The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Thanksgiving Book Post

Posted on | November 26, 2015 | Comments Off on The Thanksgiving Book Post

— by Wombat-socho

What with all the pre-season tax training, an excursion to Portland, and what have you, it’s been way too long since my last book post, so let’s do this thing. First on the docket is Jean Larteguy’s The Centurions, the famous novel that bridges the First Indochina War and the Algerian War. Out of print for about half a century (and commanding huge prices in the used book markets), the book has nonetheless been recommended reading for American military officers because of its examination of a military at war with not just the ideologically-driven guerrillas in front of them, but the politicians and society behind them. The parallels to our own wars in Vietnam and Southwest Asia are obvious even to a blind man, but Larteguy isn’t just writing a polemic here – all the characters, French paras, Vietnamese nurses, and Algerian terrorists alike have their own fully-rounded backstories and personalities, concisely described and brutally honest. I suspect even the seemingly one-dimensional spear carriers would seem better rounded to me if I were as familiar with French society in the 1950s as I am with American society in the post-Vietnam and GWOT eras. I have been waiting for Penguin to republish this book for over fifty years, and it is an absolute steal at $10 for the Kindle. Its sequel, The Praetorians, is available for pre-order and is scheduled to come out next June. It’s going to be a hard wait.

C.J. Cherryh has been one of the more prolific SF authors of my generation, and I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that some of her novels that aren’t in the mainstream of her Alliance/Union or Chanur series tend to get overlooked. Serpent’s Reach, though…I don’t really understand why this has been relegated to obscurity. Set in the quarantined Beta Hydri cluster, where a colony of humans has settled into peaceful coexistence with the alien, insectile majat, Serpent’s Reach is primarily a tale of revenge set against a backdrop of (literally) murderous political infighting, the effects of indefinitely prolonged human life, and the peculiar stratified society of born-men and azi we’ve seen in other Alliance/Union novels but with the terribly long-lived aristocratic Kontrin families atop the social and economic pyramid. Perhaps what threw people off is that the fast-paced action of the beginning and penultimate chapters is separated by a lengthy, seemingly purposeless account of our heroine’s progress toward the one planet where Alliance merchants are allowed to dock and trade – where she finds the lever she needs to shift not just that world, but all the worlds in the cluster. Perhaps not the best of Cherryh’s novels, but still a very good one.

Those of you who have been following my posts here are well aware that one of my favorite non-SF writers is Bill James, particularly when it comes to baseball. Before I left for Portland, I spent about a week and a half browsing through The Politics of Glory, which combines a history of the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown (and there’s some bizarre history behind it, as James explains) with an examination of the players elected and selected to the Hall, a dissection of the arguments – good, bad, and frankly awful- in support of various players, brief biographies of players who made it, players who probably should have but didn’t, and an analysis of some of the great controversies surrounding the Hall’s choices. The book was republished a year later as Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?, which I think isn’t as good a title, but it’s not like they care what I think. Either way, if you’re interested in the history of baseball and/or the Hall of Fame, you really owe it to yourself to get this book. It’ll give you something to do besides stare out the window and wait for spring.

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Category: Books

In The Mailbox: 11.26.15

Posted on | November 26, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.26.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Wall Street Journal: The Desolate Wilderness… …And The Fair Land


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Antisocial Personalities
American Irony: Unamerican Sniper
Michelle Malkin: Have A Happy, Politics-Free Thanksgiving
Twitchy: POTUS Is Trolling Thanksgiving


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Thinker: The Alien Nation On Its Way
BLACKFIVE: Book Sale On Kindle
Conservatives4Palin: Sarah Palin – Give Thanks
Don Surber: Happy Thanksgiving
Jammie Wearing Fools: Moron Obama – Syrian Refugees Are Like Pilgrims On The Mayflower Or Something
Joe For America: Republican Governor Sued For Denying Entry To Syrian Refugees
JustOneMinute: Happy Thanksgiving, All!
Pamela Geller: Israel Provided Key Intel To Germany On Imminent Jihadi Attack At Soccer Game
Shot In The Dark: Every Picture Tells A Story
STUMP: Opera Fun – All About The Bass
The Gateway Pundit: Donald Trump To Announce Endorsements From 100 Black Religious Leaders
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Kid! Jawa Report Is Closed On Thanksgiving!
The Lonely Conservative: Happy Thanksgiving!
This Ain’t Hell: Happy Thanksgiving
Weasel Zippers: #blacklivesmatter Protesters Attack Chicago’s Christmas Tree – “This Is Part Of The Problem”
Megan McArdle: A New Recipe For America’s Test Kitchen
Mark Steyn: Shelter In Place Until Further Notice


The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook

Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox, 11.25.15

Posted on | November 25, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox, 11.25.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Being Thankful With Cat Meme Therapy
Proof Positive: Give Us Your Tired, Poor Teeming Masses, No Huddle, Fourth And Long
American Irony: Five Passive-Aggressive Ways To Handle Liberal Loved Ones At Thanksgiving
The Political Hat: Public Service Announcement For All College Men
Doug Powers: Obama To Pentagon – Hurry Up With An Excuse For Why I Told Everyone ISIS Was Contained When It Obviously Wasn’t
Twitchy: Latest “Liberal Media Conspiracy Theory” Doesn’t Quite Match Definition Of Theory


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: The Black Book Of The American Left, Volume 5 – Culture Wars
BLACKFIVE: Exclusive Interview With Frederick Forsyth
Conservatives4Palin: Obamacare At Five – Sick And Getting Worse
Don Surber: Blocked By Bernie Sanders!
Jammie Wearing Fools: President Cop-Basher Strangely Silent On Laquan McDonald Case
Joe For America: Animal Rights Extremists Threaten NIH Director
JustOneMinute: To The Barricades For Carson! And Jefferson!
Pamela Geller: Deeply Grateful On Thanksgiving – A Note To Readers
Protein Wisdom: Here’s A Tip For Handling That Special Snowflake SJW Niece/Nephew/Whatever Xe Is Calling Xeself These Days
Shot In The Dark: Lie First, Lie Always, November 25 Edition
STUMP: Connecticut Pension Plans – Funding The Unfunded…Or Not
The Gateway Pundit: Poll Finds Only Obama And Rich Liberal Democrats Want US To Take In More Syrian Muslim Refugees
The Jawa Report: The New America! Offensive Bibles!
The Lonely Conservative: Why Do Democrats And Progressives Always Want To Ruin Holidays?
This Ain’t Hell: Canadian Soldiers Evacuate Their Barracks To Make Room For Syrians
Weasel Zippers: NY Gov Cuomo Bans Ads He Didn’t Like For Series Depicting World With No Freedoms
Megan McArdle: Imagine Thanksgiving Without The Stress
Mark Steyn: Jersey Sure


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Shop Amazon Fashion – Holiday Sweaters

Category: Linkagery

Nightmare on North Avenue

Posted on | November 25, 2015 | 34 Comments

K.C. Johnson (@kcjohnson9 on Twitter) of Minding the Campus has posted the latest “John Doe” lawsuit alleging violation of due process rights in a sexual assault case, and John Doe v. Georgia Tech is the kind of nightmare that makes me want to shout:

WARN YOUR SONS, AMERICA!
NEVER TALK TO A COLLEGE GIRL!

According to the lawsuit, Jane Roe was John Doe’s date at a party at his fraternity in October 2013. Jane got drunk on wine and, at some point during the evening, she followed John to his room. She became sick and began to vomit, and John and one of his frat brothers (a “sober monitor”) helped Jane find her friends and leave. In February 2015 — 16 months later — Jane claimed John had sexually assaulted her at the party. The alleged “assault”? According to her, John Doe “touched her genitals and penetrated her vagina with his fingers ‘for around 30 seconds without consent.'” No witnesses or evidence corroborated Jane Roe’s claim and John Doe’s lawsuit alleges that a clearly biased “investigation” by the assistant dean of students, Peter Paquette, ignored contradictory testimony from the “sober monitor.”

John Doe, who has a 3.74 GPA, was expelled in April 2015, only three credits short of graduation! His lawsuit illustrates how and why these processes have become wildly one-sided:

  • After a 2013 controversy involving one fraternity, Georgia Tech “rewrote its Student Sexual Misconduct Policy and began to conduct its investigations such that an accused individual at Georgia Tech is now ‘almost always found responsible,’ according to an investigative report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.” In other words, past misbehavior by other students created panic that shifted the process decisively against the accused.
  • In February 2015, Jane Roe was having academic difficulties which she blamed on stress related to the alleged “assault” 16 months earlier and, by making this accusation against John Doe, she thereby secured the “opportunity to retake her exams and classes for that semester.”
  • The investigation relied largely on vague hearsay — the lawsuit calls it “prejudicial and unsubstantiated rumors” — to the effect that John Doe had some kind of bad reputation.
  • Most disturbing of all, perhaps, was a Facebook message by Jane Roe in which she revealed she was “a trained peer educator on sexual violence prevention” and in that role had “worked very closely” with Peter Paquette and other officials who were subsequently involved in the decision to expel John Doe, who “was never informed of this flagrant conflict of interest.”

Dear God, America — warn your sons!

Even if Jane Roe’s allegation were true — and there is zero evidence to corroborate it — should John Doe be expelled for “getting to third base” with a drunk girl at a party? Go read the full complaint and tell me if the behavior of Jane Roe, “trained peer educator,” doesn’t look selfish and spiteful. Here’s what I think: Jane Roe was embarrassed over getting so wasted at that party, and because John Doe never asked her out again, she was concerned that this episode had damaged her reputation. Meanwhile, she hears gossip that John Doe is kind of a “player,” and that October 2013 date with him looms large in her mind as a cause of her problems. So when she starts flunking classes in February 2015, well, two birds with one stone: Accuse John Doe of sexual assault and get a “do-over” for the semester. Oh, and since she’s been working with Dean Paquette in the “sexual violence prevention” program, Jane Roe knows all the ropes of the investigative process.

John Doe never stood a chance, you see, but he never saw it coming. Just a bad night at the frat house — his date got so drunk she threw up and had to leave the party — and for the next 16 months, John didn’t even realize this ticking time bomb was going to blow up and destroy him.

Parents must warn their college-bound sons: Don’t be a “John Doe.” Don’t become a target in this hysterical witch hunt. Never — NEVER! — talk to a college girl. It’s not worth the risk in 2015 when, apparently, the only girls who go to college are selfish, dishonest and irresponsible.

 

 

Category: Sex Trouble

The Hunting of George Lawlor

Posted on | November 25, 2015 | 37 Comments

A 19-year-old student at Warwick University in England, George Lawlor ignited a controversy last month when he wrote an online column criticizing the “rape culture” hysteria:

Ah, the special feeling you get when logging into Facebook and find someone thinks you’re cool enough to invite to their event. Is it a house party? Is it a social? All the possibilities race through your mind. Then it hits you. You tap the red notification and find you’ve been summoned to this year’s “I Heart Consent Training Sessions”. Your crushing disappointment quickly melts away and is overcome by anger.
Let me explain, I love consent. Of course people should only interact with mutual agreement, but I still found this invitation loathsome. Like any self-respecting individual would, I found this to be a massive, painful, bitchy slap in the face. To be invited to such a waste of time was the biggest insult I’ve received in a good few years. It implies I have an insufficient understanding of what does and does not constitute consent and that’s incredibly hurtful. I can’t stress that enough.
I feel as if I’m taking the “wrong” side here, but someone has to say it — I don’t have to be taught to not be a rapist. That much comes naturally to me, as I am sure it does to the overwhelming majority of people you and I know. Brand me a bigot, a misogynist, a rape apologist, I don’t care. I stand by that.
I already know what is and what isn’t consent. I also know about those more nuanced situations where consent isn’t immediately obvious as any decent, empathetic human being does. Yes means yes, no means no. It’s really that simple. You’d think Russell Group university students would get that much, but apparently the consent teachers don’t have as high a regard for their peers as I do. . . .

Read the whole thing. There was nothing objectionable in that column. George Lawlor didn’t engage in slut-shaming or victim-blaming. He didn’t say anything about false accusations. He merely made the point that, as a “decent, empathetic human being,” he already understood that rape is wrong and was insulted by any suggestion to the contrary. Assuming that his fellow students were no more in need of such “training sessions” than he was, Lawlor said the result would be “an echo chamber of people pointing out the obvious and others nodding along, thinking the whole time thinking that they’ve saved the world.” Hear! Hear!

Why do feminists assume that male university students are all savages and barbarians, in need of “training sessions”? Is George Lawlor alone in feeling insulted by this assumption? Isn’t the discourse about “rape culture” really about demonizing men and inspiring female students to fear their male classmates? Why aren’t more “decent, empathetic” young men speaking out against this propaganda campaign? Perhaps because young men know they will be viciously scapegoated if they do speak out:

A student who caused a furore when he spoke out against sexual consent workshops fears for his academic future after a fierce campus backlash.
George Lawlor, 19, claims he has been driven out of lectures and bars at Warwick University by feminist campaigners who shout “rapist” wherever he goes. . . .
But he has now revealed that the reaction became so brutal that he stopped going to lectures.
The second year student said he had been attacked on Twitter and Facebook by student activists branding him a “rapist” and “misogynist”.
Mr Lawlor, who studies politics and sociology, said he feared the furore would affect his academic work and his future career.
“I was expecting a reaction, but I was not prepared for just how horrible it was,” he told the Daily Mail. “I remember putting it online and told a few people, who were? saying there would be a backlash.’
“The bus to university was the worst. I heard people talking to each other saying, ‘I really want to hit that kid’. It got really nasty.
“There was one guy messaging me on Facebook for over a week, calling me names like racist, rapist. I’ve stopped going to lectures and seminars because of the perceived threat.” . . .
The sessions are being rolled out across the country with the aim of decreasing the number of assaults and enabling students to talk openly about consent.

Questions: How many sexual assaults have been reported at Warwick University in the past five years? What is the scale and nature of the problem to which these “consent training sessions” are supposed to be the solution? Can anyone at Warwick University provide data that would give us some indication of what percentage of their male students are rapists, and what percentage of female students are victims?

The Politics of Hysteria

These are not rhetorical questions. Ever since American feminists began ginning up the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria, critics have pointed out the vast exaggeration involved. “Statistical Voodoo and Elastic Definitions,” as I said, were the basis of the phony “1-in-5” claim — a transparently false statistic publicized in speeches by President Obama and Vice President Biden, as well as by other Democrat politicians, most notably Sen. Kristen Gillibrand of New York. I believe this crusade against an artificial crisis (led by a White House Task Force) was fabricated as a partisan political effort, a continuation of the “Republican War on Women” rhetoric that helped Obama maximize the “gender gap” against Mitt Romney in his 2012 re-election campaign, and was specifically intended to boost Hillary Clinton’s electoral prospects as the presumed 2016 Democrat presidential nominee.

Taxpayer money is being used to promote this bogus crusade, as federal authorities have compelled universities to comply with a series of mandates — beginning with the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter — that they claim are necessary to end a “campus rape epidemic” that does not actually exist. Universities have hired full-time officials to direct prevention programs, but incidents of sexual assault are in fact so uncommon (e.g., 28 reports among 17,000 students at SUNY-Albany in 2014, or less than 1-in-300 female students, rather than 1-in-5) that these programs have been condemned as an “employment racket.” On campus after campus, reports indicate an astonishing gap between feminist rhetoric and the real numbers of sexual assault complaints, so that the crusaders who have manufactured this non-existent crisis are now faced with a “Campus Rape Shortage.”

Feminists are performing mental gymnastics in an effort to maintain the plausibility of the myths they have created. Kirsten Gillibrand promoted a study by the American Association of University Women that found 91% of U.S. colleges and universities reported zero rapes in 2014. The AAUW insists that these numbers cannot be believed:

Schools that report zero rapes have work to do and require additional scrutiny. When campuses report zero incidents of rape, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking, it simply does not square with research, campus climate surveys, and widespread experiences reported by students.

The absence of evidence to support claims of a campus rape epidemic “suggests students may not feel comfortable coming forward to report such crimes at some of these schools,” the AAUW argued. Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner expressed her disgust with AAUW’s tendentious and illogical analysis:

When you’re committed to perpetuating the myth of a rampant “rape culture” on college campuses, evidence to the contrary becomes baffling. . . .
The simplest explanation is that women just aren’t buying the whole “rape culture” narrative and don’t see themselves as constant victims. Reports are low because rapes are low.
There was once a time in this country where low incidence of crime was celebrated. How astounding that that’s not the case anymore.

Attempting to justify the hysteria they have created, and to avoid scrutiny of their fraud — a deliberate lie promoted by government officials — feminists have encouraged students to make unfounded accusations of sexual assault, and have relied on friendly media to promote these false claims. The debacle at the University of Virginia, where a gang-rape hoax was perpetrated with the assistance of an unethical Rolling Stone reporter, exposed the dishonest propaganda methods by which feminists have promoted their false claim of an “epidemic” of campus sexual assault. Implicated in the UVA hoax were a student activist, Emily Renda, and an Obama administration official, Catherine Lhamon, and yet neither Congress nor Virginia legislators seem willing to investigate the circumstances that suggest official malfeasance in connection with the gang-rape hoax publicized by Rolling Stone, which is now facing multiple defamation lawsuits.

Meanwhile, more than 100 male students have filed lawsuits against universities, claiming that they were falsely accused of sexual assault and denied due-process rights in Title IX disciplinary proceedings, campus kangaroo courts where accused students have none of the legal protections guaranteed to any common criminal in a court of law. Reading the filings in cases like John Doe v. Brown University (where a student says he was banned from campus merely for making out with a girl he met at a party) we see how the victim mentality promoted by feminists has fostered a climate of sexual paranoia.

“Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization . . . to come to see oneself as a victim.”
— Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (1990)

What is most striking in “rape culture” discourse is how few students are willing to speak out against this dishonest feminist propaganda campaign that has demonized heterosexual males. Perhaps this is because most students realize that they are not at risk either of becoming victims or of being falsely accused. The college girl who doesn’t make a habit of getting drunk at parties (and hooking up with equally drunk boys) knows she is unlikely ever to have the kind of “regret equals rape” experience that led to a sexual assault complaint at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Nor does the average male student expect that a girl who actively pursues sexual activity with him would turn around and accuse him of rape months later, as Emma Sulkowicz did to Paul Nungesser at Columbia University. Even if they accede to feminist efforts to redefine the meaning of rape (“Moving the Goalposts”), these incidents are still rare enough that most students figure that they will never be personally involved in such a case.

‘Abandoned to the Mercy of the Witches’

Typical students probably view the sexual assault hysteria on campus as irrelevant to their own lives, and shrug it off. It is easy, at a university with thousands of students, to assemble a protest mob of a few dozen activists to chant slogans — whether the slogan is “Yes Means Yes” or “Black Lives Matter” — and students who are not directly involved with these protest campaigns most likely take a cynical view of such activism. We can imagine that many students view feminist “rape culture” discourse as a joke, but are not willing to risk the backlash they would endure if they dared to confront this nonsense in a direct and public way.

George Lawlor took that risk, and feminist hatemongers therefore must make an example of him, so as to discourage any other students who might be tempted to call their bluff. What has happened, we see, is that feminists have adopted the tactics of ancient witch-hunters. The purpose of a witch hunt is “to strike awe into some by the punishment of others,” as the 16th-century French jurist Jean Bodin explained:

“Now, if there is any means to appease the wrath of God, to gain his blessing, to strike awe into some by the punishment of others, to preserve some from being infected by others, to diminish the number of evil-doers, to make secure the life of the well-disposed, and to punish the most detestable crimes of which the human mind can conceive, it is to punish with the utmost rigor the witches. . . . Those too who let the witches escape, or who do not punish them with the utmost rigor, may rest assured that they will be abandoned by God to the mercy of the witches. . . . Therefore it is that one accused of being a witch ought never to be fully acquitted and set free unless the calumny of the accuser is clearer than the sun, inasmuch as the proof of such crimes is so obscure and so difficult that not one witch in a million would be accused or punished if the procedure were governed by the ordinary rules.”

Feminists, of course, have denounced the witch hunts as an injustice, a historic example of patriarchal oppression that Andrea Dworkin in her 1974 book Woman Hating called “gynocide,” and to which Mary Daly devoted a 44-page chapter of her 1978 book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. While both Dworkin and Daly were guilty of gross distortions of the historical record (relying on dubious sources and exaggerating the number of cases), their political understanding of these persecutions deserves our attention. Are feminists correct that, during the centuries when accusations of witchcraft were taken seriously, the leaders of witch-hunts were simply attempting to defend male supremacy against the challenge of women who resisted the patriarchal social order? I don’t believe this, and neither do most serious historians of the era (see Ronald Hutton’s excellent 1999 book, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft). However, radical feminists have accepted the Dworkin/Daly interpretation of the witch-hunts and, evidently, have decided that they are entirely justified in adapting these methods to their own purposes, encouraging dishonest women to make false accusations against men, to “strike awe into some by the punishment of others.”

This is terrorism, and George Lawlor is being made to suffer because he had the courage to challenge the feminists who have created a 21st-century witch hunt aimed at securing their own power to dominate our culture and politics. And it is possible to perceive that Jean Bodin’s warning was in some ways prophetic. Because so many are afraid to confront the diabolical lies of feminism, we now find ourselves “abandoned by God to the mercy of the witches.”

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Late Night With In The Mailbox

Posted on | November 25, 2015 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Rule 5 Sunday is going to be punted until this weekend, when we’ll have a double scoop of pulchritudinous goodness, possibly involving ducks, but not turkeys. Going to do the long-delayed FMJRA tomorrow evening, and there’ll probably be a book post in there somewhere. Thanks to everyone for your patience!


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Own It, Obama
Proof Positive: Bernie Sanders And The Millenials
Michelle Malkin: The Ululations Of Radical College Crybabies
Twitchy: Suspended CNN Reporter Had Tweet-On-Request Relationship With State Department?


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: France Can’t Keep Tabs On 10,000 Radicalized Young Muslims
American Thinker: No News Is Bad News In The Bergdahl Case
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Along The Infinite Sea By Beatriz Williams
Conservatives4Palin: Sarah Palin – Madonna, Roseanne, And Rosie Are The Antithesis Of A Feminist
Don Surber: Kaley Cuoco – Don’t Get A Tattoo Like I Did
Jammie Wearing Fools: Obama Claims Paris Climate Clown Conference Will Be “Powerful Rebuke To Terrorists”
Joe For America: Media Caught Lying About Donald Trump AND Terrorists
JustOneMinute: When You’ve Lost Slate…
Pamela Geller: Obama-Backed Syrian “Moderates” Scream “Allahu Akbar” Over Body Of Downed Russian Pilot
Protein Wisdom: Yoga Class Canceled Due To Cultural Appropriation
Shot In The Dark: Slouching Toward Havana
STUMP: A Week Of Bad Pension Ideas – Finally, Divestment
The Gateway Pundit: Austrian ISIS Poster Girl Beaten To Death After Trying To Escape Raqqa – Was Pregnant
The Jawa Report: How The Quran Justifies The Paris Attacks
The Lonely Conservative: Witness Says Trump Supporters Did Not Kick #blacklivesmatter Agitator
This Ain’t Hell: VA Officials Demoted
Weasel Zippers: Senator Sessions Has List Of Fifteen “Vetted” Refugees That Turned Out To Be Jihadis
Megan McArdle: Obamacare Insurers Are Suffering. That Won’t End Well.
Mark Steyn: The Week In Nothing To Do With Islam


The Man In The High Castle – Season 1
Shop Amazon Fashion – Black Friday

Category: Linkagery

The Progressive Myth of ‘Diversity’

Posted on | November 24, 2015 | 32 Comments

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
— Thomas Sowell, 1998

In his 2012 book The Tyranny of Clichés, Jonah Goldberg recounts the pinnacle of his career, when the inclusion of his column (and the discontinuation of left-wing columnist Robert Scheer) caused Barbra Streisand to cancel her subscription to the Los Angeles Times in a 2005 letter that is a memorable example of bad writing and wrong ideas:

The greater Southern California community is one that not only proudly embraces its diversity but demands it. Your publisher’s decision to fire Robert Scheer is a great disservice to the spirit of our community. . . .
[Y]our new leadership, especially that of [publisher] Jeff Johnson, is entirely out of touch with [readers] and their desire to be exposed to views that stretch them beyond their own paradigms. So although the number of contributors to your op-ed pages may have increased, in firing Robert Sheer and putting Jonah Goldberg in his place, the gamut of voices has undeniably been diluted, and I suspect this may ultimately decrease the number of readers of those same pages.

Of course, Robert Scheer is a tediously predictable writer, a sort of fossil remnant of an earlier era when enthusiastic support of the Sandinistas and demands for a “nuclear freeze” were major issues for the anti-American Left. Despite the fact that the Los Angeles Times had many left-wing columnists — and that Jonah Goldberg was among the few conservative columnists for the paper — Ms. Streisand insisted, without the paradigm-stretching views of Robert Scheer, “the gamut of voices” (???) was undeniably diluted. From her multimillion-dollar beachfront mansion in Malibu, Ms. Streisand proclaimed that the newspaper’s publisher was “entirely out of touch” with readers who were demanding the kind of “diversity” that only Robert Scheer (a geriatric radical born in 1936) could provide them. Accusing a Democrat of committing “the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history” — which is how Robert Scheer described Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb in 1945 — certainly stretches the paradigm, eh?

This kind of knee-jerk anti-Americanism arises from the elitist attitude that defines the Left. Believing themselves endowed with moral and intellectual superiority, progressives harbor a limitless contempt for the Ordinary American. If the typical resident of Normalville, U.S.A., is a patriotic flag-waver, the progressive believes, any flag-waving patriot is an ignorant fool. By the same token, when contrasted with Robert Scheer’s comrades in Berkeley and Ms. Streisand’s wealthy friends in Malibu, the folks in Normalville, U.S.A., are more likely to be heterosexual Christians who enjoy hunting and fishing and football and NASCAR. Because small-town people are also more likely to vote Republican — which is the worst thing anyone could ever do, from the Scheer/Streisand Berkeley/Malibu perspective — then everything about their lives must be subjected to mocking ridicule. “Redneck dimwits! So ignorant they probably believe it was a good thing we nuked Hiroshima! Let’s insult them by calling Harry Truman a terrorist!”

Progressives do not believe in a “diversity” that would permit the residents of Normalville, U.S.A., to think of themselves as deserving a respect equal to the respect demanded by residents of Berkeley and Malibu. Those of us out here in the small towns of America, folks who believe in God, who love our families and feel a sense of patriotic loyalty to our nation’s traditions — well, we are so inferior to the likes of Barbra Streisand that she cannot even be said to hate us, because we are simply too insignificant to notice. The elite support progressive policies because these policies function to deprive the Ordinary American of political representation. The beliefs and attitudes of patriotic Americans are condemned as racist, sexist and homophobic, so that anyone who speaks for the values of Normalville, U.S.A., can be excluded from the institutions (academia, journalism, entertainment) that influence the political process. There are no Republicans in the sociology department for the same reason the New York Times will never hire a Christian editor, nor would Hollywood ever make a movie that implied a negative judgment of the Charlie Sheen Lifestyle:

Video surfaces showing HIV-positive Charlie Sheen ‘performing oral sex on another man and smoking crack-cocaine’ in 2011.
The clips reportedly show the actor, 50, performing oral sex on another man and smoking crack-cocaine out of a pipe in a Las Vegas hotel room . . .
The other man in the video reportedly sued Sheen for giving him herpes.

Do you believe sodomy is a bad thing? Well, you can’t be permitted to say that in Malibu or Berkeley — nor on any university campus — where progressive “diversity” means your opinion is excluded from consideration, and no one who agrees with you would dare to say so.

Democrats believe in “diversity” in much the same way as Hitler believed in Aryan superiority, and for the same reason, because such fanatical beliefs justify the annihilation of a hated Enemy.





 

Category: Celebrities, Intellectuals, Media Bias, Progressivism

The Academic Temple Cult

Posted on | November 24, 2015 | 27 Comments

While university administrators surrender to protest mobs of young barbarians, we behold the decline of cultural literacy:

Not only are way too many of today’s students not getting a basic grounding in these things from their schools, but they’re probably not getting it from way too many of their parents, either. No wonder so many of them are willing to throw away freedom of speech in the name of protecting minorities’ feelings — they don’t even know what freedom of speech is or what it means, or why we have it in the first place.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Our education system is no longer primarily concerned with teaching facts, but instead has become a Temple Cult of Social Justice that exists to indoctrinate students with “progressive” attitudes and beliefs. In his book Up From Liberalism — published in 1959, the year I was born — William F. Buckley Jr. wrote:

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”

Eugene Volokh documents an example of this phenomenon:

Valerie Ashby, the new dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University . . . said in response to a student question complaining about various supposedly intolerant scholarship and other statements by various faculty members at Duke and elsewhere:

I am going to every single department and saying to the faculty, these are our values, and then holding chairs really accountable, that we’re training chairs, and then holding them accountable for what’s happening in your departments.
We’re also really working on . . . the new faculty who step in the door, and really trying to teach them, these are our values, this is what’s tolerable here, this is what’s not, this is how we feel about these things. And at every point of their evaluation, and at every point of — chance where we have an opportunity to make a decision about whether or not you are Duke, we are evaluating the — we will evaluate the entirety of the person.
And so you can’t be a great scholar, and be intolerant. You have to go.

Annual tuition at Duke University is $49,341 and no one may be employed as faculty at Duke who does not share the “values” that Dean Valerie Ashby is in charge of enforcing. She is not an educator, but an indoctrinator — the commissar of a totalitarian regime that demands ideological conformity. If you’re wondering what Dean Ashby meant by “our values,” in 2004 a group of conservative students at Duke exposed the faculty’s Democrat Party allegiances:

The students had identified party affiliation by using registration records available to the public. Their chart revealed that of the deans serving schools of Duke University, nine were registered Democrats and only one was registered as a Republican. In the Department of Art History, faculty included fourteen Democrats, one unaffiliated, and no Republicans. What about the Department of Cultural Anthropology? The chart revealed eleven Democrats, two unaffiliated, and no Republicans. English? The department includes eighteen Democrats, one unaffiliated, and a single Republican. The Department of History included thirty-two Democrats, four unaffiliated and no Republicans. Literature, philosophy, and sociology, combined to total thirty-two Democrats, nine unaffiliated, and no Republicans. The only department with more than one Republican was the Department of Political Science which claimed twenty-six Democrats, one unaffiliated, and six Republicans. Apparently, “diversity” at Duke University means diversity for Democrats.

So, in total: 142 Democrats to 8 Republicans and in many departments at Duke there was not even one Republican professor. A student of history or sociology at Duke will almost certainly never encounter anyone on the faculty who ever voted Republican, and Dean Ashby’s job is to maintain the university’s partisan “values.” If this “sounds kinda intolerant,” it’s because it is intolerant. Parents who worked all their lives to be able to afford to send their kids to an elite university are spending money to pay professors who teach students to hate their parents. The real “rape culture” on campus is the faculty raping students’ minds.





 

Category: Education
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