Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

That Bursting Higher-Education Bubble

16 Comments

More thoughts on this topic, from Michael Barone.

[Update a while later]

Roger Kimball notes another similarity with housing:

As I wrote in a piece for The New Criterion a few years ago,

“Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold?”

Just imagine the sorts of sub-literate, ideologically charged nonsense that Women’s Studies debtor was battened on in her classes! The Australian philosopher David Stove, commenting on the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University, formulated a diagnosis that applies to the teaching of the humanities of most Western universities: It is, Stove wrote, a “disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.”

There are incipient signs that a Great Recoiling from this intellectual disaster is beginning to form. It will be greatly aided by the economic disaster in which the institutional life of universities is embedded. “Why,” hard-working parents will ask themselves, “does it cost more than $50,000 a year to send Johnny to college.” Leave aside the question of what it is that Johnny is and isn’t learning in those ivy-covered walls. Why does his four-year furlough from the real world cost so much? One reason, of course, is that Johnny, assuming his parents are paying full freight, is paying not only for his own tuition: he is also helping to foot the bill for Ahmed, Juan, and Harriet down the hall. Colleges routinely boast about their generous financial aid packages, how they provide assistance for some large percentage of students, etc. What they don’t mention is the fact that parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others. How do you suppose Johnny’s parents feel about that?

Honk if I’m paying your kid’s tuition.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Green Shirts

28 Comments

Some thoughts on the new green fascists and mass murderer wannabes, from Glenn Reynolds:

In contemporary America, no respectable person would advocate, say, the involuntary sterilization of blacks or Jews. Why, then, should it be any more respectable to advocate the involuntary sterilization of everyone? Or even of those who cause “social deterioration?”

Likewise, references to particular ethnic or religious groups as “viruses” or “cancers” in need of extirpation are socially unacceptable, triggering immediate thoughts of genocide and mass murder.

Why, then, should it be acceptable to refer to all humanity in this fashion? Does widening the circle of eliminationist rhetoric somehow make it better?

I don’t see why it should, and I don’t see why we should pretend — or allow others to pretend — that hate-filled rhetoric is somehow more acceptable when it’s delivered by those wearing green shirts instead of brown.

It’s a fetish of the left. It’s like the eighties, when they feigned outrage at the way the South Africans treated blacks, and were indifferent to the fact that places like the Soviet Union treated everyone that badly, or worse. If you’re a leftist, it’s perfectly OK to oppress people, as long as you’re an equal-opportunity oppressor.

Also, Jim Bennett emails:

Actually, Tom Clancy wrote a novel about a rich eco-nut who funds the clandestine development of a plague that will wipe out all of humanity, except for a small group who will have the antidote.

Highly improbable, of course. Almost as improbable as the one he wrote about the fanatic who crashes a fully-fueled airliner into a major US government building.

Not just improbable — unthinkable. At least if you’re Condi Rice. But perhaps not if you’re John Holdren.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Deluded Fantasy Life

6 Comments

…of David Brooks:

Many of the president-elect’s advisers had been reading histories of the New Deal. They had ambitious plans to address the crisis: federal jobs programs, new building projects, new spending initiatives. This was no time to worry about deficits, they said. This was an opportunity to address needs that had been neglected for decades.

Obama, in this fanciful version, held up his hand. He told his aides to put away the history books and reject the New Deal comparisons. Unlike in 1932, Americans today have a raging distrust of Washington, he observed. Living through a crisis caused by excessive debt, they will viscerally recoil at the prospect of federal debt without end. “Somehow,” Obama concluded, “we have to address the crisis without further terrifying the American people.”

The stimulus package, he continued, should rely heavily on cutting payroll taxes. This, he argued, will send a quick jolt to the economy without concentrating power in Washington. It will deliver a sharp psychological boost to the middle class. It might even be bipartisan. Obama noted that John McCain had a $445 billion stimulus plan along these lines and his fellow Republican senator, Mel Martinez, a $713 billion plan.

A fanciful version indeed. The frightening thing is that David Brooks actually believed (and perhaps, somehow, still does) that Barack Obama was ever ideologically capable of such a thing, or so wise. You and other bien pensants foisted him on us, David, despite our warnings, because you didn’t want your DC party invites to dry up. When will you admit that you quaffed too deeply the koolaid?

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Stop Saying That We’re Violent And Oppose Free Speech

3 Comments

…or we’ll chop off your head. I think that the Australians should arrest and jail this guy for incitement to violence, but they won’t. Because they’re the real Islamaphobes.

[Update a while later]

In reading the rest of the article, I see that the monster is living in Lebanon, and beyond the reach of the Aussie government. But I wonder what they’d do if he was still in Sydney?

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

Breakin’ Up Is Hard To Do

4 Comments

Barack? Ummmm…can we talk?

I guess what I was trying to say is that those early days were magical. But, well, maybe magic isn’t the best basis for a… Shit. Look, maybe the best way to do this is just come out and say it. I think it’s best if we take a break.

There, I said it.

Come… come on Barack, please don’t be that way. And don’t act so surprised, I mean you must have at least seen some of the approval rating signs. Tea Party? No, Tea Party didn’t put me up to this. Yeah, sure I’ve see him around the neighborhood. I mean, what am I supposed to do while you’re off vacationing with your friends? Sit around this place without a job and watch MSNBC? No, it’s platonic. So far. And for your information, Tea isn’t the retarded Nazi racist loser your friends are always painting him to be. And guess what? He listens to me and seems to like me for what I am, and doesn’t expect me to wear that stupid complicated Scandinavian nurse outfit like you gave me for Christmas. By the way, the charge card bill from Frederick’s of Stockholm just arrived yesterday. $1 trillion, Barack? Really?

“It’s not you, it’s me.” Heh.

Anyway, we’ll always have Denver.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Revolt

3 Comments

…of the bourgeois:

A New York Times survey earlier this year occasioned shock when it found that “Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class.” We’re so accustomed to the notion of a revolt of the dispossessed that a revolt of the possessed (in the non-demonic sense, of course) strikes us as a strange offense against the nature of things. But it’s threatening to wash away the Democratic congressional majorities in a historic wipeout.

In extremis, Democrats and liberal commentators have dragged the debate over the tea party into the well-worn rut of elite condescension to the bourgeois, a term coined in its modern sense by Rousseau and not meant as a compliment. For more than a hundred years, the bourgeois have been accused of being insipid, greedy, and unenlightened. To the long catalogue of their offenses can now be added another: unenthralled by Barack Obama, the Romantic hero seeking to transform the nation.

Apres Barack, liberte.