Be Careful What You Wish For on Social Programs
Nathan Glazer, the last of a group of famous neocon social scientists, died at the age of 95 on January 19 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. (He resisted the label “neocon.”) Glazer consistently warned that vast government plans to improve the lives of the poor often come to grief or create new problems of their own. “The evaluations of the specifics of the first ten years after the launching of (the War on Poverty) confirm that nothing worked and in particular, nothing in education worked.” He concluded that the family was the key institution to positive social change and that rights are inherent in individuals, not groups. The article here by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute ran in 2011 when President Obama planned an extension of the War on Poverty.
You, Too, Can Turn in Your Classmate
The campus police of the University of Illinois have issued calls for students to report “acts of intolerance” to the schools Bias Assessment and Response Team. It said, “acts of intolerance create an unsafe and unwelcoming environment for campus community members. Please let us know if you feel unsafe.” According to BART, bias is defined as “actions or expressions that are motivated at least in part by prejudice against or hostility toward a person or group because of that person or group’s perceived age, disability, status, ethnicity, gender, identity-expression, national origin, race, religion/ spirituality, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, etc.” Those reported to BART may be required to participate in mediation or other educational conservations.
More Evidence of Professorial Political Bias
University of North Carolina business professor Michael Jacobs polled 40 Republican students at his school and found that all but two believed they would be penalized for not expressing the professor's politics in a test answer. The professor claimed that faculty should pledge to respect ideological diversity and that chancellors who are too afraid to promote tolerance for ideological diversity should be fired. “One of my top MBA students, who I would categorize as moderate, recently told me that she will no longer participate in class discussions that involve social or political issues for fear of being branded by the ‘progressive police,’” the professor said. Read the story at Campus Reform.
More Risible News From Yale
As you recall, the campus exploded in outrage in 2015 when Prof. Erika Christakis challenged a Yale diktat warning students not to wear offensive costumes for Halloween. (“If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away,” she wrote in a campus-wide email. Her husband Prof. Nicholas Christakis, threatened by a group of offended students, quit as master of Silliman House after getting zero backing from Yale. In a review of The Coddling of the American Mind in the American Interest, writer Aaron Sibarium says Christakis' successor at Silliman, psychology professor Laurie Santos, has a program for happiness that includes this advice:
- Avoid binding attachments and obligations; these will stress you out and make you sad.
- Focus on cultivating your own mind and mental habits so that you can be happy regardless of your external conditions, a self-reliant ray of sunshine.
- Prioritize instrumental knowledge that helps to achieve your goals; in particular, learn how to manipulate others to your advantage.
Columbia’s Comedy of Errors
A comedy act by a former member of Saturday Night Live was shut down in mid-performance at Columbia University Friday night because students felt the humor was racist and anti-gay and made them feel unsafe. Nimesh Patel was performing for the campus Asian American Alliance’s charity event. One joke referred to being black and gay as a double vulnerability. So, a complaining student wrote in the Columbia Spectator, “If you’re black and gay, you don’t need a straight South Asian guy to point out that your life is hard because you’re black and gay.” You can read more at Reason.com.
College men are playing the game as poorly as possible. They should completely shun their female classmates, socially. There’s other fish in the sea. Socializing with young women at other campuses or not in college put them out of the jurisdiction of their college gulag. Shunning would force college women to socialize with roughneck men in the real world. What else could be worse than a Steven King reality show that no one can rescue them from?
Saul Alinsky’s Rule 4 is the powerful tactic being used on college campuses.
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[edited] RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.
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Amazingly, the exploited rule is politeness. “We are good people who never intend to insult or distress others.” Middle class students and faculty are polite above all. They don’t know what to do when they are accused of being offensive.
A group of activist students claim their own weakness and their distress at words, thoughts, figures of speech, and exposure to uncomfortable ideas. They must claim weakness to make this tactic work. The rule “Don’t offend people” usually does not have an exception “except when the offended person is particularly weak”. The reverse. The weaker the individual, the stronger is the claim that they must not be offended. This tactic is brilliant.
We see faculty, administrators, and even alumni cowering in defense, proclaiming that they did not intend to offend and apologizing for the offenses they have committed. The exception is the activists who never regard thir own actions as being offensive. That would be blaming the supposed victim.
Another brilliant twist is the “trigger warning”. This makes it seem that the offense is avoidable if only the faculty would be sensitive enough to prepare the discussion. In practice, there is never enough preparation to avoid causing offense.
This assualt on reason and speech can only be defended by standing up and declaring “Yes, we are offensive. That is our job and purpose. That is the freedom of our society. We intend to offend you and are only succesesful in our purpose if you are indeed offended. Learn how to control your offended reaction and think clearly. Otherwise, get out of here.”
You may think that this goes too far. Certainly, rational people can draw a line and put “truly” offensive things beyond polite discussion. This won’t work because being offended is mostly a tactic, or sometimes the learned response of students who grab onto the power they get personally by declaring their offended pain.
This is parallel to the demands of Free Speech. Offensive and Hate Speech is specifically allowed because someone will always claim offense or hate. Prosecuting hate speech shuts down free discussion. That is the loophole being exploited by the radicals.
Politeness is simple and civilized. Most people properly recoil from confronting others. But, classrooms and rallies are not random gatherings. People can participate at the risk of being offended or get out. Anything more caring shuts down the purpose of a university and the value of free discussion.
Lowering the threshold of “strength” in women to match the emasculation of men will not result in a strong society.
Liberty & Freedom will perish except from the councils of a few select individuals who will strike out on their own……as they always do.
The lack of “strong women” is another issue — ME women lack the courage of their convictions — they can not “stand their ground” in a discussion, let alone a disagreement.
It is starting to reap “rewards” as well. I teach anthropology at a large university. In my most recent class, out of 25 students, 3 are men. The rest are women. This is a trend that has become exacerbated over the last few years. My course is gen-ed.
RE: Blame the Parents?
….they’ve been raised in this bourgeois, pampered cocoon, so I think there’s been a tremendous failure of parenting… — Article
Not just the parents. The vaunted American public education system as well.
For decades—ever since Carter established the so-called Department of Education—the education of these people, both men and women, has down-played key aspects of masculinity. No playing tag or dodgeball because it is ‘exclusive’. Everyone MUST be a ‘winner’. Etc…..
Kept in a creche that hasn’t prepared them for the reality of what happens after you get out of ‘school’, they can’t stand up to the competition and pressures of life on their own.
Paglia is usually acute in her perceptions, but in this area I would look in a somewhat different direction. That woman who carried the mattress for a year at Columbia, for instance–she can hardly be called weak. She was strong with a poisonous sort of strength. She is one of the tarantulas Nietzsche wrote of.
The young women forming the mostly passive, malleable mass of the safe space brigades may be as Paglia describes, but they are being manipulated by women–faculty, administrators and other students–who most certainly know what they are doing. Motivated by varying combinations of egotism, narcissism and resentment, these women are realizing their will to power, smashing their way through the termite-eaten structures of our colleges and universities, having figured out of them what Hitler figured out of the Soviet Union: just kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.
Teenage women arriving on college campuses are as impressionable as teenagers always have been, and they are being herded on arrival into safe space pens for captive bolt stunning by a relatively small coterie of disciplined, motivated adults, who train them to start Reichstag fires so that the coterie can demand additional emergency powers, in a cycle that won’t end until they have created a desert and call it social justice. Because as Nietzsche said: they would rather will nothingness than not will.
It is these women (and their useful male idiots) who must be disempowered in order to liberate everyone else.
RE: ‘Education’…
….again is the problem. Not just at the college level, but every where before.
RE: They’re Ready to be Enslaved
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive. Easy to govern, but impossible to enslave. — Lord Henry Brougham
And Paglia touches on it when she speaks to how they’ve been ‘brought up’. That includes both parents—who trusted the educators—and the educators themselves.
Very well put!
Yeah, it’s the same old priestly schtick. Most priests were decent and meant well, but unfortunately religion and pseudo-religious ideologies give free reign to people whose métier is to hate, manipulate, control.
On the side of the public hypnotism, all it takes is a “tipping point” of conformity. Initially one just acquiesces for the sake of an easy life, or to keep on making piles of money without criticism. But eventually one has to say the right words on pain of losing one’s job, or even one’s social standing.
Most people, in their heart of hearts, probably never believed the established religions, the religions just got established by the prior method. Most people on campuses probably don’t believe the bullshit in their heart of hearts, but they have to say the right words – or, if they see advantage in the hucksterism, they pursue it.
QET – Yours is one of the most insightful comments I have ever read on the Internet. Bravo!
“Motivated by varying combinations of egotism, narcissism and resentment, these women are realizing their will to power…”
Such women include Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill; as well as Catherine Lhamonin the Department of Education. All of them are underhanded and agenda-driven.
That is a very wrong conclusion. She was not strong, she was weak and needed continual adult and administrative support. The very idea of getting college credit for hauling around a mini mattress being used in a false accusation is absurd. Do you really think Sukawitz would have carried that mattress for no credit and in the face of continual questions of why she was carrying on an assault on a man who had been found innocent? I don’t. I am with Tyler Cowan on this one.
“That woman who carried the mattress for a year at Columbia, for instance–she can hardly be called weak. She was strong with a poisonous sort of strength. She is one of the tarantulas Nietzsche wrote of.”
she had mass media support, as well as mass cultural support, on top of public acceptance for her lie, and direct support of every female within arms reach along with of the support of every white knight who has ever lived.
that is not the strength of a tarantula. it is more like the strength of a termite colony, or viral infection.
How can you say that?!!!
We are weak, by God, and weaker than weak. We cannot be held responsible for our decisions if we’ve had anything to drink…if we’ taken any drugs….if we’ve been subject to that most horrible of horrible things (male persuasion) or experienced in any way at all (heaven forbid) male psychological pressure or threat, like (and I quote) the threat to “no longer love us”.
We are easily intimidated. A compliment or invitation to get a cup of coffee can tizzy us to the max … we insist that anything and everything we don’t like is harassment… and the sheer fact of existence can trigger all kinds of trauma. Besides — we are sexually victimized on campus at a rate higher than that experienced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the “Rape Capital of the World”). Of course we are weak. And we are victims. We are super, super weak victims and require lots of Soft & Safe Places when our bellies feel all woosie…and they can feel woosie at a moment’s notice.
And yes, of course we will absolutely crush you, humiliate you, shame you, ruin your career, and get you expelled & blacklisted FOREVER if you cross us. Please keep that in mind.
QET, that girl who carried a mattress around for a year to promote the idea that “rape culture” existed on campus is a documented liar! What could possibly be weaker than using lies to assert a falsehood?
Maybe it’s that our culture has redefined strength. Where it once meant integrity, honesty, and a non-partisan devotion to truth, it now means that one’s subjective feelings is the measure of all things and the ends justify the means.
Bravo! Finally someone gets to one of the roots of the “false rape ” crisis!
It’s worse than just the “false” rapes — in academia today, having been raped is the equivalent of having been a combat veteran, it is the equivalent of having a membership card in the VFW, with all the “rights & privileges” that possessing a VFW card accorded one in past generations.
Women want to be rape victims — not to be raped, but to be able to define past unpleasantries as having been “rape” so as to be entitled to a seat at the victim’s table. This is particularly true of insecure (and psychologically unbalanced) women — who will often fabricate (often quite implausible) rape allegations out of whole cloth — but it often extends to (the quite real) hurt of the ended relationship.
It is not uncommon for a college student to retroactively re-define all of her past then-quite-consensual sexual encounters as “rapes.” When I was administering a campus judicial system (and I tried to do it fairly), I had a female student attempting to do this retroactively back to the beginning of the relationship, 3 semesters earlier — when they both had arrived on campus as freshmen.
One of the specific/explicit details she mentioned was having been raped on the (on campus) lawn of the Chancellor’s House — that they’d walked over there so he could rape her and after he did, they walked back to her dorm where she signed him in. Etc….
Ugh…when did students start becoming so infantalized? Whatever happened to the concept of making good choices and having personal responsibility?