Category Archives: Education

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Mess On Campus

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Are we creating a generation of mentally-ill, credentialed, physically mature children?

These people will never survive in the real world.

[Update a couple minutes later]

What the Yale shame should teach us.

I spent a lot of time in Columbia over the past couple weeks.

Somehow, this seems like cheap theatrics. I suspect that if they’d had a chance at a bowl, they wouldn’t have made this threat. Amusingly, I heard this morning that the basketball team (which I’d imagine has a black player or two) wants nothing to do with it. But they still have hopes for a successful season.

[Tuesday-morning update]

The “collective guilt of white people in Missouri“:

The goal is not to establish responsibility and identify actual perpetrators. The actual goal is power: the power to make demands that will be obeyed—the power to turn the tables and reverse the power differential, putting the protesters in charge of what Allan Bloom called the “dancing bears” in the university faculty and/or administration. A central demand of protesters such as those at Missouri is almost always a university-wide process of mind-control and intimidation, with the mandatory requirement that administrators offer and faculty and students attend classes and/or workshops that describe exactly what is now required in terms of speech, thought, and behavior that the protesters deem acceptable.

In other words, the protesters want to become the official campus propagandists. Perhaps they already have done so.

Yes. And in addition to the re-education camps, they won’t be satisfied with these two scalps.

Oopsie, that was racist, I guess.

[Update a while later]

Remember this is one of the top “journalism” schools in the country:

“You need to back up if you’re with the media!” a voice in the background yelled to the journalists trying to document the protest. “You need to respect the students! Back up!”

“I am a student,” Tim Tai, a student photographer trying to cover the protest, responded.

After Tai protested that the crowd was trying to push him, several people in the crowd laughed, tried to cover the camera with their hands, and responded, “Okay, then we’ll just block you.”

“You don’t have a right to take our photos,” one of the protesters asserted, apparently unaware that he was on taxpayer-funded public property that is by law open to the press.

Later in the video, the crowd aggressively started pushing the reporter around in an attempt to get him to stop covering their behavior.

As noted, I suspect they don’t think that police has such a right to “privacy” from being photographed. Freedom for me, not for thee.

[Afternoon update]

This is a little good news. The J-School faculty is voting to withdraw the courtesy appointment of the little fascist.

Business, Culinary, Education, Health, History, Technology and Society

Fixing Broken Bread

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An interesting article on going back to pre-industrial wheat.

It isn’t clear the degree to which grain is intrinsically bad for us, and to which it’s been made much worse by the current varieties and processing methods.

I found this an interesting statement: “The giant band of wheat that stripes the center of America is a byproduct of the industrial age.”

That could be said of many unhealthy things, including the public school system.

Education, History, Law

“I Love Free Speech…”

3 Comments

…but:

In less awful news, 95 percent of the students surveyed said that free speech is important to them. However, as I have long predicted and discussed, when you ask Americans if they like free speech, they nearly always say “yes.” But when you get into the nitty gritty details about what kind of speech warrants protection, you discover that some folks (especially college students) are more in the “I love free speech, but…” camp. And I fear the list of exceptions is growing larger by the day.

Not sure which is more dismaying, that they’re unaware of the First Amendment, or that they oppose it. But clearly the Left is continuing its march through the institutions. Which is why books like this one could be very valuable:

Why a father-son collaboration? That’s what I wanted to know, too, so I asked the elder Paulsen, who was a year ahead of me at Yale Law School. Mike reported that he had given a lecture at Princeton in 2006, after which the law professors and college professors at dinner complained about their students’ “goofed-up ideas” about the Constitution. The law professors blamed the college professors, the college professors said “they came to us this way,” and blamed pervasively bad ideas about the Constitution in the culture, the media and even textbooks. Stuck in an airport the next day, Prof. Paulsen killed time writing an outline.

If they can get them to read it. The problem starts in kindergarten, and extends all the way into post-docs.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Income Inequality

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What Bernie Sanders doesn’t understand about it.

To be fair, of course, I don’t think Bernie Sanders understands anything about anything.

Related: Bernie Sanders and the fixed-pie fallacy. He (like all Marxists) doesn’t understand that wealth is created, or how. He thinks it’s just something to be magically redistributed.

[Update a few minutes later]

Unfortunately for the Marxists, the American people don’t think that wealth inequality is a crisis. They don’t think that climate change is, either. It barely makes the list.

[Update a few minutes later]

Dems appeal to “progressives,” not all Americans.

There’s nothing progressive about them. Forced wealth redistribution is the oldest game in the book. Free markets are what are new and revolutionary.

Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

News College-Bound Men Can Use

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Four questions men should ask when selecting a college:

Since most college handbooks now define sexual assault broadly to include pretty much everything, one’s best bet is to avoid sex in college altogether. Colleges have enacted policies that allow non-students to bring accusations against students, so dating off campus isn’t safe either.

There’s really nothing that can be done to protect oneself from an accusation in the current climate. Sorry to sound so dire, but when a school puts up posters suggesting that even a sip of alcohol renders a women unable to give consent, things have gotten dire.

…I apologize if this seems like fearmongering, but college campuses are no longer safe for students accused of sexual assault. Due process rights have gone out the window because, activists tell us, this issue is so important that draconian measures must be taken. Their message is clear: Due process is fine and dandy for criminal courts, but this is a college campus, damn it, due process has no place here for those accused of felonies.

This is all making on-line education look better and better. And once again kudos to Ashe for being all over this beat.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Gary Gygax

1 Comment

Thoughts on his suggested reading list:

Ideological diversity in science fiction and fantasy was a given in the seventies. We are hopelessly homogenistic in comparison to them.

The program of political correctness of the past several decades has made even writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore all but unreadable to an entire generation. The conditioning is so strong, some people have almost physical reactions to the older stories now.

All part of the reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did as a kid.

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Columbus Day

20 Comments

Some perennial thoughts from Instapundit (and Jim Bennett).

I agree that Columbus gets too much credit, and I don’t disagree that his behavior was depraved by modern lights. But the Carib Arawak were hardly the noble savages that the SJWs would have us believe. They had themselves subjugated the Taino, killing, raping, assimilating, into a brutal patriarchal society that practiced human sacrifice and, by some accounts, cannibalism. So it’s amusing to see all the whining about Columbus in that context.

Business, Education, General, Media Criticism, Social Commentary

The Alleged Rules Of Writing

5 Comments

…are actually superstitions. An interesting essay from Steven Pinker:

I have long recognised the need for a style guide based on modern linguistics and cognitive science. The manuals written by journalists and essayists often had serviceable rules of thumb, but they were also idiosyncratic, crabby, and filled with folklore and apocrypha. Linguistics experts, for their part, have been scathing about the illogic and ignorance in traditional advice on usage, but have been unwilling to proffer their own pointers to which rules to follow or how to use grammar effectively. The last straw in my decision to sit down and write the book was getting back a manuscript that had been mutilated by a copy editor who, I could tell, was mindlessly enforcing rules that had been laid out in some ancient style book as if they were the Ten Commandments.

As in many other life activities, it’s OK to break the “rules” if a) you know the rules and the reasons for them and b) you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, that’s a rare combination.

I liked this:

The real problem is that writing, unlike speaking, is an unnatural act. In the absence of a conversational partner who shares the writer’s background and who can furrow her brows or break in and ask for clarification when he stops making sense, good writing depends an ability to imagine a generic reader and empathise about what she already knows and how she interprets the flow of words in real time. Writing, above all, is a topic in cognitive psychology.

It’s what I try to do when I write, though it’s always best to have someone else read it to say, “what do you mean by that?”