… won't get fooled more than four or five times again, tops.
Jul
30
2015
UNH Takes Down Bias-Free Language Guide
As I guessed might happen yesterday,
the University Near Here made its "Bias-Free Language Guide"
unavailable for web viewing early this morning.
The associate vice president for community, equity and diversity removed
the webpage this morning after a meeting with President Huddleston. The
president fully supports efforts to encourage inclusivity and diversity
on our campuses. He does not believe the guide was in any way helpful in
achieving those goals. Speech guides or codes have no place at any
American university.
I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting.
For people who missed what all the fuss was about, the pre-fuss version
of the Guide is memorialized at the Internet
Archive Wayback Machine.
An article in my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat, quotes
the president further:
While Huddleston said he respected the right of individuals on campus to
express themselves, he said that the “First Amendment is paramount and
key to” the University of New Hampshire.
So, a happy ending? Well, I figured I might point out the obvious
in a letter to Foster's:
In the wake of the massive unfavorable publicity and ridicule
stirred up by the University of New Hampshire's
"Bias-Free Language Guide",
it was good to see UNH's
President Mark Huddleston take a forthright
stand in favor of the First Amendment, and make a commitment to
"free and unfettered" speech on campus. The bizarre and arrogant
guide is now absent from the UNH web server.
I hope President Huddleston follows through on his
First Amendment enthusiasm by taking
one more step: The Foundation for
Individual Rights in education (FIRE) has long classified UNH as a "red light"
school, for having "at least one policy that both clearly and
substantially restricts freedom of speech." (https://www.thefire.org/schools/university-of-new-hampshire/).
That's at least as embarrassing as the Bias-Free Language Guide.
This shouldn't be hard to remedy: just in New Hampshire,
both Dartmouth and Plymouth State have been granted "green light"
ratings by FIRE. UNH should strive for the same.
I'll update here if it gets published. [Update: published in
Foster's Monday, August
2, right down to my capitalization typo on "education". Gotta start
being more diligent on proofing]
[Note: UNH President Huddleston is, according to the Portland
Press Herald, "troubled
and offended" by the BFLG. Can you hear the sound of our local
Social Justice Warriors being thrown under the bus?
So who knows how long it's going to
hang around on our website? Better check it out while you can.]
It's always fun to have one's employer mercilessly mocked, but
I'm not sure anyone's taken the trouble to point out: this is not
new. The
Internet Archive Wayback Machine has versions of the same URL
going back to September
2013. And almost all of the stuff that people are (laughing|shaking
their heads)
at today has been there since then.
Example: The item that many find most amusing is the guide's
deeming the use of "American" to refer to United States citizenry
to be "Problematic". But that's been in there right along, as near
as I can tell. Yes, it's stupid. But UNH is consistently
stupid. (Or, I guess I should say: consistently cognitively disabled.)
Not to say there haven't been changes. The 2013 section titled "SEXUAL
ORIENTATION" has been broadened; it's now "SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND
GENDER IDENTITY", wouldn't want to leave that out;
there are a couple of new terms in that section's
glossary: "gender expression" and "gender identity". (Not the same
thing, buddy, and don't you forget it.)
Some changes are mysterious: in 2013, "preferred" ways
to address a group of humans were "Folks, Peeps, People, You All,
Y’all". All acceptable ways to avoid the dread "Problematic/Outdated"
term "Guys".
But here we are in 2015, and "Peeps" has vanished from the "preferred"
list. But neither has it appeared in the "problematic" list. It has been
consigned to the Memory Hole, no doubt by some editor who had a bad
reaction to a marshmallow peep over Easter.
There are some obvious absurdities, probably inevitable when
a document is group-edited by peeps who score high on
feeling/thinking ratio. For example: if you refer to someone with no
disabilities
as "healthy", that is considered "problematic".
But this is a mere few paragraphs
after claiming that following the BFLG will "create a healthy, more
productive classroom culture or work environment." [emphasis added]
What is the innocent reader to think? "Healthy" is OK when you use it as
a metaphor, but not to refer to objective reality?
There's more. Much more. If your sport is shooting fish in a barrel,
have at it.
But to mention one last thing, the proffered justification for the BFLG is
especially egregious: "Starting a Conversation about Word Choice".
Presented with the usual who-could-be-against-that framing?
But "conversation" here should be taken in the progressive sense: the
one where you listen to us lecture on the current
enlightened dogma about matters racial, sexual, and political. After
which you will adjust your expression accordingly, or risk
being labeled a heretic against UNH's official "value" of "diversity".
As I'm sure I've noted before: Mrs. Salad's Netflix picks tend to the
offbeat and bizarre. Sometimes based on nothing more than (in this
case): "I like Jake Gyllenhaal". Downside: you wind up watching
movies like this sometimes. It was named "Best Canadian Film of the
Year"
at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards, but truth be told,
it might have been a slow year for movies up there.
Spoilers ahead, probably. Adam is a college history prof, who
tells his bored students about Hegel's historicism, which
Marx abbreviated to "first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
(He's shown saying this twice—heh!). But while watching
an obscure DVD movie, Adam notes a bit-part actor who is
literally his double. It's Anthony, who's shown to be a dissolute,
disagreeable jerk and pervert. Adam and Anthony eventually
meet, and before you can say:
"nothing good can come of this", it doesn't.
Keep your eye on the spiders, folks.
Problem: like many pretentiously arty movies, this one has endless
(but pointless) shots of scenery (especially the ugly Brutalist
architecture of Adam's school), Gyllenhaal-as-Adam wandering around looking
lost and moody, tricky lighting,
and the like. Cut those out, trim some of the gratuitous
nudity, and you've got a pretty good 60-minute episode of Night
Gallery with room for commercials.
I got this as a freebie for renewing my subscription to National
Review awhile back. (You can only have so many NR t-shirts
or coffee mugs.) And it finally percolated to the top of my to-be-read
pile. Written by David B. Frisk,
it is a hefty tome, 438 pages of text, over 60 pages of endnotes.
And what's it about?
It is a biography of William A. Rusher (1923-2011), the publisher of
National Review for about thirty of those years, from 1957 until
his retirement in 1988. In addition to his work at the magazine, Rusher
was also a political activist, heavily involved in an effort
to steer the Republican Party to a more consistently
conservative direction. Although his early GOP efforts were in
support of Dewey and Ike, he came around to a solid conservatism
after being disillusioned with the Eisenhower presidency.
Rusher was considerably different
from NR's famous editor, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was
born rich, comfortable moving in sophisticated society, totally
charming. Rusher was from a modest background, working his way into
Harvard Law, very much the practical politician, obsessed with
devising winning strategies. WFB was the golden
retriever in the limo, Rusher
the pitbull in the street.
It's surprising things worked as well as they did at the magazine.
Frisk does a good job of describing the inner wangling factions
at NR, often setting Rusher at odds not only with WFB, but
also with such eminences as James Burnham. There were disagreements
aplenty: what the overall tone of the magazine should be; which
political candidates should be supported, which dumped; just how
dismissive should the magazine be toward conspiracy theorists,
antisemites, and other fringe-dwellers. (Shrinking the tent of
acceptability is fine in theory, but once you start factoring
in the loss of subscribers, contributors, and advertisers, it
gets more difficult.)
Rusher was a huge Goldwater fan in the early 1960s, a major force
pushing him into his 1964 presidential candidacy. Frisk reminds
us that, like any sane person would be, Goldwater was unenthusiastic about
running. He seems only to have embraced the process when it was clear
he wouldn't win.
But the Goldwater campaign was successful at beating the liberal
Republicans, and it hatched the political career of conservatism's
most shining success, Ronald Reagan. Rusher was an active participant
there too. He never liked Nixon much, and wanted Reagan to be the
nominee in 1968.
Outside of politics, well… there wasn't much there to Rusher.
Never married, a few close friends. Obviously his choice, but somewhat
sad.
I can't recommend this book to anyone who isn't really interested
in the history of the US conservative political movement. At times it
seems that there's no memo so inconsequential, no squabble so trivial,
that Frisk doesn't describe it. Still, it's readable, and will act
as a lasting memory to someone who undoubtedly had a major effect
on his times.
That turned out to be News from Planet Rachel.
On Planet Earth, Jeb was visiting the Carolina Pregnancy
Center, which (indeed) does not perform abortions.
Is the Carolina Pregnancy Center, as Rachel claimed, falsely "designed to look
like they provide abortions to patients"? Well, you have to be
pretty oblivious to get that impression.
In fact, if you can't figure it out from their
home page,
you have to travel one
mere mouseclick from there
to learn that they "do not offer, recommend, or refer for abortions."
Some people out there get their news from Rachel. Pity them.
“I’m very proud of the fact that he speaks Brooklyn, because he’s not a
phony, and that shows,” said Marty Alpert, who used to cheer for Mr.
Sanders when he was on the track team at James Madison High School,
where she is now on the alumni board.
As a matter of fact, on a bunch of recent issues, Paul has been very
close to other, more-consciously conservative Republican candidates than
to any vision of libertarianism. His response to the murder of a San
Francisco woman by an illegal immigrant, for instance, was to denounce
"Sanctuary
Cities" and support an onerous
surveillance program. He's against the Iran
deal. While he was quick to call for yanking the Confederate battle
flag from public grounds, he was slow-to-never in challenging Donald
Trump's moronic view of Mexican immigrants as mostly criminal or to
issue a statement about the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage (he
eventually said he wants to privatize marriage). Earlier in the year, he
supported more defense spending than a couple of GOP hawks (albeit, Paul
wanted to pay for the increases with offsets elsewhere in the
budget).
Big surprise: when you blur your branding enough to blend in with the
other candidates, you don't give anyone any special reason to vote
for you.
Huckabee said that Trump has “struck a nerve with people,” and “I’ll be
honest with you, a lot of the things that he’s saying, those are things
that, in many ways, I’ve been saying those for eight years, before he
was a Republican. Things like talking about how China has cheated.
Talking about how there is this Wall Street-to-Washington axis of power
that grinds out jobs against Americans. I mean, these are themes that
I’ve been talking about. But, let me say this, if you put as much air in
my balloon, not just you, but if all the media, will pump the air in my
balloon, as has been pumped into Donald Trump’s balloon, I’ll be leading
the pack as well.”
Thanks be to Huck for reminding us that there's more than one know-nothing
demagogic populist on the GOP side.
Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, William Powell. While I suppose it would be
possible for those people to make an unwatchable movie, this isn't it.
Gable and Powell play Blackie and Jim, respectively. They are literally
boyhood chums. A tragic riverboat fire bonds them for life, but they
take divergent paths: Jim becomes a crusading attorney, destined to
root out organized crime and corruption, while Blackie adopts the path
of a gentleman gangster, with a slightly off-kilter sense of honor
about him.
Myrna Loy, lovely as always, is Eleanor,
initially Blackie's moll, but won away (literally) overnight by Jim,
as she realizes Blackie's essential disreputableness, and is charmed
by Jim's honorable intentions and traditional values.
All this—well, you see the title—sets up inevitable conflict
driven by a contrived plot. And it's all pretty good stuff,
because those three can make anything believable, and make you
care about how things are going to turn out.
Looking over the reviews, it seems that this is one of those
love-it-or-hate-it polarizing flicks. I would bet on a bimodal
distribution of user ratings. I come down on the side of "arty,
pretentious junk", sorry to the filmmakers.
It did, however, win at the Golden Schmoes Awards
for "Trippiest Movie of the Year". So maybe take that as a suggestion as
to what you need to ingest to make the movie watchable.
Scarlett Johansson plays (according to IMDB) "The Female".
In cooperation with a motorcyclist, she dons the clothes of a
recently-deceased woman, gets made up at a local store, and sets
off on her mission.
Which seems to involve
enticing lonely Scottish guys back to her lair where they
(under her alien spell) sink into a large dark pool and dissolve.
After a few rounds of this, she seems confused and
wanders off. But things eventually come to an unsatisfying
and ambiguous conclusion.
This is apparently your go-to movie for Scarlett Johansson nudity. But,
trust me, it's arty/dark enough to remove any titillation factor.
And in between there are more than enough pointless (but seemingly
endless) shots of drab Scottish scenery.
The fickle oddsmakers at PredictWise
have dropped Christie and Biden below our 2% threshold, but behold!
Mike Huckabee has arisen to take their place. This is Huck's first
appearance in the poll, and he's already in a solid second place:
The Donald dragged himself back into the spotlight by saying
something stupid and offensive about John McCain. I concur
with the sentiments of Matt Welch:
What has gone underplayed in today's widespread
outrage over Donald Trump's dismissal of John McCain's war heroism
is that the GOP
national-poll front-runner's comments, besides demonstrating an idiocratic
lack of basic human judgment and decency, are also dead wrong.
Because this is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is a vulgar
anti-intellect who cannot string a coherent paragraph together, his full
statement contradicts itself several times within 57
short words.
If you need reminding of just how dead wrong Trump was, check out the
whole thing.
Pun Salad is no fan of McCain as a person or politician. As noted back in
March
2008: he's a jerk. And note that Trump's comment was in the wake
of McCain's accusation
that Trump had "fired up the crazies" in a Phoenix rally. Referring
to thousands of McCain's own constituents.
Pun Salad did not enjoy Star Trek season 3 much, but wishes for
a solution to the McCain/Trump brawl similar to the episode
"Let
That Be Your Last Battlefield": beam them both down to a desolate
planet, let them fight it out, while the rest of us move along at warp
speed.
The NYTreported
on the doin's of man-of-the-people Bernie
Sanders last weekend:
[…] Mr. Sanders quietly stepped off the campaign trail this weekend to visit
Martha’s Vineyard, a favorite summer destination of the country’s elite,
in order to mix with representatives of some of the same interests he
inveighs against in his stump speech.
Mr. Sanders attended the annual Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
fund-raiser on the Massachusetts island, a popular gathering that draws
some of the most prominent business lobbyists and fund-raisers in the
Democratic Party.
A "prominent attendee" was anonymously quoted as saying that Bernie's
presence at the affair (which had a $37K admission fee) "suggested he
was more pragmatic than his rhetoric would let on."
Pragmatic? That's an interesting way to spell "phony". (See the
Weekly Standard for a funny poster.)
Reuters reports
that computer algorithms used by analytics firms to harvest
data from social media
are flummoxed by "sarcasm and mockery". And—you see where this
is going—that's a particular problem for political campaigns using
those results to target advertising dollars. Example:
Haystaq, a predictive analysis firm, examined Tweets containing the
expression “classy” and found 72 percent of them used it in a positive
way. But when used near the name of Republican presidential candidate
Donald Trump, around three quarters of tweets citing "classy" were
negative.
<sarcasm>I certainly hope that campaigns don't waste
money on poorly-targeted ads!</sarcasm>
Martin O'Malley hasn't cracked the 2% barrier at PredictWise lately,
but we'll blog about him anyway. In just a few hours timespan:
O'Malley made a horrific
gaffe at the left-wing Netroots Nation conference by saying: "Black
lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter." The last two
phrases departed from the current Progressive Holy Writ enough to get
him booed off the stage.
A tongue-in-cheek fantasy spy thriller. We don't get enough of those.
Mr. Darcy himself, Colin Firth, plays Harry Hart, an agent for
"Kingsman", a
super-secret private espionage organization. In a strained allegory,
the agency is run by "Arthur" (Michael Caine); there's a technical
wizard "Merlin" (Mark Strong); Harry's code name is "Galahad".
You get the idea.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Long ago, Harry's life was saved by the
noble sacrifice of a fellow agent. He tracks down the agent's son,
"Eggsy", who's
living a lower-class life with his slutty mom, hanging out with
street thugs. Harry recruits Eggsy into a grueling Kingsman "boot camp",
where he competes to be the "last man standing" in increasingly
dangerous tests of perilous adventure.
Just in time, too. Because a nefarious plot is in progress, masterminded
by "Valentine" (Samuel L. Jackon) and his deadly-but-gorgeous
assistant "Gazelle"
(Sofia Boutella). It involves massive worldwide casualties in service of
(here's a twist) eco-nuttiness.
The fifth and (so far) final book in Don Winslow's "Neal Carey"
series, originally published in 1996.
This is significantly more light-hearted than the first four.
My take on the previous entries in the series:
here,
here,
here,
and
here.
Although seemingly
out of print, they're available and inexpensive for Kindle. [UPDATE, Septeber 2022:
while checking my Amazon links, it turns out the books aren't available for
Kindle any more. Amazon clains some books in the series will be reissued
next year. There are current collectors-item prices on the books.]
Neal is enjoying semi-retirement in a remote Nevada town with his
fiancée Karen. Two problems: Karen decides she wants a baby. Like, right
now. And his "dad", Graham, calls with an assignment: Neal needs to
escort the aging vaudeville comic Natty Silver from Las Vegas back to
his home in the California desert.
Natty is a motormouthed jokester, delivering his patter and shaggy-dog
stories to any willing listener. (And also to Neal, who's unwilling.)
But there's more going on than Neal is aware of. Specifically, Natty is
the target of a desperate Nazi arsonist who wants him dead.
Things eventually work out.
I don't know if Don Winslow has any plans for writing more about Neal.
I, for one, would like to know how his life turned out, here nearly
twenty years later. Did he and Karen have those babies? Did he ever
get his English Literature doctorate? Is he out there
teaching bored undergrads
about his beloved Tobias Smollett? C'mon, Mr. Winslow, I bet there's a
lot of people who want to know what happened next!
I am something
of a Charles Murray fan. I think his 1988 book
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good
Government
remains the best introduction to libertarian philosophy I've seen.
He's been a consistent advocate of the values I most appreciate:
personal responsibility, humane individualism, mutual respect,
and so on. I buy his books automatically.
By the People is a diagnosis and possible remedy of major flaws
in modern American society and our government, combining history,
sociology, and legal analysis. Murray considers the "Madisonian" vision
of the founding fathers, and shows how that vision has been trashed over
the past 8 decades or so. (Not that flaws didn't appear earlier
with Wilsonian "progressivism".) Our legal system is a thick morass of
vague rules that a sufficiently zealous prosecutor can use to make
his chosen targets miserable. Ditto for essentially unregulated
regulatory agencies. Our politics are systematically corrupt with
both parties more than willing to play the "public choice" game, doing
big favors for well-connected constituents, spreading the costs out to
the unaware masses.
What to do? Murray suggests strategic civil disobedience, fueled
by the (so far) imaginary "Madison Fund", designed to defend the
flouters of unjust laws and stupid regulations.
The theory: make it expensive for
Big Government to force its pet policies down the throats of the
citizenry. Essentially, he hopes, the most outrageous legal
bullying will become totally impractical.
Murray describes why he thinks this might be a winning strategy,
in his usual accessible prose. I hope he's correct about that.
For the first time since May, there are no changes to our
phony presidential pol population. According to PredictWise, the following have a 2% or better
chance of being the next White House inhabitant:
Hillary comes in for scorn, obviously. Also Jindal, Christie, Walker,
Paul, and Cruz. A. Bart concludes:
Granted, it's a trifle naive to ask for authenticity from most
presidential candidates. You might as well ask a school of hungry
piranha to show a little self-restraint. Still, if recent history offers
any clue of what is to come for the next 18 months, it's a safe bet
Holden Caulfield won't be the only one who wants to throw up.
I always thought Holden's standards were a little too high.
Jonathan S. Tobin
writes in Commentary about
"Scott
Walker’s Flip-Flop Problem" and he's not talking about ancient
computer circuitry. Note: Tobin relies heavily on
a heavily
disputed report that claimed that Walker was saying one thing to
pro-immigration think-tankers, something else out on the populist
hustings. But still:
With the first GOP debate only a month away, it is no longer possible to
excuse Walker’s missteps as the inevitable mistakes of a rookie on the
national stage. Walker needs to make up his mind about immigration and
stick to it. Walker’s flip flop problem is real. If he continues to need
his staff to pressure people to walk back accounts of his flip-flopping,
he’s going to find himself outflanked by conviction conservatives on the
right who need no such help as well as other Republicans who are
prepared to stick to their guns in the same manner that Walker
demonstrated back in 2011 when he was besieged by the unions.
Walker's official entry into the race is, as they say, imminent.
Key takeaway (quoted from the linked
CNN article): "None of the 14 songs on the 67-year-old candidate’s
playlist was released before 1999."
Hil's list includes a song ("Break
Free")
featuring
the nefarious donut-licking Ariana
Grande; I can't help but wonder if that track will be quietly
dropped.
Professor Althouse articulates
something that has been percolating incoherently in my own brain for a
while, springing off Hillary's recent CNN interview where her
dismal "trustworthiness" numbers were discussed.
Yes, she lies
constantly. You know that. I know that. She knows that.
And I suspect that when she talks this over with her advisers, a central
idea is: Politicians are dishonest. Everyone knows that and everyone
thinks that. It's trifling that it shows up in a poll that people think
Hillary is dishonest. It's like a poll showing people think the
sky is blue. The important thing is, people are familiar and at home
with Hillary's dishonesty. It's a comfortable old friend. We know all
about it. It's acquired a transparency of its own. But what is the
dishonesty of all those other candidates? That is the mystery.
That is what people should worry about — all the strange ways in which
Jeb/Marco/Scott/Rand/Ted/etc. are dishonesty. So confusing and
disturbing. Who knows how to begin to delve into that swamp? Best to
stay with good old dishonest Hillary!
Wait a minute. You're telling me that this movie didn't
win the Best Picture Oscar? And it lost to Birdman?!
I mean, I love Michael Keaton and everything. But how does
a movie about an unlikeable semi-insane self-centered actor
win over this movie?
Oh well. Hollywood. At least it was nominated for Best Picture.
(Also: Best Director, Clint Eastwood; Best Actor, Bradley Cooper;
Best Adapted Screenplay, Jason Hall. It won for Sound Editing.)
Everyone kind of knows the plot, but: the movie follows Chris Kyle,
mostly centered on his exploits in Iraq, trying to save his fellow
soldiers from the savage attacks of the insurgents that popped
up post-Saddam. There's plenty of ass-clenching suspense and
action, but the movie also shows the dreadful toll of war on
Kyle, his fellow troops, and his family. It does that without
following the easy anti-American tropes of other recent Iraq movies.
It's very powerful, even when you wait to see it on DVD. Recommended.
I put this into the Netflix queue on a whim. But it's #214 on IMDB's
top 250 movies of all
time (as I type), and was nominated for Best Foreign Language
movie last year. (It's Argentinian, and you should see how it did at
the Argentinian Oscars! They thought it was the best movie ever!)
It is actually a collection of six shorter movies, with no particular
relation other than having characters dropped into stressful situations.
The IMDB lists the genres as "Comedy, Drama, Thriller", but be warned,
the comedy is pretty darn dark.
Summaries: (1) passengers on a plane flight realize they seem to have more
in common than one might expect; (2) a waitress and a cook at a
late-night restaurant deal with an unpleasant customer; (3) a road rage
incident on a remote highway escalates dramatically; (4) a demolition
engineer reacts poorly to having his car towed by a rip-off company
(yeah, they have those in Argentina too, I guess); (5) a father tries to
cover up his son's involvment in a fatal hit-and-run; and (6) a bride
discovers her new husband's infidelity and turns her wedding into an
emotional roller-coaster.
I enjoyed some more than others, but all were watchable. It put me in
mind of the old "anthology" TV shows, like Twilight Zone and
Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Certainly such a series could thrive
in these days of cheapie video?
I was encouraged to pick up this book by a glowing review
in the WSJ back in 2013. (Yes, it can take a while to get to
items in my TBR pile.)
Comparisons to Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Jim Harrison were made.
And I found it a pretty good read too. It is an auspicious debut novel
for author Bart Paul.
The narrator and protagonist is Tommy Smith. He and his longtime buddy
Lester work in the California mountain wilderness, wrangling horses
and acting as guides for tourists who want to rough it in the outdoors.
But on an expedition near a remote pass through the Sierras, Tommy
and Lester happen upon a plane crash and the pilot's corpse. They
remember news stories from months back about a missing billionaire, and
reach the obviously correct conclusion: they found him.
Tommy wants to do the obviously correct thing: report the crash site
and the body when they return to civilization. But Lester gets way too
clever, grabbing the dead guy's Rolex and some loose cash. Tommy
reluctantly refrains from doing the right thing. But things get worse:
Lester and his girlfriend launch a crackpot scheme to grab some of the
billionaire's family fortune in return for their knowledge.
Unfortunate choice, because (as it turns out) there are people who would
just as soon keep the billionaire's death unrevealed. And if the only
way to do that is to kill everyone who can say different? Okay, fine!
Tommy, just like Liam Neeson, has "certain skills" that might ensure
survival. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse can't-trust-anyone thriller.
What's new in the world of presidential political phoniness?
Chris Christie officially announced his candidacy on Tuesday; the
NYT welcomed him with an editorial: "Gov.
Chris Christie’s Phony Truth-Telling". As you might expect, they
are not fans, and much of it is predictable partisan sniping. Still:
Sometimes, Mr. Christie wants to make himself a strong, reliable
right-winger. He told an anti-gun-control crowd in South Carolina in
June, for example, that all of New Jersey’s gun laws preceded his tenure
and “no new ones have been made since I’ve been governor.” Actually, he
signed three major pieces of gun-control legislation.
So keep your hand on your wallet when Christie comes to town.
Jaime Fuller of New York Magazine writes a brief hit-piece
on Jeb: "Jeb
Bush and His Friends Have Spent a Lot of Time Explaining His Bad
Business Deals". (Although the URL implies the original headline was
something like "Jeb Bush Has Apologized a Lot For Helping Crooks".)
It is mostly a summary of reporting done by others, including the
Washington Post, but still …
One of Bush's real-estate friends gave
the Post the most amusing spin for Bush's nonexistent
business bullshit detector, saying that the presidential candidate has a
“record for having only a few clients who ultimately turned out to be
less than truthful is remarkable, and that record would compare
favorably with any firm in this business, either in Miami or another
city.” We should be impressed that a presidential candidate didn't get
involved in more shady dealings — especially in Florida!
Jeb appears to be a poor judge of character. Not a quality you really
look for in a president.
By the way, the double standard we can expect from "journalists"
is on full display
in Fuller's article. An arguably more sleazy association of Hillary
Clinton with convicted drug smuggler Jorge Cabrera is
briefly described. There's even a picture of Hillary and
Jorge in
front of a Christmas tree at a White House reception. This is dismissed
airily with "that’s what politicians do" and "how would Hillary have
known?"
Allahpundit
considers recent stories about candidate Scott Walker
reassuring pro-immigration Stephen Moore that "I’m not going nativist;
I’m pro-immigration," allegedly contradicting his current public stance.
Allahpundit speculates: "Maybe he was BSing Moore."
Or maybe he’s BSing us. Between his previous agonizing immigration
flip-flop-flipping, his well-timed reversal
on ethanol in Iowa, and his sudden rediscovery
of social conservatism, I don’t really believe anything Walker says
anymore. He’s the most conspicuous panderer among the field’s top
candidates. If there’s anyone running who might be telling voters one
thing in the name of getting elected while telling donors and
establishment allies another, it’s him.
The NYT unearthed some Deep Thoughts from Bernie Sanders'
writings for The Vermont Freeman. Particularly lurid
was a column entitled “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death"
The piece began with an apocalyptically alarmist account of the
unbearable horror of having an office job in New York City, of being
among “the mass of hot dazed humanity heading uptown for the 9-5,”
sentenced to endless days of “moron work, monotonous work.”
“The years come and go,” Mr. Sanders wrote, in all apparent seriousness.
“Suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack,
alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.”
So was Bernie about 17 when he wrote that? No, he was thirty. (Or, as
the NYT puts it, "barely 30", as if that's an excuse.)
One author, Alan Charles Kors, is a history professor at the University
of Pennsylvania; the other, Harvey Silverglate, is a Massachusetts
lawyer. After this book came out, they founded FIRE, the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, still going strong.
The book starts out with a particularly egregious example: 1993's
persecution of Eden Jacobowitz, a student who yelled "Shut up, you
water
buffalo" out of his UPenn dorm window to a group of
boisterous students below. Unfortunately for Eden, the targets of this
shouted demand were mostly black females, who complained. Penn
administrators demanded a disproportionate and unjust punishment. But
unlike most students, Eden fought back. (Prof Kors was his advocate,
to his good fortune.) Eventually, it became a national cause célèbre
and Penn backed down.
Eden's case had a happy conclusion, but the drawn-out battle, wasteful,
draining, and contentious as it was, was its own punishment.
And, as Kors and Silverlate show, it was hardly an outlier.
One might expect universities, of all places, to be champions of free
and unfettered discussion, due process for accused misbehavior, and
tolerance for oddball, unpopular views. But, as Kors and Silverglate
show with sometimes mind-numbing recitations of case after case, exactly
the opposite is true. Mostly drawing from the 1980s and 1990s, they
detail arbitrary penalties and unfair procedures, mostly aimed at the
unfortunate minorities deemed to be politically incorrect. They are
predictably and justifiably outraged.
The roots of this behavior, the book argues, lie in the 1960s,
where are generation of deep thinkers learned Herbert
Marcuse's Marxist philosophy, with special attention to
his theory of repressive
tolerance: the notion that fair treatment of all ideas only benefits
capitalistic domination of the masses. Hence, some ideas should be "more
equal than others", and there's nothing wrong with people holding
"correct" views
suppressing
rival opinions.
Now, to be fair, only a small (but very vocal) fraction of today's
university personnel are true Marcusean social justice warriors. But
the strident oft find allies with the spineless. In this case,
go-along-to-get-along administrators whose primary interest is in
keeping controversy and contention (with its attendant bad publicity)
to a minimum.
The results, over and over, are episodes that seem like they could
spring from a novel co-written by Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Ayn
Rand: secretive and power-drunk villains deploy their full arbitrary
powers against (at best) minor infractions and offenses. As in Eden's
case, the good guys usually prevail, but only after excruciating
legal procedures and publicity.
There are a lot of New Hampshire roots in the book, going back to
1942's Chaplinsky
v. New Hampshire, based on an incident that happened just up the
street in Rochester, which generated the regrettable "fighting words"
limitation on First Amendment rights. There was also
Wooley v.
Maynard, the irony-inspired case
of the free thinker who got in trouble
for taping over the "Live Free or Die" motto on
his license plates.
New Hampshire's university system is also (sadly) well-represented here,
going back to
the 1950s, the state's efforts to hassle then-professor
Paul
Sweezy about his (acknowledged) Marxist views and associates is
discussed. In more modern times, there was UNH's efforts to discipline Professor
J.
Donald Silva for allegedly creating a “hostile and offensive environment” in
his classroom with his (um) colorful analogies and examples. Up north at
Plymouth State, Leroy Young, a graphic design professor
was summarily canned after allegations of sexual harassment of his
students. (I'm not sure how Young's suit against Plymouth and USNH
turned out.)
[Well after the book came out, UNH showed that it hadn't learned much
about free expression by evicting
a student who posted a satirical flier in his dorm's elevator. UNH
continues to have a red
light rating from FIRE for its unconsitutionally overbroad
policy on "sexual harassment".]
So: while you might expect a 17-year-old book on then-current events
to be dated, it turns out (regrettably) not to be at all.
The mentalities and procedures
it describes are still in vogue in American higher ed,
as any look at recent headlines shows. (See, for example:
here;
here;
here, all
easily-found stories from the past few weeks.) Plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose, or as President Eisenhower [never
actually] said: things are
more like they are today than they've ever been before.
A relatively new wrinkle is the Obama Administration's aggressive
(and probably unconstitutional, but what's new) push
to force schools and colleges to cut back on due process and free
speech via an expansive interpretation of its authority granted
by anti-discrimination statutes, like the famous Title IX. This book
doesn't cover that, obviously, but it's easy to see how it could be
the source for Volume II.
As a kid, songs by the Four Seasons were in my soundtrack. Like most
baby boomers, I suppose. I wasn't a major fan, but I can still rattle
off (at least partial) lyrics from their hits.
So this was a natural choice for the Netflix queue. It is based on the
hit Broadway musical, and directed by the immortal Clint Eastwood.
It relates the story of how the group came together, their connections
(mostly innocuous) to mobsters, inner frictions, family woes,
and—well, I think it hits every cliché about celebrity rise and
fall you could imagine. But I suppose sometimes things are clichés
because they're based in fundamental truths. Millions of years of
evolution did not prepare mere humans to deal with superstardom.
It's a pretty good yarn—I stayed awake for the whole thing, anyhow,
which is increasingly rare these days. But it's way too long (134
minutes). I was surprised to learn that the songs were actually
performed live on set by the actors, many of whom were from the Broadway
cast. They're good!
Christopher Walken appears as a benevolent gangster,
I kept wishing for him to drop a "more cowbell" line.
Rated R, entirely
for bad language. (Except in New Jersey, where it's rated "G": a child is likely to
hear far worse in the home.)
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