Follow-Up Day, Part 1: Sunday’s Pillow Fight

Some quick notes on last Friday’s entry about the pillow fight at Dundas Square…

Intelligent Design

In the comments for my entry in which I rebut Colby Cosh’s comments about the pillow fight, one commenter talks about David Warren’s ‘angry and somewhat bizarre apologia for intelligent design’, which s/he suspects is due to the fact that it’s supposed to be part of the neocon credo.

I am beginning to believe that the refusal to follow generally accepted scientific principles is the neocon equivalent of the fear of “acting white”.

This often-debated notion goes as follows: black students create peer pressure to do poorly by taunting those who excel academically, saying that they are “acting white”.

This theory is nothing new. I remember a discussion about it with a bunch of my friends at the Diefenbaker club (not really a club, but what a group of friends of mine who were proto-neo-cons back in ’91 called themselves) at Mackintosh-Corry Hall, a regular hangout at Crazy Go Nuts University.

I remember giving them some mild but unrebuttable annoyance by remarking that “for us Asian kids, ‘acting white’ means ‘completely sucking at math, science and videogames.'”

Back to the point I’m trying to make: I will posit that Warren and a number of his ilk are leaning towards ID because belief in evolution is “acting liberal”. This is the white “acting white”.

Kill ’em all

In that same entry, I remark about how little fun hanging out on the Western Standard cruise would be. Comment away, but can we cool it with the sinking and torpedoing jokes? It brings the discourse down to Ann Coulter’s level. There isn’t much that separates suggesting that the cruise ship be torpedoed and Ann Coultersims like the classic “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”

By the bye, the word is spelled “torpedo”, not “torpedoe”.

Coverage

BlogTO went to the pillow fight; go check out their writeup.

There’s also a Flickr photoset covering the event.

An anonymous commenter who went wrote about how it was a bit creepy — they went there for fun, in the same spirit as that annual tomato fight in Spain,but instead felt co-opted as the anti-gun rally seemed to be using the event as a lure. If this was the intent, it would be as dishonest as those “wear denim if you support cause X” days in universities and high schools.

Where I was

I didn’t attend the pillow fight, owing to a prior commitment that I had forgotten about when I first made the posting. You see, I’d promised the wife and my friend Jessie that I would take them to another crazy mob event scheduled for that weekend: the 30th Annual William Ashley Warehouse Sale. That trip was worthy of its own blog entry; I’ll post one later.

I mean, dude, that William Ashley gold coin (redeemable for merchandise) that we got as a wedding present wasn’t going to spend itself, was it?