It’s now possible to get a degree in English at UCLA without any familiarity with them.
Yeah, that’s a degree worth putting yourself into undischargeable debt for.
Category Archives: Education
More Concealed Carry
And this is one of the rhetorical games (i.e., lies) the Democrats always play that infuriate me:
A frequent claim by control advocates this year has been that 80 percent to 90 percent of Americans are in favor of expanded background-checks legislation. But the polls showing such overwhelming support really ask little more than whether people want to stop criminals from obtaining guns, not whether voters actually favor the legislation that the Senate was voting on.
The actual laws being discussed were much less popular.
For example, a mid-April poll by the Pew Research Center provides one such illustration when it asks voters whether they were happy that the Senate bill had been defeated. While 67 percent of Democrats were “disappointed” or “angry” about the defeat, more Republicans and independents were “ very happy” or “relieved” than upset by the defeat.
That’s an interesting conflation of objective and process – claiming support for what a public policy ostensibly seeks to achieve, rather than what it actually does. Needless to say, this tactic is hardly unique to gun control policy.
Yup. For instance, back when the economic ignorami, like Chuck Schumer, were pushing Porkulus, they said things like “almost every economist says that this is necessary,” when at best most economists only thought that some sort of stimulus was necessary. No economist with two brain cells to rub together thought that the Democrats’ payoff to public-employee unions would be helpful.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Also, remember this the next time someone talks about a “Republican” war on science. The Left clings to their gun-control dogma in the face of all empirical evidence. Because it’s not about controlling guns. It’s (as always) about controlling you.
[Update a few minutes later]
Detroit police chief: “Better start carrying.” When seconds count, the police are only minutes (or hours) away. A decade ago, when Michigan reformed its carry laws, the anti-gun nuts predicted blood in the streets. Just the opposite happened. But they remain firmly anti-science.
PC Education
How it led to the Libya debacle.
Not just Libya, but much foreign and domestic policy. Many of the uneducated but credentialed live in a fantasy world, due to maleducation.
We’re Better Off Now
And we’ll be much better off in the future. At least technologically.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
How the government encourages kangaroo courts on campus against men.
The ObamaCare Generation
The Millennials have been had by the Democrats. Here’s hoping they’ve figured it out.
Creativity
Most people, and particularly teachers, don’t like it much.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but I think that this is one of the reasons that people can’t let go of the Apollo cargo cult. They see doing it in any other way as too risky, even though it has been thoroughly demonstrated that the big-rocket approach is unaffordable.
The Unhidden Anti-Semitism
…of the (un)American Studies Association:
On our troubled globe, where states do truly terrible things to their people, gassing them, slaughtering them en masse, impoverishing and immiserating them, I am aware of only one country whose continued existence has been called into question. Should Zimbabwe exist? Or Sudan? Or Syria? Only Israel is subjected to constant questioning of its right to remain a nation. Israel, a sliver of a country surrounded by tyrannical regimes or perpetually unstable governments, free for the moment from war because of strength and not because of neighborly goodwill, this Israel is the target of the opprobrium of preening academics the world over. The question is not whether members of the ASA are anti-Semites, as individuals. All this is not because the world’s only Jewish state is uniquely evil. It is just uniquely Jewish.
Yup.
A Good Start
Seventy public-employee unions have been dismantled in Wisconsin. One of the few things that FDR was right about was that they should have never been legal.
Of Ducks And Gays
…and tolerance:
The advantages of classical liberal market cosmopolitanism–the idea that it’s best to set aside peaceful differences of opinion and creed and worries about different races, nationalities, and genders when deciding how we interact with the world–has a great track record of making us all richer and happier.
The idea that that people should be punished with boycott or losing their jobs over having wrong beliefs hobbles the flowering of tolerant classical liberal market cosmopolitanism.
There may have been a good reason why classical tolerance of expression was summed up in the epigram: “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it!”
That has a different feel than: “I disagree with what you say, I think you are evil for having said it, I think no one should associate with you and you ought to lose your livelihood, and anyone who doesn’t agree with me about all that is skating on pretty thin ice as well, but hey, I don’t think you should be arrested for it.”
It’s a “heads I win tails you lose” situation, as it often is with the Left. As I noted at Twitter yesterday:
I despise hate speech. I won't say I hate it, though, because that would be hate speech. I think. #IAmSoConfused
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 20, 2013
I can't stand that intolerance exists. I won't say I won't tolerate it, though, because that would be intolerant. I think. #IAmSoConfused
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 20, 2013
As I also noted there, declaring someone a sinner does not justify bullying or assaulting them. There will always be bullies, but their existence is not a reason to suppress freedom of expression or religion.
[Update a few minutes later]
Joel Achenbach has a pretty amusing take: The Ducksters are the Flintstones.
[Update a while later]
The show is likely to be canceled. I noted yesterday on Twitter that A&E needed Duck Dynasty a lot more than the latter needed A&E. A&E can run whatever programs it wants, but I think that they’ll realize that this was a stupid business decision.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Thoughts from Jonah: Real rednecks.