Make the Bad Lady Shut Up, Mommy! Make Her Shut UP!!!

IN an excellent demonstration of the motto of leftist higher education: "Free speech for me but not for thee," the Chronicle of Higher Education has fired a blogger who was paid to contribute a contrary viewpoint. She was fired, "logically enough," at least in the eyes of a leftist academic, for publishing a contrary viewpoint.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has fired our former editorial-page colleague, Naomi Schaefer Riley, for a blog posting on the Chronicle's website that offended 6,500 professors. Well, they're not all professors yet, but they are members of what calls itself the "higher-education community," for which the Chronicle is its trade paper. As best we can make out, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen, fired Naomi Riley for doing what she was hired to do—provide a conservative point of view about current events in academe alongside the paper's roster of mostly not-conservative academic bloggers. _WSJ

Ms. Schaefer Riley tells the story from her point of view:

Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future,'" in which the reporter described how "young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline." The "5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates" described in the piece's sidebar "are rewriting the history of race." While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.

Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle's "Brainstorm" blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap," at worst.

For instance, the author of a dissertation on the history of black midwifery began her research, she told the Chronicle, because she "noticed that nonwhite women's experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature." Another graduate student blamed the housing crisis in America on institutional racism. And a third argued that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWhorter have "played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them."

The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that "in a bid to not be 'out-niggered' [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on." (I confess I don't actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post "racist."

Gina Barreca, a teacher of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, composed a poem mocking me. (It begins "A certain white chick—Schaefer Riley/ decided to do something wily.") MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spewed a four-minute rant about my post, invoking the memory of Trayvon Martin and accusing me of "small-mindedness."

Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren't even available. Which didn't seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.

At first, the Chronicle stood its ground, suggesting that my post was an "invitation to debate." But that stance lasted for little more than a weekend. In a note that reads like a confession at a re-education camp, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen announced her decision on Monday to fire me: "We've heard you," she tells my critics. "And we have taken to heart what you said. We now agree that Ms. Riley's blog posting did not meet The Chronicle's basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles."

When I asked Ms. McMillen whether the poem by fellow blogger Ms. Barreca, for instance, lived up to such standards, she said they were "reviewing" the other content on the site. So far, however, that blogger has not been fired. Other ad hominem attacks against me seem to have passed editorial muster as well. _Naomi Schaefer Riley_in_WSJ

Creativity is Dangerous -- Having No Creativity is Fatal

When we encounter new creativity, the work of someone who is really trying to bring something new to the game, our first reaction won’t be, ‘Oh, that’s lovely’, but rather, ‘Oh my God, that looks dangerous’. Maybe even that it’s disgusting.

We need to recapture the edge that creativity is supposed to have and inject that back into the discussion about it. _CreativeTimesUK

Removing danger and risk from life necessarily involves removing creativity. And without creativity, human life on the scale of modern times, is impossible. In other words, the engineers of modern societies are grooming their populations for oblivion, by removing risk, responsibility, and creativity from their childhood and adult lives.

As a general rule, we dislike uncertainty. It makes us uneasy. A certain world is a much friendlier place. And so, we work hard to reduce whatever uncertainty we can, often by making habitual, practical choices, choices that protect the status quo. You know the saying, better the devil you know? That about sums it up.

Creativity, on the other hand, requires novelty. Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don’t exit, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. In other words, it is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening... _SciAm "Why So Afraid of Creativity?"

Democracies are all about keeping the voting masses relatively calm and satisfied. If this involves the wide scale infantilisation of mass populations from the cradle to the grave, then so be it. Humans are unpredictable creatures. Best to keep them fat, dumb, and happy.

If you are considering putting yourself out there creatively/emotionally, or are already doing so, you have a potential audience that is much, much larger than just your parents. It is true that the world can be a cruel and punishing place, but it is also large and welcoming. It is just a matter of when you will be heard and who will be there to hear you. _PsychologyToday

Okay, the last quote is a bit touchy-feely psychobabblish. Of course there is no guarantee that taking creative or emotional risks will turn out well in the end. That is the point: There are no guarantees, either way.

Complacent people will choose not to take the risk, not to create or innovate into a new and unfamiliar world. They will choose a wide choice of home entertainment, alcoholic beverages, and prescription drugs. Lots of prescription drugs.

Perhaps you have guessed by now that dangerous children are not about staying in the safe zone, and avoiding risk and responsibility. Dangerous children learn that the best way to become trapped in the stun-stall of the abattoir is to play it safe, and stay inside the prescribed lines.

Al Fin social analysts suspect that most persons living in modern social democracies will choose the path of mass oblivion. But just in case there are some who would choose differently, we are exploring the concept of "the dangerous child."

If you are interested learning more about the concept of "the dangerous child," we are running a series of postings on that topic at Al Fin, the Next Level. Feel free to drop in anytime.

Making Predictions About the Future

The price of oil will soar to $200 per barrel. A bioterror attack will occur before 2013. Rising food prices could spark riots in Britain. The Arctic Ocean will be ice-free by 2015. Home prices will not recover this year. But who cares about any of those predictions: The world will end in 2012.

The media abound with confident predictions. Everywhere we turn, we find an expert declaiming on some future trend, concerning nearly every activity. Should we pay much attention? No, says journalist Dan Gardner in his wonderfully perspicacious new book, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, And You Can Do Better. Gardner is previously the author of The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger. _Reason

The only thing you can say for certain about the future, is that once it becomes past people will still not be sure exactly what happened. So how stupid is it to predict the future? Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine thinks it's pretty stupid (via Dennis Mangan):

As oil prices ascend once again, naturally many predict that the end of oil is nigh. Back in 1980, Gardner reminds us, The New York Times confidently declared, “There should be no such thing as optimism about energy for the foreseeable future. What is certain is that the price of oil will go up and up, at home as well as abroad.” By 1986 oil prices had fallen to around $10 per barrel. On the accuracy of oil price predictions, Gardner cites U.S. Foreign Service Officer James Akins, who said: “Oil experts, economists, and government officials who have attempted in recent years to predict the future demand and prices of oil have had only marginally better success than those who foretell the advent of earthquakes or the second coming of the Messiah.”

...In this excellent book, Gardner romps through the past 40 years of failed predictions on economics, energy, environment, politics, and so much more. Remember back in 1990 when Japan would rule the world? MIT economist Lester Thurow declared, “If one looks at the last 20 years, Japan would have to be considered the betting favorite to win the economic honors of owning the 21st century.” Thurow was far from alone. Back in 1992, George Friedman, now CEO of the geopolitical consultancy Stratfor, predicted The Coming War With Japan. Twenty years later, for those hungering for more predictive insights from Friedman, he has recently published, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.

...Back in 1968, Ehrlich notoriously predicted in The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….”

The famines didn’t happen. And Gardner notes that the world death rate was 13 per 1,000 when Ehrlich wrote his book. Every decade since it has fallen and is now 9 per 1,000 people. “In two lengthy interviews, Ehrlich admitted to making not a single major error in the popular works he published in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” observes Gardner. It is almost not too much to say that Ehrlich has never been right about anything that he has predicted. _Reason_via_DennisMangan

Experts typically suffered academic lobotomies sometime in their careers, which not only leaves them totally amoral as to the effect their predictions may have on real people's lives, but also makes it unlikely that they can ever learn from their inevitable mistakes. No wonder they are so consistently wrong.

And since experts are so highly valued in government, media, and academia, societies which allow themselves to be slapped around by government, media, and academia are going to suffer some hard times -- until they wise up to what they are letting be done to them.

Peak oil doom, climate catastrophe, overpopulation apocalypse, etc. etc. Today's conventional wisdom is a crock of shite. Perhaps it is time for people to learn to think for themselves. But can they still learn to do that?

Society's "Intellectuals" Circle the Wagons Against the Wild and Unruly Truths that Howl in the Night

There is always a tension, as [an investigator], between asking open-ended questions that allow an interview subject to explain something and pressing or challenging them on accuracy or details. But if you think you already know the subject, or already have a story angle half-formed in your head, it's easy to overlook the first part. _Atlantic

Pundits, journalists, and investigators and researchers of all types most frequently go wrong when they begin their investigation with a pre-conceived opinion, a pre-fabricated conclusion. This bias is most clear in mainstream climate science, but it is also abundantly clear in just about any mainstream media investigation of a politically charged topic. If the journalist assumes a person is stupid, their stories will display abundant evidence of the person's stupidity. If journalists consider a person brilliant, the story will be built around the "evident" brilliance of the subject. Bias, bigotry, inflexible prejudice. And these people are the gatekeepers of "the truth."

In his new book, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer cites a research study done by U.C. Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock. Tetlock questioned 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends," asking them to make predictions about future events. Over the course of the study, Tetlock collected quantitative data on over 82,000 predictions, as well as information from follow-up interviews with the subjects about the thought processes they'd used to come to those predictions.

His findings were surprising. Most of Tetlock's questions about the future events were put in the form of specific, multiple choice questions, with three possible answers. But for all their expertise, the pundits' predictions turned out to be correct less than 33% of the time. Which meant, as Lehrer puts it, that a "dart-throwing chimp" would have had a higher rate of success. Tetlock also found that the least accurate predictions were made by the most famous experts in the group.

Why was that? According to Lehrer,

"The central error diagnosed by Tetlock was the sin of certainty, which led the 'experts' to impose a top-down solution on their decision-making processes ... When pundits were convinced that they were right, they ignored any brain areas that implied they might be wrong."

Tetlock himself, Lehrer says, concluded that "The dominant danger [for pundits] remains hubris, the vice of closed-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilities too quickly." _Atlantic

In part, this is the phenomenon of the True Believer.  Humans are social animals and like reassurance that they are considered a valued part of the group.  It is also a manifestation of mental laziness.  It takes effort to change one's mind.  A person's entire life and lifestyle may be overturned by a justified and seemingly simple change of opinion.  In addition, as individuals age, they sink more deeply into the mental architecture they have constructed.

Personal opinions are fortified to protect the individual from the wildness and unpredictable threat "outside."  Stray too far from the safe, warm confines of personal prejudice and cognitive dissonance will swiftly set in.  Most modern humans are unequipped to deal with high levels of cognitive dissonance.  They quickly retreat back to the familiar. (PDF) They circle the bandwagons against the wild and unruly truths that howl in the night.(PDF)

This is our world, a world where college professors indoctrinate rather than educate, where journalists roam as a pack and savage anyone who threatens the dominant social and political memes, where scientists latch onto a theme which is popular with grant agencies and publishers -- and run with it despite all objective reality.

What would you like to do about it?

H/T Chicago Boyz

First published at Al Fin

Academic Indoctrination -- Obama Wants More

The University of Delaware program to brainwash its students into mindless leftist dogma may be lying dormant, temporarily. But Obama wants to expand the program to high schools -- to create his own National Service Corps of brown-shirted Nazi Youth like zombie minions. In order the be sure that these "Red Guard" lookalikes have gotten their minds right, Obama will instruct them all to undergo consciousness training.

And why not? These youth have very little future, once Obama has made mincemeat out of the economy for the next 50 years. May as well march to the drummer that pays that government check, eh?

Madrasas for Leftists: PC Universities Doomed?

There once was a time when the university environments of North America were not ones of indoctrination and brainwashing, as they often are now. Professor Alan Kors remembers those days:

I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term "the '60s" began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that's what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil's advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question.

...In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free-market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy's view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic....When I went off on job interviews, I was not once asked a question, ever, about my worldview, but only about my historical research and notions of teaching. Politics were simply not in the category of appropriate inquiry.

...What has changed? In terms of the university in loco parentis, which has been restored and expanded with a vengeance, the revolution has been breathtaking....From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

There also has been, compounding academic problems, a dumbing down of the professoriate that quite numbs the mind—best seen not in the monographs that earn people their degrees, but in the egregious nonsense, crude meta-theorizing, self-indulgence and tendentious special pleading that are not merely tolerated without criticism, but rewarded at the highest levels.

...Academia also has become a place where professors can achieve the highest rewards, except in the protected fields, for acting out their pathologies. In higher education, to paraphrase the Woody Allen stand-up line, we increasingly send our students to schools for learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed teachers....

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them? __WSJ__via_BelmontClub

In fact, Kors is understating the case--pulling his punches. The reality of the modern university is worse than he describes.

Richard Fernandez thinks that the age of academic indoctrination may be nearing its end. He draws that reassurance from J. Richard Gott's "doomsday argument. It is an interesting argument, related to the "anthropic principle" argument in nature. Thought-provoking, but not conclusive.

I sincerely hope that Fernandez (aka "Wretchard") is right. Universities of indoctrination are spewing out minds that are increasingly incapable of standard reasoning and logic. Too often a graduate of a liberal arts or social science program has never been exposed to divergent points of view--never learned to confront intelligent and reasonable people whose deeply held and closely reasoned ideas differ substantially from their own. Naturally he goes out into the world believing that all right-minded persons will believe as he does, and that all others are either dishonest, corrupt, or stupid.

All of that, before his pre-frontal lobes have even completely myelinated--before his powers of judgment have even come close to maturing. How could he possibly know better, unless someone at some point was willing to force him to delve deeply into diverse disciplines of thought and reason?

As Kors explains in his piece above, those halcyon days of intellectual diversity in the university are as good as gone. But is Fernandez right in supposing that this monolithic thought structure, this incompetence, this intolerance, is soon to meet its doom?

Society--in the form of the news and entertainment media, popular culture--has bonded itself to the PC worldview monoculture of the universities. Government bureaucracy increasingly adopts the same forms, and the bureaucracies of corporations and non-profit foundations have been increasingly moulding themselves according to PC intolerance.

There is no doubt that civilisation is attempting to transition from a religion-dominant culture to a secular-dominant culture. But it is not that easy. Society abhors the moral vacuum of the "middle ground." Secular morality has not truly stepped into the gap to provide a firm foundation for sound child-raising or a decent society. Leftist ideology has attempted to fill the void via many universities and much of the media, but for some reason, it has only done half the job. It has torn down most of the traditional moral icons of the civilisation, but its own moral forms have not been widely taken up by the society at large.

So instead of a culture confidently stepping out into the wide-open future, you see a fearful and insecure society full of self-doubt, questioning its own right to exist in the face of widespread poverty and misery elsewhere in the world. Entire nations are shrinking into the moral void, choosing anti-natalist ideas or going after comfort and security instead of taking risks on a wider future.

The human extinction movements are merely the extreme end point toward which a large part of the university educated are shuffling. Choosing to avoid children, or avoiding marriage altogether are other points along the same scale.

The quasi-suicidal carbon hysteria movement is a mere symptom of the basic intellectual nihilism that has followed university graduates into the culture at large. The true problem underlying the symptom is an inability to test hypotheses and theorems. If the hypothesis meets the long-term requirements of your ideology, put your emotions behind the idea, avoid the rational testing stage altogether, and use all the tools of human persuasion in your bag to put the idea over.

There are many other symptoms of the underlying problem, and it would be nice if we could deal with them all, one by one. That will be left to others, such as FIRE. Al Fin's emphasis will continue to focus on efforts to bring the "next level" into reality. The dumbing down of university students and graduates--and thus the dumbing down of society in general--does not help Al Fin's task.

Derived from a previous posting at Al Fin

Wishful Thinking Will Not Create the World You Wish

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream. Nathaniel Hawthorne

Source

During the early 1990s, it was fashionable in the west to declare "the end of history." Now that Eastern Europe had been liberated from its oppressive autocratic yoke of tyranny, many western academics and intellectuals believed that liberal democracy would continue to spread, to topple the fortresses of autocracy scattered thickly across the globe. Alas. The future they imagined was not to be.

The assumption that the death of communism would bring an end to disagreements about the proper form of government and society seemed more plausible in the 1990s, when both Russia and China were thought to be moving toward political as well as economic liberalism. Such a development would have produced a remarkable ideological convergence among all the great powers of the world and heralded a genuinely new era in human development.

But those expectations have proved misplaced. China has not liberalized but has shored up its autocratic government. Russia has turned away from imperfect liberalism decisively toward autocracy. Of the world 's great powers today, therefore, two of the largest, with over a billion and a half people, have governments that are committed to autocratic rule and seem to have the ability to sustain themselves in power for the foreseeable future with apparent popular approval.

Today the competition between them, along with the struggle of radical Islamists to make the world safe for their vision of Islamic theocracy, has become a defining feature of the international scene.

The differences between the two camps appear on many issues of lesser strategic importance -- China's willingness to provide economic and political support to certain African dictatorships that liberal governments in Europe and the United States find odious, for instance. But they are also shaping international relations at a more fundamental level. Contrary to expectations at the end of the Cold War, the question of "regime" or "polity" is once again becoming a main subject of international relations.

...Neither Russia nor China has any interest in assisting liberal nations in their crusade against autocracies around the world. Moreover, they can see their comparative advantage over the West when it comes to gaining influence with African, Asian, or Latin American governments that can provide access to oil and other vital natural resources or that, in the case of Burma, are strategically located. Moscow knows it can have more influence with governments in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan because, unlike the liberal West, it can unreservedly support their regimes. And the more autocracies there are in the world, the less isolated Beijing and Moscow will be in international forums such as the United Nations. The more dictatorships there are, the more global resistance they will offer against the liberal West 's efforts to place limits on sovereignty in the interest of advancing liberalism.

The general effect of the rise of these two large autocratic powers, therefore, will be to increase the likelihood that autocracy will spread in some parts of the world. This is not because Russia and China are evangelists for autocracy or want to set off a worldwide autocratic revolution. It is not the Cold War redux. It is more like the nineteenth century redux. Then, the absolutist rulers of Russia and Austria shored up fellow autocracies -- in France, for instance -- and used force to suppress liberal movements in Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain.

....It is no longer possible to speak of an "international community." The term suggests agreement on international norms of behavior, an international morality, even an international conscience. The idea of such a community took hold in the 1990s, at a time when the general assumption was that the movement of Russia and China toward western liberalism was producing a global commonality of thinking about human affairs. But by the late 1990s it was already clear that the international community lacked a foundation of common understanding. This was exposed most blatantly in the war over Kosovo, which divided the liberal West from both Russia and China and from many other non-European nations. Today it is apparent on the issue of Sudan and Darfur. In the future, incidents that expose the hollowness of the term "international community" will likely proliferate.

....Today there is little sense of shared morality and common political principle among the great powers. Quite the contrary: There is suspicion, growing hostility, and the well-grounded view on the part of the autocracies that the democracies, whatever they say, would welcome their overthrow. Any concert among them would be built on a shaky foundation likely to collapse at the first serious test.

American foreign policy should be attuned to these ideological distinctions and recognize their relevance to the most important strategic questions. It is folly to expect China to help undermine a brutal regime in Khartoum or to be surprised if Russia rattles its saber at pro-Western democratic governments near its borders.

....The United States should express support for democracy in word and deed without expecting immediate success. It should support the development of liberal institutions and practices, understanding that elections alone do not guarantee a steady liberal democratic course.


....Today radical Islamists are the last holdout against these powerful forces of globalization and modernization. They seek to carve out a part of the world where they can be left alone, shielded from what they regard as the soul-destroying licentiousness of unchecked liberalism and capitalism. The tragedy for them is that their goal is impossible to achieve. Neither the United States nor the other great powers will turn over control of the Middle East to these fundamentalist forces, if only because the region is of such vital strategic importance to the rest of the world. The outside powers have strong internal allies as well, including the majority of the populations of the Middle East who have been willing and even eager to make peace with modernity. Nor is it conceivable in this modern world that a people can wall themselves off from modernity even if the majority wanted to. Could the great Islamic theocracy that al Qaeda and others hope to erect ever completely block out the sights and sounds of the rest of the world and thereby shield their people from the temptations of modernity? The mullahs have not even succeeded at doing that in Iran. The project is fantastic.

The world is thus faced with the prospect of a protracted struggle in which the goals of the extreme Islamists can never be satisfied because neither the United States nor anyone else has the ability to give them what they want. The West is quite simply not capable of retreating as far as the Islamic extremists require.

If retreat is impossible, perhaps the best course is to advance. Of the many bad options in confronting this immensely dangerous problem, the best may be to hasten the process of modernization in the Islamic world: more modernization, more globalization, faster.

....In the 1990s serious thinkers predicted the end of wars and military confrontations among great powers. European "postmodernism" seemed to be the future: the abandonment of power politics in favor of international institutions capable of managing the disagreements among nations.


...Perhaps it was these grand expectations of a new era for humankind that helped spur the anger and outrage at American policies of the past decade. It is not that those policies are in themselves so different, or in any way out of character for the United States. It is that to many people in Europe and even in the United States, they have seemed jarringly out of place in a world that was supposed to have moved on.

As we now know, however, both nationalism and ideology were already making their comeback in the 1990s. Russia had ceased to be and no longer desired to be a "quasi-member" of the West, and partly because of NATO enlargement. China was already on its present trajectory and had already determined that American hegemony was a threat to its ambitions. The forces of radical Islam had already begun their jihad, globalization had already caused a backlash around the world, and the juggernaut of democracy had already stalled and begun to tip precariously.

Much more at the Source

Most people have come to realise that the forces of history continued unabated, undiminished throughout the 1990s to the present day. But the temptation remains to declare that the natural state of humanity is a harmonious community of nations with common aims and goals.

It is almost irresistibly tempting to blame the imperfect state of the world on a single person, a group of persons, or an entire nation. Without this person, these people, the world would revert to its natural perfection and harmony.

That is the delusion of utopia, in the service of petty politics in the mind of a lobotomised neotenate.

Torture: The Reality

While a lot of people who apparently don't get out a lot railed and screeched over Abu Ghraib's famed "panties on the head" abuse of prisoners, very few of these pseudo-intellectuals can be bothered to comment about the genuine bloody torture that is occurring on the battlefield of the Long War.

The Smoking Gun describes the instructions contained in an al-Qaeda torture manual found by US troops in a raid on a safe house in Iraq. (Warning graphic drawings)

In a recent raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Iraq, U.S. military officials recovered an assortment of crude drawings depicting torture methods like “blowtorch to the skin” and “eye removal.” Along with the images, which you’ll find on the following pages, soldiers seized various torture implements, like meat cleavers, whips, and wire cutters.

What? No humiliating body searches by women or the disrepectful handling of Korans?

Silence on Torture: Silence is complicity, you know. (Instapundit)

For somebody who loves torture stories to death, there’s lots of silence about this from Andrew Sullivan who’s busy slamming Catholics, sniffing out homophobia, rooting about with Ron Paul and showing the view from somebody’s window. It’s just work, work, work, for Andrew.

Don Surber asks and answers: What was Amnesty International’s reaction? — cricket chirp

“Given the media’s fascination with what American soldiers were doing at Abu Ghraib, is it safe to assume that the same level of attention will be given to what our enemy is doing? Or, would that be too much like journalism?” (Newsbusters)

Source

The media, and the less bright bloggers, appear to be fixated on the exaggeration of the sins of coalition forces, and completely blind to the actual horror that is being faced by the western world. These self-lobotomised bloggers and journalists were all over Abu Ghraib, but since looking at the real threats to civilisation might upset some of their "readers," they choose to ignore the real problems.

Respect them? What is there to respect?

Refuge from Perpetual Incompetence #1: Military Option

Regular readers of Al Fin blog are familiar with the concept of psychological neoteny. The societies of western developed nations and particularly North American societies, have adopted a method of child-rearing that results in the perpetual incompetence of an idle adolescence. By age-segregating children in classrooms of indoctrination, by removing children from all responsibility and exposure to the adult world of work, western societies are creating entire generations of incompetent and narcissistic know-nothings and do-nothings.

But there are notable refuges from the world of perpetual incompetence and irrelevance--one of which is the military. In the military there is no escape from responsibility, and no excuse for not developing the competencies of your current rating and assignment. You are thrown in with persons of all ages, backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, and experiences. You are expected to learn how to do your job, and to do it professionally.

The modern military is as much about disaster relief, and providing order for rebuilding a devastated region, as it is about fighting and killing an enemy. Military members are encouraged to improve themselves, and many gain degrees while in the service, through online courses.

Joel, who is stationed in Baghdad with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Stryker Brigade Combat Team, earned his degree through online courses and hopes to be able to watch the ceremony through an online link-up.

"A lot of it has involved slipping in homework in between missions and rest time. But there's always the unforeseen, though," Joel, 36, said Wednesday in a phone interview from Iraq. "Taking courses online gives me a sense of normalcy. ... As one class completes, I'm that much closer to being home."

According to military publications, more than 40,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq have enrolled in online college courses.

Denver Post

By acquiring real world skills in a genuine world atmosphere, while still being able to earn credits and degrees online, members of the military are able to bypass the academic lobotomy that millions of on-campus university students receive every year.

While their home societies are preparing their civilian cohorts for perpetual incompetence, military members are seeing much of the world firsthand, and working side by side with people from other cultures for both peacekeeping, disaster relief, and making war.

Military members who do not make a career of the military often join reserve units or national guard units, to combine their civilian lives with continued service to their country. Career military members often retire by age 38, at which time many of them join city, county, state, or federal agencies of law enforcement or other active civil service agencies that require competent workers.

Competence is rare in a neotenous society. You have to look for it.

The Angry Left? No, That Would Be Redundant

If using the term, "nappy headed hos" can get a person fired, vilified, demonised, and castrated, imagine the aftermath. Courageous athletes and head coach of an excellent athletic team reduced to wallowing in self-pity. A governor lying in an intensive care unit on a ventilator. A presidential candidate attempting to use the team as a springboard in her presidential ambitions.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton finally dropped by Rutgers to meet with the school's women's basketball coach -- but the players themselves skipped the half-hour meeting, citing their studies and Imus fatigue.

Perhaps they grew tired of wallowing.

Ms. Clinton could have used some more wallowing from the players, particularly since she is vying for the endorsement of Al Sharpton--master wallower--against Barak Obama in the 2008 US presidential election.

And how about the Duke university "gang of 88", and their ho-like refusal to apologize to the Duke players they had libeled, defamed, and attempted to bury. I like to call them monkeys, rather than professors, as their behaviour warrants.

Fortunately for the monkeys of Duke, universities across North America are controlled by the angry left.

Houston Baker, the Duke faculty member who wrote the appalling letter about the alleged rape, got rewarded with a job offer at Vanderbilt where he is now distinguished professor. He has never apologized or retracted his Salem-witch trial like rantings.

Being a member of the angry left, like being an islamist, means never having to say you are sorry.

Why won’t the Duke president or the culpable faculty apologize?

Because deeply entrenched among the Left is a notion of moral justice that transcends the law and is now to be adjudicated by elites versed in race/class/gender theories. In this way of thinking the “rape” is just a matter of semantics, the law an obstruction to the larger question still unresolved: a poor black woman performed sexually for white rich males.

De facto this is an indictment of our entire male-dominated capitalist system that put the poor, the female, the person of color in bondage to the white, male and wealthy.

In that prism, technicalities of law don’t matter and surely don’t address these larger pathologies so endemic in the United States, against which the university nearly alone exists to combat. That the “victim” lied under oath, ruined the reputations of innocents, was on drugs, was engaged in promiscuous sexual activity, and had a criminal record is simply proof of her victim status.

[Leftists] are endlessly tolerant of rude behavior, as long as the ox being gored isn’t one of their own. You see Imus committed the ultimate Liberal sin; he lampooned one of the Liberal media’s “sacred cows.”

Now, was Imus a young, angry, black “artist,” his use of the terms “nappy headed ho’s” and “jiggaboo wannabe’s” his comments most probably have gone unmarked. If he had used similar racially charged language about a white football team, or say a…um…I don’t know…a…white, Southern lacrosse team, for instance, this entire event would not even have warranted a page 7 paragraph in the New York Lies…uh…Times or the Washington Pest…err…Post (sorry, I just keep making that mistake), but Imus is white, male, and he crossed the sacred line. He exercised his Constitutional right to free speech against the wrong group.

The point of this screed is that there is no “reserve of decency” in today’s [Leftist] Paleo-media, there are only sacred cows (or cattle, I’m not sure which).

Source

Leftists are angry, which today is only to say that leftists are leftists. Condemned to ally themselves with islamists in seeking to overthrow western civilisation and its legacy, leftists can only seek to destroy. Expect to see a lot of that.

The Modern North American University Statement of Purpose?

The revolutionary and progressive characteristics of this university are due to the revolutionary and progressive characteristics of its staff and its courses.

The educational principles of the university are: ‘Correct political orientation, plain, hard-working style, flexible strategy and tactics’.

We must overcome difficulties, contact the masses, and heighten our militancy. Anyone who is not politically correct does not deserve to be a student of this university, for he acts against the rules of this university.

To the class of graduates: ‘You must be brave, resolute, and tenacious. You must learn through struggles and be prepared to sacrifice your freedoms for the liberation of the world.

Written for the Production Drive of the university ‘Study on the one hand, agitate on the other; overcome ideological adversaries and unnerve the enemies.’ ‘Now study and agitate. In future you will rule over the counter-revolutionaries.’

The style of the university: ‘Unity, alertness, earnestness, and political correctness.’

Paraphrased from Mao's words of wisdom.

Well, anyway, it seems to be the accepted approach to education at the University of New Mexico Law School.

Strong Leftist Bias in University Threatens Ability of Schools to Educate

Education is meant to instill in the student both the love of learning and the ability to sort through ideas and evidence in order to arrive at the most workable solutions and systems of thought and action. But if the information available to students in university is so skewed toward a particular point of view--excluding the broad spectrum of ideas prevalent in the real world--the university cannot perform its vital function for the student.

This 2005 study by researchers at Smith College, University of Toronto, and Center of Media and Public Affairs, should put to rest the claims by leftist professors that the university is not skewed to the left.

The study shows that in the arts and social sciences, and soft sciences, the faculty is almost certain to consist of mostly leftists. The proportion of leftist to mainstream is closer to 50:50 in the harder sciences and engineering faculties--where competence must be demonstrated, and where training is more rigorous and demanding.

It is no surprise that leftists tend to flock to areas where competence-testing is rare, and based upon subjective peer appraisal rather than unforgiving objective criteria, as in harder sciences and engineering. This allows them to pretend to be knowledgeable and expert in an area without actually needing to demonstrate any competence--except to other members of their in-group. Circular jerkulating is the rule in those departments of university.

Read the study before commenting, as a favour to others.

Brainwash U--A Tour of America's Universities

If you haven't been on campus for a while, you may be unaware of what universities in North America have become--indoctrination centers.

The active suppression of conservative (non-leftist) ideas extended to extra-curricular speaking and activities programs which supported almost exclusively leftwing viewpoints, and to required freshman reading programs, which assigned only leftwing texts, and to supplemental course offerings – the “house” program at Duke University is a striking example -- where professors voluntarily provided students with training sessions in Marxism and other radical creeds under the guise of enriching their academic “education.”

Another form of ideological suppression conducted by faculty ideologues was the abusive treatment of conservative ideas and conservative students in the classroom itself.

Source.

Go ahead and take the tour. The brainwashing tour.

I would not be as concerned about the heavy-handed leftist takeover of the universities if not for one thing--there is no room on campuses now for the diversity of ideas. Without this exposure to a diversity of ideas--the only kind of diversity that is important to students--today's students will never learn to think for themselves. Perhaps this is what the brainwashers want--it certainly appears so.

But the western world must face a serious outside threat posed by a fascist and bloody religious extremism from the middle east, if it is to survive. Handicapping the minds of the brightest youth does nothing to increase the strength of western societies--just the opposite.

Young people are expected to be leftists, naturally. But as they gain experience in the real world, the more intelligent will curb their leftism as they acquire wisdom and perspective. When their higher education is so strongly biased to a caricatured left, as it is today, many students will lose the opportunity for true independence that university is supposed to present.

Role-Playing Islam in Schools--Stop Pussy-Footing And go Hard Core!

There are some public school districts inside the US that have implemented a 3-week program of Islamic role-playing, as a way of teaching american students about other cultures. But in the truest traditions of multiculturalism, they watered Islam down into an inoffensive, wimpish, unrecognizable sissy-culture that has nothing to do with the real world.

The 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco ruled that muslim role-playing exercises in tax funded schools are okay:

In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:

Reciting aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful . . . ."

Memorizing the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger."

Chanting "Praise be to Allah" in response to teacher prompts.

Professing as "true" the Muslim belief that "The Holy Quran is God's word."

Giving up candy and TV to demonstrate Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

Designing prayer rugs, taking an Arabic name and essentially "becoming a Muslim" for two full weeks.

Parents of seventh-graders, who after 9-11 were taught the pro-Islamic lessons as part of California's world history curriculum, sued under the First Amendment ban on religious establishment. They argued, reasonably, that the government was promoting Islam.

But a federal judge appointed by President Clinton told them in so many words to get over it, that the state was merely teaching kids about another "culture."

So the parents appealed. Unfortunately, the most left-wing court in the land got their case. The 9th Circuit, which previously ruled in favor of an atheist who filed suit against the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, upheld the lower court ruling.

The decision is a major victory for the multiculturalists and Islamic apologists in California and across the country who've never met a culture or religion they didn't like — with the exception of Western civilization and Christianity. They are legally in the clear to indoctrinate kids into the "peaceful" and "tolerant" religion of Islam, while continuing to denigrate Judeo-Christian values.

Source.

The pathetically diluted form of "Islam" presented to school children said nothing about it being okay to rape girls who do not wear the hijab. The absurdly unrealistic "role-playing" did not include honour killings or shahid suicide bombings of civilian women and children. Somehow they forgot to teach the children about going away to Iran, Syria, or Pakistan to learn terrorist tactics, or ways of betraying your fellow american citizens to a supremacist, alien culture.

Why did the public school system's particular style of role-playing choose to omit some of the most salient aspects of the most expansive forms of Islam in existence at this time? Why not role-play a "consciousness raising session" where the masses are driven to a homicidal frenzy over a few cartoons? Why not teach Sharia in its pure and undiluted form? Were they afraid that genuine exposure to a foreign culture would not fit into "multicultural ideals?"

Why not role-play a school fire where religious policemen forbid the girls from leaving the burning building because they were not properly attired for public viewing--resulting in the burning deaths of several girls? Why not role-play a child caught shoplifting candy and given a sentence of hand amputation for the crime? Why not role-play a girl's honour killing for innocently talking to a boy in public who is not a family member? Why not simulate a child walking into a pizza shop full of civilian teenage boys and girls, and blowing himself up and killing dozens and wounding dozens more? Why not role-play a thirteen year old girl being married to a much older cousin for economic reasons, and being taught to submit to her husband in all things.What is the problem with accurate depiction of a death-worshiping culture, if you are going to teach multiculturalism? Why not get real--go hard core?

What would the 9th Circuit Court say about a role-playing exercise that follows the reality of the death-loving culture much more closely? What would most school districts in the US say about such an exercise?