Sunday, November 15, 2015



Brown U's Editorial Board 'Deeply Troubled' by Politician's Denial of 'White Privilege'

What about Indian privilege, Chinese privilege or Japanese privilege?  They all do better in the USA on average than whites do.  So do whites have any privilege at all?  If so it must be rather low down the pecking order.  Compared to some they do have the privilege of working harder, I guess

But the whole idea of privilege is just a leftist slur.  It asserts that some people or classes of people were/are given certain things unfairly rather than working for them, earning them or deserving them

If a high IQ person makes a scientific breakthrough, is that privilege?  I can't see it.  He may be amply rewarded for his breakthrough but that reward is a reward for his work, not privilege.

Being born bright could be seen as a privilege but that is conferred by genetics not society -- and being bright of itself may mean little.  I knew a very high IQ man who could only find work supervising garbage bins.  It's the work you do using your brain that matters and which gives you any rewards. And the results of work are not "privilege".  They are justly earned  rewards

And a rejection of a job application by a black is also a justly earned reward, though the individual black himself might not have earned it. If Leftist privilege-critics can talk in terms of such broad categories as "whites", why can employers not think in terms of such broad categories as "blacks"?  And the well-known poor performance of blacks in many ways will often give rise to a reasonable fear that any given black may perform poorly in tasks relevant to the job in question. If the task involved singing and dancing or running fast, an application from a black could well be given priority.  Who would be "privileged" then?

Any attempt at answering that question shows immediately that the whole idea of anchoring your analysis of wellbeing or success in such  broad and diverse categories as "whites" or "blacks" is near brain-dead.  It indicates an inability at detailed thought or a lack of fine-grained perception.  It is just a typical Leftist overgeneralization. There all sorts of whites, rich, poor and in-between.  Are they all equally "privileged" by being white?  Only a Leftist would think so

An intelligent appraisal of various forms of success in society would require much, much more than such childish categories as "whites".  Pre-schoolers can tell whites from blacks and Leftists  would appear not to have got beyond that infantile stage in their thinking.  Leftist politicians do talk of 'nuance' but they rarely display any of it

But nothing in Leftist "privilege" discourse is remotely intellectual.  It is just an attempt at stirring up racial antagonisms.  It is racism pure and simple


The Speaker of the R.I. House, Rep. Nicholas Mattiello (D-Cranston), has drawn the wrath of The Brown Daily Herald for saying he doesn't think "white privilege" exists.

As noted in a Nov. 11 editorial, Mattiello told The Providence Journal on Oct. 31: "I'm not sure I've ever thought of the phrase 'white privilege.' I don't think there is a white privilege."

(The newspaper called it ironic that Mattiello made the comment while advocating passage of legislation banning racial profiling.)

Mattiello also told the newspaper, “I absolutely disagree with that phrase. I don’t think anybody in society views any particular nationality as having any privilege over any other. I certainly don’t.”

The Daily Herald editorial board responded: "We are deeply troubled by one of the most powerful politicians in the state government denying a reality that affects his constituents and Rhode Islanders more broadly, including students here at Brown. To argue that white Americans do not have unfair advantages over people of color ignores both the voiced experiences of people of color and the corroborating data."

The editorial points to a survey released by the Associated Press showing that more than half of black millennials know a victim of police brutality, while less than one third of white millennials do -- "a poignant reminder of how white privilege inheres in our own generation," the editorial says.

"Further data — like that demonstrating that white job applicants are more likely to receive a callback after submitting job applications than people of color, or that of the 46,235 New Yorkers stopped by police last year, 55 percent were black, and only 12 percent were white -- illustrate how entrenched white privilege remains in our society and how misguided Mattiello’s statement is."

'Microaggressions'

Completely unrelated to the Brown newspaper editorial, The Los Angeles Times on Thursday published an article explaining that on many college campuses, "microaggressions" are seen as "the new face of racism."

Microaggressions include "everyday slights and snubs, sometimes unintentional,"  rather than "blatant acts of bias."

According to the newspaper, the phenomenon "is drawing widespread attention across college campuses and kicking up a debate about social justice and free speech rights."

Students are sharing their experiences with microaggression on websites and Facebook pages at -- you guessed it -- Brown, as well as Harvard, Oberlin,  Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Columbia, Willamette and other universities."

SOURCE





Faisel Mohammad had ISIS flag when he stabbed 4 people at UC Merced

Faisel Mohammad the Muslim terrorist who stabbed four at UC Merced last week had an ISIS flag printout with him as he carried out his stabbing. But according to the idiots at UC Merced still claim Faisel Mohammad wasn’t a terrorist and his stabbing wasn’t a terrorist act. Here’s a dose of reality to the brain-dead leftists in Merced: if a Muslim stabs Americans and carried a printout of an ISIS flag with him, he’s a terrorist. This is why it took so long to get the details of Faisel Mohammad. And it took a week to come out about this terrorist’s ISIS flag printout? Give me a break.

The printout of the ISIS flag was reported Tuesday by the Merced Sun-Star, citing a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity on Monday. The official also said Mohammad’s manner of dress during the attack and some of the websites he may have visited in the days leading up to the incident ultimately led local authorities to hand control of the investigation over to the FBI. Warnke confirmed that decision, saying “new information” had been discovered on Saturday about Mohammad, who was shot and killed by police during the episode.

“I met with the FBI Saturday night and turned over copies of all evidence we’ve collected to that agency and the UC Merced police department,” said Warnke. “As far as any further investigation into any outside influence, the FBI will be handling that from now on.”

While the unnamed law enforcement official who spoke with the Sun-Star didn’t directly say the flag was related to the attack, the Islamic caliphate is known to be recruiting U.S. citizens directly and attempting to inspire lone wolf attacks within the country. The group’s social media savvy is well documented.

SOURCE






The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Two Faces of the American Academy

By most measures, American universities are the envy of the entire world.  Of the top thirty universities affiliated with Nobel Prize winners, for example, eighteen are in the United States.  According to the U.S. News and World Report rankings, of the top ten universities worldwide, only two – Oxford and Cambridge – are not in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, or New York.  Prospective students from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America flock to even the humblest American colleges, hoping to receive diplomas from the same system that once sheltered Albert Einstein, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss.

American universities are rich, too.  Harvard’s endowment, for instance, is approximately 35 billion dollars.  If one adds together just the endowments (and not the tuition income, grants, subsidies, athletics licensing fees, patent and copyright income, alumni donations, and total asset value) of the top ten American universities, one arrives at a sum just about equal to the GDP of Senegal.  Universities are building and expanding, hiring new professors, publishing oceans of data in a virtually uncountable number of specialty journals, attracting new students, opening campuses overseas, and paying presidents and chancellors salaries in the millions of dollars per year.

American universities, that is to say, stride, Colossus-like, over a Rhodes of higher education.  They seem to be the masters of all they survey.

But this tale of wild success is only half the story.  While the faculty, administrators, and trustees bask in the splendor of their educational empire, the students under their care descend deeper and deeper into a maelstrom of insecurity, impecuniousness, immaturity, and the insatiable lust for sex, power, and diversion.  Addled with drug and drink, host to a staggering rate of venereal disease (half of the new cases each year occur among 15- to 24-year-olds), crushed under student loan debt, and, increasingly, unable to find anything better to do with their time than riot, the American university student – ignorant, ill-mannered, and enraged – would seem to be the diametrical opposite of the American university system he inhabits.

What explains this strange Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomenon?

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, novelist Oscar Wilde reveals the effects of a life of debauchery on the soul, even when the body seems ageless and hale.  The protagonist, after whom the novel is named, has his picture painted by an artist and thereafter begins to live a life void of all the decencies of civilized society.  He jilts faithful women, cavorts with opium addicts, indulges every unholy passion, and even murders the artist who painted him as a handsome young man.  With each transgression of the moral law, the face on the canvas – really, it turns out, a mirror for Dorian’s inner self, his soul – grows more twisted and deranged.  Dorian’s body remains freakishly youthful despite the passage of many years, but the portrait ages and gnarls, a true representation of what is really going on inside Dorian’s heart of hearts.

The American university and the American university student: stand them side by side, like Dorian and his portrait, and you have the full picture.  Every sin of the professoriate, far from harming their careers, has, conversely, redounded to their great benefit.  Like Dr. Faustus after his bargain, the American professoriate is on the unstoppable up and up.  Every book and article written in praise of some perverted theory of gender or queerness gains wide acclaim for the author.  He or she wins awards, gives speeches, and gets an even bigger heaping of taxpayer money in his or her bank account each month.  (Melissa Click, for example, who threatened student journalists at the University of Missouri with violence this week, is paid $4,750 per month.  Her field of study?  Lady Gaga.)

Everything is power, the professors proclaim.  There are no eternal truths.  The United States is an oppressive society.  Capitalism is the enemy.  Everyone around you is a racist.  Scott Walker is Hitler.  I hate Republicans.  The only possible relationship to the university is one of thievery.  The only legitimate subjects of inquiry are the grievances of the perpetually aggrieved.

As for the students: a common lament among those who take universities seriously is that graduating seniors are statistically no better educated than incoming freshmen.  This is all true when “educated” is taken to mean “having greater facility with logic, language, math, science, and history than one previously enjoyed.”  But, as the now undeniable outbreak of full-blown Maoist Cultural Revolution on our campuses makes clear, the students have been soaking in every word their teachers have said.

When the professors criticized capitalism, for example, the students took to the streets, protesting the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and Wall Street (and, now, the very financial system that loaned the students the money to attend their four years of socialist re-education).  The professors went home each evening to jazz records and cocktails, but their charges were busy making signs redolent of Paris in 1968 and planning to burn down the capitalist system themselves.

When the professors told the students that they could be any gender they chose, the students swooned into a pandemic personality disorder.  Everyone, it now seems, is some variant of transgendered.  The professors, for the most part, got married, had kids, and moved into respectable homes.  Their students underwent perhaps the most pervasive and acute dissociation of sexuality and identity in recorded history.  Universities are asylums for the sexually confused, mainly because professors and administrators actively encourage them.

And when the professors told the students they lived in a racist, bigoted, evil land, the students began to agree with them.  The professors paid their taxes, voted the straight Democrat ticket, reported for jury duty, and dutifully plastered their office doors with Hope and Change stickers.  The students attacked the police, joined ISIS, trampled and burned the American flag, ran armed forces recruiters off of campus, welcomed militant imams and rabid anti-Jewish terrorists to speak (and even employed a few of them – is that you in the crowd, Mr. Ayers?), and learned that, simply enough, in all the world, there is no problem that cannot ultimately be blamed on the land of their birth.

Let us not be surprised that the young people at universities are shrieking, infantilized moral cripples, while their professors are the very picture of worldly success.  These two images are inseparable.  The professors have sown falsehood and profited from it.  Their students have reaped the bitter harvest and now literally scream for someone to placate them in their barbarism.

The American university and the American university student – together, they make up the full picture of Dorian Gray.

SOURCE



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