Society and culture
Faust, zweiter Teil
Steve Sailer has a good piece on how the college prestige racket works. Basically, he says, no one cares what kind of education top colleges offer. Whatever Dr. Faust may do, a Harvard degree will still prove that its holder was able to get into Harvard and that’s all that really matters.
That certainly fits … More ...
The New Age marches on
So far as I can tell, the “rising tide of religious fundamentalism,” at least in the West, is really the “rapid dissolution of religion as a social presence.” That dissolution leads to occasional complaints from people who aren’t totally on board with the new program, as well as horrified outbursts from radical secularists who are … More ...
Crimson but unembarrassed
It appears that the result of Larry Summers’ rather unadventurous but still non-PC comments on women’s tendency to avoid the hard sciences is that Harvard will have feminist victimologist Drew Gilpin Faust as president. Some thoughts:
- Once those in power have started lying about fundamental political issues it’s hard to stop. If you insist
Going with the social flow
I just finished reading Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority. The book’s an account of his famous experiment that tested the willingness of ordinary people who had volunteered to participate in a psychological study to inflict painful electric shocks on another volunteer (who was in fact an actor who was not being shocked at all). … More ...
Lords, chancellors, and lofty moral imperatives
The Blair government is issuing regulations implementing a statutory prohibition against discrimination in the provision of “services.” The regulations say you can’t discriminate against homosexuals, no exceptions. Among other things, that rule will require Catholic adoption agencies to treat sex as irrelant to intimate human relationships (and consequently engage in PC child abuse) by … More ...
Filling out the quotas
For the sake of fairness I ought to include a white male (one who’s not yet dead) in my gallery of intellectual corruption and psychological disorder in academia. So here’s a piece from British philosopher A. C. Grayling in which he gives views on Christianity and European history that in manner and substance qualify him … More ...
Lies have consequences
A few days ago I called Houston Baker a “thuggish hack,” and mentioned him as an example of “the lost honor of academia.” It seems to me that the information readily available on the internet supports those views (examples can be found here and here). Still, I was struck by how bad his situation … More ...
I don’t get it
How come “anarchotyranny”
only appears 39 times in the Google index?
UPDATE: Good news: “anarcho-tyranny” appears 15,000 times. Still not enough, but better than 39!
To expand on the topic a little, the expression—however spelled—refers to a state of society in which government goes after nontraditional offenses like racism more vigorously … More ...
The lost honor of academia
What must it be like working in a profession in which a pleasant out-of-her-depth fantasist like Elaine Pagels or a thuggish hack like Houston Baker (see this discussion) are named-chair superstars at top universities?
It appears that in Professor Pagels’ case there’s a certain amount of snickering, so academics don’t lose their critical abilities … More ...