Category Archives: Education

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Anybody But Obama

4 Comments

Despite the hopes of the foolish, the Tea Party hasn’t gone away:

“When it comes to the presidential contest, I think the tea partiers will turn up in droves,” she told The Daily Caller.

“They aren’t rallying in the street anymore — I think they’ve been there, done that, so they appear to be quieter. But tea party chapters are still alive and vigorous, and they are just chomping at the bit to pull a lever in November.”

What’s more, says Foley, is that tea partiers will ultimately rally behind whomever the GOP nominee turns out to be.

“And frankly, I think many tea partiers are eager to pull the lever in favor of the Republican presidential nominee — whoever that turns out to be — simply because, from their perspective, that person’s policies will be clearly preferable to those of President Obama,” she said.

And then there’s this:

Foley is the rarest of species: a tea party supporter in liberal academia. A law professor at Florida International University and chair in constitutional litigation for the Institute of Justice, Foley says many of her liberal colleagues didn’t receive her pro-tea party book too well. (RELATED: Full coverage of the tea party movement)

“It’s more than a little ironic that some of the most close-minded folks I have ever met make their living as professors whose entire job is to engage in scholarly inquiry and convey that spirit of open-minded inquiry to their students,” she said. “It never ceases to amaze and disappoint me.”

I’m long past either amazement or disappointment. They can do neither any more.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a review of Foley’s book, which explains the Tea Party to the idiots in the media.

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

If You Can’t Learn From Detroit

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You’re probably incapable of learning:

When American cities embraced the high cost, high regulation statist model two generations or so ago, they were often the richest and most dynamic places in the country. Increasingly “progressive” policies, with higher wages for unionized teachers, bigger bureaucracies enforcing tighter regulations, more “planning” by qualified technocrats and more government services and benefits to improve the quality of residents’ lives were supposed to take the American city into a new golden age.

It’s hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. None of this affects the hold of progressive and urbanist ideology on true believers; if anything, they believe even more passionately in the cause. Obviously the problem is that we haven’t spent enough on enough tenured teachers, haven’t written enough new regulations and established enough new bureaus to enforce them, haven’t published enough white papers by enough credentialed planners, haven’t extracted enough taxes and provided enough services. If we could just tax the suburbs and exurbs more heavily and spend more of the money in the cities, all would be well.

It’s a classic case of the definition of insanity.

[Noon update]

No, it’s not just Detroit.

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

James Q. Wilson’s Insight

…improved America. As opposed to the insight of (say) Barack Obama.

[UPdate a while later]

More (and lengthy) thoughts from Roger Kimball:

The Moral Sense is far from being anti-intellectual. But it is, in part, a cautionary tale about the dangers of taking intellectuals, especially academic intellectuals, too seriously. Given the presumption that education will broaden one’s perspective, it is curious that the chief danger is a narrowing of horizons. The peculiar combination of arrogance and despair that seems characteristic of homo academicus today breeds a remarkable obtuseness about many important questions. Wilson puts it thus: “Someone once remarked that the two great errors in moral philosophy are the belief that we know the truth and the belief that there is no truth to be known. Only people who have had the benefit of higher education seem inclined to fall into so false a choice.” It is a sobering thought that last year in the United States, some thirteen million students partook of that benefit.

Sobering indeed.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Green Movement Jumps The Shark

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Walter Russell Mead:

Between Rajenda Pachauri and Peter Gleick, the international green movement has displayed a penchant for colorful personalities. But the root cause of the green meltdown is not the flawed personalities and eccentric ethical standards some greens display. The problem has been that the greens tried to stick the world with a monstrous and unworkable climate control system through the flawed medium of a global treaty. This project is so expensive, so poorly conceived and, in fact, so naive and unthinking, that greens increasingly felt their only hope to get their agenda adopted involved scare tactics.

Like Dean Acheson addressing the communist menace, they were “clearer than truth.” They stretched evidence, invented catastrophes — vanishing glaciers, disappearing polar bears, waves of force five hurricanes sweeping up the coast, the end of snow — to sell their unsalable dream. Not all greens were this irresponsible, but many prominent spokespersons and journalists working with the movement were; ultimately the mix of an unworkable policy agenda and a climate of hype and hysteria holed the green ship below the waterline.

Of contemporary mass movements, the green movement has been consistently the most alarmist, the least constructive, the most emotional, the least rational, the most intolerant and the most self righteous. What makes it all sad rather than funny is that underneath the hype, the misstatements, the vicious character attacks on anyone who dissented from the orthodoxy of the day, and the dumbest policy ideas since the Kellogg-Briand Pact that aimed to outlaw war, there really are some issues here that require thoughtful study and response.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to get it from people who are reflexively anti-human socialists, such as John Holdren.