Haiku for the Day

A badger's challenge
Work within gentle limits
Poetry for bears.

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F.B.

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The Shame Game

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Men bond by making jokes about each other. Women bond by shaming other women.

I would dearly love to tell you about what I have been doing this past week. The hours-long conversations with lawyers. The equally long conversations with colleagues and friends. The decisions that I have had to make about when to speak—and when to say silent.

But to tell you, I would have to do something that I am not very good at.

Namenames.

I am amazed that other women find it so easy.

It took me a year and a half of being called names on social media to call out another woman who had been trying to shame me. (I understand that she has continued to do so, including in more formal academic settings.)

It has now been almost a year since I wrote about her, and the name-calling has only gotten worse.

For the most part, from other women.

I think my favorite this past week was, in effect, an unnaming. I am She Who Must Not Be Named.

Others have been more blunt.

(And, yes, I get that by providing these links, I am…
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SJWs Converge on Medieval Studies—in Real Time!

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Unlike their modernist colleagues, medieval historians rarely get to study events as they are unfolding in real time.

Usually we are stuck in the library, poring over manuscripts, hoping for a good bit that will give us a glimpse into the passions and provocations of the past, making do with chronicles written tens or hundreds of years after the events they are recounting, having to imagine what it must have been like through analogy with our own experiences, all the while knowing that we are more than likely projecting our own concerns onto the scraps of evidence that we find.

But not this week! This week in our little corner of academia we got to witness a SJW convergence in real time—just like Vox Day describes!

The opening move came on June 27, with this status posted to the Facebook Group for the International Congress on Medieval Studies (K’zoo) (I would link to the Group for you, but I can’t, for reasons which will become clear in the course of this narration).


Puzzled—and, of …
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How to Spot a Fascist

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For the past several years, some of my colleagues in medieval studies have been claiming that our neck of the scholarly profession is infected not just with white supremacism, but also with fascism, so much so that they are willing to label fellow members of the profession as out-and-out “fascists,” including yours truly.

As Inigo Montoya would put it, I’m not sure that word means what they think it means.

What they seem to mean by it is “racist,” because, of course, everyone knows that fascists are racists—and racists are evil.

It also seems for them to have something to do with being of European ancestry and/or white and not apologizing for it, as well as having status in our profession that others do not.

At a guess, it could have something to do with arguing in favor of Western civilization and/or Christianity, but for the most part they leave it undefined, hanging there as the slander that everyone knows it is without quite being able to say why.

Sometimes they gesture towards Mi…
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Why Jordan Peterson Lost That Bout to Cathy Newman

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It should have been a great victory.

There he was, holding his own against a ferocious assault by a committed feminist.

“So you’re saying,” she would attack.

“No, I’m not,” he would calmly respond. “I’m not saying that at all!”

Over and over and over again, to the delight of his fans and the horror of her followers. Would this male chauvinist pig never crack?!

She tried every move she had against him, and nothing could get through.

It was a woman’s worst nightmare, a man she could not ruffle.

You can hear it in her voice as the interview proceeds.

Her voice gets shriller and shriller, her questions more pointed, her mouth harder, her smile colder.

And then a moment comes. She has challenged him about his refusal to use the newly-invented pronouns now mandated for use in Canada by the passage of Bill C16.

She attacks: “Why should your right to freedom of speech trump a transperson’s right not to be offended?”

He parries: “Because in order to be able to think you have to risk being offe…
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Why Dorothy Kim Hates Me

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I have never met Dorothy Kim. I do not know why she decided to make me her target in January 2016. Since it is clear that many even in our field of medieval studies do not know – or are refusing to admit that they know – what she has been saying about me on social media, I will show you.

On June 5, 2015, I posted a short blog post, listing three “cheers” that I suggest we talk about as products of Western, a.k.a. European, a.k.a. “white” civilization. I entitled it “Three Cheers for White Men.”

On January 18, 2016, I learned from friends on Facebook that Dorothy Kim had found this post and was encouraging her friends in the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Facebook group to condemn me for posting it. Here is her initial post:

In response, I wrote a long series of blog posts clarifying what I had meant in praising “white” men for idealizing chivalry, consensual marriage, and women’s full participation in our representative democracy. These posts are linked in the original “Thr…
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