It’s sort of like Godzilla versus Bambi.
Category Archives: Education
Freedom Of Speech
An eighteen-year-old community-college student is suing it over its “free speech zone.”
Good for her. The entire country is a free-speech zone.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Nat Hentoff notes that the ACLU has been ignoring the campus-speech issue. The ACLU has always been very selective about which civil liberties it defends.
Peer Review
(From a surprising source) let’s stop pretending that it works.
They can’t do that. It cuts the legs from under one of the primary weapons they use against critics of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Senator Cruz’s climate hearing with Judith Curry, John Christie, Mark Steyn et all is today at noon PST. Get out the popcorn.
Crybullies
…are narcissistic, and mostly female.
But wait! I thought feminists told us that it’s women who are oppressed!
How To Get Excommunicated In Climate Science
Thoughts on Judith Curry, from Matthias Shapiro.
[Friday-morning update]
The post seems to have disappeared. I’ll ask him what the deal is.
Political Correctness
Jonathan Chait has decided he’s been mugged enough by the campus fascists:
The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs. It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement. (For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important, bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)
American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state. The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core (a character I tried to explain in my January essay).
Of course, given his own history, he’s not the best standard bearer for the message.
Cutting The Cost Of College
Four tough things the schools could do (but won’t):
“The American university is a grand political accommodation,” says Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist and founder of the Center for College Productivity and Affordability. College presidents, he argues, appease faculty members by giving them control over what and how they teach. They appease students and parents with high grades and good facilities. They appease alumni with expensive sports teams. They appease politicians with shiny new research centers. “The idea is to buy off any group that might upset the political equilibrium,” Vedder said.
I was particularly struck by the worthlessness of the majority of research, as judge by the number of citations.
By “won’t,” of course, I mean they won’t until they are forced to when they run out of other peoples’ money. That day may be approaching.
The Yale Problem
Actually, I think it starts earlier than that.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sort of related: How a Progressive became an unperson.
Over on Twitter, I’ve been noting the irony that being a racist was one of the less objectionable things about our first fascist dictator (and arguable worst president, at least until 2009). But they Left was happy with all of the other things Wilson did, including trampling on that pesky, hateful Constitution.
[Update a couple minutes later]
How to spot and critique leftist free-speech tropes in the media. It’s worth noting that Oliver Wendell Holmes’s comment occurred during the Wilson administration.
Treating Brain Cancer
After quitting my job, I decided to study for a Master’s degree in Nutritional Therapy. As I got deeper into my course work,I was shocked to discover that everything I had learned during my undergraduate studies was either false, misleading, or outdated information.
It’s an anecdote, but a pretty powerful one. The ignorance about nutrition in the health-care field is probably killing thousands.
The English Language
Possibly the weirdest one on the planet.
Funny, seems perfectly normal to me. But it’s a fascinating history.