Who will call these thugs out for what they are?
Hard to think of a better way to engender sympathy for your cause than preventing people from Christmas shopping, or getting home for Christmas.
[Update mid afternoon]
Enough is enough: Hold “Black Lives Matter” accountable.
David Solway has thoughts on living with it:
Our electrician is a fundamentally decent man, as are probably the majority of his fellow citizens whose views are shaped by skewed reporting and yellow journalism, and who share the same erroneous beliefs. Moreover, many do not enjoy sufficient disposable leisure to research the topics and issues on which they vote. I suspect that even if they did, however, they lack the interest, desire and will to educate themselves, to acquire a historical perspective and a grasp of the less obvious details that ultimately impinge on their well-being. Vigilance is a desideratum of informed citizenship.
Even more dispiriting, many do not want to hear the Muslim hum for what it is, instead attributing it to other sources or re-interpreting it as something it is not. Perhaps the hum is only an auditory hallucination or, for those with ears differently attuned, the hum is “really” a sweet and appealing melody. Robert Spencer recounts a recent instance of such a convenient transposition, involving a young woman affiliated with Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. She was photographed at a Washington demonstration carrying a sign reading: “I’m a Christian and I LOVE the Quran.” The woman presumably believes, Spencer comments, “that Jesus is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, who was crucified and rose from the dead for the salvation of the human race. Yet she is professing love for a book that not only denies all of that, but also insists that Christians are accursed, vile beings who should be waged war against until they submit to the hegemony of a group that believes differently.”
This may be an unaccommodating thing to say, but what one tends to find among the temporizers is a particularly daunting combination of ignorance, stupidity and self-infatuation. Such people do not want to recognize the peril before them since that would require the impulse to think, which is always hard, and the courage to act, which is never easy. Meanwhile, it’s obvious that ear mufflers won’t work against the Muslim detonations. Living beside a construction site is bad enough; living in a destruction site is infinitely worse.
Europe is learning this the hard way.
[Update a couple minutes later]
From early in the year, but related: Islamaphobia is a myth:
“Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence.”
Yes.
[Update late morning]
The perils of Islamic apologetics: “…it’s not my job to make Islam look good, or to argue that Islam “is a religion of peace,” when the reality is more complicated.”
You don’t say.
NASA’s launches always have been as well, but in a different way. This was more of a popular culture event. Let’s hope we see a lot more of them.
A touching Christmas story.
This is pretty funny. How an insurance company lost its mascot to Internet porn.
Star Wars proves they’re clueless about it.
Of course, #Gamergate has been demonstrating that for many months.
A guide to its current lack, and the importance of restoring it, from Jonathan Haidt.
Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman on their increasing disconnect from reality on guns.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: The Democrats’ compassion gap on terrorism.
They reserve their compassion for the enemy.
[Update a while later]
Here’s an example. Yes, the Obama administration nixed a probe into the California jihadis.
[Update a few minutes later]
And this: Whistleblower says Obama more concerned with rights of Islamists than with protecting the American people. That’s pretty obvious.
Ken White has some questions for Reuters:
Who leaked the time and place of the arrest? Was it an FBI agent, a prosecutor, staff, a coordinating local cop? How high up in the government did the decision to leak the arrest go? Did the leak violate the law? Did it violate the defendant’s rights? What was the government’s purpose in leaking the time and place of the arrest? How does this instance fit into the pattern of which arrests get leaked and which don’t? Which nonviolent defendants without records get arrested, and which get summonsed in (or self-surrender through arrangement with their lawyers), and why? What impact does a front-page picture of a defendant in handcuffs have on the jury pool? Is that impact a feature, or a bug, of leaking it? Was the leak intended to inflict extra-judicial humiliation and punishment on the defendant? If the government lies about whether or not it leaked, would you still keep it secret?
“Journalism.”
Things you should know about the university you’re sending your kid to, but don’t. A long, but brutal critique of modern academia:
…what remedy is there for the problems of declining student competence and increasing student illiteracy? Ability and literacy are the true deliverables of a university education, aren’t they? How is their disappearance to be managed?
The first remedy is simply to juke the stats. Over the past 14 years of teaching, my students’ grade point averages have steadily gone up while real student achievement has dropped precipitously. Papers I would have failed 10 years ago as unintelligible and failing to qualify as “university-level work” I now routinely assign grades of C or higher. Each time I do so I rub another little corner of my conscience off, cheat your daughter of an honest low grade or failure that might have been the womb of a real success, and add a little bit more unreality to an already unreal situation.
I am speaking, of course, of grade inflation. For faculty, the reasons for it range from a desire to avoid time-consuming student appeals to attempting to create a level playing field for their own students in comparison to others to securing work through high subscription rates rather than real popularity to cynical acceptance of the rule of the game. Since most degrees involve no real content, it doesn’t matter how they are assessed. Beyond questions of mere style, there are no grounds for assigning one ostensibly studious paper an A and another a B when both are illusory. So let the bottom rise to whatever height is necessary in your particular market, so long as there remains at least some type of performance arc that will maintain the appearance of merit.
For students, the motives for grade inflation are similar to those of their professors in some respects and different in others. Given the way the university game is currently played, they too desire a level playing field and understand the importance of appearing to be, if not actually being, competent in their chosen field. But as practices change so do habits of mind and expectations. As students are awarded ever-higher grades, over time they will begin to believe that they deserve such grades. If this practice begins early enough, say in middle or secondary school, it will become so entrenched that, by the time they reach university, any violation of it will be taken as a grievous and unwarranted denigration of their abilities. Perhaps somewhere deep down they know, as do we, that their degrees are worthless and their accomplishments illusory. But anyone who challenges them will very likely be hauled before an appeal board and asked to explain how she has the temerity to tell them their papers are hastily compiled and undigested piles of drivel unacceptable as university-level work. The customer is always right. As one vice president I know of states on her website, she promises to provide “one-stop shops” and “exceptional customer service” to all. Do not let the stupidity of this statement fool you into believing it is in any way benign. The sad truth of the matter is that it more accurately describes the manner in which modern universities operate than the version I am arguing for here. We no longer have “students” — only “customers.”
None of what I am describing here is ever said in so many words. It doesn’t need to be, because in this regard the university operates much like a reality television show in which overt scripting is unnecessary, because everyone — the participants (students) as much as the directors (professors and administrators) — knows the script by heart: be outrageous, stupid, vulgar, and then cloyingly sentimental to bring the whole story to a satisfactory conclusion. The university’s narrative is not quite so lowbrow but it is just as scripted and just as empty: fill your classrooms with the rhetoric of experiential learning, e-learning, student-centered learning, lifelong learning, digital literacies and so on, and then top it all off with superlative grades to confirm the truth of the rhetoric, QED. Thus you may dispense with real learning and real intelligence, just as reality television has dispensed with reality.
We really need to end the student loan program. Or at least reform it.