2014 Roundup

My more typical New Years Eve

Well 2014 was much better than 2013 if only because I didn't have a  major operation during the entire year. Actually it was better than 2012, too, when I was unemployed for six months. And 2008 - 2011 because I had a horrible job (and others agree) which, combined with major depression caused me to develop an anxiety disorder, which I'm still dealing with - but which is improved thanks to therapy.

In 2014 I managed to finally produce the full-length version of JULIA & BUDDY which I had been trying to do since 2011. I also completed a first draft of DARK MARKET about Ayn Rand and the 2008 meltdown, started my play about Marilyn Monroe, wrote a 10-minute play about the Bronte sisters. I also made almost serious money from ads on the NYCPlaywrights web site - I made twice as much money from the blog in December 2014 as I did in December 2013.

Also in 2014:

 >  The liberal media finally woke up to the perniciousness of Social Justice Warriors, thanks in part to the Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars article in The Nation and to the ridiculous kerfuffle fomented by a friend of right-winger Michelle Malkin who goes by the Twitter handle of Suey Park and her moronic attack on Stephen Colbert. Followed up by the less well-known but just as significant "Jacobinghazi" in which the absolute awfulness of Sarah Kendzior became crystal clear.

And of course I have a personal interest in the SJW phenomenon, since I was smeared by SJWs way back in 2011 for daring to think that a song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono was not racist, and thanks to the collusion of Google and Tumblr, smears against me by SJW Mikki Kendall and SJW K. Tempest Bradford still show up at the top of Google search results on my name.

It should be noted that in spite of the name Social Justice Warriors, these people do nothing to promote social justice. They simply use good causes to promote their own careers, through endless Twitter wars and attacking liberals and feminists. I still have to wonder how much of the SJW phenomenon is sock puppetry by the Right, the SJW attacks are so ridiculously focused on the Left, virtually ignoring the actual perpetrators of social injustice on the Right.
But although the SJWs were called out in 2014 instead of universally lionized as heroes of the Left as they were in 2013, I also discovered that those who might be allies against Social Justice Warriors turned out to be just as fond of anti-feminist rhetoric, as when I found Doug Henwood attacking "bourgeois feminists" (whatever that is - I saw via Facebook that Henwood seems to live as bourgeois a lifestyle as anybody I've ever known) and discovered Will Shetterly supporting faux feminist right-winger Christina Hoff Sommers who has a long, long history of anti-feminist statements and is currently a "resident scholar" at the far-right, Koch brothers-supported American Enterprise Institute.

Leading me to conclude once again, as with the SJW vs. New Atheist war, that both sides are idiots. And feminism is as usual under attack from all sides. But on the plus side, I received a very nice email from Katha Pollitt for defending her against Kendzior's scurrilous attacks.

 >  The Rise of Ayn Rand Awareness - in the past I have been amazed by how many people - educated and, I thought, well-informed people had no idea who Ayn Rand was. But I think more and more people are aware of her, partly because some prominent Republicans are followers of hers, including Rand and Ron Paul and Paul Ryan. And just this past month she's been getting lots of publicity lately thanks to this story: Ayn Rand helped the FBI investigate whether ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was commie propaganda. And one of the New Yorker's most viewed blog posts of 2014 was a parody Ayn Rand Reviews Children’s Movies. So this is definitely the year to produce DARK MARKET - if I can manage it financially or find a producer or co-producer.

 >  My dating life - I actually had one in 2014, although it was a string of indisputable failures. The one guy I might have liked well enough to be intimate with turned out to live in a pit of filth in Brooklyn, and was shameless enough to invite me into it. I had a date last night with a guy who claimed to be 58 but who finally admitted to being older, although he never said how much older. At least 60. He really liked me though, enough to inquire, as I was about to go through the subway turnstile at the end of the date, "when was the last time you had your pussy eaten really well?" I guess since I have mostly been dating guys under 30, I assumed that making such explicit statements on a first date was an issue for younger guys. Coming from a guy who is at least 60, it's just gross. I mean, if it was a really hot guy saying that on a first date, maybe it would be tolerable. But I really doubt there is any 60 year old guy in the world attractive enough to qualify as really hot. Certainly not this guy. You would think he'd have enough restraint and gravitas at that age not to bust out with something like that in a freaking subway station. Some people never grow up I guess. My therapist says the best way to meet people is through activities that you like, but I haven't had any luck through the world of theater. So many men in theater are gay, and the ones who are not gay, and at all attractive, are in too much demand from the straight female actors. Oh you goddam teasing actors. And it's just as bad if not worse with directors. And almost all straight male playwrights I know are creeps.

 >  Jury duty - my first as a citizen of New York. It was a hell of an experience and I hope to get a play out of it, TWELVE ANGRY JURORS FROM QUEENS, but so far I've only gotten a few pages written. 

 >  Running - this was my real success story. I have run more in 2014 than in my entire life. Two official 5K runs, and almost weekly runs of 3 - 4 or even 5 - 6 miles. And I plan to start off 2015 right by running in the NYRR Midnight Run tonight. My daughter has me in training for a 10K for 2015 and she's even talking half marathon. Wow. Running, like all endurance physical activities, can be very unpleasant, but I keep doing it because first of all, I get to spend time with my busy daughter, but also it seems like every time I look in the NYTimes there is another article about how running and other exercise keeps you young:

How Exercise Changes Our DNA
Now new research reports that the answer may lie, in part, in our DNA. Exercise, a new study finds, changes the shape and functioning of our genes, an important stop on the way to improved health and fitness.

Got a Minute? Let’s Work Out
According to a lovely new study, a single minute of intense exercise, embedded within an otherwise easy 10-minute workout, can improve fitness and health.

Run to Stay Young
Running may reverse aging in certain ways while walking does not, a noteworthy new study of active older people finds. The findings raise interesting questions about whether most of us need to pick up the pace of our workouts in order to gain the greatest benefit.

Does Exercise Really Make Us Smarter?

Still, the findings are strong enough to suggest that exercise really does change the brain and may, in the process, improve thinking, Mr. Stothart said. That conclusion should encourage scientists to look even more closely into how, at a molecular level, exercise remodels the human brain, he said. It also should spur the rest of us to move, since the benefits are, it seems, not imaginary, even if they are in our head.

What’s Your Fitness Age?
Dr. Wisloff and his colleagues offer free exercise suggestions on their website. But he said almost any type and amount of exercise should help to increase your VO2max and lower your fitness age, potentially increasing your lifespan.

How Exercise May Protect Against Depression

Exercise may help to safeguard the mind against depression through previously unknown effects on working muscles, according to a new study involving mice. The findings may have broad implications for anyone whose stress levels threaten to become emotionally overwhelming.

Running 5 Minutes a Day Has Long-Lasting Benefits

Running for as little as five minutes a day could significantly lower a person’s risk of dying prematurely, according to a large-scale new study of exercise and mortality. The findings suggest that the benefits of even small amounts of vigorous exercise may be much greater than experts had assumed.

Want to Be More Creative? Take a Walk

For almost every student, creativity increased substantially when they walked. Most were able to generate about 60 percent more uses for an object, and the ideas were both “novel and appropriate,” Dr. Oppezzo writes in her study, which was published this month in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Well that's enough for now - I find it pretty compelling.

Now I'm off to run in Central Park to mark the beginning of 2015.

Doug Henwood and the cowardly anti-feminist radical chic brigade

I had an unpleasant run-in on Facebook with Doug Henwood and his merry band of feminist-hating sycophants the other day.

Who is Doug Henwood, you may ask. Well not nearly as well-known as he feels he deserves to be, since Henwood apparently thinks that Paul Krugman stole all his best ideas.

Henwood is one of these radical chic types who thinks that Sheryl Sandberg is the Great Satan. Katha Pollitt addressed that idiocy in The Nation.

It's clear from Doug Henwood's personality that he is a true Social Justice Warrior, even if he is much older than your average SJW - he enjoys attacking actual feminists out of some bullshit holier-than-thou double standard and he cannot tolerate criticism - like any standard SJW he much prefers to smear and then censor critics as you can see him doing in the debate I had with him. He blocked me and then he and his gang continued the "debate" without me. Much like Clint Eastwood arguing with invisible Obama in the chair.

 He even posted the K. Tempest Bradford/Mikki Kendall smear against me to try to make me shut up about his idiocy concerning Sandberg and "bourgeois feminists."

What really bothers Doug Henwood and others who attacked Sheryl Sandberg is that Sandberg has the nerve to address female career aspirations, while radical chic purists like Henwood and some freelance Philistine named Abby Tallmer believe that women need to wait until all the problems of the third world are solved first before they worry about their own lives. You know, they should address important issues, not insignificant little women's issues.

UPDATE: Henwood appears to be part of the same cadre of self-important leftist quasi-anarchists as David Graeber, with whom I tangled some months ago. And Henwood was actually in on the Twitter war known as Jacobinghazi.

Pollitt vs. Henwood: Round 2

Katha Pollitt comes back swinging at Doug Henwood after he responded to her review of his latest Hillary-hating screed, in a new piece in the Nation: The Book That Turns Hillary Clinton Into a Cartoon.

The reason that Doug Henwood turns Clinton into a cartoon is because Clinton is a "bourgeois feminist" and Henwood believes that bourgeois feminists are evil monsters out to deliberately exploit third-world workers. I am not kidding. And that was my very first introduction to Henwood - although I had actually read some of his tweets during the Twitter flurry known as Jacobinghazi.  But he didn't register there.

He sure did here:











The Fawcett Society, accused of exploiting workers, said they had not been aware of this situation - but Henwood and his gang would not consider the possibility that an organization which has been fighting for women's rights for 150 might have made a mistake. No, it was apparently much more believable to them that this organization, on behalf of "bourgeois feminists" were deliberately out to hurt women.

So that's what Doug Henwood thinks of "bourgeois feminists" in general and Hillary Clinton in particular: as pure evil. Which is why he presents Clinton as a murderer on the cover of his book.

So since Henwood thinks Clinton is pretty much the personification of evil it's no surprise that he can find nothing at all good to say about her, ever. As Pollitt notes:

 But even if every word he writes is completely accurate, it’s not the whole story. If he’s going to attack her for botching healthcare reform, Doug should at least have mentioned her role in establishing the SCHIP program, which gave healthcare to millions of low-income children. If he’s going to dismiss her as a “carpetbagger” and a “mediocre” “seat warmer” in the Senate, he should have noted that her voting record made her one of the more liberal Senate Democrats—70 percent more liberal than her fellow Senate Dems in her final term. And isn’t it relevant that Republicans controlled the Senate from 2001 to 2007? What Doug gives us is so partial—he mentions every negative (even her supposed breaking of a lamp in a fight with Bill)—he turns her into a cartoon.

Pollitt also hits back over Henwood's smearing of Brad DeLong. But of course as I've demonstrated on this blog, smearing defenders of Hillary Clinton is just what Henwood does. Which tells you about the mind of Doug Henwood - a center-left woman running for president is evil personified and anybody who says different is a lying opportunist or a "Clinton towel-boy."

And Henwood and his wife Liza Featherstone are both contributors to The Nation. No wonder The Nation has gone downhill.

Meet the Brocialists

Jacobin magazine is the Kremlin of the Brocialists.  In my new ongoing series, I will be looking at the people associated with Jacobin magazine.

So far it appears that the majority of Jacobin writers are private-college educated white men from privileged backgrounds.

Ironically, two years ago, before I knew what a Brocialist was, I was on Jacobin's side during a Twitter war dubbed #jacobinghazi. Turns out it was really the old "both sides are just as bad" scenario. I've discussed social justice warriors vs. new atheists on this blog as an example. Well this was social justice warriors versus brocialists.

I took Jacobin's side because I wasn't acquainted with brocialism and didn't realize that it was a continuation of the socialist tradition of dismissing women's complaints about sexism as "bourgeois." And then I met Doug Henwood on Facebook. And his wife Liza Featherstone. Both of them write for The Nation. And their pal Amber A'Lee Frost. All three of them write for Jacobin. All of them have the attitude that feminism should not be about women, it should be about socialism. And they routinely attack women who are actual feminists.

When Brocialists attack women, no matter how viciously, they will always blame the women for the attacks. This also true of Gamergaters and Bernie Sanders supporters - and I suspect there is quite a bit of overlap of all three of these groups.

To get a good sense of the Brocialist attitude towards women, observe this tweet by Liza Featherstone. Matt Bruenig had a history of being abusive towards women on Twitter, and when this was brought to the attention of one of Bruenig's employers, Demos, they asked him to tone it down and when he refused they fired him. And Brocialists like Featherstone decided that the real problem wasn't a man representing a social justice organization behaving like an ass. The real problem was women complaining about it. Women complaining about abusive men is "authoritarian" according to Featherstone.

I will be discussing more about Bruenighazi soon because Matt Bruenig will be the first individual Brocialist I write about. Not counting Henwood, Featherstone or Frost.

More on Doug Henwood's hatred for the "bourgeois feminists"

It appears that Doug Henwood, hater of "bourgeois feminists" recently gained notoriety by attacking Hillary Clinton at Harper's.

But who actually cares what Doug Henwood thinks? He claims to be a Marxist, whatever that means these days - is he a card-carrying member of the Communist Party? Since I read the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris, and his analysis of the Marxist-leaning school of anthropology I haven't been able to take Marxism seriously, influenced as it is by the airy-fairy Hegelian dialectic.

But as far as I can tell, what being a Marxist boils down to for Henwood is calling everybody you don't like "bourgeois" and especially feminists. So Henwood's economic analyses are completely useless - he's just a bitter ranting old man who has nothing helpful to add to any economic discussion.

This is from Jacobin (of the notorious Sarah Kendzior-instigated Jacobinghazi):

BKS: Accumulation and its discontents: is there a specifically Marxist understanding of the current economic crisis that you subscribe to?

DH: Mine, of course, which is that the bourgeoisie launched a successful war on a troublesome working class in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That assault – wage-cutting, speedup, deregulation, outsourcing, union-busting, cutbacks in the welfare state, all the familiar stuff gathered under the name of neoliberalism – created a problem for a system dependent on high levels of mass consumption both to maintain aggregate demand and to secure its political legitimacy. Why put up with the volatility and tsurris of American life if there’s no promise of plentiful gadgetry and upward mobility? So the answer was to counter the downdraft of falling wages with rising borrowing, via credit cards and mortgages. That model seemed to hit a wall in the recent economic crisis, but there’s no real recognition of that fact, and no new model for accumulation.
In orthodox terms, the U.S. would be ready for a serious austerity program, but our ruling class is afraid to push too hard on that, at least for now. So I think we’re going to stumble along for some time until some new economic and political model emerges. Or if one doesn’t emerge, maybe we’ll just fall apart.

Austerity program? Seriously? The thing right-wingers are always pushing for and Krugman is always objecting to? And Henwood claims to care so much about the poor, on whom all austerity programs would fall especially hard.

Now the "bourgeoisie" sound evil and Henwood's description of their activities would seem to identify them as Ronald Reagan and the Koch brothers, but the term's umbrella is very large, especially when it comes to feminists. As I noted yesterday, he blamed "bourgeois feminists" for exploiting workers in a t-shirt factory. He's referring to a Gawker article, but at least the article provides a link to the dastardly "bourgeois feminists" at The Fawcett Society, which has been working for women's rights since 1866. They say:

“Upon receiving samples of the range at our offices in early October we noted that the t-shirts had in fact been produced in Mauritius, upon which we queried (over email) the ethical credentials of the Mauritian factory, and the fabric used.
“We were assured by Whistles (over email) that the Mauritian factory:
‘is a fully audited, socially and ethical compliant factory which has the following accreditations.

So apparently these dastardly "bourgeois feminists" made a mistake. Which is all it takes for Henwood to attack them as heartless exploiters of the poor. Because of course over at the commune where he lives in Brooklyn, they vet every last consumer good they use, to ensure there is no exploitation anywhere in the production and distribution cycle. Which is why they only use artisinal cell phones.

But of course they don't - they just expect feminists (and unless you are in the Third World you are by definition a bourgeois feminist in Henwood's personal Marxist dictionary) to be perfect.

And then there's Henwood's lazy journalism.

I've been a fan of the work of Joe Conason and Gene Lyons since I read their "The Hunting of the President" and so was very pleased to see they both went after Henwood for his piece on Hillary Clinton.

Conason:

In short, Henwood simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about (and his reliance on former Fox News personality Dick Morris for guidance is mindboggling). What’s most disappointing is that a magazine of Harper’s’ reputation – which first exposed Whitewater as a political hoax – would provide a platform for his baseless speculations.

And based on Henwood's response to Lyons, I guess I shouldn't take his smearing and blocking me personally. Lyons writes:

...Then, after I wrote a column pointing out that almost everything he'd written about that phony scandal was nonsense, Henwood began calling me bad names on social media. "Clinton towel boy" was one.
So I posted the following on his Facebook page:
"I find it interesting that when confronted with several quite basic factual errors in his description of the great Whitewater scandal of legend and song, Doug Henwood's response is name-calling. That tells me pretty much all I need to know about him...

...Now if somebody took something of mine apart like that, I'd do my best to make them regret it. But Henwood can't, because he was blowing smoke to begin with.
"What I don't get," he answered "is why you're so invested in doing PR for these (bleeps)."
Sorry dude, not playing. Facts are facts.
Everybody makes mistakes. Professionals own them.

Apparently being nasty to his critics is just who Doug Henwood is. But at least we all know what the true meaning of "bourgeois" is now - if you make a living writing for the Nation, Harper's and your own blog, you are a righteous revolutionary. Pretty much everybody else in the First World is a member of the bourgeoisie. Especially those uppity feminists.

More on the dirtbag left

Some more good critiques of the Dirtbag Left.

James Livingston:

What these ignorant yet arrogant little shits can’t fathom is the simple fact that the detachment of income from work, no matter what its social or intellectual provenance, means the decompositon of capitalism, because you can’t have capitalism without a labor market that correlates effort and reward in a legible and legitimate manner. Socialism resides in that decomposition—why not embrace and enlarge upon it, even in the fragmentary form of a UBI? 

But the moral of this story is larger. The Chapo crew are satirists who produce, as a matter of course, pure cynicism. Not mere irony, the “critical distance” we all need and use when we experience conflicting desires or points of view. Irony leads us into the world because it divides us between these possibilities, makes us want to test them. Cynicism via satire protects us from the world by teaching us how to abstain from its conflicts. 

But that is a way of saying that cynicism via satire protects us from politics as such. Is that we want, just now?

And Noah Berlatsky:

The dismissal of feminism is consistent throughout the podcast. Chapo doesn't treat feminism as a valuable movement or analytic framework. They treat it as a boondoggle, a distraction, and a joke. They argue that Wonder Woman's feminism is simply a way to sell imperialism through identity politics. Or they argue that William Marston, Wonder Woman's creator, was just a horny guy; the supposedly irreverent Chapo dismisses Marston's feminist commitments via prudish kink-shaming. At no point do the hosts ever admit, or entertain the idea, that women might legitimately lack heroic role models. They don't discuss the possibility that women are often excluded from lead roles in Hollywood, and that Wonder Woman in that way might address an actual inequality. They don't talk about other problems with representation either. The vigorous criticism many black women have made of the film isn't broached. 

Instead, Chapo devotes its energy to presenting feminism as useless and worthy of mockery. They discuss the Ghostbusters reboot and suggest that the sexist backlash to the film was just part of the girl-power marketing—as if the female stars of the series wanted massive amounts of sexist bile directed at them. They make a crack about "give your money to Wonder Woman"—referencing the "give your money to women" hashtag, which was an effort to highlight disparities in women's pay. The low point is when a guest blogger named Matthew Brady pops up briefly to sneer at his ex-wife, and then cracks "oh this film taught me jokes like that are wrong." His entire segment could have been lifted, virtually without alteration, from an MRA Youtube video.

I noticed the Mens' Rights Activist vibe too. 

What is most striking about Chapo Trap House and the dirtbag left is its problem with rape. Thanks to the Jeet Heer piece in The New Republic, Melissa McEwan talked about CTH host Felix Biederman's attack on her. And I've already blogged about Amber A'Lee Frost and Liza Featherstone's attitude towards rape, which is that rape isn't nearly so bad if you go to an Ivy League school. (Featherstone and her husband Doug Henwood both went to Ivy League schools.)

And one of the major components of Jacobinghazi was Amber A'Lee Frost mocking Sarah Kendzior for talking about rape threats.

Well nobody ever lost money sucking up to the Patriarchy - Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Sommers among others have built solid careers on it. And the existence of the Dirtbag Left and its hostility to feminism demonstrates that Patriarchy-servicing is not monopolized by the Right.

Meanwhile Henwood & Featherstone have been up to their usual hard-hitting journalism. 

My guess is that The Atlantic "stole" the title because they hadn't heard of Featherstone's advice column. Although the idea of The Nation having a personal advice column as if it was Glamour magazine, and that it hired someone as self-absorbed as Featherstone to give anybody personal advice is utterly absurd. My assumption is that Featherstone has a good friend in the hierarchy at The Nation and they wanted to give her an income stream as a personal favor. And the same goes for Amber A'Lee Frost, who has a personal advice column at The Baffler. Although reading the questions they print, I fully expect they just make them up themselves.

David Graeber makes me Google his TinyURL

A hallmark of your typical Social Justice Warrior is that they are cowardly little weasels, which is why they don't contact you directly with their complaints - or say, when they wish to hint to their Twitter followers that you have defamed them. They just whine about you on Twitter.

Starting this morning my blog post from a couple of days ago entitled Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendzior, David Graeber and friends edition was blowing up in my blog analytics. I didn't have time to investigate until now, I was running the Brooklyn Pride LGBTQ + Family 5K this morning and then had brunch, and then I had to do my weekly NYCPlaywrights emailing duties, and then had to nag an actor about a production issue relating to my play JULIA & BUDDY.

So I only finally had time to find out what's going on this evening.

Most of the traffic coming to the blog post is from this TinyURL   http://t.co/BSPNKny2rX, so I did a search on Twitter and found David Graeber talking about me. (Although oddly the link seems to be different, perhaps created from another URL shortening service?)

He didn't contact me. He just talked about me on Twitter. As I said, that's what SJWs do. Because they're cowardly little smear-mongering weasels.

My response:

I included @KathaPollitt - if you aren't familiar with Twitter, it's basically like I cc'd Pollitt in my response. I felt it was appropriate since the reason I got into this kerfuffle is because SJW Sarah Kendzior was smearing Katha Pollitt. Again.

I assume that what Graeber is referring to is Item 3 on the blog post:

So to recap:

1. Joshua Foust falsely claimed that writers at Salon and Jacobin were sending rape threats to Sarah Kendzior.
2. Sarah Kendzior apparently did not correct Foust although she was often on Twitter during that time.
3. David Graeber accepted Foust's false claim.
4. Katha Pollitt questioned David Graeber about it.

Now the reason I said he accepted Foust's claim is because Katha Pollitt seemed to think he did. And I certainly have no problem making that explicit. So I changed it to:

3. David Graeber seemed to have accepted Foust's false claim, according to Katha Pollitt.

But that is such a typical SJW move - deliberate obtuseness used to attack someone. Although admittedly you do have to wonder sometimes if it is truly deliberate.

David Graeber and Sarah Kendzior are both anthropologists, so I assume that's how they know each other. An anonymous commenter informed me that Sarah Kendzior's number one Twitter sycophant "Perfectly Cromulent" (mentioned on the "smear campaign" post) turns out to be Kendzior's husband Peter J. Blackwell. Now I didn't even think to question the possible personal connection between Perfectly Cromulent and Kendzior, but then, I'm not a professional journalist. Certainly Blackwell and Kendzior don't bother to make the connection plain.

And that's the point I've been making about SJW Twitter wars - it is so easy to create false accounts, or sock puppets, or in Kendzior's case, a pseudonymous cheering section, and journalists seem to be very unconcerned about investigating the identities of SJW celebrities and their allies. Very disturbing.

Now Katha Pollitt seemed to think that David Graeber had accepted Foust's claim, but didn't have evidence because, allegedly, he deleted the Tweet. Unfortunately it is not possible to recover deleted Tweets anymore, (but if anybody out there knows different please let me know) but certainly Twitter still has them somewhere, so if David Graeber wants to get all litigious I'm sure somebody's lawyer can subpoena Twitter. I tend to trust Katha Pollitt, a well-known writer who works for media that actually bothers with fact-checking, over the SJW Twitterati.

I'm no more a professional anthropologist than I am a professional journalist, but I know several anthropologists thanks to my interest in Marvin Harris. I was going to write a bio of Harris but that project has sadly been back-burnered with nothing but an almost-never-updated web site to show for it. If only I had the time. Maybe after I retire from my day job, or hit the lottery. Sigh.

Anyway, I'd never heard of David Graeber before. I'll have to ask some of my anthropologist friends about him. He appears to be of the postmodernist branch of anthropology, though, something I thought had pretty much died since Harris documented their doings in his Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times in 1998.

But the SJWs seem to get their theories of human cultures via postmodernists, and we see Flavia Dzodan name-dropping Jacques Derrida here.

Will Shetterly makes some amusing observations about "Jacobinghazi."