The Further Adventures of Ron in Skanky and Slaggy Amazon Land

Every so often one is reminded of just how skanky and slaggy Amazon is. One of the things that I used to like about Amazon was that it was, to some extent, global and that it offered services around the world. One could, for example, compare and contrast the cost of product at Amazon, Amazon.CA, Amazon.UK, and Amazon.De and buy product from one and all.

Given how greedy mammon worshipping Amazon is, however, they eventually realised that customers were engaging in comparison shopping, and they recently made it either impossible or prohibitively expensive by increasing postage, to order items from Amazon beyond ones constructed Amazon "shores". They made it impossible for me to buy,  because they won't ship it to the US, for example, the thirteenth season of Heartland from Amazon.CA at a cheaper price than for what it or its marketplace flunkies and sycophants sell it at Amazon or for me to buy less expensive Doctor Whos from England (I have an all region DVD and blu ray player) because of the cost of postage. Additionally, and this says volume about this gilded corporation, Amazon established its Amazon Global service to sell items one used to be able to buy at a more reasonable cost from Amazon.CA or Amazon.UK. 

Interestingly, since I can no longer buy product sold by Amazon.CA or from Amazon.UK I decided to cancel my Amazon.CA and Amazon.UK accounts. Not surprisingly, however, I can't. Amazon may not allow one to buy globally but they have a global (and increasingly mediocre) digital information system so if I want to cancel Amazon.CA and Amazon.UK I must also cancel my Amazon account. That I can't cancel my Amazon.CA or Amazon.UK accounts, neither of which I use anymore because of the reasons cited above, shows just how skanky and slaggy Amazon is. Skankyness and slaginess, in other words, are in Amazon's cultural DNA. I think it is time once again to contact the office of the Attorney General of New York State.

Further Musings on Political Correctness and Cancel Culture

It is remarkable, though not surprising, how easy it is for demagogues to manipulate the masses and even the chattering class of right-wing intellectuals these days. The reasons for this are not hard to discern. Both are largely historically illiterate, and both prefer what "history" they do know to be largely of the mythic and political, and I would add ideological, correct variety and ahistorical. 

In reality, of course, and contrary to those who have contracted ideologically based historical amnesia, both political and ideological correctness and cancel culture have long histories stretching back centuries.  For example, Alkibiades and his circle's supposed desecration of the statues of Hermes in Athens in the fifth century BCE was an act of what we would today call political incorrectness though others might call it a lack of patriotism, an act of vandalism, or an act of heresy, whether he and they actually "desecrated" the statues or not. The Spanish Inquisition and other inquisitions like it before and after aimed at Christian "heretics" and Jews was an act of political and ideological correctness and cancel culture, sometimes very deadly cancel culture. The deportation of anarchist Emma Goldman by the United States government in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The banning of the Communist Party in the United States during the Cold War was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The blacklisting of hundreds in the United States during the Cold War, such as scholars like Moses Finley, was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. 

What is, of course, remarkable, is that the historically illiterate and those whose minds have been colonised by right wing historical myths, manichean fantasies, and negations think and argue, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, that political and ideological correctness, is novel and that it is the product of a liberal or left-wing conspiracy to take over American educational institutions, America itself, and the world. I recently, for example, saw a comment from someone who attributed the fact that Timothy Hutton wasn't in the recent iteration of the TV show Leverage, Leverage: Redemption on IMDb TV, to liberal and left wing cancel culture. Needless to say, such an "argument", if I can call it that, has to ignore the fact that the accusations against Hutton, as I discovered very quickly during a search online, have been corroborated by someone who knew the person who was allegedly raped, and was told by that person that she had been raped at the time. It also ignores the reality that in the world of consumer capitalism corporations, like those that produce media product, these corporations are constantly conscious of their brand and, in a world where public relations is a fact of corporate (including educational corporations) and increasingly everyday life, of their reputation and that having someone with accusations of rape hanging over him star in a television show might not be good for their brand or for viewership numbers and hence the possible financial gains that come from commercials that run during each episode of the show and on which the show depends for its continuation. What, in sum, the nattering nabobs of the right don't see, in other words, is the mote in their own eye, their political correctness, which they fetishise or transcendentalise, their own involvement in cancel culture both past and present, and empirical reality. All of those, of course, are impressive examples of how ideology creates a rather perverted "reality".

The Books of My Life: The Soul of the American University

Humans are, as well as being economic, political, geographic, and biological animals, cultural and meaning giving animals as George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) makes abundantly clear. Marsden's book, which places cultural history at its centre, explores how American colleges, once dominated by sectarian Protestant groups like the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, became, by the twentieth century, universities where "secularism" (or better the sacralisation of certain meanings) rather than Protestantism became the established "faith". 

Marsden argues that the seeds of secular establishment and Protestant disestablishment lay in evangelical Protestantism, the form of Protestantism that dominated American colleges, itself. As evangelicalism confronted the children of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment such as evolutionary Darwinism and evolutionary and historically oriented "higher" biblical criticism, evangelicalism split into the more "traditionalist", at least in self perception, conservative evangelicalism and moderate and liberal and even socialistic evangelicalism. This more moderate and liberal evangelicalism, claims Marsden, created a brand of Protestantism that adapted to and adopted Darwinism, adapted to and adopted "higher" biblical criticism, and tied mission to ethical and moral development and advocacy activism. Over time, the Protestant character of all of these was demagicified or secularised creating the modern university, a modern university shorn of its once dominant WASP Protestant heritage.

Though Marsden seems to place most of the blame for university "secularisation" on science and pragmatism and on academics, reality is a bit more complicated than that as Marsden seems to sometimes realise. Faculty did, as Marsden notes, come to place free speech and free inquiry (autonomy) at the heart of the faculty enterprise. It is not the faculty, however, who ran or who run American universities. As Thorstein Veblen noted in his The Higher Learning in America of 1918 it is capitalist economic interests with their practical need for trained workers and for technocrats who, through university Boards and university administrators, really control and run America's universities. Today, the dominance of universities by economic interests and their fellow travellers who fetishise a particular economic ideology that has been dehistoricised and who worship the holy trinity of Mammon, Greed, and Managerial Professionalism, has provided American universities with a corporate model of governance, a corporate model of corporate planning (the planning is our plan mentality), and a corporate retail model of education where the customer, those consumers universities are trying to attract and maintain, students, are almost always right.

Beyond empirical issues there are problems associated with the normative aspects of Marsden's book. In the concluding chapter to The Soul of the American University, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript", Marsden goes all normative on us calling for and advocating a return of religion, and particularly Christianity, to the ivy covered groves of academe. Using postmodernism in the same way Mormon intellectuals do, Marsden takes a postmodernist approach arguing that if tolerance and diversity are truly central to the academic and intellectual enterprise religion too should be tolerated in a university environment that preaches the gospel of diversity.

There are, of course, several problems with such an argument. In an age where the Bircher/Dixiecrat anti-intellectual and inquisitional variety of Protestantism in both its religious and "secular" form has taken over the Republican Party should universities, with their emphasis on facts and valid approaches to empirical facts (economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic methods and strategies), allow such hate filled paranoid and conspiracy driven perversions of reality to enter the academic playing field? Should those intolerant of any views other than their own and who have made demonic inquisition central to their ideologies and practises be allowed into the halls of academe? Marsden implies they shouldn't arguing instead for the creation of Habermasian like boards of experts who adjudicate what varieties of religion are acceptable on college campuses along with the need for religious groups themselves to agree to certain broad rules of the academic game. Marsden, in other words, accepts that universities should and must have standards and those that violate such standards should not gain admission into university halls. Moreover, as Marsden notes, religious organisations are already present on university campuses. University campuses are full of religious oriented groups that students can join and find community and friendship at if they so wish (see, for example, Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield, Religion on Campus, 2001). I, for instance, used to go to Hillel periodically when I was a student though less for religious reasons than for community and friendship. If students are not availing themselves of such opportunities is that the fault of "secular" universities or, for example, the fact that many of these religious groups are intolerant of and inquisitorial towards a number of empirically grounded political, economic, and cultural ideologies? Finally, one can and should question whether corporations, like universities, are "persons" with souls.

Now don't get me wrong, I quite like the structure of the University of Toronto, where I was admitted, with its three postgraduate theological colleges and its three religious based federated religious colleges that are part of the public University of Toronto (Canada has taken a different approach to the separation of religion and state than the US). I wouldn't mind if this structure was replicated in the United States and Marsden notes that there were attempts to replicate the Canadian model in the US and that they had limited long term success. It must be remembered, however, that the history of English Canada is different from that of the US and this is one reason religious colleges are affiliated with or federated with public and private universities in Canada. It also must be remembered that a "secular" curriculum is at the core of the federated colleges at the UofT--and should also be if the Canadian system is copied in the US, on the primary, secondary, or higher education level--and that, as D.S. Masters noted in his book on Protestant church colleges in Canada, such federation and affiliation played a major role in "secularising" church colleges in Canada. In Marsden's terms, I suppose, this brings us back to square one once again where we don't seem to be able to pass go. It brings us back to square one for when change occurs, as it, historically speaking, always does, religion adapts to this change and adopts aspects of these changes as both the history of Protestant liberalism and Protestant reactionism well show.