly peaceful” demonstrations by the left. Pastor suspects abortion activists.

Nothing new, here: vandalizing Catholic churches was a routine tactic of intimidation by the all-Democrat Klu Klux Klan in its campaign against mongrel races, including Catholics.

Democrats today might issue half-hearted condemnations and rationalizations of acts like these, as well disavow past connections with the Klan. Perhaps so, but should the perpetrators be caught, they ought to be polled their party affiliation. When it is inevitably determined there is not a single Republican among them, Democrat party leaders should then be asked why that is so.

The Church of England plumbs new depths, but diving will continue until it hits bottom or attendance hits zero, whichever comes first.

In a written reply to a question submitted to General Synod, a senior Bishop said that although the meaning of the word woman was previously “thought to be self-evident”, “additional care” was now needed.

The question was posed as institutions grapple with the ongoing debate surrounding trans rights and what defines “a woman”. 

The question was posed as institutions grapple with the ongoing debate surrounding trans rights and what defines “a woman”. In a written reply to a question submitted to General Synod, a senior Bishop said that although the meaning of the word woman was previously “thought to be self-evident”, “additional care” was now needed.

The question was posed as institutions grapple with the ongoing debate surrounding trans rights and what defines “a woman”.

Those few remaining faithful in the C of E must await with bated breath the outcome of such a vital and critical soteriological debate.

–With thanks to William Tighe.

UPDATE: The C of E’s Eldest Daughter (sort of), The Episcopal Church, follows suit in spectacular fashion at its 80th General Convention. Why, the C of E may find in its race to the bottom ECUSA is already there to greet them. Those Americans! Always having to be bigger and better in everything.

A mere soupçon of what the Episcopalians just served up:

Resolved, that the 80th General Convention understands that the protection of religious liberty extends to all Episcopalians who may need or desire to access, to utilize, to aid others in the procurement of, or to offer abortion services.

And your Tatler’s favorite:

The Episcopal House of Deputies condemns Crisis Pregnancy Centers.

Resolved, the House of Bishops concurring, That the 80th General Convention denounces the work of Crisis Pregnancy Centers, also known as Pregnancy Resource Centers.

The Deity, if there is one, forbid those people, all NOKD, to encourage others of their kind to produce even more of them. None will ever become Episcopalians, so can we please just get rid of ’em?

–Stephen Green @Instapundit.

Linking to this piece by veteran blogger Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.

Note the “finishes” specification.

D’ye suppose our Chinese friends meant dull? Or perhaps matte? The Free Dictionary provides a clue.

[French, curdled milk, matte, from feminine of obsolete mat, compact, from Old French, dull, from Latin mattus, stupefied; see mat2.]

Twitter’s chairman to Musk: See you in court.

As a young attorney friend said to your Tatler years ago: “Billable hours are sweeter than flowers.”

Quarterly returns of these partnerships should prove most impressive and provide years and years of nice steady income.