Chesler chronicles the deepening madness of academe

I’m not one often to toy with Godwin’s law, but in commenting on such an absurd study, should we pretend these people are capable of reasonable diaogue?

… Harvard study, published in the latest edition of the medical journal, Lancet, shows murder of Goebbels family the fault of Red Army. “If one is not allowed to live with respect as a proper, world-dominating Nazi, then life can have no meaning for my children, let Odin sort them out… the existence of non-Nazi states is to blame for all our problems”, Goebbels told the Harvard scientists. “We’ve been fighting the Communists since the end of World War I, and now it’s come to this – how dare they have defended themselves so successfully against the bloody sacrifice of a generation of Aryan manhood?!”

The Red Army took away his masculinity, the feminist scholars pointed out. Holy Mother in Heaven forbid that such an emasculated, effeminate creature should be held responsible for his actions.

Chesler Chronicles » Lancet Study Blames Palestinian Wife-Beating on Israel

Meanwhile, Code Pink to the rescue.

A Professor gives advice on how to protect free speech: treat the universities in their current form with contempt

Via The Blog of Walker: Professor Robert Martin on Canadian colleges

Thursday Theater

A reminder of sunnier and simpler times on this dismal Thursday morning, to serve as a backdrop for stories making entrances and exits in the spotlight of online news.

Charity: Provocative article on how the worlds of Christianity and socialism are built from different principles.

“Bertrand Russell, who, when asked why he did not give to charity, replied: ‘I’m afraid you’ve got it all wrong. We are Socialists. We don’t pretend to be Christians.’” Needless to say, that witty retort contains a whole theology and a philosophy that deserve to be spelled out. The logic of classic socialism makes Christianity not only superfluous—everyone has everything by rights—but impossible—no one has anything to give.

Russell is right, of course. In a socialist world, no charity can exist because there can be no need that is unfulfilled by the commonality’s duty. It is a world in which there can be no gratitude. I can thank someone for giving me what is really his. I cannot thank him for giving me what is by rights already mine. And if everything belongs to the community, how can I give it away? Or if I do give it away, how can it be anything but stealing from the commons on my part and receiving illicit booty on the receiver’s part?

Absurdity: Walter Williams latest column, "Fraud In Academia", is even more depressing than usual.

At Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are A's. At Harvard, 50 percent of all grades were either A or A- (up from 22 percent in 1966); 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. The Boston Globe called Harvard's grading practices "the laughing stock of the Ivy League." Eighty percent of the grades given at the University of Illinois are A's and B's. Fifty percent of students at Columbia University are on the Dean's list. At Stanford University, where F grades used to be banned, only 6 percent of student grades were as low as a C. ...

A recent survey of more than 30,000 first-year students revealed that nearly half spent more hours drinking than study. Another survey found that a third of students expected B's just for attending class, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the assigned reading.

Redress: An update on the UK government's ingratitude towards its Gurkha veterans, which we've previously blogged about here and here. Actress Joanna Lumley, whose father fought alongside the Gurkhas in WWII, justifies my teenage crush on her in The New Avengers by steadfastly pushing the Gurkhas' residence rights in a private meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"The meeting was extremely positive. He is wholly supportive of the Gurkha cause. He is going to come up with a new solution by the end of this month," Ms Lumley said.

The argument boils down to two sides. One: the Gurkhas should be allowed to live in the country they fought for. The other: We never promised you a rose garden.

Agony: Trial, or circus? Ajmal Amir Kasab, the Pakistani jihadist captured after the 26/11 murder rampage in Mumbai, India, that left 166 people dead last year, has been charged with waging war on India, along with over 80 other charges. His plea: not guilty (!). The start of the trial has been delayed due to Kasab's lawyer's insistence that the youthful terrorist should really be tried in juvenile court (!). This prompted the need to first establish through blood tests whether or not Ajmal Amir Kasab was a minor at the time of his terrorist acts. The verdict: he wasn't. Now Kasab is demanding perfume to sanitize the smell of his prison cell as well as the return of the blood money that was taken from him when he was captured. His "mental balance" also requires that he be allowed to go for an occasional stroll outside on nice days to relieve the stress of living in solitary confinement.

Tragedy: An 11-year old boy fell into the Potomac River while fishing, and was carried away by the strong current. His dad dove in to pull him to shore, but the river pulled the kid right out of his father's hands.

He looked back as the river carried him downstream and the distance between father and son grew. "I saw him two more times," he said. "Then he went under."

Nine long days later, the missing body has been found.

Sadly, there's more to the story. It was later discovered that Hau Nguyen, a fellow fisherman who happened to witness the event, dove in and risked his life to save the boy as well, but unlike the father, he was not able to escape the river. The body of the Good Samaritan was found Saturday, a tragedy that united both families in grief: [Hat Tip to Ann at Catholic Herald]

The incident has brought together two families -- one from Vietnam, one from Mexico. For much of last week, as police boats, helicopters and recovery dogs swept the river, groups of Hispanic construction workers, Vietnamese monks and the family and friends of both victims came to search the muddy banks and pray at the spot where the two had disappeared.

Nguyen's wife and Thanh Vo, her brother, said Nguyen was a strong swimmer who had grown up along a river in Vietnam and had jumped into the Chesapeake Bay to rescue a friend a few years ago. "He just loved the outdoors," Thanh Vo said. "If he saw someone needing help like that, he'd just jump in."
...Nguyen's widow said her husband was a "good man, a sweet man," who "you loved the first time you talked to him."

"When my son grows up, I want him to be like his dad," she said.

Godspeed to both families.

On saving the modern university

AlanABQ writes:

Any dissent will [be] tolerated with all the restraint of a Taliban troop coming across a girl wearing a bikini & makeup while eating a pork chop.

...but, when you think about it, a pretty, fertile, not readily shared or kept girl might have as much of a powerfully sacred charge among some randy Taliban as a "right-wing dissenter" in intra-lefty faculty politics. Who gets to be the chief denouncer? What disappointed lesser denouncer might accuse his rival of being herself just a little too McCarthyite, once all the potential thought crimes are professorially parsed... of course, if the dissenter is a pretty girl, which is something one could never quite say, amidst the false irony and feminized sacrality of the contemporary quadrangle, the silence might just become interesting... how shall our universities ever know who should be head Talib? Quarreling over one's Mohammedan lineage is maybe like asking whether you can go full bore in expelling a black woman who just happens to be a notable Bushbot.

The impossibility of any or all Taliban ever being long satisfied with any answer to this question - by what right is she head? - opens the door to those who will remember why the human world has evolved covenants whose peace is the deferral of impossible solutions, a deferral that ultimately require real intellectual freedom, and ethical innovation, and not just "LitCrit jargon" (as one PJ commenter puts it: “Jane Austin and the Deterritorialized Gaze: Possession, Feminism, and the Other in 19th Century England”). I refer to the freedom which the covenant exists to guarantee as the only alternative to the full-scale Talibanization of the universities. As much as I'd like to see the ninja sociologists and the Haida anthropologists going after each other in the ivy halls when the easy cultural blackmail money really dries up, I expect a starving Talib can learn to love a pork chop. Some can't, mind you, their minds too far gone; but reality ultimately masters most, to some degree, i hope. Freedom's job is to constantly ask how to bring human reality on without it being easy prey for the periodically unrestrained.

Pajamas Media » A Huge Serving of Academia Nuts

Freak out your prof?

Well, aside from being seemingly oblivious to the fact that much of the professoriate is permanently freaked out (postmodern thought is the belief that any and all signs of the normal betray violence towards the Other and, since the normal, or myths defending it, will inevitably always come to the fore, it/they must be forever opposed in an institutionalized, never-ending, freak out) you've got to get a chuckle over the latest ad from the Young Tories.

But as I say, many academics can't take a politically-incorrect (if any) joke, especially not one that cuts close to the truth: they consider it their sacred duty to be permanently freaked out, reading every myth of the normal as a demonization of some victim, a process of victimization put beyond doubt for all time by the unmistakable model of the unquestionable vicimization, the Nazi and the Jew. Nothing the Jews ever did could justify their massacre.... (But the professoriate, that has been preaching one conspiratorial/Gnostic view of history after another for several generations now?) A good prof. can't miss up a chance to feed on this theme, least of all when he doesn't simply get to play the role of the victim advocate but can be, oh it's so glorious, the victim himself:

A 2004 study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., found that academics are five times more likely to identify as liberals than as conservatives. The study polled over 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 schools.

But academic administrators say most professors encourage a diversity of viewpoints.

Bruce Feldthusen, vice-president of university relations at the University of Ottawa, said he hasn't seen any evidence of political bias among faculty members. He called the Conservative ad campaign an attempt to "demonize" academia.

"This demonizing of institutions is all too common in American politics, and not very helpful here. We've seen the demonizing of the courts here in the last few years. Are we going to do the universities next?"

Oh the poor man, the next thing we'll be asking him to do is to think through his very dependence on the theme of "demonization" and victimization and to question whether continually invoking the mad mob that wants to turn Stephen Harper into the neocon fuhrer (or is it Bush's Goebbels?) in the name of the normal, oil, and the American lie of freedom, is actually not an intellectually or professionally respectable way to make a constructive contribution to the debate on maintaining a free society. The victimary elites fear, most of all, being pressured to seriously study the conservative truth claim: that the academic victim mongers are parasitic on a free society and are working to erode our capacity to renew our freedom, as they use emotional blackmail (see above) and demand appeasement from defenders of the sacred bases of freedom, all in the name of the victim, a figure they put beyond debate whatever minor nods they make to entertaining various points of view.

But the good news is:

Once considered redoubts for political pariahs, Conservative campus clubs are enjoying a resurgence at Canadian universities and colleges, emboldened by a cheeky ad campaign that encourages students to "freak out their profs" and join the federal party.

Campus-club presidents say membership has increased since Prime Minister Stephen Harper took office nearly two years ago. The Conservatives' ascent to power in Ottawa, they say, has had a multiplier effect on campus, enabling clubs to attract centre-leaning students.

The surge is evident at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. Despite the university's strong Tory roots, membership in the campus club sank to the low double digits at the start of the decade, when the country's two main conservative parties were still divided.

But more than 200 members now subscribe to the club's e-mail list, said Alex Bednar, president of the Queen's Campus Conservatives.

"People are now seeing us as a more viable option. The more politically ambitious kids are joining, because they see what's happening in Ottawa," said Bednar, a 21-year-old history major.