- A social-justice pecksniff explains that there’s nothing wrong with suppressing free speech and erasing history. It’s just a way of achieving a better future.
- Meanwhile, both members of the formerly well-regarded Couple Christakis have now fled Yale because they can’t work in such an environment.
- Kevin of The Smallest Minority takes all of three lines to explain weapons of war
- You already know the USPS has been photographing the outside of all your mail (“security,” of course). Now they’re offering to email you the photos. As a service. (H/T ML)
- The answer to terror: tougher (armed) citizens, not bigger government.
- Sorry. I was wrong the other day when I wrote that killer cops gave Tamir Rice two seconds to live. It wasn’t that long.
- Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago is like New York in 1974.
- But this is a hopeful sign.
- Why isn’t this getting more press? A fedgov taskforce supposedly intended for “reconstruction” and business development in Afghanistan apparently spent 20% of its budget on luxury villas for its personnel, complete with meal service with entrees of “at least 3-star” quality.
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I hope you are right about the cop cameras thing, but I don’t really think it means anything. The police still have the same agenda as always. Did you read where this guy says clearly that “…the one thing we definitely have in common is the passion for policing and this Police Department.”
Since “policing” simply means control of others, that tells me this is yet another example of, “welcome to new boss, same as old boss.”
When the courts can look at some of these graphic and seriously damning videos and still determine that the cop “followed procedure” – seems the procedure is the real problem, not lack of video.
Great column today, Claire. I never heard the term pecksniff before but, after looking it up, I like it. As to the rest, I’m reminded of H L Mencken’s quote:
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
OK, the USPS photographs all mail. And that gives our mail a decidedly-unprivate view from the government. That I understand and deplore. But I don’t grasp what advantage it gives to the recipient. Knowing digitally what mail we’re about to receive doesn’t open the mail for us, does it (unless photographing “the front side” of our mail looks at the inside)? And I’ll bet it doesn’t send back junk mail we don’t want.
Am I missing something here? Or do they figure we’ll get so enamored of this system that we’ll ask USPS to open our mail and read it to us in the future? I really don’t see any practical advantage to this.
I remember NYC in 1974. I moved to Manhattan from the Bronx that year. It was (and probably still is) a corrupt, sordid mess, but the very well off were hardly affected and former hippies like me just accepted it as “the man” was doing his evil thing. Haha.
Political Correctness on campus and anywhere is nothing more than thought control, and these so-called trigger warnings and micro aggressions are nonsense. Anyone who supports them is not thinking clearly, imo.
“Escalante said he thinks the video of McDonald’s fatal shooting in October 2014 was ‘probably a little harder’ to watch than most videos of violent deaths because a police officer was responsible.”
So, what exactly is the difference between watching a regular violent death and a death where a police officer is the perpetrator? Has society forgotten that officers of the law are humans–made out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen just like the rest of us–and the brass they wear on their shirts doesn’t make them Gods, innately capable of instantaneously deciding the fate of any and all around them? Death is death, whether at the hands of men or governments.
And about today’s “modern universities”, I recently escaped my dorm to take a bike ride out of Collegetown USA. I hadn’t fully understood the fundamental difference between the university world and the real world until then. Riding my bike, I noticed that each time I would meet a car on the winding, shoulder-less road, the driver of that car would make eye contact with me. There is something primitive about eye contact, it is a way of acknowledging respect of a person. By making eye contact with me on the road, drivers were telling me that they acknowledged my existence, that they respected me–as a human being–although they had never met me and that, if they could help it, wouldn’t run me over.
Back in Collegetown, the world is different. Walking the sidewalks it is rare to get a person to make eye contact. If you look at the videos of Dr. Christakis speaking to students in the quad of Yale you will notice that many of his adversaries break eye contact during their arguments. That shows a lack of respect, not necessarily a lack of respect of his argument (although there is certainly plenty of that). It shows a lack of respect of Christakis as a human being.
I believe that the ability to respect people as humans as called empathy. And it sure ain’t taught in schools, at least not anymore.
I’m glad to see that your “social-justice pecksniff” has learned all the important lessons from Stalin et al (and Orwell): rewrite history to further your narrative. An ignorant populace is a docile populace.
I read part of the article on suppressing free speech. I found it rambling, incoherent, full of false assumptions, and unnecessarily wordy. It used way too much text to convey way too little information. Each paragraph was merely a collection of words that may or may not make coherent sentences that may or may not support a thesis. In terms of Shakespeare and simians, I rate it 14 monkeys, 20 minutes.
Jwg — All true. But of course the author did just admit to having graduated from one of Those Schools. So the poor dear probably doesn’t know any better. 😉
Thank you, Claire!
Very apt blogging, Kevin. I wish I could be so succinct — about anything. And you are of course spot on, especially on your last line. 🙂
Academia is built on the expectation—the hope—that by applying these abstractions to reality, mankind can evolve.
It would be interesting to ask Kate Groetzinger for an example of academics dreaming up an “abstraction” that actually survived confrontation with reality. (My memories of going from being a captain in the infantry to freshman sociology classes are surfacing.)
OTOH, to be “fair,” Kevin’s AR-15s are at least as military as a Hummer II.
Why isn’t this getting more press?
That’s why I can’t resist Living Freedom. Claire always closes with something funny.
In order to believe that erasing history makes for a better future, you have to NOT believe that those who do not know history are doomed to relive it. E.g. we erase any and all references or artifacts of the time of slavery (actually all human history up to and including today), and then what? ‘What’ is that there will soon be no memory of it, and so no moral judgement against it, and so slavery will exist again, with all of it’s egregious offenses.
My response of late to ‘PC’ controls over free speech is to double down, and double down again. I repeat myself, and then say some even more ‘unsafe’ thing, intentionally. If you don’t like it, go crawl back up your own hiney.
That pecksniff article is just a bunch of mental masturbation. The next one about the Yale professors has a flavor of rats from a sinking ship.
If college kids think they are going to kick off an American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution over here, they are in for a rude awakening. People like doing and saying what they please, and they have the guns to back it up.
I was a college teaching assistant for my short time in graduate school. I corrected homework for our “Physics for Poets” class (actually a pre-med thing). The prof would review the questions he had assigned, during the following lecture. One time I noticed that a few guys just did this homework during that review and turned it in “late”, expecting perfect grades from it. I was pretty naive at that time, had never cheated in my life, and was shocked to see it, so I put a big red “0” on the top of these papers along with the words, “YOU CHEATED!” The funny thing was that later, those guys came up to me and became very friendly, and stopped cheating. They actually appreciated being told they had done something wrong. It was like nobody had ever told them that before.
To me, college is a place where kids push back their boundaries (of acceptable behavior). But they still do need limits, and this anecdote tells me they actually want some limits (within reason). I have a feeling this is not provided in college any more, which is the source of all the PC nonsense going on. They are like ships without a rudder.
[State and local governments should equip their citizens to defend themselves from acts of terrorism.]
Considering the source, that USA Today editorial was a good one, but I don’t agree with this point. The thing for government to do is just to get the Hell out of the way. Stop criminalizing defensive behavior. One should not need permission from a bureaucrat to defend one’s family.