A long but important essay, that explains much about the mess we’re in, when one considers that these people are running the country, and our lives, particularly the one currently in the White House. For what it’s worth, I’ve never had a problem talking to either plumbers or auto mechanics. Perhaps because I’ve spent a good part of my life doing both.
Category Archives: Education
A Victory For Free Speech
In the Netherlands:
The presiding judge said Wilders’ remarks were sometimes “hurtful,” “shocking” or “offensive,” but that they were made in the context of a public debate about Muslim integration and multi-culturalism, and therefore not a criminal act.
“I am extremely pleased and happy,” Wilders told reporters after the ruling. “This is not so much a win for myself, but a victory for freedom of speech. Fortunately you can criticize Islam and not be gagged in public debate.”
Meanwhile, back in the supposed land of the free and home of the brave, Yale has decided that criticism of some anti-semitism is off limits:
An antisemitism program needs scholars who deal with Qassam rockets, Grad rockets, and other rocket systems, not snowballs. Scholars who deal with satellite systems, and firebombs targeting Israeli civilians and tanks. Who study soldiers of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other antisemitic terror groups. It needs scholars who deal with Islamist thinkers, from Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Mohammad Chatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s anti-Israel and pro-suicide-bombing fatwas.
It needs scholars who deal with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism — not only in Egypt, but in the entire Middle East, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. It needs scholars on Iran and the analysis of incitement to genocide.
It needs scholars on Turkey, lawful Islamism, and its relationship to anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
It needs scholars on Islamic jihad, terror, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and homegrown terrorism in the West.
It needs scholars on left-wing, progressive, Muslim, and Neo-Nazi anti-Zionist antisemitism, and the ideologies and concepts of postorientalism, postcolonialism, and their possible relationship to antisemitism (e.g., in the work of Edward Said). And it needs scholars on antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda in Western mass media in the 21st century.
There is nothing wrong with scholarship on France and Jewish history; it is important. But it shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for serious scholarship on contemporary antisemitism. The study of dead antisemites and past campaigns of vilification is already part of every single Jewish Studies department in the world. And dealing with Jewish literature (the topic of Samuels’ new book in 2010) has nothing to do with research on (contemporary) antisemitism.
Unfortunately, any serious anti-Semitism program at Yale would probably end up indicting much of the faculty there, which is probably why it was shut down to be replaced with the more anodyne one.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Mark Steyn:
Nevertheless, as in all these cases, the process is the punishment. The intent is to make it more and more difficult for apostates of the multiculti state to broaden the terms of political discourse. Very few Europeans would have had the stomach to go through what Wilders did — and the British Government’s refusal to permit a Dutch Member of Parliament to land at Heathrow testifies to how easily the craven squishes of the broader political culture fall into line.
And at the end the awkward fact remains: Geert Wilders lives under 24-hour armed guard because of explicit death threats made against him by the killer of Theo van Gogh and by other Muslims. Yet he’s the one who gets puts on trial.
As he says, it’s shameful.
The Office Of Civil RightsWrongs
Apparently it doesn’t think that free speech is a civil right.
Lukianoff notes that campus definitions of sexual harassment include “humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable” (University of California at Berkeley), “unwelcome sexual flirtations and inappropriate put-downs of individual persons or classes of people” (Iowa State University) or “elevator eyes” (Murray State University in Kentucky).
All of which means that just about any student can be hauled before a disciplinary committee. Jokes about sex will almost always make someone uncomfortable, after all, and usually you can’t be sure if flirting will be welcome except after the fact. And how do you define “elevator eyes”?
Given the prevailing attitudes among faculty and university administrators, it’s not hard to guess who will be the target of most such proceedings. You only have to remember how rapidly and readily top administrators and dozens of faculty members were ready to castigate as guilty of rape the Duke lacrosse players who, as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper concluded, were absolutely innocent.
What the seemingly misnamed Office of Civil Rights is doing here is demanding the setting up of kangaroo courts and the dispensing of what I would call marsupial justice against students who are disfavored by campus denizens because of their gender or race or political attitude. “Alice in Wonderland’s” Red Queen would approve.
I hope that FIRE (which is a great cause to which you should contribute) will take them to court, and demand that they obey the First Amendment.
Blue State Schools
The shame of the nation. What, public teachers’ unions don’t improve educational outcomes? You don’t say.
The Metaphysics Of Theft
Thoughts on societal entropy:
Where does this all end — these open borders, unsustainable entitlements and public union benefits and salaries, these revolving door prisons and Al Gore-like energy fantasies?
We are left with a paradox. The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.
I will make a wild leap and suggest that a vast majority of Americans are reaching the point where they accept that the blue statist paradigm is reaching its logical end and simply cannot go on any more, given that it is antithetical to human nature itself. There is not always a Germany for every Greece.
That which cannot continue, will not.
Former Astronaut Bernard Harris
An interesting interview. He’s being a little too politically correct here, though:
…in the 21st century we need teachers who teach math and science to have expertise in math and science. So there needs to be an upgrade there, and refocus on how much we value those teachers. As you know, in this country, we don’t pay our teachers all that well. We need to rethink that.
The problem isn’t that we don’t pay teachers well, at least on average. The problem is that we don’t pay the valuable ones enough, and we pay the worthless ones far too much, thanks to the unions. We need to be able to adequately compensate the teachers who have actual useful knowledge to impart, and get rid of the ones who don’t. This would all start by eliminating the worthless, or to be more accurate, negative-value, “education” major.
Lemonade Stands
Some thoughts on their educational power.
And, actually, I suspect that this particular lemonade stand taught a particularly valuable lesson about the role of government.
The “Un-Professorial” Law Professor
…and the stuffed shirt.
Thoughts On Rampant Racism
…in academia. But if you point it out, and urge them to be judge people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, you’re the racist.
Hyphens Can Be Your Friend
…or your enemy. I’m fairly fastidious about this (as I am with apostrophes), and I no doubt annoy many people whose stuff I edit. As the piece points out, the purpose of a hyphen is to disambiguate adjectives, so you can tell for sure what is modifying what. For instance, “a light red fox” could be an underweight red fox, but “light-red fox” indicates that it is a fox (of indeterminate subspecies) that is light red in color. The exception is if the first word is an adverb, such as “lightly colored fox,” in which case the hyphen and connection of the two words is implicit.
That is all.