{"id":14717,"date":"2015-11-24T07:35:39","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T12:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14717"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:35:39","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T12:35:39","slug":"boundary-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14717","title":{"rendered":"Boundary Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Boundary Problems<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
I<\/span>t\u2019s no accident that Donald Trump\u2019s vaunted wall along the US-Mexico border became such a potent metaphor for a floundering American polity. The US has boundary problems \u2014 and not just with illegal immigrants (whoops, undocumented visitors). A mighty flux of standards and principles is symptomatic of an economy in freefall. Nothing is settled. All values are put up for re-negotiation. Steamrolling and bullying are the new fair play. Foundational ideas, such as the first amendment, erode under a flood of special pleadings. There is no center left to hold.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The latest identity politics fracas at Princeton University is instructive. Princeton students\u2019 Black Justice League demanded both the vilification of former university president Woodrow Wilson as an arch-segregationist at the same time they demanded a segregated \u201ccultural safe space for black students.\u201d The pusillanimous current Princeton president, one Christopher Eisgruber, entertained their \u201cdemands\u201d perhaps knowing that the threatened \u201cindefinite\u201d occupation of administration offices would be cut short by the Thanksgiving week vacation. (So far, the occupying force of the Black Justice League has not demanded delivery of free turkey and cranberry sauce \u2014 turkeys problematically have distinct regions of white and dark meat.)<\/p>\n

The past ten days have also seen protests against free speech at snooty eastern elite Amherst College and a \u201cwhite privilege retreat\u201d at the University of Vermont for students \u201cself-identifying as white\u201d \u2014 why not \u201cstudents of whiteness?\u201d \u2014 with required reading on \u201cThe Invention of the White Race,\u201d \u201cWhite Privilege, Male Privilege in Race, Class, Gender,\u201d \u201cThe Feminist Classroom,\u201d and \u201cThe Abolition of Whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n

You might whiff a general drift in all this of antagonism against people of whiteness and men in particular. Hence it\u2019s extra-specially unfortunate that the oafish and sadistic Donald Trump is so conspicuously out there representing that identity group.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boundary Problems It\u2019s no accident that Donald Trump\u2019s vaunted wall along the US-Mexico border became such a potent metaphor for a floundering American polity. The US has boundary problems \u2014 and not just with illegal immigrants (whoops, undocumented visitors). A mighty flux of standards and principles is symptomatic of an economy in freefall. Nothing is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7],"tags":[10730,10731,7844,236,2703,449,10732,827],"class_list":["post-14717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-american-polity","tag-boundaries","tag-donald-trump","tag-economic-collapse","tag-free-speech","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-self-identification","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14718,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14717\/revisions\/14718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}