…and its immorality. People who advocate it are the true racists. As Glenn says, it’s all about exploiting ignorance, and the difference between that which is seen, and that which is unseen. Of course, as a commenter notes, the most devastating impact on the nation of affirmative action to date is that it put a mediocrity in the White House.
[Update a while later]
Debates and racial preferences.
Virginia Postrel has a column about Harvard’s bizarre PC loyalty oath:
Course registration versus niceness; success versus compassion; “attainment” versus kindness. Something is missing from all these dichotomies, and that something is the life of the mind.
Where in the list of ranked values are curiosity, discovery, reason, inquiry, skepticism or truth? (Were these values even options?) Where is critical thinking? No wonder the pledge talks about “attainment.” Attainment equals study cards and good grades — a transcript to enable the student to move on to the next stage. Attainment isn’t learning, questioning or criticizing. It’s getting your ticket punched.
Just one more sign of the decline of the academy, as costs continue to rise.
…of the earbud people.
I do have to wonder about someone who seems afraid to be alone with their own thoughts. Of course, I don’t wear them because they hurt my ears.
Are the books not being written, or not being published?
…on Che:
In case you read Town Hall, Ms. Fonda, here’s some consolation, honey: “I used to call him El Gallo (the rooster)”recalled Carlos Figueroa who was Ernesto Guevara’s adolescent friend in Alta Gracia, Argentina. “I’d be visiting him and eating in his family’s dining room and whenever the poor servant girls would enter Ernesto would promptly grab her and force her to lay on the dining room table where he’d have rapid intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he’d throw her out and continue eating as if nothing had happened.”
“Es un gallo—un gallo! (He’s a rooster!—rooster”) complained a scowling Berta Gonzalez a few years later upon emerging from her Mexico City bedroom summer of 1955. This was shortly after his Motorcycle Diary trip, when the hobo Ernesto Guevara was scribbling unreadable poetry and mooching off women in Mexico City, where he met Fidel and Raul Castro. Berta Gonzalez was a Cuban exile in Mexico at the time.
Gallo, as you might have guessed, is a common pejorative by Spanish-speaking women against men who terminate carnal encounters prematurely.
If only that were the least of his crimes. Here’s how Cuba treated real feminists:
They started by beating us with twisted coils of wire recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”
“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls, Manuela Calvo from exile today.” But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”
“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalls prisoner Polita Grau.
The gallant regime co-founded by Che Guevara jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba — but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer, Jane Fonda, etc. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.
Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”
But they got free health care.
This is a problem that has been concerning me for some time. We have a lot of people who plain don’t understand how things work, from cars to economies and businesses.
My latest space policy piece is up at Pajamas Media.
Some thoughts on vintage Forest Service posters:
There were probably debates about “your” versus “thy” versus “my.” It would be confusing to say “thy,” since “thy” always means “God,” but “thy” had more Biblical authority than “your.” “My” might suggest Smokey owned the forests, and was assuming the first-person voice of the author of the other Ten Commandments, and some people have enough trouble with the Trinity without bringing a bear into it.
From you guessed it.
Two chatbots being d**ks to each other. Are they really being emotional? Only Turing knows.
But no one will care:
Timothy F. Johnson, founder of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, said Wednesday that the civil rights abuses and crimes of the Jim Crow era were carried out mostly in regions controlled by the Democratic Party. He decried Carson’s comments as “outrageous, hateful, and desperate,” adding in a statement: “When some Democrats can’t win a political disagreement, they normally resort to race-baiting, which is in itself racist.”
Deneen Borelli: Carson “absolutely should resign,” Borelli said. “This is very dangerous, the comments that he made.” Deneen Borelli, an African-American tea party speaker and a fellow with Project 21, a network of black conservatives under the auspices The National Center for Public Policy Research, called for Carson to resign.
“This is absolutely outrageous for him to say these kinds of comments, especially considering what position he holds in the Congressional Black Caucus,” she told Newsmax. “This is someone who is supposed to be showing a leadership role, and instead he is inciting racial tension in our country.
It’s who they are. It’s what they do.