W12 C2 Notes and Homework

I'll post updated marks this weekend. Get those last two chapter summaries done.

Also, I'll have a couple of specific questions about the readings and I'll fill you in on the exam. Let's have a bit of food next class -- i'll bring some snacks, you may, too :)

Homework: Are there any questions you'd like to discuss or do you know more than you wanted to know about what in the world is going on?

Why Reporters -- and Judges and Professors -- Are Biased

Dennis Prager
Tuesday, November 25, 2008

That the news media were biased in the 2008 presidential election is now acknowledged by fair-minded people, left or right

As Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin said this weekend at a Politico/USC Conference on the 2008 election: “It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business. … It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Given how obvious this bias is, the question is not whether liberals in the media tend to offer biased reporting. The question is why? Why can’t liberal news people report the news without any slant?

The answer is that for people on the left, all -- I repeat, all -- professions are a means to an end, not ends in themselves. That end is the social transformation of society, meaning the promoting of “social justice” as the left understands that term.

For most liberal news reporters, therefore, the purpose of news reporting is not to report news as objectively as possible. The purpose of the media in general and of reporting specifically is to promote social justice and the social transformation of society.

For most liberal judges, the primary purpose of being a judge is to promote social justice and transform society. That is why liberal judges are so much more likely to be judicial activists than conservative judges. Most liberal judges do not see their roles as merely adjudicating a dispute according to the law. They see their role primarily as using the law and their power to rule on the law to promote social justice.

For most university professors -- and many high school teachers, as well -- outside of the natural sciences and math, the same holds true. The task of a teacher is to teach, i.e., to convey the most important information as honestly as possible. But, again, this conflicts with the social justice goal of the left. History teachers who merely teach history are of little use to the left. History -- and English and political science, and sociology and other liberal arts -- teachers must use their classroom to produce young people who will wish to engage in society-transforming work for social justice.

For most liberals in the arts (there are very few conservatives in the arts) there is no denial of their having an agenda. They state quite candidly that the purpose of the arts is to challenge the (conservative) status quo, to raise political and social consciousness by advancing a “progressive” political and social agenda. The artist whose agenda is merely to produce beautiful art is looked upon as a reactionary buffoon, and is not likely to be taken seriously -- no matter how talented -- in the worlds of music, dance, painting, and sculpture.

Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a “progressive” end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America -- science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research. There are the exaggerated secondhand smoke data popularized so as to decrease smoking and fight “Big Tobacco.” And now we have the scientifically questionable belief in man-made carbon emissions causing global warming leading to natural catastrophe – and recommended “solutions” many of which, if adopted, will serve the goal of undermining corporate capitalism.

The best analogy of the directing of all human endeavors toward a left-wing purpose would be those early medieval centuries of European life when just about everything man made was supposed to reflect a religious consciousness. Virtually nothing stood apart from the Church. The arts were religious, the sciences were handmaidens of theology, and schools were religious in nature.

Most moderns look upon that period as a dark age -- perhaps a bit unfairly at times. But the people who most scorn what they deem the religious “Dark Ages” are trying to building a secular-left dark age in our time. Because the left is a religion, a substitute for the Christianity it seeks to displace.

Videos: feminism, men, and women

Chivalry: Hoff Summers
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22The%20New%20Girl%20Order%22&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGIC_enCA219CA227&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#q=christina%20hoff%20summers&emb=0

Maher:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22The%20New%20Girl%20Order%22&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGIC_enCA219CA227&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#q=christina%20hoff%20summers&emb=0

Glen Sachs:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22The%20New%20Girl%20Order%22&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGIC_enCA219CA227&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#q=anti%20male&emb=0

Ali G:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=%22The%20New%20Girl%20Order%22&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGIC_enCA219CA227&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#q=feminism&emb=0&start=50

Castration at the University of New Hampshire

Castration and Tolerance at UNH
March 30, 2005
by Mike S. Adams, Ph.D.

Recently, one of my readers wrote saying that my school, UNC-Wilmington, had the craziest feminists in the entire nation. That was incorrect. The honor belongs to the University of New Hampshire (UNH).

This March, posters depicting a woman grasping a hammer with “Feminism” stamped on the handle were hung over campus. With clenched fists, the woman on the poster was saying “If I had a hammer...I'd SMASH Patriarchy.”

Another caption above the hammer said, “I FOUND IT!”The Feminist Action League (FAL) organized the on-campus event, which featured poetry readings, skits, monologues and an open microphone. Members of FAL said they wanted to share experiences of oppression in a “comfortable setting.” The UNH campus is a good choice, as long as you aren’t a man, of course.


One member of FAL was quoted as saying that “Ninety-nine percent of sexual perpetrators are men. They are the root cause of the rape and oppression against women.” That pretty much sums up the tone of the event. Nonetheless, it gets worse.

One FAL member’s monologue follows: “Hello, my name is Mary Man-Hating-Is-Fun. I am 23 years old, and I am what a feminist looks like. Ever since I learned to embrace my feminist nature, I found great joy in threatening men's lives, flicking off frat brothers and plotting the patriarchy’s death. I hate men because they are men, because I see them for what they are: misogynistic, sexist, oppressive and absurdly pathetic beings who only serve to pollute and contaminate this world with war, abuse, oppression and rape.”

Other members of the FAL wore scissors around their necks and sang a song about castration.

David Huffman, a writer for the UNH conservative paper “Common Sense” was outraged by the, shall we say, mr-ogyny of the event. Huffman was asked to leave the public university event during the open microphone session. Despite the fact that he wasn’t singing songs about castration, FAL members said he was making women feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t singing about castration that these women felt uncomfortable.


Huffman pointed out that nowhere did the posters advertising the event say “Women Only.” He was simply excluded from an event at a public university based upon his gender.

The evening of man-hating was simply an example of an extremist group promoting stereotypes and encouraging violence towards another group. This is the kind of thing that is tolerated in the name of campus diversity, simply because the targets are the “right” group (Read: Not blacks, women, or gays).

After hearing poems that talked about castrating men, read by women with scissors around their necks, Hoffman asked “How is this any different than hating African-Americans or Jews?” The answer is simple: It is no different in principle. But, of course, the FAL is not based upon principle. The organization is based upon blind hatred.

But the women weren’t the only lunatics in the audience. Rob Wolff, of the Men Against Patriarchy, said the following: “I hope men are confronted. That's what it's going to take. Events like this are the beginning of a women's revolution.”


But many observers ask whether a fraternity advocating female genital mutilation at a campus event (and throwing women out of the event) would be as cute and entertaining as the stunts FAL pulled recently on the UNH campus.

But there’s no need to contemplate hypothetical cases at UNH. Just look at what happened to sophomore Timothy Garneau last semester. The university kicked him out of his dorm after he posted fliers mocking freshmen women who gained weight.


Although he had to sleep in a friend’s car while temporarily homeless, things could have been worse for Timothy. He would have been castrated if the FAL ran the university. In a few years, maybe they will.

Top Gobal Warming Scientist Lying?

See this very interesting article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml

How welfare has destroyed Britain

Welfare’s Devastating Effects

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/24/2008

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Martin Durkin, the producer of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. He is preparing a documentary series on the social history of Britain.



FP: Martin Durkin, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

Durkin: Thanks for asking me.

FP: I would like to follow up with you a bit on our last interview, as we hit on many profound and significant themes associated with the Left and its main causes and agendas.

I’d like to touch on social engineering with you today.

Tell us your thoughts and observations in terms of welfare. Where has it caused the most devastating effects?

Durkin: To most people, I imagine, welfare seems an obviously good thing. But in fact the corrosive and iniquitous side of welfare has been evident for many decades. It’s only now that people are poking their heads out of the trench and daring to say so. You can see the devastating effects of welfare in Britain, for example, in the exponential rise in single motherhood. The figures are astonishing. In the 1950s almost all children in Britain were brought up by their natural parents. Today, only around half the children in Britain are brought up by their natural parents. Half!

FP: Why has that happened?

Durkin: To see why that happened, let me paint you a picture. In the 1950s, the typical working man and his wife In Britain lived in an income-tax free existence. They kept every penny they earned. For an unmarried teenager, there was no council flat (the ‘projects’ I think you call them), no rent rebate, no rate rebate, no housing benefit or anything else. The burden of looking after her and the child fell on her family, friends or charity. Parents who discovered their daughters were pregnant were understandably furious – because they had to pick up the tab. That’s why Dad stomped round to the family of the boy responsible, to call him to account. They boy’s family understood the full economic implications of making babies and came down on him like a ton of bricks. From the real economic relationships there arose a real moral code – the value and the cost of things were clear.

The growth of welfare benefits has been huge since that time. And within that system a pregnant girl gets special treatment (top of the state housing list etc). The fear has gone. The old idea, “Don’t, for heaven’s sake, get pregnant. It would be a disaster” has gone. For many girls, getting pregnant is a ticket to get out of the parental home. This has been the subject of detailed studies. A ten percent increase in benefits, one of them finds, tends to increase the prevalence of single mothers by 17 percent.

FP: How has the Left played a role in this development?

Durkin: This whole trend in social policy was fuelled by the anti-family views of the left. The family was bourgeois. Divorce was even celebrated (at least among the serious Left and among tougher feminists). I suppose they thought they were doing young girls a favor. If they did, they were fatted-headed idiots. The effect is disastrous for all those involved. The levels of depression, violence and criminality among lone parents (and their wayward children and transient partners) is heartbreaking. As one commentator puts it, “The evidence that lone parents – and indeed those who cohabit – are very more likely to be victims of violence is worldwide, consistent and overwhelming.” In Britain single parents are about 20 times more likely to suffer domestic violence. A child of a single parent is 15 times more likely to be abused than a child brought up by two natural parents. A child brought up by their natural mother and a cohabite (non natural father) is at even greater risk – 19 times more likely to suffer violence and 74 times more likely to be killed.

It’s awful. To catalogue in detail the full devastating effects of welfare – also for example the crippling effects on men who are out of work – would take ages.

FP: Ok, but tell us some more negative effects.

Durkin: Overall, I think in general the bigger evil effects of welfare have been enormously underestimated, even by commentators who regard themselves as more pro-capitalist in their sympathies. Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years.

The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.

I’m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don’t think people fully realise what’s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened?

FP: So what the hell happened?

Durkin: The logic is inescapable. Each slice of do-gooder social policy has had its own tragic, unintended effects. The weight and quality of evidence leaves no room for doubt. The Welfare State has been an unremitting disaster, beyond any hope of reform. It is not that the welfare state isn’t functioning properly, it is that the welfare state is in essence degrading.

In the US, I think much the same can be said of the effects of welfare on the black community. How did we get from the nobility of Martin Luther King, to the sordid, gun-toting, rantings of the gangster rappers? Does the Left imagine that this represents liberation? Larry Elder and others have no doubt what’s to blame. The story goes back to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which had people going door to door, encouraging people to get on welfare. Now, I understand, nearly 70 percent of today’s black children are born out of wedlock.

It can be demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the modern ‘cultural trends’ which we lament have an economic cause, and are a direct result of state intervention. The Left do not see economic necessity as a proper reflection of actual human relationships, but some capitalist carbuncle. It’s clear now that in removing economic necessity from people’s lives (which is what welfare does), we risk sinking into barbarism.

A Professor's politically incorrect thoughts...

from 10 random politically incorrect thoughts by Victor Davis Hansen

The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

An interesting view of the recent election

Excerpt from "How the universities elected Obama":

Of all the reasons why America voted the way it did on November 4, one factor stands out: young people and first-time voters turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.

MSNBC's exit polling, which is consistent with other exit polling, showed that voters aged 18-29, who made up nearly one in five voters -- or about 25 million ballots -- went for Obama by more than two to one: 66 to 32 percent. Those voters alone well exceeded Obama's overall popular vote advantage, which was roughly eight million. Likewise, 11 percent of voters were first-time voters, and they went for Obama at an even higher rate: 69 to 30 percent. Single (unmarried) voters, which constituted one in three voters, went for Obama 65 to 33 percent.

While these categories are not monolithic, and overlap, they capture the current generation of college students, who clearly went bonkers for Barack Obama. Why? What are they learning -- and not learning?

These youth live and learn on college campuses where "diversity" and "tolerance" and "multiculturalism" -- bogus buzzwords that apply only to ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity, not genuine diversity of ideas -- reign supreme. Racial diversity is at the crux of this academic trinity, the source and summit of the faith. It is the molten, golden calf, where much of the intelligentsia and their disciples gather to worship. Political correctness has supplanted traditional religion.

...

This is an abbreviated way of explaining why Barack Obama's communist connections didn't matter in this election, and how the Ivory Tower paved the road to victory. We won the Cold War but seem to have lost the long-term, crucial ideological struggle at home. We lost not on the battlefield but in the classroom. On November 4, it finally came back to bite us, and at a time (economically and politically) that couldn't be worse.

Finally, I should add that I've received emails in the last couple of weeks from distraught conservative parents saddened to learn that their college-student children voted for Obama. They shouldn't be surprised; sadly, these parents have unwittingly paid for precisely this. In the vast majority of the nation's colleges, this is what their children are learning at a cost of the parents' lifetime savings. I'm reminded of the statement from the late atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who said that the job of professors like him was "to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own" and "escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents."

This has been the personal mission of many professors for decades now -- in flagrant violation of the scandalously fraudulent mission statements of the colleges where they teach. They've been enormously successful. The left's gradual takeover of academia is complete -- the Long March a stunning success. Behold: the presidency of the United States of America.

The fruits of the left's dogged work were on display on November 4, 2008. And now, alas, to paraphrase the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, America's chickens have come home to roost.

W11 C2 Notes

I'll post up the last short assignment on Saturday. Next week, I'll start to prepare you for the exam.

For homework, answer the questions about "To End All Wars".

Don't forget the ch 9 and 11 summaries, due by Monday night.

How the universities elected Obama

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=91CB4A3A-1284-4CCB-A275-4F5BA3B4A28D

W11 C1 Homework: "To End All Wars"

Which character in the film would be you? Why?


Which character do you most admire? Why?


Can you relate the film to Dr. King's teaching about being willing to die for what's right?

'Socialism'? It's Already Here.

By George F. Will
Sunday, November 16, 2008; B07

Conservatism's current intellectual chaos reverberated in the Republican ticket's end-of-campaign crescendo of surreal warnings that big government -- verily, "socialism" -- would impend were Democrats elected. John McCain and Sarah Palin experienced this epiphany when Barack Obama told a Toledo plumber that he would "spread the wealth around."

America can't have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans -- whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; and a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm -- and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called "the private sector" has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be "spread around."

The seepage of government into everywhere is, we are assured, to be temporary and nonpolitical. Well.

Probably as temporary as New York City's rent controls, which were born as emergency responses to the Second World War and are still distorting the city's housing market. The Depression, which FDR failed to end but which Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor did end, was the excuse for agriculture subsidies that have lived past three score years and 10.

The distribution of a trillion dollars by a political institution -- the federal government -- will be nonpolitical? How could it be? Either markets allocate resources, or government -- meaning politics -- allocates them. Now that distrust of markets is high, Americans are supposed to believe that the institution they trust least -- Congress -- will pony up $1 trillion and then passively recede, never putting its 10 thumbs, like a manic Jack Horner, into the pie? Surely Congress will direct the executive branch to show compassion for this, that and the other industry. And it will mandate "socially responsible" spending -- an infinitely elastic term -- by the favored companies.

Detroit has not yet started spending the $25 billion that Congress has approved but already is, like Oliver Twist, holding out its porridge bowl and saying, "Please, sir, I want some more."

McCain and Palin, plucky foes of spreading the wealth, must have known that such spreading is most of what Washington does. Here, the Constitution is an afterthought; the supreme law of the land is the principle of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Sugar import quotas cost the American people approximately $2 billion a year, but that sum is siphoned from 300 million consumers in small, hidden increments that are not noticed. The few thousand sugar producers on whom billions are thereby conferred do notice and are grateful to the government that bilks the many for the enrichment of the few.

Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious -- destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government. But if conservatives call all such spreading by government "socialism," that becomes a classification that no longer classifies: It includes almost everything, including the refundable tax credit on which McCain's health-care plan depended.

Hyperbole is not harmless; careless language bewitches the speaker's intelligence. And falsely shouting "socialism!" in a crowded theater such as Washington causes an epidemic of yawning. This is the only major industrial society that has never had a large socialist party ideologically, meaning candidly, committed to redistribution of wealth. This is partly because Americans are an aspirational, not an envious, people. It is also because the socialism we do have is the surreptitious socialism of the strong, e.g., sugar producers represented by their Washington hirelings.

In America, socialism is un-American. Instead, Americans merely do rent-seeking -- bending government for the benefit of private factions. The difference is in degree, including the degree of candor. The rehabilitation of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are candid about their complicity in what government has become.

As for the president-elect, he promises to change Washington. He will, by making matters worse. He will intensify rent-seeking by finding new ways -- this will not be easy -- to expand, even more than the current administration has, government's influence on spreading the wealth around.

Global Cooling -- look out!!!

"Sea ice growing at fastest pace on record":

An abnormally cool Arctic is seeing dramatic changes to ice levels. In sharp contrast to the rapid melting seen last year, the amount of global sea ice has rebounded sharply and is now growing rapidly. The total amount of ice, which set a record low value last year, grew in October at the fastest pace since record-keeping began in 1979.

So apparently those polar bears will be all right after all.

W10 C2 Dr Shelby Steele on Race in America

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b15qEY1z2iI

On Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTqeQ3XYIwI&feature=related

W10 C2 Homework: one question

from Discover the Networks:

The campaigns of the socialist left, under the noble-sounding banners of “social justice” and “equality,” have inflicted catastrophe in many forms—poverty, moral decline, criminality, violence, illness, and death—upon countless millions of people over the course of the past half-century.

The programs and policies that led to these disastrous outcomes were unfailingly promoted by the left—under the false flag of “liberalism”—as expressions of a high-minded idealism that promised to spawn an era of unprecedented societal harmony, and to literally create the world anew.

The leftist model holds that non-socialist societies are composed exclusively of dominators and the dominated, oppressors and the oppressed. The alleged cause of this social arrangement is the economic system of free-market capitalism, which the left considers the root of all manner of social ills and vices—racism, sexism, alienation, homophobia, imperialism.

In the calculus of the left, capitalism is the agent of tyranny and exploitation that presses its iron boot upon the proverbial necks of a wide array of victim groups—blacks and other minorities, women, homosexuals, immigrants, and the poor, to name but a few.

That is why according to the left, the United States (the standard-bearer of all capitalist economies) can only do wrong.



Do you understand how this brief excerpt (we'll look at more next week) relates to political correctness and the msm?

W10 C2 Notes

No summary/response this weekend. I've decided not to give you a third essay, but there will be a third short assignment. I'll redistribute the marks. The final exam will be partly a take home -- I'll give you two or three articles at least a week in advance; you'll relate one or more of them to a specific chapter/chapters in the book. I'll give you information about the format of the exam -- short answers, paragraphs, essay, definitions -- soon.

Next class, we'll watch a movie -- not a documentary -- which I'll relate to various themes of the course. It has captions, for those whose first language isn't English, in fact, since there's a lot of Scottish accents, even for us English speakers :) It's a true story of despair, hope, and hatred set in a WW2 Japanese prison camp.

You may post ch's 9 and 11 summaries when you like. Week after next we'll talk about both. I want to save the week before the exam to tie a few things together.

Summary/response Ch 11 "The Most Important Story you Never saw on TV"

Same instructions as Ch 9

Summary/Response: Ch 9 "Targeting Men"

If you prefer, you may take the three points approach rather than a summary paragraph and a response paragraph for this and for Chapter 11. In other words, quote or briefly describe an interesting point and then respond. Next point, response. Or as usual. Your choice.

Tolerance in Higher Education

November 12, 2008 Powerline

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that an 18-year-old freshman at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Annie Grossman, was assaulted by four young women on election night. The attackers called Grossman a "racist" because she was wearing a McCain/Palin button. Grossman was diagnosed with blurred vision and a concussion.

The four attackers are believed not to be Augsburg students, but Grossman's parents say she has had trouble in school, too:

Grossmann's parents, Bruce and Dawn, said that in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, Annie had trouble on campus because of her political leanings and for being a hunter.

Bruce Grossmann said a "PETA person" had to be removed from her dorm room because he was upset by a photo of her with a black bear she had shot. Also, he said, she attended an icebreaker on campus and was booed when she identified herself as a Republican.

"I don't think she was prepared for the close-mindedness," he said. "I told her she needs to take a lower profile [for the sake of] her academic and her sports careers."

That's probably good advice, but it's one more reminder of why our colleges and universities have been described as "islands of repression in a sea of freedom."

W10 C1 Race and the msm: videos

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcmw4842_169fk56pxf7

W 10 C 1 Homework: What would you be willing to die for?

The words of Dr Martin Luther King, his last speech, the night before he was assassinated:

...The only way we can achieve freedom is to somehow conquer the fear of death. But if a man has not discovered something he would die for, he isn't fit to live. And deep down in our non-violent creed is our conviction, there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they're worth dying for.

And if a man is 36 years old as I happen to be, and some great truth stands before the door of his life, and some great opportunity to stand up for what is right and just, and he refuses to stand up because he wants to live a little longer, and he's afraid his home will get bombed and he's afraid that he will lose his job, and he's afraid to get shot or beat down by state troopers, he may go on and live until he's 80, he's just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80, and the cessation of breathing in his life is merely a belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. He died. [long applause, cheering]

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for what is truth...

http://kdbishop.blogspot.com/2008/10/martin-luther-kings-last-speech.html

Dr King's speech at 6 minutes 15 seconds.

A true Canadian...

An Englishman, a Canadian and an American were captured by terrorists.

The terrorist leader said, "Before we shoot you, you will be allowed last words. Please let me know what you wish to talk about."

The Englishman replied, "I wish to speak of loyalty and service to the crown."

The Canadian replied, "Since you are involved in a question of national purpose, national identity, and secession, I wish to talk about the history of constitutional process in Canada, special status, distinct society and uniqueness within diversity."

The American replied, "Just shoot me before the Canadian starts talking."

4 Sovereignty Destroying Treaties

What price popularity?

November 8, 2008

Other than the racial angle, the thing that has Barack Obama's supporters most excited is the prospect that, thanks to ascension, America will once more be liked and respected around the world. Those aroused by this prospect can be divided into two categories. The first are the folks who believe, with the naivety only a certain type of liberal can possess, that a gesture (the election of Obama) can transform, lastingly and without cost, the way the world views us. These people are fools.

The second category are those who believe that Obama will take substantive positions that please foreigners and that, in particular, he will back measures that limit U.S. sovereignty. These people are on to something.

In the November 17 issue of the National Review (not available online to my knowledge), John Fonte of the Hudson Institute identifies four "transnational power grabs" that Obama is likely to push for They are:

• the Law of the Sea Treaty,
  
• the Rights of the Child Treaty,
  
• the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and
  
• the International Criminal Court.
  

Agreement by the U.S. to these arrangements would make us more popular with foreigners, but only at a cost to our national security, our right of self-governance, and our rights under the Constitution.

As Fonte explains, the Law of the Sea Treaty could result in maritime disputes involving U.S. defense forces being arbitrated by an international panel composed of 21 judges, some of whom would be chosen by the likes of China, Russia, and Cuba.

The Rights of the Child Treaty would require uniform penal codes for minors in all 50 states. It would abolish the death penalty and life imprisonment for everyone under the age of 18. And it would limit parental rights, for example by granting children the legal right to correspond with anyone, anywhere, without interference from their parents.

According to Fonte, CEDAW would likely result in the imposition of gender-based preferences in multiple spheres, including elective offices. He says the U.N. committee that monitors compliance with CEDAW has called on the Republic of Georgia to return to its Communist-era policy of gender quotas in public offices. Britain has been told to adopt the "comparable worth" standard of "equal pay" under which bureaucrats set pay rates. Fonte also warns that CEDAW would also provide a method for "overturning a vast array of federal and state laws that [feminists] do not have the votes to defeat through democratic means."

The ICC, according to Obama foreign-policy advisor Sarah Sewall, "represents an acid test for America's commitment to international and universal concepts of justice and human rights." The problem is that under the ICC American soldiers could be charged with war crimes and tried by a court comprised of judges whose interests and values are foreign to our own. Thus, the ICC is indeed an acid test. . .of our commitment to national sovereignty and self-governance.

Fonte points to a Harris poll taken for the Bradley Foundation in which by a margin of 63 percent to 16 percent, Americans said they see the U.S. Constitution, not international law, as the highest legal authority for Americans. 83 percent think of themselves as U.S. citizens, rather than citizens of the world.

To Obama, these views may signify a bitter population clinging to archaic concepts. But they also signify a challenge. To achieve what I take to be his transnationalist agenda, and to ensure our popularity among foreigners, Obama will have to risk some of his popularity among Americans.

The Msm and white guilt

---

November 07, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Racial Psychodrama Sucking up to a black politician does not mean you are colorblind. By Mona Charen Twelve years ago, the most popular man in American political life was an African-American — Colin Powell. A four-star general who had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as national security adviser, the Harlem-born Powell had presidential timber written all over him. A number of leading Republicans — Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp leap to mind — talked him up at the time. New Hampshire polls of Republicans in 1995 showed Powell leading the pack. Powell declined to run and Robert Dole got the Republican nod that year, ultimately losing to Bill Clinton. Exit polls suggested that Powell would have defeated Clinton by 50 to 38. (I did not climb on board the Powell bandwagon because he was insufficiently conservative for my taste — a judgment that has been amply vindicated.) It’s important to remember this history lest the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency be interpreted as evidence that “only now,” 45 years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is the nation ready for a black president. Yes, it’s wonderful that we’re ready now. But it’s equally or more wonderful that we’ve been ready for a long time. We’ve had two black secretaries of state (not that the Republicans who appointed them get any credit for that); black CEOs of major corporations; black TV stars like Oprah Winfrey, advising millions on how to live with integrity (as she sees it); black radio hosts (on all sides); black movie stars; black doctors and lawyers and teachers and astronauts. Yes, segregation and racism were facts of life within living memory, but this country set its face against that history hard and fast and almost completely. It has been for so for my entire life. I’m proud of my country for living down its racist past. And, pace Michelle Obama, there has been a lot to be proud of — even in that category — for a very long time. What is less admirable is the sycophancy one sees among some. Shelby Steele has identified the tendency among some whites to seek “racial innocence” at the hands of blacks, and we certainly saw it in play throughout the drama of Obama’s campaign. As Steele explain it, Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him. And whites love this bargain — and feel affection for the bargainer — because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence. Some whites are so pathetically grateful for this bargain that they quite lose their heads. Instead of being truly beyond race, and treating African-American candidates exactly like everyone else, they demonstrate their continuing racial consciousness by shameless toadying. Something like that afflicted the press during this election year. Nothing would be permitted to impede Obama’s victorious procession toward the White House. He was a green first-term senator? We won’t mention that (even when we decry Sarah Palin’s lack of experience). He skirted 130 decisions, voting present, during his time in the Illinois Senate? No problem. He broke his promise to accept public financing of his campaign? Just evidence of his fundraising “prowess” (AP) or ability to “set records” (New York Times). Early in his career, he was listed as a member of the socialist New Party? New Zealand papers picked up on it. Didn’t make it into our major media. He supported the most extreme abortion agenda of any candidate in modern American history and then lied about it? Not relevant. He enjoyed close ties with ACORN, a group that is facing criminal charges of vote fraud in a dozen states? Yawn. As for his thoroughly repellent associations with Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and others, it was considered very bad form to mention them. Even John McCain refrained from raising the Wright issue for fear of having his “racial innocence” compromised. As a result of this racial psychodrama played out in our national politics (among other reasons), we are now about to have the most left-wing president in history. We can only hope, for his sake and for the country’s, that his left-wing positions were adopted out of expedience, not conviction, and that President Obama will decide that success requires him to tack to the center.

Prediction: The Middle East will hate Obama

Thomas Lifson

Nibras Kazimi of the Hudson Institute writes an intriguing column today predicting that the Middle East will come to hate Obama.

I fear that the Middle East is engrossed in the darker subplots of this story, and what speaks to them about Obama's ascendency has little to do with what is good about America [....]

For now, Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East see two things in Obama: to them he's a walking, talking apology, and an infiltrator. He's an apology for the Bush years; America's gift basket to the rest of the world for the fault of protecting itself [....]

...there are two powerful opinion makers in the region that cannot afford to do away with the convenience of hating on America and its leaders, and those would be the ruling regimes and their most ferocious enemies, the jihadists.

A popular Obama is dangerous since it deprives both camps of a distraction, a focus for white-hot rage; for the regimes, anti-Americanism, like anti-Zionism, is a most useful tool for deflating the wrath of the gathering mob, a mob whose numbers will swell as the world becomes poorer and resources turn scarcer, and oil profits are bled, while the jihadists need the seething anger to enlarge their recruitment pool.

The faster that Obama can be turned into a hated figure, the quicker that matters revert to how things were.

W9 C2 Homework

Don't forget: respond to the Shelby Steele article below, before you post your summary/response to Chapter 7 this weekend.

W9 C2 Can one culture be better than another?

Can we say confidently that one culture is better than another? Why/why not?

W9 C2 Political correctness = cultural Marxism = multiculturalism

Do you understand how political correctness in the universities relates to the brief article below? If there are terms that you don't understand, like "cultural Marxism", please post them with your answer.

There are two misconceptions held by many Americans. The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded. The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well. "The Sixties are dead," wrote columnist George Will ("Slamming the Doors," Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991)

Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace' activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay' rights groups.

All of these groups pursue their piece of the radical agenda through a complex network of organizations such as the Gay Straight Lesbian Educators Network (GSLEN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, United for Peace and Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and Code Pink for Peace.

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words:

• tolerance,


• social justice,


• economic justice,


• peace,


• reproductive rights,


• sex education and safe sex,


• safe schools, inclusion,


• diversity, and


• sensitivity.

All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

Just to illustrate how serious this is on campus, read the article "A Residence Assistant's Tale" -- check out the Riddle Homophobia link. Check this out after you respond to the above.

An article that ties together many things we've been discussing

Preventing National Suicide:Tips on conserving and protecting from across the pond.

By Melanie Phillips

In Britain, there is a collective swoon over the election of Barack Obama. Media superlatives have exhausted the lexicon of cliches. Journalists wept with joy over his acceptance speech. Even members of the Conservative shadow cabinet are firmly in the fan club. There’s been nothing like it since... well, I was going to say Dianamania, but actually the person who most comes to mind at this moment is Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair.


Like Obama, Blair took the country by storm when he won the first of his three general elections in 1997and threw the Conservative party completely off balance (indeed, it still hasn’t recovered).

Like Obama, Blair was charismatic, eloquent, hip, and relaxed, in cruel contrast to the bunch of sleazy, incompetent throwbacks to the paleolithic era in the departing Conservative administration.

Like Obama, Blair was seen as a messiah figure, who would lay his hands upon a broken nation and bring healing where there was discord. And like Obama, Blair had an agenda of change. Blair was widely considered to be a conservative cuckoo in the Labour nest. Indeed, he came to power because he symbolically trashed the party’s commitment to state-control socialism, thus establishing his credentials as a centrist.

What few realized at the time was that in fact he was a radical of a different stripe. He wanted to remake Britain and even change human nature itself, wiping out prejudice and ushering in a new world order of progressivism.

Accordingly, his government either directly promoted or did nothing to stop the long march through Britain’s institutions — the systematic undermining of the country’s fundamental values and traditions, in line with the cultural Marxism strategy of the philosopher Antonin Gramsci.

• It tore up Britain’s (unwritten) constitution, devolving power to Scotland and changing the composition of the upper parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords, destroying the delicate equilibrium of the balance of power.

• It also set about changing the identity of the country. Promoting the doctrine of multiculturalism, it opened Britain’s doors to mass immigration. In the state-controlled schools, teachers no longer saw their role as the transmission of Britain’s historic culture, which was “racist”; accordingly, children were not taught the history of their country, but instead a concept of ‘citizenship’ which was all about changing the values of the country.

• It undermined marriage, promoting instead “lifestyle choice” by incentivising lone parenthood (official forms no longer refer to husband and wives, merely “partners”).

• It discouraged prison sentences because criminals were said to be victims of life and jail would make them worse.
  

Obama has talked about remedying what he sees as the flaws in the U.S. Constitution which promotes only “negative liberties,” or freedom from something rather than positive rights to something. Well, through human-rights legislation Britain has exchanged its historic concept of “negative” liberty — everything is permitted unless it is actively prohibited — for the ‘positive’ European idea that only what is codified is to be permitted. As a result, freedom has shrunk to what ideology permits.

Equality legislation has cemented a “victim culture” under which the interests of all groups deemed to be powerless (black people, women, gays ) trump those deemed to be powerful (white people, men, Christians). Since this doctrine holds that the “powerless” can do no wrong while the “powerful” can do no right, injustice is thus institutionalized, and anyone who queries the preferential treatment afforded such groups is vilified as a racist or bigot.

All this constitutes a profoundly illiberal culture in which no dissent is permitted, group is set against group and intimidation is the order of the day. And this also happens to be the culture of ACORN, of the radical groups funded by the Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund, and the ‘educational’ or criminal justice ideas of William Ayers, endorsed by Barack Obama.

Just as Britain thinks the “powerless” can do no wrong at home, so it thinks the third world can do no wrong abroad — and even when they fly planes into American buildings, the blame therefore lies with America for behaving badly in the first place.

It is hard to exaggerate the virulent hatred of America that has been coursing through Britain these past eight years. The reason was that America had dared to defend itself by use of force, riding roughshod over the U.N., and thus, it was said, putting the rest of the world at risk; and that it wanted to export its values to countries which did not live under democracy and the rule of law because it thought that these values were superior to their own.

Britain thought this was an imperialism which had cost thousands of lives — and that America was to blame for Islamic violence in the first place because it supported Israel.

Now, however, the refrain in Britain is that “now we can all love America again.” Britain is ecstatic that America has elected an apparently antiwar president in a time of war. Some might think this is a form of national suicide. But Britain recognizes Obama as one of its own. That is because Britain’s intelligentsia and political class is signed up to “transnational progressivism” which holds that the nation is the source of all the ills in the world because it is inherently racist.

Obama believes America has to expiate its sins: both its original, Founding sins of slavery and racism, and its latter-day sins against the world of Islam.

Britain likes the sound of that. It wants America to be humbled. Nations, it thinks, cause wars. Arrogant, hubristic, imperial nations like Bush’s America cause big and horrible wars. By contrast transnational institutions — such as the sacred UN or EU — promote civilised “engagement” with the enemy to discuss grievances and reach compromises.

So it is thrilled that Obama will get out of Iraq and talk to Iran and may even force wretched Israel (which Britain blames for Everything Bad in the World) to give away the disputed territories and half of Jerusalem to the Arabs. The fact that such actions would leave Iraq in chaos, empower Iran still further, destroy Israel’s security and imperil the free world doesn’t trouble it at all.

And if Obama, under the responsibility of office, should change from an appeaser to a war leader in America’s national interest, then Britain’s new found love for America would revert once again into rage and disdain.

Of course. transnational progressivism, multiculturalism, victim culture, pacifism and all the rest of it do amount to a national suicide note. The reason Britain has embraced them is because, for the past several decades, it has lost belief in itself as a nation and so has been systematically hollowing out its values and its defences.

• The result is a cultural vacuum which is steadily being filled by radical Islamism. Paralyzed by its “universal” value system of multiculturalism and minority rights, Britain is failing to assert its own civilisational principles against the cultural onslaught being mounted by Islamists. Accordingly, it is permitting the spread of Muslim enclaves governed by a parallel jurisdiction of sharia law — the steady creation of a “state within a state” — encouraging the development of sharia finance, and permitting Saudi money to fund British universities and other institutions.

Millions of Britons are appalled by the implosion of British culture, identity, and values. But they find themselves politically disenfranchized, because the Conservative party does not understand that British values are under attack.

And Republicans should take careful note of this in order to recognize a similar danger and dilemma facing them following their defeat.The British Conservatives think that, to regain power, they have to show they have broken with cultural conservatism and go instead with the way society has changed — gay rights, green politics, anti-racism.

What they have failed to grasp is that such change has turned values such as right and wrong, good and bad on their heads and has produced a sentimentalised, cruel, oppressive and perverse society — one where burglars go scot-free, but householders are prosecuted for putting the wrong kind of garbage in the trash can, and where people are too frightened to protest at the erosion of British, Christian, or Western values because of the opprobrium that will follow.

The Conservatives don’t realize that by embracing such “change” they are endorsing a kind of enslavement. They don’t realize that the first duty of a conservative is to conserve that which is precious and protect it against attack.

The result is that millions feel betrayed and abandoned by the absence of conservatism, and yet more still think the Conservative party is just a bunch of opportunists who don’t have any principles. Why vote for the progressive wannabes, after all, when you can have the real thing?

The challenge for conservatives on both sides of the pond is to find a way of conserving the essential values of Western Civilization and defend them against the onslaught being mounted against them both from within and from without — but to do so in a way that is generous and big-hearted rather than narrow and sectarian, and embraces rather than repels.

Melanie Phillips is author of Londonistan.

W9 C1 Like my style?

What would the reaction be if I wore a t-shirt like this?

W9 C1 Summary Response Chapter 7

by Sunday night. In your response, make any relevant connections between the Steele article, the film, and this chapter.

W9 C1 Summary/Response: please do for homework

This will help connect the film with our discussion of Chapter 7 next week. Please post the Chapter 7 Summary/Response above and do this for homework. It is equal in value to a summary/response.

Shelby Steele, author of, "The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America," is a distinguished professor of English literature. As a black man who grew up during the years of segregation, he has witnessed and written about race relations in America for many years.

Try and remember, as you read, the racial issues on campus in the film "Indoctrinate U". For instance, recall the professor who maintained that being a white person makes one, by definition, a racist. Remember the shoutdown of Ward Connerly, the black prof who was attempting to speak about his anti-affirmative action views. Remember the black author of "It's ok to leave the plantation" -- what he said about being a black conservative.

As you did with "My Second Marxist Indoctrination", pick three interesting points and respond to them.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/15/DDG5HIR5VC1.DTL

W9 C1 Essay 2 is ready!

Look under "Links", to the right... :)

The Utopian dream of leftism

The idea that mankind might find life beautifully easy if only the right laws could be promulgated and the right social attitudes inculcated is a beguiling one. It suggests that dissatisfaction and frustration arise from error and malice, rather than from the inescapable and permanent separation between man’s desires and what the world can offer him. Difficulty, however, cannot be abolished; it is the condition of human life itself. We try to avert our eyes from this truth as we avert them from death itself.

It takes maturity to know when to compromise with what exists, and when to resist.

Theodore Dalrymple