It’s a culture of victimhood.
[Update a couple minutes later]
An open letter to the administration from Emory alumni. I’d be embarrassed myself.
[Update early afternoon]
Schools like Emory trivialize education by empowering little student dictators.
And this is Harvard. “Cost of attending Harvard College: $64,400 per year.”
I’m always amused by things like this:
Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on,” says Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Very few talked about warfare.”
Because they bought into Rousseau’s “noble savage” BS.
I suspect there’s still a lot more that we don’t know about human history than we do.
Judith Curry’s thoughts on Michael Shermer’s thoughts:
Beyond Georgia Tech, I have visited many campuses over the past several years, and I was invited to talk in most instances to present an alternative perspective on climate change. One of the universities was Oberlin, which featured prominently in Shermer’s article. There is a club of young republicans and libertarians, which receives contributions from a donor to invite speakers on a range of topics to add diversity. Apparently I was sufficiently tame or insufficiently known to have instigated much of a backlash.
Apart from the social issues that are of primary concern in Shermer’s article, I am particularly concerned about all this promoting groupthink in terms of actual research in the social and natural sciences. I don’t see a near term solution, but I think that heterodox academy.org and the blogosphere are making a difference.
It’s an ongoing battle for freedom.
“Hey, Bernie, don’t lecture me on socialism; I lived through it.”
[Late-morning update]
Related: Five economic myths that will not die.
A lot of economics is counterintuitive to many.
When people ask why college tuition is so high, defenders of the higher-education system point to things like “Baumol’s cost disease” (costs in industries without much productivity growth tend to rise, because they have to compete for labor with more productive industries) and declining state contributions to public colleges. No doubt these play a part. But this cannot explain the vast upgrades in college residential amenities that have taken place in the 20 years since I graduated from college, when a student union and some ivy on the walls was about the best you could expect.
But of course, our parents were paying for it, and they didn’t care whether we had a swimming pool. A certain Spartan element was supposed to be part of the ritual of college attendance, just as it had been when they were in college. What changed? I suspect the answer is that rising tuition, and the increasing reliance on student loans, has placed more of the financial responsibility into the hands of students. And the students shop for colleges based on … well, about what you’d expect when you give tens of thousands of dollars to 18-year-olds and ask where they’d like to spend the next four years.
This is policy insanity.
I think we’ve come to the point at which academia is just one huge case of Poe’s Law.
What they’re really all about.
They’re about totalitarianism, and stamping out any thoughts that deviate from DoublePlusGoodThink.
A long but very interesting piece on the overconfidence of the incompetent, by David Dunning (of Dunning-Kruger fame). For some reason, I think it has some relevance to the Trump phenomenon, and politics in general.
For the record, I have never had a problem claiming my ignorance on a topic.
A good description of how Rubio and Cruz (finally) teamed up to expose Trump as a fraudulent incoherent empty suit. And I find Christie’s and Huckabee’s endorsements of him despicable.
[Update a few minutes later]
Does anyone actually believe that Trump is being audited because he’s a “strong Christian”?
Even Trump’s sincere Christian supporters don’t believe that he’s a very sincere Christian, at least according to the very polls Trump prints out and sleeps on like a dragon atop a pile of gold. (Though, looked at from the right angle, it’s more like a guinea pig hoarding all the shredded-paper cage-lining.) In fact, only 5 percent of Republicans believe that Trump is “very religious,” while nearly half think he’s “not at all” religious or “not too religious.” I know he now says that “nobody reads the Bible more than me.” But, again, I can’t imagine anyone actually believes him. (I also would have thought this is the kind of lie truly God-fearing people would not utter, for fear of, you know, lightning bolts or salt-pillarification.)
Anyway, all of this public religiosity is fairly new. Before he ran for president, if you played the word-association game with 100,000 Americans, I’d venture that not one of them would have said “Christian!” when asked, “What first comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump?”
Apparently, according to Trump, that’s only true of normal Americans. The IRS is different. It’s like the eye of Sauron searching the land for “strong Christians.” When its cruel gaze landed upon the failed casino magnate, beauty-pageant impresario, thrice-married and confessed adulterer who’s talked about how his own daughter is so hot he’d date her if she wasn’t his daughter and bragged about how it doesn’t matter what critics say about you so long as “you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” and who told Howard Stern that his ability to avoid getting the clap while sleeping around was his “personal Vietnam,” the IRS immediately saw the truth of the matter.
Suddenly, the alarms at the IRS Christian persecution squad started flashing. Over the P.A. system came: “Code Red! We’ve got a ‘strong Christian’ in sector 7!”
If you don’t see that Trump is a con man, you’re the mark.
[Update a while later]
Ace explains why Trump is no Ronald Reagan (and I’d note that “Steve Goddard” on Twitter has lost his mind on this issue):
A big problem I have with Trump not knowing things, and clearly never have thought about things, combined with his obvious desire to pander and make the big sale, is that when he’s caught out without any good answer, and senses that he’s losing the room with an unpopular answer, he usually (75% of the time) tries to get back on the right side of popular opinion and embrace the liberal position on the issue.
You couldn’t do that to Reagan, because Reagan always had a series of facts to back him up, and because he’d been thinking about things — not feeling about them; thinking about them, theorizing about them — for years, like during his famous GE addresses.
Unlike Trump, he never felt that he was “losing the room” with an unpopular conservative answer. He was always confident and in command, because he had earned being confident and in command. He had done the homework — he wasn’t some Millennial who had feelz that xe was right. He was a thinking, intellectually-voracious man who tested his own thoughts until he knew he was right, because he’d looked at the question from several directions.
When Reagan felt he was addressing a hostile crowd, he didn’t immediately attempt to placate them by offering them a liberal position he flip-flopped to on the spot. Instead, he went into his mental note-card file and tried to convince them of the conservative opinion.
And a lot of the time, he did.
My problem with Trump is that he is a dealmaker trying to make a sale. Right now he’s trying to make a deal with conservatives — so this is the very most conservative we’ll ever see him.
If he gets the nomination, he now starts working on making the second part of the deal with the other party in the negotiations, the general public.
So this is the most conservative we’ll ever see Trump — this is the absolute most conservative he’ll ever be — and he’s not conservative at all, except, possibly, on immigration. He combines liberal policy impulses with frankly authoritarian or even fascist ones, which he thinks are “what conservatives want,” because, frankly, he conceives of us as ugly-minded, stupid dummies who get off on this shit.
That’s why he didn’t put the “Ban Muslims” line in a more palatable, persuasive form, like “Reduce immigration from Muslim-majority countries or countries with a terrorism problem to a level where we can vet each individual applicant.”
No, he put it in the most bigoted, ugly way he could think of, because that’s about his level, and because, also, that’s what he thinks “conservatives” are.
Yup. It’s ironic that his supporters think he “tells it like it is,” when he really tells it like he thinks his audience du jour wants to hear it.