The Other McCain

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

‘Systemic Racism,’ Anarchy and Incipient Totalitarianism at University of Missouri

Posted on | November 10, 2015 | 133 Comments

The New Regime: Mob rule on the Missouri campus.

A frenzied student mob is now running the University of Missouri, having forced the abdication of university system president Tim Wolfe, while chancellor Bowen Loftin will “transition” to another job, the university board announced:

Today the board announced a series of initiatives to be implemented over the next 90 days to address the racial climate on its campuses, including:

  • A first-ever Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer will be appointed for the UM System. Accountability and metrics will be established for the position going forward;
  • A full review will be initiated of all UM System policies as they relate to staff and student conduct;
  • Additional support will be provided for students, faculty and staff who have experienced discrimination and disparate treatment.
  • Additional support will be provided for the hiring and retention of diverse faculty and staff;

Complete capitulation to the mob, basically. Robert Tracisnki at the Federalist tries to explain what happened at Missouri:

A helpful timeline of the case indicates that it started with two cases in which black students at Mizzou said they had racial epithets shouted at them, and one in which a swastika was scrawled on the wall of a bathroom in a university building. In all three of these cases, nobody knows who did it or why. But they were taken as proof of “systemic racism” at the university, and protesters howled for Wolfe’s resignation. Throughout the case, Wolfe issued condemnations of racism, acknowledgements of the justice of the protester’s cause, and apologies for not seeming to take them seriously enough — which, as we should know by now, are all the signs that he’s doomed and will eventually be forced to resign.
Wolfe was targeted, as one protest group put it, because he was “‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus.” I love the “not completely.” It reminds me of the old rule about totalitarian revolutions: first, you go after the counter-revolutionaries, then you go after the insufficiently enthusiastic. So Wolfe had to be removed for failing to show immediate and total compliance toward their political agenda.

You can read the whole thing. Tracinski’s point about the futility of Wolfe’s pandering — the apologetic, defensive stance signaling weakness, a prelude to surrender — tells us what to expect as a result of the board’s newfound commitment to “diversity” and “inclusion.” Henceforth, no heterosexual white males will be hired by the University of Missouri, and whenever any student complains of having “experienced discrimination and disparate treatment,” a scapegoat will be fired immediately to appease the Gods of Social Justice. A thorough purge of the faculty and administration is to be expected, and woe be unto anyone on campus who complains about this scorched-earth campaign of bloodthirsty vengeance to eliminate “systemic racism.”

Jim Hoft notes that one of the mob leaders spent five months as an intern to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. These young totalitarians represent the Progressive Future. The ranting campus mobs are expressing the zeitgeist of a dawning New Age of Intolerance that will suppress dissent and abrogate liberty in the name of Equality. Forcing the authorities into humiliating gestures of abject submission, these impudent student radicals have now imbibed the intoxicating spirit of Total Power and are likely to become lifelong addicts.

Commissars of the New Regime move to squelch any critical scrutiny:

After desperately trying to gin up media coverage of student protests at the University of Missouri, one of the school’s media professors is now furiously trying to “muscle” the press off campus to prevent them from covering student protests that rapidly spiraled out of control Monday. . . .
On Monday afternoon, activists who had demanded Wolfe’s resignation abruptly demanded that media stop covering their activities on the public campus of the taxpayer-funded university. At the center of those demands was Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media within Mizzou’s communications department. . . .
“You need to get out, you need to get out,” Melissa Click demanded of the person filming the protest. “You need to get out,” she continued before trying to grab the camera out of the videographer’s hands.
“I actually don’t,” the journalist told Click.
“Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here,” the media professor then hysterically exclaimed to the assembled mob. “I need some muscle over here!”


What sort of scholarship does Professor Click pursue?

Her research interests center on popular culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences disdained in mainstream culture. Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy. Current research projects involve 50 Shades of Grey readers, the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children’s television programs.

She got her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a dissertation about the “commodification of femininity, affluence and whiteness in the Martha Stewart phenomenon.” A quote from pp. 57-58 of her dissertation:

Feminist scholarship, which investigates the social construction of gender and the ways in which power infiltrates the most intimate aspects of people’s lives, grew out of a critique of the foundations of “traditional” research. Reinharz (1992) traces the development of feminist scholarship in “Principles of Feminist Research” to the early 1970s when academia began feeling the effects of the social upheaval of the 1960s outside the Academy, and the critique of positivism in the social sciences inside the Academy. The feminist scholarship that emerged from the early 1970s was founded on a critique of the ways in which scientific discourses, far from being neutral and objective as regularly claimed, were biased, androcentric, ethnocentric and heterosexist and distorted the experiences of those under study. Feminist scholars argued that scientific research produced partial knowledge that worked as violence against non-dominant groups excluding them and silencing their voices. In this sense, feminist scholarship offered a revision, a transformation of academic knowledge that would encourage new ways of thinking about the processes and goals of theory and research.

Professor Click is engaged in “a transformation of academic knowledge” to end the “violence against non-dominant groups” perpetrated by traditional methods of research, which are “androcentric, ethnocentric and heterosexist” and thus invalid.

Taxpayers subsidize the universities where young people are indoctrinated by scholars like Professor Click. Do you need any further explanation for why lunatics are running the academic asylum and why dissent against the New Regime will soon be strictly prohibited?

UPDATE: It appears that assistant professor Melissa Click did not have tenure at the university, and the journalism faculty has voted to revoke her appointment. Good.





 

Category: Education

In The Mailbox: 11.09.15

Posted on | November 9, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.09.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Where’s My Safe Space?
Da Tech Guy: Palestinians Claim Temple Mount Cam Is A Trap To Show Them Doing Nothing Wrong
American Irony: Time To Start Calling The Media What It Really Is
Conservative Review: The Knife Intifada – Coming To A City Near You
The Political Hat: The Climate Inquisition
Michelle Malkin: Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best & Brightest Workers
Twitchy: This Is A Stupid Statement, Even For Joe Biden


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Black Activists Turn On Shaun King For Collapse of “Justice Together” Org, Financial Irregularities
American Thinker: Warren Buffett And The Keystone Decision
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Blood Red By Wendy Staub
Conservatives4Palin: Hillary Shrugs Off The Deaths Of 300,000 Veterans
Don Surber: Does Jim Justice Already Own West Virginia?
Jammie Wearing Fools: Nine False Things Obama Said About His Biography That Didn’t Cause A Media Feeding Frenzy
Joe For America: Thugs With Knives And Hammers Terrorize British Streets
JustOneMinute: End It, Don’t Mend It
Pamela Geller: Thousands March Demanding Merkel’s Resignation
Protein Wisdom: Starbucks – Tempest In A Coffee Cup, Or Just Another PC Paper Cut Against Tradition?
Shot In The Dark: Heather Martens – “Round Up The Usual Suspects!”
STUMP: A Week Of Bad Pension Ideas – First Up, Guaranteeing Returns
The Gateway Pundit: UC Stabber Faisal Muhammad Was On Terror Watch List – College Was Warned
The Lonely Conservative: Carson Tells Media “Thanks For Helping Me Rake In $3.5 Million”
This Ain’t Hell: Captain Andrew Gremillion, Louisiana NG, Saving the World
Weasel Zippers: British Catholic Schools Eliminate Islam From Religious Studies Courses, Muslim Leaders Outraged
Megan McArdle: A Birth Control Morality Play Comes To The Supreme Court
Mark Steyn: We Were Soldiers


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Category: Linkagery

OK, If #BlackLivesMatter Affects SEC Football, We Have a Serious Problem

Posted on | November 9, 2015 | 108 Comments

University of Missouri football players are threatening a boycott until university president Tim Wolfe resigns, but considering the way they’ve been playing this season (4-5 overall, 1-5 in the Southeastern Conference), it’s not as if this will have any impact on the SEC title picture. Alabama beat LSU Saturday, so Derrick Henry and the Crimson Tide defense are far more important, from a purely athletic perspective, than the racial acrimony roiling the Missouri campus.

Exactly what is happening at Missouri? Well, of course, the proximity to Ferguson — scene of the Michael Brown shooting that sparked what has become the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement — could be seen as a relevant factor. However, the real trouble campus has been agitated by a graduate student named Jonathan Butler:

Butler . . . wants to force Wolfe’s resignation because of a handful of recent incidents which have occurred on the Columbia, Mo. campus.
In a letter to school officials posted on his Facebook page, Butler indicated that he began his hunger strike because someone in a pickup truck allegedly shouted a racist insult at a black student government member, because state law prevents Planned Parenthood from performing on-campus abortions and because someone drew a swastika with human feces in a dormitory bathroom.
Some observers have suggested that the bathroom swastika may be a hoax. Why, law professor blogger Ann Althouse has asked, for example, would any dedicated racial supremacist create a swastika out of human feces?
Butler admits in the letter that none of the incidents he cites are Wolfe’s fault. Nevertheless, Butler has concluded, “as a collection of incidents at the university, they are his responsibility to address.”
This summer, prior to Butler’s decision to go on a hunger strike because of racism allegations, the graduate student’s substantially different agenda focused on a change in University of Missouri policy which ended subsidized health insurance for graduate students. . . .
School officials have said the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — forced them to stop subsidizing grad student health insurance.


So, basically, this is Obama’s fault. It figures. Meanwhile, in Tuscaloosa, the Crimson Tide refuses to be distracted. Arkansas upset Ole Miss on Saturday, thus making it possible for Alabama to hope for a shot at the SEC title, but Tide linebacker Reggie Ragland was so focused on beating LSU that he didn’t even know about the Arkansas game until a reporter told him after ‘Bama had beat the Tigers 30-16:

“So we hold our own destiny,” Ragland said, laughing. Then he turned stone-faced again. “That still really don’t mean nothing. We’ve got to keep playing ball,” he said. “We’ve still got two games left in the West to finish off. We’ve still got to do our job. We’ve got a great opponent in Dak Prescott and [Mississippi State] next week.”

Damn right. You hold your own destiny. One game at a time.




 

Category: Football, Racism

Rule 5 Sunday: The Hearts of Space

Posted on | November 8, 2015 | 16 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The local classical music station here in Las Vegas is notable for three things: an absence of annoying NPR “news” programs, the most excellent Pipe Dreams program, devoted to music from pipe organs, and the intriguing Music from the Hearts of Space, arguably one of the oldest radio shows devoted to electronic music, especially of the ambient variety. It is the latter that inspires the post title today, reminding us of Jeri Ryan, who played Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager. Here she is, completely de-Borgified.

Look Ma, no (cybernetic) implants!

Politically Incorrect Conservative leads off this week with Heidi Klum as Jessica Rabbit, followed by Goodstuff with Elizabeth Hurley and all-seeing robots! Next up, Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls with Guns; we also heard from Animal Magnetism with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, The Last Tradition with Mia Michelle and Monika Jac Jagasiak, and First Street Journal with a salute to American women in uniform.

EBL’s collection of beefcake and cheesecake this week includes Roger Moore as Simon Templar, a/k/a The Saint, Jill St. John, Lisa Baur in her role as Shelly Dubinski from Animal House, historical figures in popular culture, Shirley Temple, and Angie Dickinson.

A View from the Beach checks in with Elle, Strange Religion Nearly Kills Blogger, The Thursday Morning Work Out, Wednesday Morning Triple Play, Clinton.com Potpourri, Jessica Biel Likes to Say Vagina, Monday Morning Language Lesson, Cats ARE Probably Trying to Work Out How to Kill You (cat ladies), “Black Magic Woman”, and “Season of the Witch”.

Soylent Siberia submits Coffee Creamer Reflections, Monday Motivationer Ela, Tuesday Titillation Stocking Stuffer, Leonard’s Lunchtime Lesbians, Humpday Hawtness Rebecca, Vintage Fursday Pamela Stein, and Weekender Hardwood.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Bella Thorne, his Vintage Babe is Ann Rutherford, Sex in Advertising is covered by Victoria’s Secret, and of course there’s the obligatory 49ers cheerleader. Dustbury also took note of Heidi Klum, to say nothing of Lorde.

Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery! Remember, links for next week’s Rule 5 Sunday (tentatively titled The Post-Veterans Day Recovery Edition) are due to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox no later than midnight on Saturday, November 14. Please do not send them to my regular Wombat-socho mailbox; there’s a good chance they’ll be overlooked amidst all the spam from National Review, the Federalist Society, and various other conservative outfits trying to get my attention and/or money.


Star Trek: Voyager Season 4
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Category: Rule 5

The Godless Men at Yale

Posted on | November 8, 2015 | 48 Comments

Every time I mention William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale here, it sells a few copies via the Amazon Associates link, a surprise that is both pleasant (because I need the money) and troubling, because it bugs me to realize that today, in 2015, there are conservatives who have not yet read that 1951 classic. Buckley’s book, published not long after he had graduated from Yale, immediately ignited a firestorm among the liberal elite. God and Man at Yale was published amid the Cold War tempest that history has called “McCarthyism,” and Buckley pointed out the ways in which “the superstition of academic freedom” was used to protect teaching that was clearly hostile to capitalism and Christianity.

More than that, Buckley documented how Yale had become confused about its own mission and, as a result, had betrayed the trust of the alumni whose contributions funded the university. God and Man at Yale, while focused on one particular Ivy League school, was in fact an indictment of American higher education generally, and especially of the academic elite whose embrace of New Deal-era liberalism had made it difficult for them to recognize the menace that Communism posed to our civilization. Though written at a particular time about a particular set of issues at a particular university, God and Man at Yale is nevertheless a work of timeless value and highly relevant to many of the controversies we encounter today, especially in higher education.

The recent absurd racial controversy at Yale, which resulted in an incident with an enraged student shouting obscenities at a dorm headmaster, calls our attention to why we cannot disregard (or treat as a joke) what is being taught at our nation’s universities. The cultural and political climate on campus today will shape the beliefs and attitudes of America’s future leaders, and incidents like this should give us cause for great concern. Yale is run by cowards:

In a closed-door meeting Thursday night, Yale University’s president apologized to a large group of minority students for the school’s failure to make them feel safe on campus.
“We failed you,” Peter Salovey, a psychologist, told more than 40 students gathered in the ornate room where the Yale Corporation meets, on the top floor of the president’s office.
“I think we have to be a better university. I think we have to do a better job,” he said, according to several students in the room who were taking notes.

You can read more at Reason magazine and at Hot Air, where Jazz Shaw points out the meaning of this abject surrender:

So it’s no longer good enough to admonish the actual practitioners of controversial speech . . . Now the faculty needs to go on the chopping block if they don’t proactively go out and squelch any offensive thoughts. This is the price we’re paying for generations of liberal thinkers encouraging the coddling of students and stamping out any competing ideas.

In other words, administrators now must vet their faculty, to make sure they never hire anyone who could harbor opinions that any student might find offensive, and sternly instruct professors to be sure that they do not tolerate any potentially offending expressions. This is the “better university” that President Salovey promised Yale’s students, and all because of Halloween costumes.

The laughably trivial nature of this controversy is, in fact, the point.

Go back to 1951. The Soviet Union had acquired nuclear weapons, the Rosenberg case had exposed the espionage by which this had happened, the Alger Hiss case and the Amerasia case had further exposed Soviet subversion, which was implicated in the Communist takeover of China, U.S. troops were fighting Red Chinese troops in Korea, and Joe McCarthy was investigating the lax security policies implicated in this national security crisis. Amid this cauldron of controversy, Yale student William F. Buckley Jr. wrote an erudite and thoughtful book about what all this meant for America’s institutions of higher education — he was not screaming dirty words while demanding that the campus be made a “safe space” to protect him from offensive Halloween costumes.

America’s cultural elite is decadent and depraved, and it has become so because our intellectual class failed to heed the warnings that Bill Buckley sounded in 1951. Yale University rejected Buckley’s criticism, and has proceeded in subsequent decades to do the exact opposite of what they should have done, had they taken Buckley’s criticism seriously. The true threat to “academic freedom” is not, as Yale’s defenders in 1951 imagined, from right-wingers like Buckley, but rather from the totalitarian impulses of the Left.

The truth about what is being taught at Yale, and at other colleges and universities, is of concern to every citizen, because it is abundantly evident that the pursuit of soi-disant “academic freedom” has now created a climate that excludes from campus the expression of any fact or opinion which the Left does not approve.

God has been banished from Yale, and the godless men who now exercise authority in academia — pusillanimous neurasthenic cowards like Yale President Peter Salovey — are evidently prepared to surrender to the puerile tantrums of young heathens whose “education” has rendered them incapable of even pretending to be civilized people.





 

Category: Education

FMJRA 2.0: After The Gun Show

Posted on | November 8, 2015 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Just What It Says On The Label
Animal Magnetism
Politically Incorrect Conservative
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Ninety Miles from Tyranny
Batshit Crazy News

Tancredo Rejects the GOoP
Batshit Crazy News

FMJRA 2.0: Ride Across the River
The Pirate’s Cove
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

American Academia Is a Corrupt Racket
The Political Hat
Batshit Crazy News

Hillary Is Lying, People Are Dying
The DaleyGator
Batshit Crazy News

Guys: Never Talk to a College Girl, Because All College Girls Hate You
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

She Is 23 and ‘So F–king Exhausted’
Inoperable Terran
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.02.15
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

On ‘Crackers’
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.03.15
Batshit Crazy News

Faisal Mohammad: Authorities Say Stabbings at UC-Merced Not Terrorism
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

Is Ellie Clougherty a Liar?
Batshit Crazy News

Feminism: How a Privileged Elite Can Claim Permanent Victimhood
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.04.15
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

The @Salon Pedophile Click-Bait Magical Internet Outrage Marketing Machine
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.05.15
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Story
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 11.06.15
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (18)
  2.  (tied) A View from the Beach, Regular Right Guy (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


After the Gold Rush

Category: FMJRA Award

Our Moral Superiors™

Posted on | November 7, 2015 | 49 Comments

Tuition at Yale University is $47,600 and you would think, for that kind of money, they could provide decent mental health counseling for students, or maybe screen the applications to make sure they’re not admitting psychotics. Unfortunately, they seem to have an affirmative action quota for lunatics, including students so deluded they think they are “oppressed.” Some kind of absurd racial controversy erupted on the Yale campus, and a deranged student freaked out and started screaming obscenities at a dorm headmaster named Nicholas Christakis:

The conversation is at first tense but calm, but it escalates rapidly after a student accuses Christakis of creating an “unsafe space” at Yale.
“I did not-,” Christakis attempts to reply, but a student aggressively interjects.
“Be quiet!,” she screams. Then, voice quavering with emotion, she continues. “[In] your position as headmaster, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman.”
Christakis attempts to dissent, saying “No, I don’t agree with that,” unleashing a torrent of shrieks from the student.
“Then why the f–k did you accept the position? Who the f–k hired you?,” she cries, drowning out any attempt by Christakis to explain himself (Christakis never raises his voice, except to be heard by the crowd).
“You should step down! If that is what you think of being headmaster, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not!”

If your kids are maniacs, just send ’em to Yale. For $47,600 a year, it’s cheaper than putting them in a psychiatric ward.

 

Category: Education

Reasons to Home School Your Kids

Posted on | November 6, 2015 | 42 Comments

Are you a homophobe? I mean, do you sit around all day seething in rage, waiting for nightfall, so you can go out and terrorize some homosexuals? Of course not. You are not a hater and you have no irrational “phobia.” You are a decent law-abiding citizen, and not a violent menace to your fellow citizens. If it weren’t for the incessant lectures from gay activists who insist you are a hateful homophobe, you’d probably never think about the subject. But if you aren’t a hater . . . why not?

Did you go through a special anti-homophobia training program in school when you were a kid? No, of course not. You were taught to be polite to everyone and respect others. You are not a bully. You’re a nice person.

So you are a civilized person, and not a violent ruffian, yet you never had any specific lessons about not being a homophobe. Why then do public school teachers seem to think such lessons are necessary? In Conway Springs, Kansas, a middle school teacher decided his eighth-grade history students needed to see a film “that depicts a fictional world in which heterosexual children are bullied by homosexual classmates”:

The movie he showed his eighth-grade students last month portrays a heterosexual girl being raised in a dystopian society where homosexuality is the norm.

(The Women’s Studies department at Bryn Mawr College?)

The girl is bullied by classmates — to the indifference of several teachers and other adults — until she commits suicide.

Question: What does this have to do with history?

Do this teacher actually teach any history? What do the kids in Conway Springs Middle School know about history? I mean, can they name all the presidents in order, by memory? Do they know anything about the Missouri Compromise or the Spanish-America War or the election of 1948? If I were to say “Cross of Gold” to these kids, would they automatically shout, “William Jennings Bryan”?

I’m gonna guess, no, because they’re too busy learning the only lesson that really matters anymore: Don’t Hate the Gays.

Look: There is this thing called “the Internet,” and if any parent thinks their child needs to see “a dystopian society where homosexuality is the norm,” you could download the YouTube video.

In other words, this ridiculously didactic Don’t Hate the Gays propaganda film is just one click away for anybody who wants to see it, including your eighth-grader. So why do you think the public schools (paid for with your tax dollars) need to force kids to watch this stuff in class? Does it now occur to anyone, besides me, that public schools have stopped teaching facts — William Jennings Bryan, and all that — and instead are teaching attitudes? And don’t you see that the attitudes being taught in public schools are liberal attitudes, because all the teachers are liberals who vote for Democrats and they want to train your children to be liberals who vote Democrat, too.

The American public school system is corrupt. Public schools are a political indoctrination program operated by Democrat activists who pay dues to a teachers union that is one of the major funders of the Democrat Party. Why would any Republican parent let their children go anywhere near these kind of wicked and dishonest people?

By the way, William Jennings Bryan was a Democrat, and his “Cross of Gold” speech was an irresponsible and demagogic appeal to envy and economic ignorance. But those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, which probably explains why Barack Obama is president. And if your daughter decides to go to Bryn Mawr and major in Women’s Studies, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

Category: Education
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