Category Archives: Education

The Unhidden Anti-Semitism

…of the (un)American Studies Association:

On our troubled globe, where states do truly terrible things to their people, gassing them, slaughtering them en masse, impoverishing and immiserating them, I am aware of only one country whose continued existence has been called into question. Should Zimbabwe exist? Or Sudan? Or Syria? Only Israel is subjected to constant questioning of its right to remain a nation. Israel, a sliver of a country surrounded by tyrannical regimes or perpetually unstable governments, free for the moment from war because of strength and not because of neighborly goodwill, this Israel is the target of the opprobrium of preening academics the world over. The question is not whether members of the ASA are anti-Semites, as individuals. All this is not because the world’s only Jewish state is uniquely evil. It is just uniquely Jewish.

Yup.

Of Ducks And Gays

…and tolerance:

The advantages of classical liberal market cosmopolitanism–the idea that it’s best to set aside peaceful differences of opinion and creed and worries about different races, nationalities, and genders when deciding how we interact with the world–has a great track record of making us all richer and happier.

The idea that that people should be punished with boycott or losing their jobs over having wrong beliefs hobbles the flowering of tolerant classical liberal market cosmopolitanism.

There may have been a good reason why classical tolerance of expression was summed up in the epigram: “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it!”

That has a different feel than: “I disagree with what you say, I think you are evil for having said it, I think no one should associate with you and you ought to lose your livelihood, and anyone who doesn’t agree with me about all that is skating on pretty thin ice as well, but hey, I don’t think you should be arrested for it.”

It’s a “heads I win tails you lose” situation, as it often is with the Left. As I noted at Twitter yesterday:

As I also noted there, declaring someone a sinner does not justify bullying or assaulting them. There will always be bullies, but their existence is not a reason to suppress freedom of expression or religion.

[Update a few minutes later]

Joel Achenbach has a pretty amusing take: The Ducksters are the Flintstones.

[Update a while later]

The show is likely to be canceled. I noted yesterday on Twitter that A&E needed Duck Dynasty a lot more than the latter needed A&E. A&E can run whatever programs it wants, but I think that they’ll realize that this was a stupid business decision.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Thoughts from Jonah: Real rednecks.

“This Is What Happens In Obama’s America”

What happens in Obama’s America is that people think that it’s intrinsically racist to criticize the president. If that cartoon had been published six years ago, with “Obama’s” replaced by “Bush’s,” would it have been racist then? If not, what would be the difference, other than the melanin content of the two mens’ skin? The editor shouldn’t have apologized, or retracted. He should have called out the detractors as the racialist demagogues they are.

Ten Questions For Al Gore

from a Canadian:

Earlier this year in an interview with the Globe and Mail you described Canada’s development of the oil sands as the equivalent of treating the atmosphere like an “open sewer.” What do you have to say about the findings of Canadian climate scientist and lead UN IPCC author Andrew Weaver, and his colleague Neal Swart, published in the journal Nature, that even if Canada developed all the commercially viable oil in the oilsands, global temperatures would rise by an insignificant 0.03 degrees?

It’s frightening how close this pompous hypocritical math-challenged fool came to being president.