Voices Inside My Head (#8: The Cosmic Injustice)

Let's face it, if the entire Universe is out to screw you, maybe you should just give up?

Today being Eclipse Day, and everything in Creation having been identified as some sort of raaaaaacist plot, why shouldn't this be both true....and hilarious:

Someone named Alice Ristroph, who claims to be an academic at Harvard University, is concerned that today's total solar eclipse is the ultimate form of racism because it will not be equally visible to all people according to race (and if we dug deeper, we'd probably find she also means "gender" and "the mental illness known as trans-gender", as well).

Oooookay....

So now the Universe is racist? Because black people don't happen to live near to it's effects in sufficient numbers to make Ristroph happy (I dare not use the honorifics "Miss", or "Mrs." because I don't wish to be accused of stereotyping her. Because that would be wrong. However, implying blacks are too poor to live in the right spot to see an eclipse, or announcing to the world that you're blithering idiot all by yourself appears to be quite okay).

Obviously, this is a conspiracy. It is a plot between the Klan, Neo-Nazis, and Donald Trump to prevent People of Color from being equally left in the dark by the blocking of direct sunlight as their white male counterparts. Since I was at the last meeting of the White's Only Universe Committee, I can report that this is undoubtedly true. In fact, mine was the deciding vote.

I basically said "Fuck it! The Universe is going to eventually be tarred with the epithet "raaaaaacist", so why worry about the bad publicity? Fuck those stupid people who live in the wrong part of Oregon and Missouri who didn't plan ahead for their opportunity to witness the incredible power -- so incredible that we can blot out the very Sun! -- of the White Male Patriarchy.

After all, we invented astronomy and shit, right?

Oh, we didn't? That was some Middle Eastern guys?

Shhhh...don't tell Alice Ristroph; she might have to find a real job if she couldn't blame us for it.

Incidentally, if you were to send your child to Harvard for an education -- which presupposes some possible form of interaction with this moron -- it would cost you $147,312.

If you were a rational person, and you saw what Harvard Academics, like Ristroph, are churning out as "scholarship" on that kind of scratch, would you write that check?

I'm betting you would, because it's "Harvard", and that has some sort of cachet, still. But then again, you would never have known about Ristroph and her Kosmik Konspiracy Kapers (yes, I know that's "KKK") when you did. It's not like Harvard would be presenting her to a would-be check-writer as a shining example of the extra-high-caliber teaching talent available to students, would they? I mean, if it became known that Harvard was handing out professorships to people who view astronomy and the physical laws of the universe through the lens of race, do you think many people would be lining up to write that check in the first place?

I know I wouldn't.

Now, obviously, Alice Ristroph 's sanity is open to question on this one, and perhaps her intelligence, too. In fact, a quick Google search turned up that she's also incredibly white. Like a fucking light bulb. She's also very obviously one of those Upper-Middle-Class people who is embarrassed at their own privilege, a symptom of being raised in an environment in which there was a private income involved.

These usually become the most "woke"of the Modern Left for three reasons (all based upon generalizations on my part, so spare me the e-mail):

1. They bear an incredible amount of guilt for having been born wealthy, or into a wealthy family, or of having acquired wealth. It's why an Alice Ristroph can --with a straight face -- devote her life to "studying ways in which the law suppresses, tolerates, or even facilitates various forms of resistance to criminal justice institutions" -- according to her bio.

In other words, she's so guilty, one may assume, that she has devoted her life to finding excuses for others to be douchebags, since they'll never be as rich and privileged and white as her.

She probably expects that this activity will buy her some form of indulgence when the day comes when the Raging Masses of The Oppressed finally (according to Marxist theory) rise and slaughter their oppressors. But, just in case, she'll turn out a few articles every now and then claiming astronomical phenomena ought to have some sort of social justice angle to them.

Now, what's funny about this on a level that is more ironic than comic, is that in a back-handed way, Alice is actually engaged in what can be construed as a form of racism: see? you're so poor, black people, that you can't even afford to live some place from which to see an eclipse. Not like us white people in the suburbs. 
In the course of making an argument about racism, she's unwittingly (because let's face it, she's only Harvard Law) making a racist inference.

But then again, the racism of the modern Leftist would-be intellectual is often unconscious, mostly because they are. It also has a streak of classism in it that I find distasteful; on the one hand, Upper-Middle-Class-Uppity-Twat is going to lecture America on the plight of people who will be equally without Sunlight, anyway, and at the same time implying that the only way anyone will ever see a solar eclipse is to move to the suburbs...oh, wait, you can't, you're poor. Unlike her.

2. If Alice Ristroph couldn't write something so incredibly retarded protected by the shield afforded by Harvard, there'd be some very burly men with a van and a funny-looking jacket coming to visit her.

Now, if I'm misunderstanding something here, and she's simply talking about the distribution of POC's and there's some injustice in it that which is only made obvious during a solar eclipse, then she hasn't done a very good job. Perhaps if she put the bong down while writing and, I assume,  thinking? (That was sarcasm).

Then again perhaps she wrote exactly what she means to say, and I  haven't missed anything, in which case I would suggest that Alice is not very fucking bright (that wasn't sarcasm).

3. Considering the competition among academics for attention, particularly when it's mainly for the gratuitous brandishing of one's PC Credentials (Is Alice looking for a new job, perhaps? Got a book in the pipeline?), you can apparently never be too outrageous. In fact, the more outrageous you are, the more attention you get.

Sometimes, however, the outrage outstrips the logic inherent in your argument (not that this one had any to begin with), and you just come off looking like a dingbat.

This is why I'm a great believer in the idea that academics are usually not worth listening to. Oh, occasionally they might have something useful to say, but on the whole, these are people who spend entirely too much time studying entirely too-obscure subjects being entirely too-lavishly funded, regardless of whether they produce anything of value, at all.

I mean, at $147, 312 a pop, I wonder how many fewer People of Color manage to fall under Harvard's shadow, and why isn't that a greater crime?

Perhaps if they weren't paying for something written by a complete doofus, Harvard's prices might come down, and allow those People of Color they care about SOOOOO MUCH to attend as easily as they might attend a concert or church.

But then what would Alice do? If Harvard couldn't charge top-dollar for bottom-of-the-barrel "scholarship", Alice would have to find gainful employment elsewhere, and I think NASA has probably hit it's affirmative action quota for assholes, already.

Correction: Alice Ristroph is a professor at Brooklyn College. Total cost for a 4-year degree? $114,400.