It’s foolish to conflate educational level with intelligence, particularly when in many cases the “education” is a maleducation with a credential.
Category Archives: Education
British Comedy, And “Diversity”
Thoughts from Terry Gilliam and Ed Driscoll. I remember (barely) That Was The Week That Was.
Facebook’s “Fact Checking”
You’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that it’s one sided. I wonder if all this social-media censorship will revivify the blogosphere?
[Thursday afternoon update]
Facebook’s algorithm removed the text of the Declaration of Independence as “hate speech.” Because of course it did. I mean, Jefferson was a slaveholder.
Happy Birthday, America!
It’s the 242nd anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, and 155th since the victory at Gettysburg and fall of Vicksburg, sealing the ultimate fate of the Confederacy. It’s also Calvin Coolidge’s birthday (1872) and he gave a very memorable speech on the subject in 1926.
Sadly, though, the same political party that lost that war, and particularly young people whom they’ve maleducated from kindergarten through college, seems to continue to hate America.
[Afternoon update]
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s a great quote from that Coolidge speech:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Yes. Collectivism is the oldest game in the book.
[Update a while later]
I just realized that he gave that speech on the sesquicentennial.
[Thursday noon update]
(Formerly Portuguese) Sara Hoyt: Conceived in liberty:
I’d worked. I’d worked at becoming an American.
Afterward came the INS crawling all over our papers and asking the strangest questions about things like the fact we had no children (despite much trying). They wanted to make sure we had a real marriage, see, not a sham to get citizenship. I’m all right with that.
Because it’s important to want to be an American. And it’s important to do it properly so you know you belong. It’s important to believe in the rights of others to their own liberty and their own property. You can be a citizen of this great country with no chicanery.
On that day I took the oath like I took my marriage vows. As words that change you inside. Afterward, we went out to lunch, then came home, and I went out to get the mail, and I felt that this was now my country — that I belonged. We all have a place in the world, and this is mine.
I’m an American. It’s an amazing thing to be, a part of a country that’s something new in the world.
You see, the natural way for humans to live is to be subjected to some tyrant, to the whims of some strong man. Some other countries, like England, have curbed (used to have curbed) the rights of those in power to mistreat them. But no country has devoted itself as fully to the cause of individual liberty as we have.
Sure, we squabble over what that means, and some of our elected officials are disgraces. Sure, we face a very difficult fight to continue existing. Yes, the socialists in the failed state to the South pose a danger, because we can’t afford Venezuela on our doorstep or the streaming hordes coming over the border to make us into copies of what they left behind. (And you thought Californians were bad.) Sure, many of our compatriots are that only in name and seem to want only to bring us low and destroy us.
What? You expected a cake walk?
We are something quite new in the world. You expected the old to accept us with applause?
Our very existence shames them and makes them feel their smallness. And of course they’ve convinced the weak-minded in our midst — many of them self-proclaimed intelligentsia — to fight on their side and against us.
No one said it would be easy. Liberty is always a generation from extinction. And that’s if we’re lucky.
This reminds me of Elon Musk’s saying that he wasn’t born in America, but he got here as soon as he could.
[Late afternoon update]
College grads feel less patriotic than non college grads. Great job, academia.
The Hockey Stick Emails
An appeals court is compelling the University of Arizona to (finally) release them.
The sixth anniversary of the blog post that launched Michael Mann’s lawsuit against me and Mark Steyn is coming up next week.
Corporate Recruiters
They’re paying far too much attention to prestigious degrees.
Yes. There’s no reason to think that will give them better employees. And all this does is continue to inflate the disastrous higher-ed bubble.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related: Students complain that a professor’s op-ed makes them feel bad.
Stop Trivializing Naziism
Thoughts from David Harsanyi:
It’s difficult to take this spurious reasoning seriously, but simply because you think you detect some trace parallels between what Nazis engaged in and contemporary politics doesn’t make them comparable in any important way. The Nazis adopted a bunch of socialist policies, but that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a would-be Himmler.
Admittedly, there is huge space in-between zero tolerance and lawlessness at the border. But none of the positions that have been taken in American political discourse so far portends the Fourth Reich. Switzerland and Japan, to name just two liberal democracies, have far stricter immigration laws than the United States, and neither is on the cusp of fascism. Simply because the arbitrary number of allowable immigrants you’ve come up with differs from that of your political opponent doesn’t make that person a budding sociopath.
I've never seen a week in which the Holocaust, Nazis, Dred Scott and Korematsu were so trivialized.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) June 26, 2018
Disrupting Education
Elon has started a private school. I like the name.
The Climate Wars
The (rare) voices of reason:
10. Can we put the polarization genie back in the bottle, on climate or anything else? I really don’t know. But I do wonder how those advocating further radicalization of climate advocacy imagine any of this ends.
11. Making ever more radical demands might be a fine strategy were there someone to negotiate with. But by the reckoning of most prominent climate hawks, there isn’t.
12. Nor does it appear that a more inclusive climate coalition is likely to bring larger congressional majorities. Any Democrat-only climate strategy has to be predicated on not only winning but holding purple/red districts over multiple elections.
13. These are precisely the districts that radicalized climate rhetoric alienates culturally and the green policy agenda punishes economically. Since the failure of cap and trade in 2010, climate activists have taken rhetoric to 11, and what it got them was Trump.
And it will continue to.
Remembering Bobby Kennedy
I remember waking up on a school day to hear that he’d been shot out in California. That was a rough couple months, between it and the earlier MLK assassination. Fifty years on, a useful reminder that much of the history has been rewritten, and that both he and JFK were highly overrated. Teddy was scum, but apparently some Americans have need for royalty.
More thoughts from Ed Driscoll.