Category Archives: Education

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The “Hollywood Holocaust”

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…and other Cold War myths. I agree with Glenn:

Leaving aside the obscenity of comparing out-of-work screenwriters with gassed Auschwitz inmates, there’s this: Communists are no better than Nazis. Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing, not a sin. Go broke and starve, commies. It’s what you deserve for being eager, willing servants of totalitarianism.

That it’s perfectly acceptable to be a communist, but not a Nazi, in society at all, let alone teaching students on campus, is morally disgusting. All children of Rousseau should be ostracized in a truly liberal democracy.

Education, General Science, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Politicians’ “War On Science”

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Who said it, Rubio or Obama? It’s useful to point this kind of thing out, of course, and I’ve always thought that Chris Mooney’s theses were nonsensical — both parties have ideologies that are opposed to scientific reality.

But I disagree with this:

So Obama believes in evolution, and presumably he’d like to teach it in the nation’s public schools, while Rubio suggests that “multiple theories” should be given equal time. But even so, both men present the science as a matter of personal opinion. Obama doesn’t say, Evolution is a fact; he says, I believe in it.

Well, he shouldn’t say that, because evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory. And it is perfectly philosophically legitimate to say that alternate theories should be taught in school, but it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one). That there is an objective reality about which we can discover things through scientific methods is not a fact, or “truth,” but an axiomatic assumption. Science is a form of faith, but in terms of understanding the natural world, and forging new artificial creations from it, it is a very successful and powerful one.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Buzzfeed

…and their historically illiterate insinuation.

Demographics might well cost the Republican party the future, and conservatives must address this if we wish to stay relevant. But we should also ensure that the historically illiterate don’t cost us our past as well. In the comments section on BuzzFeed, one woman rants about the “Republicans” being responsible for “Jim Crow,” and a man says that the GOP should be banned because it’s always on the wrong side of history. The temptation is to look at this and ignore it as meaningless pop-culture silliness. This would be a mistake. Conservatives and Republicans have for too long ceded pop culture’s influence to the Left. If we continue to allow progressives to construct a linear historical narrative that casts conservatives and the Republican party as the villains in every piece, we can kiss goodbye to ever winning a national election again.

This is why the country is on the verge of ruin — the takeover of the educational system at all levels by the Left for the past forty years. While the coming collapse of the academic bubble (and the unsustainable pension of the teachers’ unions) may help purge the system of a lot of these liars, as Jedediah Bila notes, we have to take back the popular culture as well.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Obama’s Worst Day

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Was it November 7th?

And there’s this:

…then there’s Michael DiPietro, 25, of Brooklyn, who accumulated about $100,000 in debt while getting a bachelor’s degree in fashion, sculpture, and performance, and spent the next two years waiting tables. He has since landed a fundraising job in the arts but still has no idea how he will pay back all that money. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an obsolete idea that a college education is like your golden ticket,” DiPietro says. “It’s an idea that an older generation holds on to.”

Yes, because the older generation remembers a day when college degrees actually had value, and people weren’t spending a hundred grand to get a B.SA. degree in “fashion, sculpture and performance.”