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.”
The latest polling of likely voters shows a dead heat between Cruz and Trump.
It’s worth noting (as the article doesn’t) that CA is winner-take-all by Congressional District. So if that polling holds, Cruz would probably pick up about half the delegates. But we don’t know what the race will look like by the time CA has come around. Trump may have already taken enough delegates, or there may be a last-minute push on to prevent him.
An analysis from a cultural anthropologist who lived there:
It is nearly impossible to explain to an outsider, but Belgium is a country of six governments, Brussels a city with 19 mayors. These many administrative posts are not filled with competent people. Security services are fragmented and tend to compete with one another. The lack of a strong, central authority may be one of the many quirks of this sometimes charmingly dysfunctional country, but just as it resulted in many botched trials — notably of the Brabant Killers, or “Nijvel Gang” who committed a series of violent raids between 1982 and 1985, and the Dutroux scandal in 1995, to name just two — it also creates the perfect breeding ground for potential terrorists.
But the most important factor is Belgium’s culture of denial. The country’s political debate has been dominated by a complacent progressive elite that firmly believes society can be designed and planned. Observers who point to unpleasant truths such as the high incidence of crime among Moroccan youth and violent tendencies in radical Islam are accused of being propagandists of the extreme-right, and are subsequently ignored and ostracized.
The debate is paralyzed by a paternalistic discourse in which radical Muslim youths are seen, above all, as victims of social and economic exclusion. They in turn internalize this frame of reference, of course, because it arouses sympathy and frees them from taking responsibility for their actions. The former Socialist mayor Philippe Moureax, who governed Molenbeek from 1992 to 2012 as his private fiefdom, perfected this culture of denial and is to a large extent responsible for the current state of affairs in the neighborhood.
I think that Belgium has outlived whatever usefulness it may have ever had. Time to give just it back to Holland and France.
[Saturday-morning update]
It’s not just Molenbeek. “Belgium, my country, is in denial.”
[Bumped]
Yes:
One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.
Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
The real act that broke the Left from Hitler was when he betrayed Stalin.
[Update a while later]
Obama: “No difference between communism and capitalism.” Well, if you ignore the tens millions of citizens murdered by their governments, sure.
[Sunday-morning update]
…is a suicide pact.
No federal bailouts, at least without a rewriting of the state constitution.
RIP.
I saw him at a Reason event in LA a couple years ago. He will be missed.
[Saturday-morning update]
Nick Gillespie told me on Twitter that there will be a service in Santa Barbara in a couple months. I’ll post an update when I have more info.
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.
I’d love to hear some Shakespeare in the original language. I think I’ve linked this before, but here’s an example.
I suspect that the “arrr” pronunciation of “r” after a vowel, is related to the pirate “arrr.” Many of them were from southwest England and Cornwall.
…falls apart when no one is willing to make samwiches.
Maybe they’ve just realized that people should go paleo.
OK, probably not.
I’m in the air somewhere over Wyoming on the way to ORD to switch planes for a flight to DCA this afternoon. Attending a workshop on space safety tomorrow. I’ve got Internet, obviously, but what I don’t have is room to type comfortably, given the seat pitch and guy ahead of me reclining. So probably light posting.