Enthm

Nanga dance?

Looks like hacking—the first sentence of the 4th paragraph has a bizarre insertion about Nanga dancing; seemingly only that sentence is corrupted.

Putin/Trump era?

I think this article is beautifully written, and the Notes, especially, are so engaging that they might earn inclusion in the text body proper. But I wondered why the mid-20th-century, a golden age for critical theory, shouldn’t receive more survey, at least in mention of such prominent thinkers as Isaiah Berlin, Cynthia Ozick, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker and the many estimable writer/researchers on human social evolution, language, consciousness and neural correlates of selfhood.

    From there it’s a short step to recognize the contemporary wellsprings of anti-intellectualism on both the left and right. It might be a misstep not to recognize them, if not thoroughly reckon with the anti-DWPHM (dead, white, Protestant, heterosexual men) antipathies in academia—born at least 50 years ago in critiques of art and literature curricula—with Homer becoming the iconic lightning rod for the dispossessed—as well as in the rise of civil-rights and environmentalist activism, which was followed by anti-Vietnam War, Farmworkers, Feminist and Gay Rights movements. The admirable political and legal progress effected by these social movements expanded into influence over hiring practices, college admissions, diplomatic trends in foreign policies, and regulatory and legislative consensus throughout the liberal, industrial democracies of the world. But they also provoked a backlash from the conservative sectors of those societies, and many progressive tendencies were hijacked by, or misinterpreted as confluent with, anti-science marginalia (anti-vaccination programs, anti-chemotherapeutic “natural” cancer protocols, and genetically modified foods hysteria) and religiously fundamentalist propaganda (anti-evolution school boards, anti-abortion referenda, homophobic candidates and campaigns).
   So recently, since the election of xenophobic populists around the world, the hard left and hard right have grown in both adherents, rigidity and anti-intellectualism, efflorescing in social media, college speaking circuits and electoral cycles. We are in the U.S. confronted, on one hand, by—
  *. the Christian Right, Tea Party and white nationalists, all supporting the Bush and Trump administrations, condemning affirmative action and Muslim and Latino immigration, sex education and the erosion of traditional sex roles and proprieties, and also includes traditional Republicans and Libertarians, though many of those are now irreparably alienated from the GOP’s drift toward xenophobia and isolationism, and back toward frank, openly racist and homophobic violence;
      and, on the other hand, by—
  *. the inheritors of both the Old & New Left: the established but somewhat ossifiec civil-rights movement, the anarchist ultra-left, the democratic socialist, progressive left, the self-sustaining environmentalist, women’s and LGBT movements, and the older, alienated traditional liberal Democrats and pro-labor working-class voters, all advancing in principle from, but often reacting angrily to, Roosevelt/Kennedy legacies of gradualism, secular ecumenism, enforced racial and sexual diversity, the “politically incorrect” epithet and the so-called “cancel culture” that seems to co-habitate with the political activists rallying around ”Me, Too” and “Black Lives Matter.” I know these discussions are fraught. But they do not disentangle themselves or dissolve just because we don’t address them.

01:37, 28 November 2020 (UTC)01:37, 28 November 2020 (UTC) Enthm 27-Nov-20 (communication from editors Ok with me; Denny Smith, globeandorbit@gmail.com )