‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I’ll Be Brief …’

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“The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg: Isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!”
— Eric Stratton, Delta Tau Chi, Faber College, 1962

That classic moment in the history of American higher education came to mind when I saw that Instapundit (“Glenn Reynolds, rush chairman — damned glad to meet ya!”) had linked a Wall Street Journal column arguing for the abolition of college fraternities.

Caitlin Flanagan’s argument is based on a 1984 rape that occurred at the Pi Kappa Psi house at the University of Virginia. The perpetrator was prosecuted two decades later when, as the result of his involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous (“Step 9: Make Amends”) he sent a letter to the victim confessing his crime.

Flanagan’s WSJ column then goes on to say that, when she attended UVA, she was warned “never, ever to go upstairs at a fraternity house.” That’s very useful advice for young women, and I would extend it by adding: (a) Never, ever go to a guy’s dorm room and (b) if you go to a party or a bar, always use the “buddy system,” so that you have a girlfriend to keep an eye out for your safety and vice-versa.

While we’re at it, coed dorms endanger women and ought to be abolished. In fact, I would go so far as to say that co-education is itself a bad idea, and that ideally we should go back to having separate men’s and women’s colleges. But such draconian measures in pursuit of the social good only ever seem to be popular when advocated to achieve liberal ideas of the social good, whereas my purposes are entirely reactionary.

Also, finally, I denounce this kind of exploitatively sexist behavior:

“No more fun of any kind!”

Steven Crowder and Susannah Fleetwood on Making Fun of Retarded People

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And by “retarded people,” of course, we mean . . . Wonkette:

That’s the best work by Crowder I’ve seen yet, and Susannah Fleetwood has an excellent post: “3 Reasons Why Wonkette Self-destructed by Publishing a Hit Piece on Trig Palin.”

Let’s face it, folks: When it comes to exposing liberal media bias, Trig Palin has probably accomplished almost as much as Brent Bozell. Not bad for a 3-year-old.

Hateful Atrocity as Transvestite Beaten by Christian Fundamentalists. Oh, Wait …

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By now you’ve probably seen the viral video in which a woman (or, according to the guy who shot the video, a transvestite) was beaten senseless by two teenage girls in a McDonald’s restaurant:

It appears that the victim used the women’s restroom, and these two teenagers decided to appoint themselves the Anti-Drag-Queen Vigilante Committee of Rosedale, Maryland. The horrible sadism of this crime — the perpetrators returning to beat the defenseless victim over and over again — is shocking to watch. Indeed, it “says quite a bit about where we are as a culture,” as Bryan Preston observes. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun reports:

State’s Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger said the racial dynamics of the incident — the attackers are black, and the victim is white — could result in hate-crime charges.

Can you imagine the political uproar if the attackers had been right-wing Tea Party types? Perhaps we can ask Paul Krugman to favor us with another one of his “climate of hate” sermons.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!


Why Do They Hate Poor Kids?

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You may recognize these two gentlemen:

They had a few words (including “drop dead”) for Kerry Picket of The Washington Times who, during a press conference, had the temerity to ask questions about D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s opposition to school vouchers. Miss Picket has now tentatively identified the gentlemen:

It has come to my attention after further review that the man speaking to me in my video is likely Richard Rosendall of D.C.’s Gay and Lesbian Activist Alliance. The other individual next to him is likely D.C. LGBT activist and Washington Blade blogger Peter Rosenstein. Repeated attempts to reach Mr. Rosendall and Mr. Rosenstein to confirm their identities have not been answered.

So why don’t these guys want poor children in D.C. to have an opportunity for better education than is provided by the city’s wretched public-school system?

Apple Wanted Location Data To Make Its Products Even More Compelling

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by Smitty

In its way, the concern over Apple’s iPhone data collection is laughable. If people understood the half of the data that companies and governments collect, they would. . .do pretty much what they are doing.

Turns out the answer is simpler than you think, and it doesn’t involve a conspiracy theory, the government or David Duchovny. Basically, Apple keeps track of your location data so that it can maintain its own location database. By golly, it also turns out they’ve explained it some time ago–last summer.

Last year, Apple lawyer Bruce Sewell sent a letter to two congressmen explaining and disclosing Apple’s location-data collection techniques and policies. The 13-page letter reports that location data is only tracked and transmitted if a user turns on the Location Services option on in the Settings menu. If the option is turned off, nothing is collected.

According to the letter, the data is stored in what we can only assume is “consolidated.db,” randomly assigned an identification number every 24 hours, and sent off every 12 hours to Apple. The data gets stored in a secure database “accessible only by Apple.”

Apple then collects information about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points whenever you utilize a service that requests your current location. It sometimes automatically happens with location-based apps that utilize GPS technology.

It turns out Apple ditched the location databases it was previously using from Google and SkyHook Wireless, and is in fact using their own. Now for that to happen, what Apple needs is location data. What better way than to pull it from the millions of existing iPhone customers already roaming around the globe?

The crux of the matter is that there is precious little middle ground. You either go full-on modern data-driven society, and know that you have to deliberately unplug to be free of the tether, or, alternately, you can opt for something in the Afghanistan to Papua-New Guinea range. It’s almost a binary proposition. High or low tech. Not much middle ground.
One of the translators here in Bagram was decrying the state of Afghanistan in terms of infrastructure. I gathered he’d been a US citizen for a couple of decades. I couldn’t resist making the gentle point that one of the things needed to get Afghanistan going was for people who had been abroad and acquired some education to cease their wandering ways and come home. Fix up the joint.
The response was along the lines of “Screw that noise!”
Sure, I’m quite ready to drop the place like a bad habit. So what are we going to do, distribute 80 million iPhones around Afghanistan? “Domestic peace: there is an app for that!”
As for iPhones, I’ve been a Nokia addict for too long, even though I’m composing this post on a MacBook Pro, and ran 5k while jacked into an iPod, the Genius Mix thingy being a killer feature. When we’re all dead with this technology, Stacy McCain will stand in the ruins, I-told-you-so card cocked at 11 o’clock, saying “Uh huh.”