Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

SLS

12 Comments

This isn’t a space transportation system; it’s a cathedral:

The foundation that was already there at Michoud was too weak to support the tool. We had quite a job to reinforce it, to dig it out and then put it back so it could hold up the Vertical Assembly Center. To give you context for the magnitude of the new foundation, Louisiana is not known for its hard soil, and the new foundation that we laid for the Vertical Assembly Center would hold the largest building in downtown New Orleans, 1 Shell Square.

For a program that’s likely to fly, at best, twice.

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

The Infantilization Of College Students

3 Comments

Even the Left is getting frightened of the brown-shirted monster they’ve created. I find it interesting that this professor has such a lack of self awareness:

Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.

The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

He keeps using that word “liberal.” I don’t think it means what he thinks it means.

[Update early afternoon]

The wrong time to coddle:

Between the infantilizing of campus culture and the growing global harshness, something has to give and—hint, hint—it won’t be the real world. The worst thing about the current climate of PC stupidity and mandatory cocooning on campus isn’t the ugly repression it entails. The destruction of free speech and free debate in the institutions that ought to be the citadels of intellectual liberty is a terrible thing and a horrible betrayal of everything universities are supposed to be about. But there is yet a worse consequence: the catastrophic dumbing down and weakening of a younger generation that is becoming too fragile and precious to exist in the current world—much less to fight the real evils and dangers that are growing.

These are the great-grandchildren of The Greatest Generation, corrupted by that generation’s children in the academy and public schools. How we have fallen.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

More Free Speech Problems

3 Comments

Though, actually, it sounds like this kid is kind of a nutcase.

[Friday-morning update]

This seems related somehow:

These little Junior Anti-Sex League members combine thuggishness and fragility in a particularly obnoxious way. They should be sent home until they are mature enough for college. And America. And no parent should pay tuition to a school that takes this sort of hysterical behavior seriously.

Higher ed (as well as public ed) is an effing mess.

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Obama/Netanyahu Phone Call

10 Comments

The crisis has exploded:

The crisis in the relationship we discuss in our new editorial statement has entered a new and potentially unprecedented phase.

It may well be that the president is going to present American Jews with a choice over the coming months no American president should ask us to make—to become parties to and participants in his effort to create what, in 2009, he called “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel.

…If you want to hate what Netanyahu said, hate it. But here’s the thing: How the prime minister of Israel talks about Israeli citizens who possess equal rights under the law and have their own means of redress under the law if they are mistreated should have no basis whatever in the “assessment” of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Israel. The president has spent years making very nice patter with Turkey’s Erdogan and other foreign leaders whose treatment of minorities do not deserve mention alongside Israel’s and whose suffering small sub-populations have no means of achieving redress.

Even those who are furious with Netanyahu should really take a breath and a close look and consider this point carefully: The Arab-vote business is a pretext. American presidents, this one especially, typically do not revisit special strategic relationships based on election-day maneuvers in a democracy, however unpleasant they might find them. In my view, Obama is hoping once again to use liberal Jewish disaffection in the United States with Netanyahu as a wedge to give him space to make a major policy pivot from the special relationship—one for which he has hungered since he came into office.

Yes.

[Update early evening]

No peace in the Middle East soon, but it’s not because of Bibi.

The idiocy of the left knows no bounds.