Telegraph:

The leaders at Portsmouth City council were asked to donate £500 to a fun day event to raise money for the charity Help The Heroes, which looks after wounded soldiers back in this country.

But they initially turned down the grant because it argued their support may upset ethnic minorities who could have been traumatised by armed conflicts.

A rejection letter said the event “could cause offence to ethnic minority groups living in the community who may also have experience of injury/violence due to the war”.

The decision left Richard Chamberlain, 57, who had arranged the event with other residents in his block of flats “jumping up and down” with anger.

Poster of entire Portsmouth City Council

The LA Times happily records the triumph of ressentiment over reality in the left coast’s open air asylum.

Across the state Monday, at 5:01 p.m., the moment that same-sex marriage became legal by order of the California Supreme Court, exultant gay couples raced to be first to partake in a legal ritual long denied them.

Claiming that anyone was denying homosexuals anything is a false and tendentious kind of phrasing. No one was stopping homosexuals from marrying. Homosexuals who think they can marry are in conflict with reality not their fellow citizens. Same-sex couples can no more marry than they can reproduce.

The homosexual political movement wishes to erect a coercive regime of equality by compelling everyone else to accept a changed definition of marriage and forcing everyone to participate in the recognition and celebration of such relationships. It is really as if there were a politically influential group of madmen who used their strength within the democrat party to pass a law or obtain a judicial edict requiring all the rest of us to address each of them as “the Emperor Napoleon.”

The Supreme Court of the State of California has no more authority to change the definition of marriage than it does to decree that 2 + 2 = 5.

In the 19th century, many people in San Francisco used to greet a local madman who styled himself Emperor of the Unted States with the title he desired, indulging his absurdities with a smile at their humor. Saluting the Emperor Norton was a voluntary proposition. In today’s California, that state’s citizens and businesses will be obliged by law to recognize the imaginary status claimed by large numbers of the deranged.

CBS:

Most children growing up in the US memorize the Pledge of Allegiance. But, in one Oregon elementary school, the kids won’t be allowed to recite it at an end of the year assembly.

The principal banned it that day so as not to offend Muslims.

One resident of Portland, Oregon was a little surprised when she received an e-mail from her stepson’s school principal.

The e-mail said that the children would not be reciting the pledge because of its reference to God.

The principal was named Pam Wilson, and all this occurred at the Capitol Hill Elementary School in Portland.

KATU.com:

The following is the full e-mail response that parent Briana Reese received from Principal Pam Wilson:

“The Pledge contains the words, ‘under God’ and we have many Muslim families here. So out of respect for the diversity of religious faiths practiced by our school community (parents and families) we decided that this year the students would memorize and sing the Preamble to the Constitution. At the rehearsal on Friday they did it from memory and to a wonderful song. It was very joyful and unique. I think you, and other parents, will really appreciate the creative and new way to open the program.”

Johns Hopkins Professor Phyllis Piotrow wanted to sell her brick five-bedroom house next to Hillmead Park in Bethesda, Maryland and retire to New Hampshire.

She had been hoping to sell her house with 1.3 acre lot to a developer, but Montgomery County fought development plans until the real estate market softened, then cajoled Piotrow into selling the property for a below-market price of $2.5 million to be incorporated into the neighboring park.

Then, somebody had an idea, as Marc Fisher reports in the Washington Post, 6/8:

The parks commission had planned to demolish Piotrow’s 1930s house, at a cost of about $65,000. Instead, staffers at Montgomery’s housing agency wondered, why not spend about twice the cost of demolition to renovate Piotrow’s five-bedroom place and use it to house a large (mother with 13 children -DZ) homeless family? After all, finding housing for large families is notoriously difficult, the county already shells out about $100,000 a year to keep a homeless family in a motel and at least six other houses in county parks are being used in similar fashion.

You will not be shocked to learn that the good people of Montgomery County thought this a very poor idea.

The same Marc Fisher recycles the same story into a blog editorial with a title which wonders indignantly: Is This House Too Nice for the Homeless?

(I mean, really, what kind of person could possibly think that?)
———————————————————-

Residents of the Hillmead neighborhhood evidently could, and did, think un-PC, uncharitable thoughts.

Examiner.com

Washington Post 3/23:

As the Montgomery County Council put the finishing touches on a $2.5 million plan to buy more land for a Bethesda park, council member Nancy Floreen lobbed what has turned out to be the equivalent of a neighborhood cluster bomb:

Why not house a needy family in the 1930s-era home on the property in the Hillmead neighborhood and expand the park at the same time? ...

Residents of Hillmead, a leafy community about three miles from downtown Bethesda with small Cape Cods and large McMansions selling for more than $1 million, say they only recently learned of the county’s plans and think officials did a poor job of keeping them informed. ...

The Hillmead residents insist that their opposition does not stem from antipathy to poor people. Those leading the fight say it’s a debate about how the county chooses to spend its $4 billion budget in tough economic times, and about due process for communities. ...

“This really isn’t about having a homeless family living in a house that is bigger than probably 90 percent of the houses in the neighborhood,” said Brett Tularco, a developer who lives in the neighborhood and has offered to tear down the house to save the county the expense. “Our kids are going to school in trailers and then this homeless family would be living in a $3 million estate. That money could have been spent on housing tons of people instead of one family.”

He said he is also worried about public safety if the homeless family moves on and the county then uses the house to shelter mentally ill residents or drug abusers.

“That really isn’t who we want our kids playing next to,” he said.

Councilmember Nancy Floreen’s website

Barack Obama:

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times, whether we’re living in a desert, or living in the tundra, and then just expect that every other country’s going to say okay, you guys just go ahead and keep on using 25% of the world’s energy, even though you only account for 3% of the population.

2:33 video

Hat tip to Nicola Karras.

Britain’s Government has banned ownership of pistols, rifles, self defense, and hunting. Participants in the Countryside March against the Blair Government’s Hunt Ban wish Britons had defended their liberties before it was too late. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for defending his home, certainly wishes so even more.

9:07 video

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Don’t think that saying “Gay Marriage isn’t real marriage” could get you into trouble one day?

Just give it time. Over in Europe, where political correctness is always just a step or two ahead, the Guardian reports that calling Scientology “a cult” is currently treated as a crime in Britain.

A teenager is facing prosecution for using the word “cult” to describe the Church of Scientology.

The unnamed 15-year-old was served the summons by City of London police when he took part in a peaceful demonstration opposite the London headquarters of the controversial religion.

Officers confiscated a placard with the word “cult” on it from the youth, who is under 18, and a case file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.

A date has not yet been set for him to appear in court. ...

The incident happened during a protest against the Church of Scientology on May 10. Demonstrators from the anti-Scientology group, Anonymous, who were outside the church’s £23m headquarters near St Paul’s cathedral, were banned by police from describing Scientology as a cult by police because it was “abusive and insulting”.

Writing on an anti-Scientology website, the teenager facing court said: “I brought a sign to the May 10th protest that said: ‘Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.’

“’Within five minutes of arriving I was told by a member of the police that I was not allowed to use that word, and that the final decision would be made by the inspector.”

A policewoman later read him section five of the Public Order Act and “strongly advised” him to remove the sign. The section prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.

The teenager refused to back down, quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a “cult” which was “corrupt, sinister and dangerous”.

After the exchange, a policewoman handed him a court summons and removed his sign.

In Germany, on the other hand, they’ll probably arrest you if you say that Scientology isn’t a cult.
——————————————————————————-

Hat tip to Little Baby Ginn at DBKP.

Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Dear Lady) in Dendermonde, Flanders (Belgium) features a late 17th century pulpit, sculpted in wood by Mattheus van Beveren, upheld by angels treading underfoot the false prophet Mohammed, who is leaning on the Al-Koran.

As we see above, the inhabitants of Christendom used to have no scruples about expressing their opinion of Islam and its founder.

New York Slimes story

Can anyone imagine an American general during the late 1940s apologizing to local Germans for a private in his command using Hitler’s Mein Kampf for target practice? Can anyone imagine a similar apology being made to the Japanese for a Marine shooting up a photo of the Emperor?

And can anyone imagine US news organizations from coast to coast publishing reports treating an incident of this kind as a major news story, vehemently reproaching a US soldier serving in harm’s way overseas for insulting the enemy, and turning a trivial personal expression of opinion at a shooting range into an international brouhaha, specifically in order to embarrass their own country?

Of course, the treason of the media elite finds its expression in this particular incident upon the foundation of an almost even more objectionable habitual moral cowardice which precludes ever affirming one’s own nation, country, race, religion, culture, or cause over that of the Other. All the American left can do confronted with a hostile enemy or a rival religion is apologize and cringe.

I’m not sure New York City, and similar ideological enclaves, wouldn’t be better off if an army of Muslim primitives swept down and occupied them, beheaded a few, and imposed a more manly (if barbarous, bigoted, and primitive) faith on the rest. It would at least be a step up from their current sniveling political correctness.

George C. Scott plays General Patton Slapping a Malingering Soldier in 1943

The Wall Street Journal explains liberalism’s latest atrocity: first, cowardice is promoted to a medical condition; then it becomes possible to argue that cowards should receive medals for their war-time sufferings.

With an increasing number of troops being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (Completely undocumented journalist’s factoid – JDZ) the modern military is debating an idea Gen. Washington never considered—awarding one of the nation’s top military citations to veterans with psychological wounds, not just physical ones.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered cautious support for such a change on a trip to a military base in Texas this month.

“It’s an interesting idea,” Mr. Gates said in response to a question. “I think it is clearly something that needs to be looked at.”

Priya Venkatesan, Dartmouth ‘90

Joseph Rago, at the Wall Street Journal, is running a bit late in covering a recent political correctness flap at Dartmouth, but I’m even later since I only learned of this news story from him.

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their “anti-intellectualism” violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to “problematize” technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the “problems” owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was “intolerant of ideas” and “questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways.” Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But “these weren’t thoughtful statements,” Ms. Venkatesan protests. “They were irrational.” The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student’s “diatribe,” several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was “fascist demagoguery.” Then, after consulting a physician about “intellectual distress,” she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

The original story, Dartblog 4/26 quotes Ms. Venkatesan’s emails

Email 1:

——- Original Message——-
From: Priya Venkatesan
To: [REDACTED]@Dartmouth.edu ; editor@dartmouth.com
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008 [time redacted]
Subject: Class Action Suit

Dear Student:

As a courtesy, you are being notified that you are being named in a potential class action suit that is being brought against Dartmouth College, which is being accused of violating federal anti-discrimination laws. Please do not respond to this email because it will be potentially used against you in a court of law.

Priya Venkatesan, PhD

Email 2:

—- Forwarded message from “Priya Venkatesan”—-

From: “Priya Venkatesan”
To: < [REDACTED]Dartmouth.EDU>,
Subject: Re: Class Action Suit
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 [time redacted]

Dear Student:

Please disregard the previous email sent by Priya Venkatesan. This is to officially inform you that you are being accused of violating Title VII pertaining to federal anti-discrimination laws, by the plaintiff, Priya Venkatesan. You are being specifically accused of, but not limited to, harassment. Please do not respond to this email as it will be used against you in a court of law.

Priya Venkatesan, PhD

Email 3:

Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:56:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU
To: “WRIT.005.17.18-WI08”:;, Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU
Subject: WRIT.005.17.18-WI08: Possible lawsuit

Dear former class members of Science, Technology and Society:

I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal [SIC] discrimination laws.
The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit.
I am also writing a book detailing my experiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluations and these will be reproduced in the book.

Have a nice day.

Priya

Priya Venkatesan’s academic goal:

After finishing up my studies in literature, I entered a molecular biology lab at DMS with the intention of seeking parallels between scientific practice and literature. My interests in graduate school were mainly theoretical, as I textually analyzed certain aspects of scientific communication. However, for me, a question remained: Is there room for literary theory within the framework of the laboratory?

Priya Venkatesan left Dartmouth and wound up at Northwestern. She announced that she was withdrawing her law suit the students, and would avenge herself on them via a novel, but she was still planning to sue Dartmouth.

Dartmouth Review interview 4/30.

————————————————————————————-

Dartmouth Independent 5/1 update and bio.

One female student was a nose-blower,” says Priya Venkatesan, who, until just a few weeks ago, was a professor in Dartmouth’s writing department. A 1990 graduate of the College, Venkatesan spent the better part of her twenties earning a Masters in Genetics and a PhD in Literature. But those were different days. Now, Venkatesan finds her thoughts occupied by that student who “incessantly disrupted class with her nose-blowing.” Or the one who interrupted her lecture on bioethics with “a real evil look that made me feel very uncomfortable.” Or the one who loudly declared that Lyotard was “cheesy.”

A casual observer might conclude that Venkatesan is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, frantically trying to confront her demons that sometimes appear to her as students. But Venkatesan has no apparent demons; in fact, she seems like she has had a very normal, undramatic life. Raised halfway between New York City and Albany by traditional Hindu parents, Venkatesan suggests that her heavy inculcation in Indian culture may have played a part in her ardent desire to excel academically (but then again it may not have – such is the nature of the self-described “postmodernist in the laboratory”). ...

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Bruce Bawrer has a fine article in City Journal identifying the principle of Free Speech as the first to go in the Left intelligentsia’s orchestration of Western societies’ surrender to Islam.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia.

Read the whole thing.

This anti-Obama ad was produced by the North Carolina GOP. (Good for them!)

0:40 video

And, would you believe this?

John McCain and (the now McCain-ite) Republican National Committee have called upon those tarheels to withdraw the ad, calling it “offensive,” “inappropriate,” and not “respectful.”

the ineffable Michael Pollan

The New York Times rather outdid itself on Sunday in serving up its traditional ration of stupidity and cant, but Earth Day occurs this week and provided the occasion for the Times to devote the entire Sunday Magazine to an Enviro-PC-Fest of preening libs.

Michael Pollan, for instance, took a long, hard look into his own navel, and understood that changing the world, the choices, habits, lifestyles, and behavior of all of the world’s 6 and a half billion inhabitants, reversing the course of history, and rejecting capitalism, consumerism, and modern industrial civilization might be only a matter of setting a personal good example.

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. ...

f you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on.

And even if what you do personally doesn’t actually have any real impact on the world, you should, of course, do all this goofy green stuff anyway, since even if you can’t meaningfully change the world, you can change yourself into an environmentally-PC member of the more-enlightened-than-thou elite, a nobler, finer being, capable of experiencing the orgasmic sense of narcissistic self-righteousness that only comes from composting.

Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

The artist at the time of her high school graduation

Helaine S. Klasky, Yale University Spokesperson, raised some interesting issues in the administration’s statement denying the reality of that naughty Aliza Schvarts’ senior art project:

(Yale now has at least one Spokesperson, forsooth! Demonstrating that the current president and his entire skulk of deans are too self-important, or know themselves to be too inarticulate, to speak for the University. Jesus wept.)

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

But Ms. Schvarts fired back a manifesto, repeating the story of her project, and artfully identifying it as “myth,” while darkly hinting at a purpose and meaning capable of shaking the Yale art department and the University’s administration to their very foundations.

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. ...

To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators (Note the term -JDZ) who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms . copies of copies of which there is no original. ...

The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.

In other words: the supposed piece of art never existed at all, except as a concept, a narrative, and a spoof.

Then, embedded in more jargon, Schvarts delivers the ultimate ambiguity.

Is she spouting a bunch of ridiculous leftwing cant, or is she producing what looks like a classic example of the genre in order to mock and satirize it? Is Aliza Schvartz possibly really a nice, ethically-concerned Jewish girl, taking a shrewd whack at the conventional liberal consensus on sex, reproduction, and abortion in the contemporary elite university with a vicious parody of the methodology and hermeneutics of fashionably politicized “art?”

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. ... This central ambiguity defies a clear definition of the act. The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming . an authorial act.

It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it.

As an intervention into our normative understanding of .the real. and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are .meant. to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are .natural. (while all the other potential functions are .unnatural.) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives.

Just as it is a myth that women are .meant. to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are .meant. for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not .meant. for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are .meant. to birth a child.

When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction . the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth . the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.

Roger Kimball, at PJM, notes that Ms. Schvartz’s “art” has successfully challenged some orthodoxies, and recognizes that the question is exactly which ones?

Yale’s response was a masterpiece of evasion. “Had these acts been real,” their statement continued, “they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.” You don’t say?... And what, by the way, was the standard being violated? I wonder, for example, whether the Yale spokesman would say that abortion itself violated a basic ethical standard? Or maybe the violation requires first deliberately impregnating oneself? (But why would that affect the “basic ethical standard” involved?) Or maybe it was videotaping the performance that was the problem?

I know that in the universe occupied by Ivy League academics, the spectacle of a woman repeatedly inseminating herself, quaffing abortifacient drugs (“herbal” ones, though: we’re all organic environmentalists here), and then video taping the resultant mess poses a problem. I mean, in that universe there really are basic ethical standards: Thou shalt not smoke, for example. Thou shalt not support the war in Iraq. Thou shalt not vote Republican. There really are some things that are beyond the pale. ...

Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps—just possibly—Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.

James Taranto, too, at the Wall Street Journal, sees the ironic possibilities.

When Yale says that Shvarts’s project, “if real,” violates “basic ethical standards,” what kind of ethical standards does it have in mind?

It seems unlikely that Yale is making a moral claim against the putative Shvarts project. The abortion debate is driven by two irreconcilable moral premises: on the antiabortion side, that it is wrong to take a human life deliberately at any stage of development; on the pro-abortion side, that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body.

In practice, most people’s actual positions on abortion amount to a compromise between these two absolutes. If Yale has an institutional view on abortion, surely it is closer to the pro- than the antiabortion side. And if Shvarts did what she claims to have done, she destroyed protohumans (for want of a better neutral term) no later than the embryonic stage of development—a stage at which, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, a woman has an absolute “constitutional” right to terminate her pregnancy.

Is Yale claiming that Shvarts violated academic ethics? This is a real head-scratcher. Academic ethics center on honesty; the most important prohibitions are against such actions as falsification of data or plagiarism (misrepresenting another’s work as one’s own). But Yale is claiming that Shvarts’s project violated “basic ethical standards” if she was honest in describing it. If Shvarts perpetrated a hoax, then according to Yale she was exercising “the right to express herself.” The implication is that if she was lying, she was behaving ethically.

Yale therefore is either taking a moral position in opposition to abortion or standing academic ethics on their head. Which raises an intriguing possibility: Could it be that Aliza Shvarts is an opponent of abortion who has staged a hoax aimed at embarrassing those who support or countenance abortion?

Earlier postings

How the Royal Navy Dealt with the Pirate Blackbeard

The London Times reports on the latest case of Pecksniffery from Britain’s Labour Government: Asylum for Pirates!

The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights.

Warships patrolling pirate-infested waters, such as those off Somalia, have been warned that there is also a risk that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain.

The Foreign Office has advised that pirates sent back to Somalia could have their human rights breached because, under Islamic law, they face beheading for murder or having a hand chopped off for theft.

Hat tip to Walter Olson (who reminded me of this one).

At least they have to take California!

The same Swedish Absolut vodka brand, which has notoriously previously targeted the Gay Community with special advertising and sponsorships, is now running in magazines and billboards in Mexico an advertising campaign imagining the reversal of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase.

Absolut’s map even takes a particularly partisan Mexican position on the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase.

Did Absolut’s advertising agency think that news of this particular campaign would not reach Americans, particularly Americans residing in Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and the non-Bay-area, non-Hollywood, non-Marin-to-Humboldt portions of California?

Via Gateway Pundit.

Jules Crittenden thanks the democrats for a lesson in political correctness.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the Democratic Party, its two remaining presidential candidates and their campaigns for the important lessons in sensitivity and political correctness they have offered in recent weeks.

Political correctness is not simply the denial and dispute of facts or subject matter, but more practically the denial of the right to speak them, due to their objectionable or politically inconvenient nature. It’s generally wielded as a weapon against opponents. But it is more fascinating to watch it swung as a cudgel against allies. And in a campaign in which the strongest points … hope, change, experience … have tended to be a little vague or tenuous at best, the most memorable moments turn out to be about what must not be said, when we’ve seen that cudgel come down.

Of course they have platforms. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have attempted to outbid each other with your money. There are subsidies for universal healthcare, giveaways to newborns, that kind of thing. It theoretically gets paid for by taking from the rich, but stopping the war. Though that of course depends on what your definition of rich is, and whether the war can stopped…

Read the whole thing.

Residents of the university town of Oxford are evidently still resisting efforts of Muslims to reverse the results of the Battle of Tours, using the politics of political correctness in place of scimitars.

AFP reports:

Famous for its university and quintessentially English “dreaming spires,” the city of Oxford has been plunged into controversy over the sound of Muslim call to prayer from a local mosque.

Those church spires have been joined by a minaret, with a loudspeaker on top which has triggered protests from locals concerned about the influx of a foreign culture.

“I don’t have any problem with Islam but don’t force it on people,” said Oxford University historian Allan Chapman, whose typically English house has a view of both the minaret and the nearby Church of Saint Mary and Saint John.

The Central Mosque was built in the east of the city, the “other Oxford”, which is home to a poorer population and more immigrants than the historic centre of ancient, sandstone colleges, libraries and students on bicycles.

Cutting through the area is the main, multi-ethnic thoroughfare of Cowley Road, where Pakistani men in traditional tunics and other immigrants rub shoulders with the city’s student intelligentsia going to and from their digs. ...

The mosque itself—which can hold up to 700 of the town’s 6,000 Muslims—is little more than a 15-minute walk from Oxford’s colleges, many of which were founded by Christian religious scholars as long ago as the 12th century.

But while the city’s history is marked by Christianity’s influence, some believe the mosque’s imposing minaret defiles the city’s famous skyline, which has remained largely unchanged for centuries.

Those feelings have been brought to a head since last November when mosque authorities expressed a desire to broadcast via loudspeaker the Muslim prayer call, the Adhan, sparking controversy that has not yet died down.

Wearing a three-piece suit with a bow tie and a gold chain hanging out of his jacket pocket, Chapman describes himself as “profoundly English” but rejects suggestions that he is taking an extreme view.

“I’m a liberal… I want to be inclusive but I don’t want to be walked over,” he said.

For him, the issue goes above and beyond the noise created by the call to prayer, which goes out five times daily in Muslim countries, and instead challenges English tolerance and threatens Britain’s values and history.

“If Oxford accepts it, it would be used right across the country,” he said.

Charlie Cleverly, the rector of the Saint Aldates church, in the heart of Oxford, says the city has long represented “the essence of Englishness”.

“It is common knowledge, though few will say it, that ‘radical Islam’ has a programme to ‘take Europe, take England and take Oxford’,” he said.

“In this strategy, some say the prayer call is like a bridgehead, spreading to other mosques in the city.”

The local Oxford Mail newspaper quoted locals in the area as fearing the creation of a “Muslim ghetto”. The counter argument runs that the pealing of church bells is also a call to prayer.

To calm the mood, Central Mosque’s treasurer Masood Ahmed insisted that the desire to issue a call to prayer was still only a proposal which required the approval of Oxford’s mayor.

“We’ll get their views, what they feel,” he said.

The Church of England Bishop of Oxford, the Right Reverend John Pritchard, has entered the row, but supports plans to broadcast the Adhan, calling for people to “relax” and “enjoy community diversity”.

“I believe we have good relationships with the Muslim community here in Oxford and I am personally very happy for the mosque to call the faithful to prayer in east Oxford,” he said in January.

But he accepted that the number of times the call went out and its volume still needed to be resolved.

Chapman, though, is less accommodating, pledging to seek compensation from the mayor for “discrimination” if the proposal is approved.

For the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the debate is as futile as its direction is inevitable, as a debate rages over the extent to which cultural diversity is affecting the traditionally British way of life.

“The call to prayer will be part of Britain and Europe in the future,” said Inayat Bunglawala, the MCB’s assistant secretary general.

Earlier posting.

Steve King (R-Iowa) made a prediction on Fox News which has the left blogosphere today hissing like scalded cats.

1:43 video (Courtesy of John Amato)

Pointing out that Obama’s personal ties to Islam and his personal names will make the enemies of the United State happy is certainly politically incorrect, but Congressman King’s point is defintely a valid one. The election of Barack Hussein Obama to the Presidency of the United States on the basis of a platform pledging withdrawal from Iraq really would constitute a national capitulation heavily loaded with symbolism, and radical Islamists would be right in celebrating it as a colossal victory for their cause.

The Boston Herald reports:

Six times a week, Harvard kicks all the guys out of the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center at the request of the Harvard Islamic Society. This is to accommodate those female Muslim students whose faith won’t let them work out in front of men.

In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the name of Mohammed.

At Harvard, that’s called progress.

When I asked Harvard spokesman Bob Mitchell about this new Sharia-friendly policy, he denied that they were banning anyone. “No, no,” he told me, “we’re permitting women to work out in an environment that accommodates their religion.”

By banning all men from the facility, right?

“It’s not ‘banning,’ ” he insisted. “We’re allowing, we’re accommodating people.”

Muezzins will soon be summoning the faithful to prayer from towers at Harvard like this one, too, as another “accommodation.”

The Telegraph has an amusing story on the rise of eco-snobbery.

What was it, this frisson that passed between the young woman behind the counter at Pret A Manger and me? It wasn’t flirtation, exactly. It was more conspiratorial than that. A knowing look. A social judgment shared.

As she asked me if I wanted a plastic bag for my two items – a (wild) salmon sandwich and a banana – the man at the head of the queue next to mine was asked the same question by another assistant. He had a sandwich and an apple. The point is, I said no. He said yes. That was when the look was exchanged.

That, I am ashamed to admit, was the moment I felt superior, if only by one degree, if only for a second. The man had committed a faux pas. He had transgressed an unwritten ethical code. He had fallen foul of the new morality, which actually, if you think about it, is also the new snobbery.

It is apparent everywhere. In a restaurant the other night our companions asked us if we wanted sparkling water or whether we were happy with a jug of tap. The clue to the correct answer was in the word “happy”. We went with the tap. It wasn’t that we were being cheap – but we probably were being a little smug. My wife and I are paid-up members of the enlightened middle classes, you see. Our consciousnesses have been raised. We are E, the modern equivalent of U.

Just as Nancy Mitford divided society into the upper classes and the aspiring middle classes – that is, into U and Non-U – so society is being divided into the environmentally aware and environmentally unaware, or E and Non-E. It satisfies a need we seem to have to judge one another.

Read the whole thing.

Today’s spoiled haute bourgeoisie extend aspirational self-affirmation far beyond mere careerism and materialistic consumption into realms of spiritual narcissicism and ethical pretension undreamt of by previous generations.

The pious and politically correct are throwing a hissy fit this morning over (a conservative radio talk show host I’m not familiar with, named) Bill Cunningham referring to someone currently active in politics named Barack Hussein Obama:

Juan Cole gets out his portable soap box, and starts rhetoricizing:

(Barack) is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of General Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!

Well, not really. If Jewish and Arabic identities were both Semitic and just the same, why, Israelis and Palestinians would doubtless be living happily in peace.

It’s true that many Biblical names, like Benjamin, are popular personal names used by Christian Europeans and Americans for centuries, and some Biblical names are used in cognate forms by Muslims as well as Christians, but both Barack and Hussein are not Biblical and therefore have no real resemblance to Benjamin.

Both are Arabic names. The press has been confusing Barack (barraaq) “flashing, bright, shining, glittering” with Barakat (barakaat) “”blessings, good fortunes, prosperities.” Hussein (diminutive of Hasan) means “beautiful.” *

General Bradley was doubtless named for Omar Khayyam, the Persian author of the Rubiyat, which was extremely popular in the Edward Fitzgerald translation in the Victorian era. A one-shot use of the name of a Persian poet does not demonstrate a vital and indigenous American tradition of the use of Islamic Arabic personal names.

America is, it’s true, a nation of immigrants, but we do not have any established, familiar naturalized population of Luos from Kenya. People have been elected president whose ancestors did not arrive on the Mayflower, but, in fact, Americans have not actually elected any representatives of most well-known immigrant groups to the presidency at all. American presidents have all been of English or Scots Irish descent, with three Dutch, two German, and one single Irish Catholic exception.

No Swedes, Poles, Italians, Finns, Danes, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Norwegians, Belgians, Lithuanians, or Jews have ever occupied the White House.

The contributions to America in war and peace of Jews and Roman Catholics have not been small, and yet there has been a single Catholic president and not one Jewish one.

Mitt Romney’s Mormonism proved a serious obstacle to his securing support in many parts of the United States, and his background is clearly considerably more conventional and familiar than Obama’s.

The left has a natural interest in drawing a line forbidding raising the question of Obama’s background, or poking fun at it, as Eric Zorn tries to do, and wants to arrange that anyone violates their taboo at peril of being ostracized and designated a bigot. But Barack Hussein Obama is alarmingly unknown, has campaigned in deliberately vague and obfuscatory style, and has successfully gotten a lot farther than normally happens by slick marketing and superficial glamor. He can hardly expect to claim an affirmative action presidency as a massive national gesture of racial compensation, while evading all scrutiny and discussion, and forbidding derisive mockery, of his alien names and exotic personal and political background.

Romney’s Mormonism was evaluated, for good or ill, by the public freely, and people made up their own minds how they felt about that. The same thing is going to happen with respect to Obama’s Islamic personal names and his Islamic childhood and education in Indonesia, and it should. Attempts to erect a protective barrier of political correctness to preclude discussion, or joking, about Obama’s exoticism will fail.
———————————————————-

*Salahuddin Ahmed, A Dictionary of Muslim Names, New York: New York University Press, 1999.

The Telegraph, 2/4, reported that in Britain Islamic rules are having an impact on medical procedures. One wonders: Do National Health Service patients get to refuse the services of Muslim doctors and surgeons?

Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion.

Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam. ...

Universities and NHS trusts fear many more will refuse to co-operate with new Department of Health guidance, introduced this month, which stipulates that all doctors must be “bare below the elbow”.

The measure is deemed necessary to stop the spread of infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have killed hundreds.

Minutes of a clinical academics’ meeting at Liverpool University revealed that female Muslim students at Alder Hey children’s hospital had objected to rolling up their sleeves to wear gowns.

Similar concerns have been raised at Leicester University. Minutes from a medical school committee said that “a number of Muslim females had difficulty in complying with the procedures to roll up sleeves to the elbow for appropriate handwashing”.

Sheffield University also reported a case of a Muslim medic who refused to “scrub” as this left her forearms exposed.

Documents from Birmingham University reveal that some students would prefer to quit the course rather than expose their arms, and warn that it could leave trusts open to legal action. ...

But the Islamic Medical Association insisted that covering all the body in public, except the face and hands, was a basic tenet of Islam.

“No practising Muslim woman – doctor, medical student, nurse or patient – should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow,” it said.

Tyler (Texas) Morning Telegraph:

Sheriff’s officials were astounded by a letter requesting the man accused of murdering his girlfriend and possibly participating in cannibalism be placed on a vegetarian diet to keep him from being “involved in any senseless killing” while incarcerated.

The letter was faxed to the Smith County Sheriff’s Jail from the national headquarters of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Thursday morning.

“You have to be kidding me, right?” was his initial reaction to the news of the letter asking the jail to feed Christopher Lee McCuin, 25, a special vegetarian diet and no meat.

McCuin is jailed for the murder of 21-year-old Jana Shearer and authorities have said, in previous stories, that when McCuin was taken into custody there was an ear boiling in a pot of water on the stove and a plate on the kitchen table with what appeared to be human flesh and a fork.

“It is up to you to prevent McCuin from contributing to any more suffering and death by placing him on a healthy, humane vegetarian diet,” the letter by PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich reads.

In a phone interview with the newspaper Thursday, Friedrich responded the letter was serious and was not intended to be funny nor take away from the brutal death suffered by Ms. Shearer.

“Like humans, animals are made of flesh, blood, and bone. They have the same five senses that we do, and they have the same capacity to experience suffering and fear. And all animals share the desire to live their lives free of pain and to avoid a violent death,” he said.

Friedrich said his organization hoped to help Smith County prepare a nutritional vegetarian menu and possibly help organize a menu for the entire jail population.

Clearly not all the crazies are behind bars.

London Times:

Stiles and kissing gates are the latest aspects of country life to fall victim to political correctness.

They have been a familiar feature of the landscape for centuries, but local authorities now believe that installing them along footpaths and rights of way is a breach of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

This law requires public services to make “reasonable adjustments” to allow disabled access.

A number of councils have identified stiles and kissing gates as obstructions for people with mobility problems or with visual impairments. Some want stiles banned and kissing gates replaced by larger ones that allow wheelchair access.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

The Daily Mail published some valedictory political remarks, excerpted from George McDonald Fraser’s memoir and testament The Light’s On At Signpost.

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes’s Victorian novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, political correctness hadn’t been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero’s character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness.

On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.

Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue – the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.

And no one minded, or if they did, they didn’t tell me. In all the many thousands of readers’ letters I received, not one objected.

In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way. ...

Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.

It comes in many guises, some of them so effective that the PC can be difficult to detect. The silly euphemisms, apparently harmless, but forever dripping to wear away common sense – the naivete of the phrase “a caring force for the future” on Remembrance poppy trays, which suggests that the army is some kind of peace corps, when in fact its true function is killing.

The continual attempt to soften and sanitise the harsh realities of life in the name of liberalism, in an effort to suppress truths unwelcome to the PC mind; the social engineering which plays down Christianity, demanding equal status for alien religions.

The selective distortions of history, so beloved by New Labour, denigrating Britain’s past with such propaganda as hopelessly unbalanced accounts of the slave trade, laying all the blame on the white races, but carefully censoring the truth that not a slave could have come out of Africa without the active assistance of black slavers, and that the trade was only finally suppressed by the Royal Navy virtually single-handed.

In schools, the waging of war against examinations as “elitist” exercises which will undermine the confidence of those who fail – what an intelligent way to prepare children for real life in which competition and failure are inevitable, since both are what life, if not liberal lunacy, is about.

PC also demands that “stress”, which used to be coped with by less sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments lavished on griping incompetents who can’t do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen “traumatised” by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted.

Furthermore, it makes grieving part of the national culture, as it was on such a nauseating scale when large areas were carpeted in rotting vegetation in “mourning” for the Princess of Wales; and it insists that anyone suffering ordinary hardship should be regarded as a “victim” – and, of course, be paid for it.

That PC should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country’s decline.

No generation has seen their country so altered, so turned upside down, as children like me born in the 20 years between the two world wars. In our adult lives Britain’s entire national spirit, its philosophy, values and standards, have changed beyond belief.

Probably no country on earth has experienced such a revolution in thought and outlook and behaviour in so short a space. ...

My generation has seen the decay of ordinary morality, standards of decency, sportsmanship, politeness, respect for the law, family values, politics and education and religion, the very character of the British.

Oh how Blimpish this must sound to modern ears, how out of date, how blind to “the need for change and the novelty of a new age”. But
don’t worry about me. It’s the present generation with their permissive society, their anything-goes philosophy, and their generally laid-back, inyerface attitude I feel sorry for.

They regard themselves as a completely liberated society when in fact they are less free than any generation since the Middle Ages.

Indeed, there may never have been such an enslaved generation, in thrall to hang-ups, taboos, restrictions and oppressions unknown to their ancestors (to say nothing of being neck-deep in debt, thanks to a moneylender’s economy).

We were freer by far 50 years ago – yes, even with conscription, censorship, direction of labour, rationing, and shortages of everything that nowadays is regarded as essential to enjoyment.

We still had liberty beyond modern understanding because we had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied to the youth of today.

We could say what we liked; they can’t. We were not subject to the aggressive pressure of specialinterest minority groups; they are. We had no worries about race or sexual orientation; they have. We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed PC to scorn, had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist.

We had available to us an education system, public and private, that was the envy of the world. We had little reason to fear being mugged or raped (killed in war, maybe, but that was an acceptable hazard).

Our children could play in street and country in safety. We had few problems with bullies because society knew how to deal with bullying and was not afraid to punish it in ways that would send today’s progressives into hysterics.

We did not know the stifling tyranny of a liberal establishment, determined to impose its views, and beginning to resemble George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

Above all, we knew who we were and we lived in the knowledge that certain values and standards held true, and that our country, with all its faults and need for reforms, was sound at heart.

Not any more. I find it difficult to identify a time when the country was as badly governed as it has been in the past 50 years.

We have had the two worst Prime Ministers in our history – Edward Heath (who dragooned us into the Common Market) and Tony Blair. The harm these two have done to Britain is incalculable and almost certainly irreparable.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

The next sound heard ringing out over Oxford’s dreaming spires may not be church bells, but the ullulations of the Mohammedan muezzin summoning the faithful to pray five times (not three times) a day.

Public proclamations (in Arabic) that “There is no God but Allah” and that “Mohammed is the prophet of God” may well strike some as signals of Islamic domination, which the battles of Tours and Vienna ought to have effectually prevented.

The Daily Mail reports resistance:

Muslim plans to broadcast a loudspeaker call to prayer from a city centre mosque have been attacked by local residents who say it would turn the area into a “Muslim ghetto”.

Dozens of people packed out a council meeting to express their concerns over the plans for a two-minute long call to prayer to be issued three times a day, saying that it could drown out the traditional sound of church bells.

But a spokesman for the Central Mosque said that Muslim’s also have the right to summon worshippers.

Dr Mark Huckster, who lives in Stanton Road and works at East Oxford hospice Helen House, told the Oxford Mail: “The proposal to issue a prayer call is very un-neighbourly, especially in a crowded urban space such as Oxford.

“I have lived in the Middle East and a prayer call has a very different feel to church bells and I personally found the noise extremely unpleasant, rather disturbing and very alien to the western mindset.”

He added: “If an evangelical Christian preacher proposed issuing sermons three times a day at full volume there would be an outcry.

“There could be a sense of ghettoisation of East Oxford. Cowley Road would have a Muslim flavour and could become a Muslim ghetto which is contrary to what we want in a multicultural society.”

Dr Huckster was among six residents speaking in opposition to the plans, revealed in the Oxford Mail in November.

Allan Chapman, who lives in East Oxford, said: “We are concerned with civil liberties and civil peace and the right to be able to live in our own space.

“I do not want preaching at. It is not the tradition of this country or the tradition I subscribe to.

“I find this totally, utterly unacceptable and I plan to do whatever I can to stop it.”

wftv.com reports another incident of insane hoplophobia at an elementary school in Ocala, Florida.

School officials say the 5th grader was brown-bagging it. She brought a piece of steak for her lunch, but she also brought a steak knife. That’s when deputies were called.

It happened in the cafeteria at Sunrise Elementary School. The 10-year-old used the knife to cut the meat.

“She did not use it inappropriately. She did not threaten anyone with it. She didn’t pull it out and brandish it. Nothing of that nature,” explained Marion County School Spokesman Kevin Christian.

But a couple of teachers took the utensil and called the sheriff. When deputies arrived, they were unable to get the child’s parents on the phone, so they arrested her and took her to the county’s juvenile assessment center.

“And we didn’t handcuff her or treat her like a criminal. But, we took her to the assessment center to be assessed,” said Capt. James Pogue, Marion County Sheriff’s Office.

School officials said it doesn’t matter what the knife was being used for. They said they had no choice.

“Anytime there’s a weapon on campus, yes, we have to report it and we aggressively report it because we don’t want to take any chances, regardless,” Christian said.

But the sheriff’s office said the extreme measures in what some may say was a harmless incident had to do with school policy, not theirs.

“But once we’re notified, we have to take some type of action,” Pogue explained.

The student now faces a felony charge for the possession of a weapon on school property and the principal suspended her for ten days. The parents of the girl could not be reached for comment.

The sheriff’s office has turned the case over to the State Attorney’s Office.

London Times:

The proud motto of northern Europe’s crack rapid-reaction force is ad omnia paratus. Prepared for everything, everywhere. But the heraldic lion above the Latin tag now sends a less plucky message – he has just been digitally emasculated and, though technically still a lion rampant, he does not seem to be ready for anything, anywhere.

The change was implemented after a group of women Swedish soldiers protested that they could not identify with such an ostentatiously male lion on their army crest. A complaint of sex discrimination was then lodged with the European Court of Justice.

“We were forced to cut the lion’s willy off with the aid of a computer,” Christian Braunstein, from the Tradition Commission of the Swedish Army, said.

Now the Nordic Battlegroup, a force of 2,400 soldiers, is looking deeply embarrassed. For sceptics who already consider the Nordic Battlegroup to be something of an oxymoron – it is led by the Swedes, who were last in battle in 1809 – the operation on the lion is not an auspicious omen.

“A castrated lion – the perfect symbol for European defence policy,” an American military blogger sneered.

There are 18 battle groups in the European Union and the Nordic one, comprising Sweden, Finland, Norway, Estonia and Ireland, goes on standby on January 1, 2008.

Most upset, though, was Vladimir Sagerlund, the designer of the crest from the National Archives. “A heraldic lion is a powerful and stately figure with its genitalia intact and I cannot approve an edited image,” he told öteborgs-Posten, a Swedish daily.

“The Army lacks knowledge about heraldry. Coats of arms containing lions without genitalia were given to those who betrayed the Crown.”

Hat tip to Englishman’s Castle via Bird dog.

This kind of thing comes up all the time in relation to the arms of particular Swiss cantons featuring bears whose equipment is not only intact, but even more flamboyantly erect and displayed gules, (i.e. red). Attempts to censor the overly-explicit Swiss charges always result in absolute uproar with lots of coarse Swiss comments about refusing to be represented by female bears.

Robert Maranto, associate professor of political science at Villanova University, reports, in the Washington Post, on the chasm separating the gauchist monoculture of the contemporary academical clerisy from the American political mainsteam.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views—commonplace in American society and among the political class—are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused “a sensation” at his university. “It was as if I had become a child molester,” he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because “you don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”

I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently “fit” better than I did. At least that’s what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn’t believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.) ...

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans. ...

I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

Daily Mail:

A grandfather has been given a prison sentence for racial harassment after calling a Welsh woman “English”.

Mick Forsythe used the term during an argument over a scratched car in his Welsh home town.

He called the vehicle’s owner, Lorna Steele, an “English bitch”.

She and her husband took great offence at the jibe and decided to take him to court.

The 55-year-old former lorry driver was found guilty of racially aggravated disorderly behaviour, and received a ten-week prison sentence suspended for 12 months.

Yesterday Mr Forsythe attacked the prosecution as a waste of time and money.

“I find it unbelievable that I’ve been prosecuted for this,” he said.

“I’m originally from Northern Ireland so I’m an adoptive Welshman.

“I’ve travelled all over Europe as a lorry driver and never had any problems with anybody and now they’re officially calling me a racist.

“It’s political correctness gone mad.

Gorman Beauchamp demolishes, and then dances over the corpse of, one of principal idiocies of our time.

Fifty years ago, New American Library published the Mentor Philosophers series, each with a title beginning The Age of . . . Belief, Ideology, Reason, and so on; the 20th-century selections bore the title The Age of Analysis. Had the series continued to the end of that century and into this, the volume should no doubt be The Age of Apology. Our postmodern ethos seems to hold that if anything can be proved to have happened, then surely someone needs to apologize for it.

We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered mea culpas to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul) for its sacking 800 years ago by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, an event for which the late John Paul II expressed “deep regret.” No wonder that a group in England, claiming descent from the medieval Knights Templars, is asking the Vatican to apologize for the violent suppression of the order and for torturing to death its Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314, an apology timed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of that fell deed. In America, the National Council of Churches apologized to Native Americans for Europeans’ discovering their continent and appropriating their land (but did not return any church’s specific holdings to any specific tribe). The United Church of Canada followed suit, officially apologizing to Canada’s native peoples for wrongs inflicted by the church; the native peoples, however, officially rejected the apology.

The current lieutenant governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, personally presented the leaders of the Mormon church with a copy of his state legislature’s House Resolution 793, expressing “official regret” for the 1844 murder of Joseph Smith and the expulsion of his followers, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The language asking for “pardon and forgiveness” was toned down when certain lawmakers protested that they could not ask for forgiveness for acts that they had not personally committed — a retrograde notion, apparently, of individual responsibility. Tony Blair, as British prime minister, apologized to the Irish for his nation’s insensitivity to the plight of the victims of the Potato Famine in the 1840s. A hundred years after the event, the U.S. Congress offered a formal apology to the Hawaiians for the overthrow of their monarchy in 1893. The French parlement unanimously adopted a law stating that “the trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade, perpetuated from the 15th century against Africans, Amerindians, Malagasies and Indians, constitutes a crime against humanity”: the centuries of slavery before the 15th and the slavery of other peoples do not, apparently, constitute such a crime, at least in France.

In 2005 the U.S. Senate formally apologized for something that it had not done: make lynching a federal crime. Such a record of inaction, claimed one of the resolution’s sponsors, constituted a “stain on the United States Senate.” True enough, no doubt, but one of how many? Imagine if the United States or any other government began apologizing not only for sins of commission but for those of omission: an infinite regress of culpability.

My favorite apology so far, however, appeared in a brief Reuters account. “Villagers of the tiny settlement of Nubutautau [Fiji] wept as they apologized to the descendants of a British missionary killed and eaten by their ancestors 136 years ago,” the news agency reported. “The villagers and the relatives of the missionary, the Rev. Thomas Baker, were taking part in a complex ritual intended to lift a curse the locals say has caused an extended run of bad luck.” A cow was slaughtered and kisses given to the 11 relatives of the missionary by the village chief, Ratu Filimoni Nawawabalavu, “a descendant of the chief who cooked the missionary.” No word on whether the curse lifted. ...

Our mania for apology stems from a radical sort of “presentism”: the belief, in practice, if not fully articulated, that the actions and actors of the past should be evaluated, and usually condemned, by present-day standards. In our relativistic age in which advanced opinion notoriously eschews universals and absolutes, the criteria obtaining at the moment in Cambridge and Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, Austin and Madison seem to have more than contingent status. The criteria appear perilously close to absolutes, the sort of absolutes obeisance to which allows moderately competent graduate students in sociology or culture studies to relish their moral superiority to almost any denizen of the benighted pre-Foucault past. One has only to listen to the incredulous-to-hostile laughter that, at academic conferences, greets the opinions of, say, Henry Adams or Thomas Carlyle on the mental capacities of women, or of Hegel or Hume on Africans, commonplace a century or two ago, to understand how relative our relativism really is.

Presentism wants not only to judge the past by the criteria of the present, but, in a complete failure of historical imagination, can’t conceive of the criteria of the future being radically different from today’s.

Don’t miss the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Katherine Kersten reports on a recent PC outrage at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.

(The editor of the sudent paper) is lamenting the headache of student reporters’ missed deadlines with fellow staffers. The group jokes about various tongue-in-cheek motivational messages—an ice pick, a bloody knife and other fanciful instruments of discipline. Keith impulsively sticks a mock noose made from his sweatshirt drawstring to the ceiling, with a note about the hazards of missed deadlines.

The drawstring was there a few minutes, he says, and he tossed it in the wastebasket before he left.

Keith’s antic raised the curtain on the politically correct circus-of-the-month at MCTC. Someone flipped the “I’m outraged, simply outraged!” switch, and Keith found himself at center ring under the Big Top after two black staffers filed complaints.

The day after the incident, an astonished Keith got a call from the paper’s editor, who fired him. At a meeting set up by college authorities, he apologized profusely to staffers. He called the noose joke “unprofessional” but explained that it was a misunderstanding.

“Too late,” one student responded, said Keith. “The staffer told me, ‘An example needs to be made. We need to raise awareness of issues like this on campus.’

“They didn’t want an apology,” Keith added. “They wanted me out of there so they could launch the aftermath.”

An investigation by campus authorities found that Keith had no intention of making a racist threat. No matter. He was on his way to being tarred as the campus arch-racist.

College officials declined to comment Friday but referred me to a statement saying they have no authority over hiring and firing of student newspaper staff members.

“We are angry,” Lisa Dean, president of Association of Black Collegiates, a student group, told the Star Tribune for an article about the incident. “If we do not nip it in the bud, it will spread and a lot of students may not want to attend this college because of racism.” ...

Educate about what? You guessed it: “We want to educate around cultural understanding,” Laura Fedock, interim associate vice president for academic and student affairs, told the Star Tribune. “We need to teach each other when something is offensive.”

One wonders: Are students learning anything else?

How did Keith’s light-hearted “get-your-assignments-in-on-time” joke flip the outrage switch?

The thinly veiled secret is that an incident like this is a godsend to campus political posturers and must be milked for all it’s worth.

Today, a favorite college pastime is fanning the flames of grievance. Victimhood is a tremendous source of moral power, and being outraged and oppressed is a sure bet to get your picture in the paper—displaying a look of grave concern for all humanity.

If I can get ten right-wing undergraduate to do a hunger strike for two weeks, will Columbia create a Department of Big Game Hunting, start teaching Selous and Bell, buy a bunch of Purdeys and Rigbys, and build a shooting range? Somehow I doubt it.

New York Sun:

A weeklong hunger strike staged by five students at Columbia University could cost the institution $50 million.

Columbia officials said Wednesday night that, after a faculty committee grants approval, the university would spend the funds to pay for an expansion of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and a restructuring of Columbia College’s core curriculum that would add faculty for courses on non-European civilizations.

Sympathetic shudder to Bird Dog.

Daily Mail:

Teachers at a primary school have been ordered to dress up as Muslims to promote multi-culturalism.

The West Midlands school is belatedly celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid and told its pupils and teachers to don traditional Muslim dress for the day.

All 257 pupils, most of whom are Christians, and 41 teachers – two of whom are Muslims – dressed up.

A morning assembly was held to mark the event and an afternoon party was strictly for women only, because Muslim husbands object to wives mixing with other men.

Sally Bloomer, head of Rufford primary school in Lye, West Midlands, told The Sun: “I have not heard of any complaints. It’s all part of a diversity project to promote multi-culturalism.”

But a relative of one of the staff reportedly said: “Who would put their job on the line? They have been told they have to embrace the day to show their diversity. But they are not all happy.”

The British National Party’s Home Affairs correspondent observes

I imagine that Rufford Primary School in Lye in the West Midlands will be one of schools that are not going to celebrate a traditional Christmas this year.

Via Red Planet Cartoons and Death By 1000 Papercuts.

Acceptable in Fort Collins: A display called “Source of Life”

WorldNetDaily:

A special task force in a Colorado city has recommended banning red and green lights at the Christmas holiday because they fall among the items that are too religious for the city to sponsor.

“Some symbols, even though the Supreme Court has declared that in many contexts they are secular symbols, often still send a message to some members of the community that they and their traditions are not valued and not wanted. We don’t want to send that message,” Seth Anthony, a spokesman for the committee, told the Fort Collins, Colo., Coloradoan.

He said the recommended language does not specifically address Christmas trees by name, but the consensus was that they would not fall within acceptable decorations.

What will be allowed are white lights and “secular” symbols not associated “with any particular holiday” such as icicles, unadorned greenery and snowflakes, the task force said.

The group was made up of members of the city’s business and religious communities as well as representatives from some community groups. Members met for months to review the existing holiday display policy, which allowed white as well as multi-colored lights and wreaths and garlands.

In previous years, there also was a Christmas tree at the city’s Oak Street Plaza.

A vote on the proposal will be coming up before the city council on Nov. 20, officials said.

“As far as I’m concerned, the group ended up in a very fair place in which primarily secular symbols will be used on city property,” task force member Saul Hopper told the newspaper.

The existing holiday display rules were adopted in 2006 after a rabbi requested that the city display a menorah.

The only apparent exception to the completely secular rule would be at the Fort Collins Museum, where a “multicultural display” of symbols and objects would be collected to represent Diwali, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Christmas among others.

“I expect criticism from people who feel like we are taking Christmas away. And I expect we will get criticism from people who think educational display endorses religions,” Anthony said. “(But) to the extent we can, recognizing that offending no one will be impossible, we want to be inclusive.”

City officials touted their own efforts.

“I am really delighted to see us taking this step,” Mayor Doug Hutchinson said when the task force was being assembled. “I think Fort Collins is a great city, and I think great cities are inclusionary.”

“Inclusionary” obviously means including Jewish holiday symbols, Hindu holiday symbols, and made-up holiday (Kwanzaa) symbols, but excluding traditional Christian holiday symbols.

The Daily Mail offers a glimpse into what kind of policies Labour may have in store for Britain in future.

Christmas should be downgraded in favour of festivals from other religions to improve race relations, says an explosive report.

Labour’s favourite think-tank says that because it would be hard to “expunge” Christmas from the national calendar, ‘even-handedness’ means public organisations must start giving other religions equal footing.

The leaked findings of its investigation into identity, citizenship and community cohesion also propose:

• “Birth ceremonies”, at which state and parents agree to “work in partnership” to bring up children

• Action to “ensure access” for ethnic minorities to “largely white” countryside

• An overhaul of Britain’s “imperial” honours system

• Bishops being thrown out of the House of Lords

• An end to “sectarian” religious education

• Flying flags other than the Union Jack.

The report by the Institute for Public Policy Research was commissioned when Nick Pearce, now head of public policy at Downing Street, was its director.

IPPR has shaped many Labour policies, including ID cards, bin taxes and road pricing.

The report robustly defends multiculturalism – the idea that different communities should not be forced to integrate but should be allowed to maintain their own culture and identities.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) issued a press release on October 30 denouncing a mandatory program reeducating students in politically correct thinking.

The following day much of the conservative portion of the Blogosphere, including this blog, reported and commented on the story.

And, yesterday, November 1, Patrick Harker, president of the University of Delaware, announced the cessation of the thought-reform program.

The University of Delaware strives for an environment in which all people feel welcome to learn, and which supports intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, free inquiry and respect for the views and values of an increasingly diverse population. The University is committed to the education of students as citizens, scholars and professionals and their preparation to contribute creatively and with integrity to a global society. The purpose of the residence life educational program is to support these commitments.

While I believe that recent press accounts misrepresent the purpose of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, there are questions about its practices that must be addressed and there are reasons for concern that the actual purpose is not being fulfilled. It is not feasible to evaluate these issues without a full and broad-based review.

Upon the recommendation of Vice President for Student Life Michael Gilbert and Director of Residence Life Kathleen Kerr, I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted.

Vice President Gilbert will work with the University Faculty Senate and others to determine the proper means by which residence life programs may support the intellectual, cultural and ethical development of our students.

“All whites are racist” according to official policy at the University of Delaware, and students are required to undergo “treatment” and obliged to demonstrate “behavioral changes.”

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education article:

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.

“The University of Delaware’s residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students’ private beliefs,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional.”

The university’s views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations. Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.” ...

According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university’s ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an “oppressed” social group, and taking action by advocating for a “sustainable world.”

In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation.

Office of Residence Life—Report 1 On Strategic Change:

In the most turgid of bureaucratese (page 9), the Assistant Director for Residential Education is tasked to “design… engage in action… interpret,” yada yada, and so on “competencies,” i.e. student (re-education/indoctrination subject) program goals.

1. Understand how your social identities affect how you view others.

a. Each student will understand their social identities which are salient in
their day-to-day life.
b. Each student will be able to express an understanding of how their social
identities influence their views of others.

2. Understand how differences in equity impact our society.

a. Each student will learn about the forms of oppression that are linked with
social identity groups.
b. Each student will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society
c. Each student will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of
oppression

3. Understand your congruence with citizenship values:

a. -Human suffering matters.

This program surely produces plenty of human suffering.

Minding the Campus:

Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school.

Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus. Neither is the lack of protest among faculty and students for the kind of treatment Scheffler got. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is defending the student, reports that it has failed to find a single Hamline student or faculty member who has spoken out in favor of Scheffler’s right to free speech. So far, no protest from has been reported in the student newspaper or in outside internet outlets such as Myspace.

FIRE’s collected links on the case.

The Dennis Township ُPrimary School in Cape May, New Jersey suspended a 7-year-old second grader for drawing a stick figure holding a gun. He gave the drawing to a schoolmate whose parents saw it and complained.

The 7-year-old’s mother thought the official reaction was excessive, particularly since the drawing was depicting a person using a water pistol.

Press of Atlantic City

AP

In a seasonal allusion to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ late 17th Century witch trials (which resulted in 19 hangings), a Chicopee, Massachusetts homeowner decorated his front yard with the effigy of a witch dangling from a gallows.

But one of his neighbors (who practices Wicca) is offended, and considers his display a hate crime.

WHIOTV video

AgenceFrance story.

Charles Johnson notes the irony of such observance “In the city that suffered the worst Islamic terrorist attack in history.”

JCM comments: “How about lighting the windows in a bullseye pattern?”

New York Times:

For five years, Yale Law School has fought to restrict military recruiters from its job fairs because of the Pentagon’s policy that bars openly gay or bisexual people from the military. But with the federal government threatening to withhold $350 million in grants if the university does not assist the recruiters, that fight will all but end on Monday.

After an appeals court ruled in favor of the Defense Department on Sept. 17, the law school said it would allow recruiters from the Air Force and Navy to participate in a university-sponsored job interview program for law students on Monday afternoon. For now, the legal battle to stop the recruiters is over, said Robert A. Burt, a Yale law professor and the lead plaintiff in the case.

“The judges who hold office at the moment disagree with us,” Professor Burt said. “We must wait for history to vindicate our position.”

History will have nothing but contempt and derision for pampered academic prigs whose commitment to leveling the distinction between perversity and ordinary life so greatly exceeds their loyalty to country and their gratitude to the armed forces which defend them.

Telegraph:

Police are considering charging a 10-year-old boy with a race hate crime after he was beaten by a Slovakian woman with an iron bar.

Jake Stedman needed hospital treatment after the attack in Chatham on Friday, when he was allegedly beaten around the head and neck after being chased down an alley, and was left with two black eyes.

But police are now looking into claims from the 35-year-old woman who allegedly attacked him and who is currently on police bail, that he made racist remarks by telling her “to go back to her own country”. ...

If charged with racially aggravated assault, Jake, who has only just reached the age of criminal responsibility, would become the youngest person in the country to face a race hate charge.

“It is very early stages but we are investigating whether the boy should face any charges,” said a police source.

”There have been allegations that he used racist language and it is necessary for us to investigate the claims.” ...

The incident occurred as Jake and his friends were playing outside a local convenience store when a group of four Slovakian women passed by.

The boys allegedly called out to the women and threw soft fruit at them. ...

“Medway Police will continue to monitor the situation and work in partnership with other agencies and we are treating these matters extremely seriously.”

Ch Insp Peter Wedlake, of Medway Police, said: “We won’t tolerate racially motivated offences, whoever they are committed by.”

And they’ll soon have cameras everywhere, so they can catch you hunting with dogs or name calling.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

The Wall Street Journal noted yesterday a certain inconsistency in the way Columbia University enforces support for Gay Rights in its campus access policies.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his doubts about whether the Holocaust happened. He thinks the Jewish state should be wiped off the map. His regime funnels sophisticated munitions to Shiite militias in Iraq, who use them to kill American soldiers.

Oh, and by the way, his regime also executes homosexuals for the crime of being themselves. Maybe if Columbia University President Lee Bollinger were aware of the latter fact he would reconsider his invitation to the Iranian president to speak on his campus next Monday.

Mr. Bollinger, notoriously, voted in 2005 not to readmit an ROTC program to Columbia (absent from the university since 1969), ostensibly on the grounds of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gay service members. Never mind that other upper-tier schools, including Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania all have ROTC programs. Never mind, too, that in 2003 the Columbia student body voted in favor of readmission by a 2-1 margin. In Mr. Bollinger’s view, “the university has an obligation, deeply rooted in the core values of an academic institution and in First Amendment principles, to protect its students from improper discrimination and humiliation.”

Mr. Bollinger’s position might at least be coherent were he not now invoking the same principles to justify his invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose offenses to gay rights and any other form of human dignity considerably exceed the Pentagon’s. After promising that he would introduce the president “with a series of sharp challenges”—including Iran’s “reported support” for international terrorism—he went on to say that “it is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their expression.”

We’re all for free speech and the vigorous exchange of intellectual differences, though we don’t see how Mr. Bollinger can be, given his decision to discriminate against young men and women who seek to make careers in the military. We also don’t quite see how the right to free speech—a freedom Mr. Ahmadinejad conspicuously denies his own people—is tantamount to the right to an illustrious pedestal. Columbia is a selective institution in its choice of students as well as speakers; its choices confer distinction on those whom it selects. Were it otherwise, Mr. Ahmadinejad would surely have better uses for his time.

And the Journal’s comments must have stung, because Lee Bollinger promptly deleted the honorific portion of Columbia University’s invitation, removing Ahmadinejad’s from a “World Leader’s Forum” program. At this point, however, Ahmadinejad is still scheduled to deliver an address at Columbia.

NY Sun:

The president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, yesterday withdrew an invitation to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The dean of Columbia’s school of international and public affairs, Lisa Anderson, had independently invited Mr. Ahmadinejad to speak at the World Leader’s Forum, a year-long program that aims to unite “renowned intellectuals and cultural icons from many nations to examine global challenges and explore cultural perspectives.”

In a statement issued yesterday afternoon, Mr. Bollinger said he canceled Mr. Ahmadinejad’s invitation because he couldn’t be certain it would “reflect the academic values that are the hallmark of a University event such as our World Leaders Forum.” He told Ms. Anderson that Mr. Ahmadinejad could speak at the school of international and public affairs, just not as a part of the university-wide leader’s forum.

And Ahmadinejad is clearly doing a lot better than former Harvard President Larry Summers, who is regarded as such a villain in the groves of Academy for merely speculating upon the possibility of other explanations besides discrimination for the less frequent academic focus of women on science, mathematics, and engineering that faculty members at the University of California at Davis were able to pressure their regents into withdrawing an invitation to Summers.

And, at Stanford, 2500 students, faculty, and alumni are petitioning to prevent the Hoover Institution making former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a visiting fellow.

The BBC has a story demonstrating that the surrender of common sense to zero tolerance policies in service of therapeutic state paternalism is an international phenomenon.

Supermarket staff refused to sell alcohol to a white-haired 72-year-old man – because he would not confirm he was over 21.

Check-out staff at Morrisons in West Kirby, Wirral, demanded Tony Ralls prove he was old enough to buy his two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Mr Ralls asked to see the manager who put the wine back on the shelf.

The grandfather-of-three said he had refused to confirm he was over 21 as it was a “stupid question.”

Mr Ralls, a retired insurance firm regional manager, said he expected the store manager to resolve the situation but he was disappointed. ...

The pensioner abandoned his shopping on the conveyor belt and left the store – but not before demanding a complaints form and phone number for Morrisons’ headquarters. ...

A Morrisons spokesman said: “We take our responsibility with regard to selling alcohol very seriously and all our stores operate the Task 21 scheme, which addresses the difficulties our staff face in being able to determine if a customer is legally old enough to buy alcohol.

“To further limit any element of doubt staff at the West Kirby store are required to ask anyone buying alcohol to confirm that they are over 21.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has reversed a district court decision, ruling against Yale Law School in Burt v. Rumsfeld thereby upholding the Solomon Amendment which denies certain federal funding to a college or university if any part of the college or university refuses military recruiters equal access to its students and campuses.

Scott Johnson notes the nobility of the University administration’s commitment to the interests of “the world at large.”

I happened to be at Yale in October 2003 when Navy Judge Advocate General recruiter Brian Whitaker was scheduled to meet with students interested in serving as Navy lawyers. Virtually all Yale law students had signed a petition vowing not to meet with Whitaker or other JAG recruiters. The petition was publicly posted inside the law school as part of a protest display that included black and camouflage wall hangings. The one law student scheduled to meet with Whitaker cancelled the interview.

The ostensible cause of the consternation occasioned by Whitaker’s visit was the military’s compliance with the federal “don’t ask/don’t tell” law on homosexual conduct in the armed forces. Law schools across the country had hindered military recruiters from meeting with law students because the military’s adherence to the “don’t ask/don’t tell” law violates nondiscrimination policies enforced by the schools against on-campus recruiters.

Whitaker’s putative right to visit Yale Law School despite its nondiscrimination policy was attributable solely to the Bush administration’s enforcement of the Solomon Amendment requiring federally-funded universities to open their doors to military recruiters or risk losing federal funds. After 9/11 the Defense Department began to threaten enforcement of the amendment, and law schools began to comply. At Yale, for example, the law school has waived its nondiscrimination policy in order to preserve the university’s annual $350 million in federal funding only since the fall of 2002. Then-law school Dean Anthony Kronman explained:

We would never put at risk the overwhelmingly large financial interests of the University in federal funding. We have a point of principle to defend, but we will not defend this—at the expense of programs vital to the University and the world at large.

Dean Kronman paid a backhanded tribute to the “money talks” impetus behind the Solomon Amendment. The Kronman Doctrine provides: For the good of the world, Yale must retain access to your money.

Yale Daily News

James Lewis dissects the political description “Progressive,” a weasel-word commonly substituted for communist.

what kind of person has to label himself “Progressive?” Obviously somebody who believes he (or she) understands real progress better than the rest of us. Because if you are a Progressive it implies that everybody else, let’s face it, is a Regressive, or maybe just a Stagnant. It’s a smirky, self-flattering way of saying you’re a lot better than the rest.

So what kind of ego needs do you have to have to call yourself that? And what do you believe about others? In fact, Progressives must believe that other people are worse than they are; that only they can Save the Planet, or create Peace on Earth, or Solve Inequality, or whatever sin bedevils mankind.

Like the preacher who is focused on nothing but sin, Progressives must emphasize the alleged flaws of other people. They need to pinpoint those flaws, to feel important. Because Progressives make it clear that the real obstacle to Progress is Other People. In fact, if you really ask a “Progressive” what other people are like, you’re likely to hear that much of humanity is either ignorant or evil.

The word Progressive first became popular in the late 19th century, but has now been adopted as a popular synonym for “socialism.” Americans tend not to like socialism, associating it with the Soviet Union and other bad characters. But “Progressivism” sounds fine. So it is a euphemism for something people fear; a cover-up label.

The odd thing, of course, is that real progress in the world is almost never achieved by self-proclaimed “Progressives.” They generally make things worse rather than better. ...

All of Political Correctness, the dominant cultural theme of the Left, depends upon.. allegations and accusations. It is incredibly shallow and superficial – but it is also very effective as a power-play. If you can put the world at a disadvantage by implicitly accusing them of sin, you can also manipulate and oppress others, conscious of your own moral superiority. Evidence is not required. It is the pervasive McCarthyism of the Left.

Abigail Thernstrom has some harsh comments on the Progressive community in her review of the new book by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson on the Duke Lacrosse Case.

Until Proven Innocent” is a stunning book. It recounts the Duke lacrosse case in fascinating detail and offers, along the way, a damning portrait of the institutions—legal, educational and journalistic—that do so much to shape contemporary American culture. Messrs. Taylor and Johnson make it clear that the Duke affair—the rabid prosecution, the skewed commentary, the distorted media storyline—was not some odd, outlier incident but the product of an elite culture’s most treasured assumptions about American life, not least about America’s supposed racial divide. ...

The state attorney general—after an agonizing yearlong investigation, culminating in Mr. Nifong’s removal from the case—determined in April 2007 that Messrs. Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann were innocent of all charges. Nothing—absolutely nothing—had happened at the party. The players’ innocence had been apparent to their own attorneys from the outset. It should have been apparent to Mr. Nifong, too, given all the exculpatory details he knew. But he was desperate to win a close primary election and needed black votes, so he proceeded with an unjustified prosecution and publicly vilified innocent young men.

In this fundamental injustice, he was aided and abetted by others in Durham. Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke, condemned the lacrosse players as if they had already been found guilty, demanded the resignation of their coach and studiously ignored the mounting evidence that Ms. Mangum’s charge was false. He was clearly terrified of the racial and gender activists on his own faculty. Houston Baker, a noted professor of English, called the lacrosse players “white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape,” men who could “claim innocence . . . safe under the cover of silent whiteness.” Protesters on campus and in the city itself waved “castrate” banners, put up “wanted” posters and threatened the physical safety of the lacrosse players.

The vitriolic rhetoric of the faculty and Durham’s “progressive” community—including the local chapter of the NAACP —helped to intensify the scandal and stoke the media fires. The New York Times’ coverage was particularly egregious, as Messrs. Taylor and Johnson vividly show. It ran dozens of prominent stories and “analysis” articles trying to plumb the pathologies of the lacrosse players and of a campus culture that allowed swaggering white males to prey on poor, defenseless young black women. As one shrewd Times alumnus later wrote: “You couldn’t invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bienpensant journalist.” Such Nifong allies—unlike the district attorney himself—paid no price for their shocking indifference to the truth.

Some observations by the authors themselves appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post.

The 24-hour sentence was imposed on Mike Nifong, the disbarred former district attorney of Durham, after a contempt-of-court trial last week for repeatedly lying to hide DNA evidence of innocence. His prosecution of three demonstrably innocent defendants, based on an emotionally disturbed stripper’s ever-changing account, may be the worst prosecutorial misconduct ever exposed while it was happening. Durham police officers and other officials aided Nifong, and the city and county face the threat of a massive lawsuit by the falsely accused former students seeking criminal justice reforms and compensation.

All this shows how the criminal justice process can oppress the innocent—usually poor people lacking the resources to fight back—and illustrates the need for reforms to restrain rogue prosecutors. But the case was also a major cultural event exposing habits of mind among academics and journalists that contradict what should be their lodestar: the pursuit of truth.

Nifong’s lies, his inflaming of racial hatred (to win the black vote in his election campaign) and his targeting of innocent people were hardly representative of criminal prosecutors. But the smearing of the lacrosse players as racist, sexist, thuggish louts by many was all too representative.

Dozens of the activist professors who dominate campus discourse gleefully stereotyped and vilified their own students—and not one member of Duke’s undergraduate faculty publicly dissented for months. Duke President Richard Brodhead repeatedly and misleadingly denigrated the players’ characters. He also acted as though he had no problem with Nifong’s violations of their rights to due process.

The New York Times and other newspapers vied with trash-TV talk shows hosted by the likes of CNN’s Nancy Grace, a biased wacko-feminist, and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a right-wing blowhard, in a race to the journalistic bottom. The defendants—who endured the ordeal with courage and class—and their teammates were smeared nationwide as depraved racists and probable rapists.

To be sure, it was natural to assume at first that Nifong had a case. Why else would he confidently declare the players guilty? But many academics and journalists continued to presume guilt months after massive evidence of innocence poured into the public record. Indeed, some professors persisted in attacks even after the three defendants were declared innocent in April by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper—an almost unheard-of event.

Brushing aside concern with “the ‘truth’ . . . about the incident,” as one put it, these faculty ideologues just changed their indictments from rape to drunkenness (hardly a rarity in college); exploiting poor black women (the players had expected white and Hispanic strippers); and being born white, male and prosperous.

This shameful conduct was rooted in a broader trend toward subordinating facts and evidence to faith-based ideological posturing. Worse, the ascendant ideology, especially in academia, is an obsession with the fantasy that oppression of minorities and women by “privileged” white men remains rampant in America. Its crude stereotyping of white men, especially athletes, resembles old-fashioned racism and sexism.

Hat tip to Daniel Lowensten.