Captain Algernon: “The Royal Ministry of Culture will need to investigate the atmosphere of this opera house to make certain that ladies may equally enjoy the performances.
[Yale] University is under investigation by the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights stemming from an alleged mishandling of several instances of sexual misconduct in recent years.
The Office for Civil Rights will open an investigation into the University “for its failure to eliminate a hostile sexual environment on campus, in violation of Title IX” — which prohibits discrimination or exclusion from education programs — according to a press release by the complainants sent to the News Thursday afternoon. Yale administrators said they have not yet received a copy of the complaint and cannot comment.
The measure comes after 16 Yale students and alumni filed a formal complaint March 15 informing the Office for Civil Rights about Yale’s breach of Title IX by citing a slew of “inadequate response[s]” to public episodes of sexual misconduct on campus, such as the controversial Delta Kappa Epsilon chanting incident on Old Campus last fall.
“We have tried so many avenues,” complainant Hannah Zeavin ’12 told the News Thursday. “We exhausted every internal process [available at Yale].”
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Alumna Presca Ahn (Branford ‘10) details the unspeakable outrages that drove sixteen of Yale’s daughters to turn Mother Yale in.
On March 15, 16 students and recent alumnae of Yale filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights; I was one of them. The signatories were a diverse group, representing men and women, current students and recent graduates, those who have been involved in campus feminism and those who have not. The complaint itself was a detailed and heavily sourced 26-page document that outlined incidents of sex-based harassment and intimidation that have occurred at Yale every year for the past seven years, and argued that these incidents — and the University’s inadequate response to them — have resulted in a hostile educational environment for women at Yale. ...
For the past seven years, Yale has demonstrated… tolerance towards harassment of women: in 2004, when fraternity members stole (and photographed themselves wearing) four t-shirts from the annual Take Back the Night Clothesline Project, in which past victims of rape record their testimonies on t-shirts and display them; in 2005, when a new class of fraternity pledges stole 20 more of the t-shirts; in 2006, when yet another class of pledges gathered by the Yale Women’s Center and chanted, “No means yes! Yes means anal!”; in 2007, when over 150 Medical School students wrote a letter of protest about the conditions of sexual harassment on campus in which eight specific instances of sexual assault were cited; in 2008, when Zeta Psi pledges posed in front of the Yale Women’s Center with a poster reading, “We Love Yale Sluts,” photographed themselves in the pose, and disseminated the photo on Facebook; in 2009, when anonymous male students at Yale authored and circulated a “Preseason Scouting Report” e-mail that rated incoming freshman women according to how many beers it would take to have sex with them, and listing their names, hometowns and residential colleges; and this past October, when DKE pledges congregated on Old Campus chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f—- dead women and fill them with my semen.”
So what do we mean when we say that Yale is a hostile environment for women? What we don’t mean is that every female student at Yale has experienced sexual harassment or assault. What we mean is that the University has consistently demonstrated an attitude of tolerance for highly public acts of misogyny and sexual aggression. Female undergraduates see their peers call them “Yale sluts” and hear still other peers chant that “no means yes.” They live with the knowledge that the University has failed to punish those peers for sexual harassment. It takes little imagination to understand the effect of this kind of atmosphere on female students’ ability to engage in campus life on a basis of safety and equality.
Oh me! oh my! Stolen t-shirts! Frat members displaying “Yale Sluts” posters… and on Facebook, too! DKE pledge chanting slogans which were crude!
And no one was expelled or conspicuously punished and ostracized for politically incorrect expressions in mocking and parodistic contexts. It is easy to understand how the failure of President Levin personally to horsewhip those rowdy and insensitive fraternity men inevitably drove Yale’s womynist leaders to drop a dime on their alma mater.
After all, as a lot of Old Blues warned back when Kingman Brewster started talking about coeducating the place in the 1960s, many womyn are just to emotionally frail, too politically refined and sensitive, to bear uncouth, oppositional speech or mocking expressions of political incorrectness.
Such females may suffer untoward intellectual confusion, ideological indignation, and hyper-emotional distress. They may suffer from feelings of persecution and harassment. Thus, a real sector of the female community cannot possible function at an equal level in a university environment which naturally and inevitably features high-spirited young men, and in which ideas and perspectives are intended to be challenged, ridiculed, and vigorously contested. Some of these poor lambs are simply too delicate, too frail, too easily upset for all that.
Females of this kind need protection. As we see, some 16 unhappy Yale womynists felt vulnerable and persecuted, simply because their preferred ideological positions had been mocked or derided on several occasions in the course of a period of years, and no masculine protector had come forward to avenge them. In the end, they had to turn to the ultimate alternative masculine surrogate, Big Brother himself.
I was talking about all this with one of my pre-coeducation friends from Bones and DKE, just this afternoon.
“I warned you that this kind of thing was bound to happen.” Tripp observed, taking another sip of his gin-and-tonic. “Political ideas and higher education just mess up some female heads. They become fanatical and they egg one another on. Sexual frustration, of course, is endemic among politicized females. And the combination of sexual frustration and their hormonal cycle leads directly to delusions of victimization, paranoia, and vicious and destructive behavior. Imagine complaining about Yale to the Federal Government! It’s the behavior of a cad and a bounder, but for a politicized feminist it’s par for the course. That radical Brewster sowed the seeds, and Levin is reaping the harvest.”
The Bookworm has some thoughts on the morality and practical consequences of returning antiquities from Western museums to their lands of origin.
The narrative has long been in place: For centuries, the predatory West raped the ancient world — Egypt, Greece, the Fertile Crescent, Persia — of her culture. Greedy treasure hunters and archeologists stole her mummies, her statuary, her carvings, her jewels and her wall paintings. Their museums gained world renown because of these ill-gotten gains, while the countries of origin moldered, deprived not only of their natural riches, but also of their historic legacy. With the end of colonialism after World War II, the situation started righting itself, as now-properly abashed Western countries began returning these stolen treasures to their true homes.
The actual story is a bit different. The cultures that had created those treasures had long vanished by the time the Western collectors showed up and started sniffing around. Where once had been glory, now was abysmal poverty. More than that, there was a profound disinterest in the past. The citizens of Egypt, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, etc., cared nothing for the treasures beneath their feet. Those that they couldn’t see, they forgot; those that they could see, they recycled. They broke down ancient structures and used their stones to build their homes; they melted down ancient jewelry, and refashioned the gold in modern design. The Egyptian mummies to which thieves had easy access had long since vanished — some within days of being interred — especially since their wrappings made good paper and, for centuries, their dust was thought to have curative powers.
What made these remnants of the past valuable was the interest the West had in the ancient world’s past. To the Middle East, they were raw material; to the Westerners, things of beauty and wonder. And so the West took them away, to museums and private collections. In terms of what was happening in the Middle East 200 years ago or 100 years ago, Western activity was akin to digging in the garbage to collect someone else’s discards. The only thing that bespoke value in the regions themselves was gold, so the archeologists figured out that, if they gave to the fellahin who unearthed the ancient gold a sum of money equal to that object’s weight, the latter cheerfully parted with their cultural past.
The relics, once in the West, were treated with a reverence denied them in the lands from which they emerged. They were cleaned, restored, maintained, studied and much visited. And of course, as their status rose, the people who had so cavalierly parted with them realized that they had lost something of value. When they had achieved some measure of moral power, they demanded them back. Often, the West complied with those demands. ...
[M]any ended up back at home, in lands governed by dictatorships. These, no matter how long they last, invariably seem to end in a welter of violence, flames, vandalism and theft. Is it a surprise, then, that when a dictatorship ends, it’s often the case that the treasures, once ignored and abused, then revered in foreign lands, and then returned to their natal soil, should be amongst the first casualties?
Statue of 18th Dynasty Pharoah Akhenaton, circa 1336 BC, recently looted from Egyptian museum and found two weeks later discarded beside a garbage bin.
Paul Mirengoff (left) at a PJM Conference next to Claudia Rossett
William Jacobson yesterday delivered the sad news that political correctness has taken down one the top half dozen conservative bloggers.
Paul Mirengoff, one of the three highly talented and intelligent principals of Power-Line, posted some comments on the memorial services conducted in Tucson for the shooting victims, titled “An evening in Tucson — the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
On the negative side of the ledger, I didn’t appreciate the president of the University of Arizona (and master of ceremonies) telling us how lucky we are to have Barack Obama as our president and Janet Napolitano as our homeland security chief. Nor did the frequent raucous cheering by the huge crowd seem appropriate at what was, at least in part, a memorial service.
As for the “ugly,” I’m afraid I must cite the opening “prayer” by Native American Carlos Gonzales. It was apparently was some sort of Yaqui Indian tribal thing, with lots of references to “the creator” but no mention of God. Several of the victims were, as I understand it, quite religious in that quaint Christian kind of way (none, to my knowledge, was a Yaqui). They (and their families) likely would have appreciated a prayer more closely aligned with their religious beliefs.
But it wasn’t just Gonzales’s prayer that was “ugly” under the circumstances. Before he ever got to the prayer, Gonzales provided us with a mini-auto biography and made several references to Mexico, the country from which (he informed us) his family came to Arizona in the mid 19th century. I’m not sure why Gonzales felt that Mexico needed to intrude into this service, but I have an idea.
In any event, the invocation could have used more God, less Mexico, and less Carlos Gonzales.
Bloggers generally have the journalistic habit of trying to incorporate referential word play into cultural and political commentary and, in this case, I suppose the Southwestern location of the events brought the well-known Sergio Leone movie to mind as the basis for a rhetorical triad.
The application of “ugly” (in quotation marks) was clearly just a triadic reference to what the religiously-minded might regard as the aesthetically unfortunate choice of a decidely un-Christian invocation couched in fashionable PC Mexican Amerindian cultural identity terms. Paul Mirengoff thought that since the deceased were actually Christian Americans and not Mexican Yaqui Indians or fashionistas, a more conventional, and less PC, form of memorial prayer would have been more apropos.
But, it turns out, that Paul Mirengoff’s very large law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld (800 lawyers, 14 offices), has a significant practice in Amerindian law, representing tribes like the Pima of Arizona and the Seneca of New York in casino and gaming licensing, real estate acquisitions, bond issues, and lobbying.
Paul Mirengoff’s posting became an issue at his firm, when James Meggisto (another partner specializing in Amerindian practice) went on the PC warpath, describing himself as “shocked, appalled and embarrassed” by the “insensitive” posting.
Stacy McCain noted the importance of Amerindian billings at Akin Gump.
The lawyer who denounced Mirengoff, James Meggesto, is a member of the Onondago Nation of New York who was hired by Akin Gump in February 2007 – i.e., right after Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats took over Congress. Megesto was one of three lawyers, including Vanessa Ray-Hodge and Madeline Soboleff Levy, hired by the firm at that time as part of an expansion of Akin Gump’s “American Indian law and policy practice” according to a Feb. 23, 2007, press release. Akin Gump’s total haul from lobbying in 2007 was $32 million – an increase of 25% over the previous year.
Paul Mirengoff was obliged to remove the posting (preserved here), to post an apology, and to quit blogging at Power-Line.
Liberal jerks like Steve M. and sanctimonious people like Charlie Martin (at PJM, no less) are self-righteous and unsympathetic.
Jeff Goldstein, more appropriately, in my view, reflected on the power and efficacy of PC intimidation.
If we’re going to pretend that language works in a way that it clearly doesn’t — and to institutionalize that idea into our very epistemology — what we will end up with is the slow erosion of our speech, as more and more of it becomes subject to “interpretations” motivated by cynicism and a will to power.
This latest is just another dismal example of how precisely such a “democratic” method of “interpretation” can and will be used to diminish the individual at the whims of a motivated collective.
Jeff is right to be concerned. One of the most influential and articulate conservative bloggers was successfully silenced by the ability of the left to employ advantageously exaggerated interpretations of speech to panic the command of one of the small battalions of the conventional capitalist world into throttling one of that system’s best defenders. The Gramscian long march of leftist assumptions and expectations obviously has passed right down the halls of America’s leading law firms.
The sad lesson here is that, if you want to make a living in the world, conservative speech is not free. Even the most intelligent and articulate conservative commentator may on some random day express himself imprecisely or choose an inapt figure of speech, subject to inflammatory interpretation and advantageous misuse by the enemy, and then find himself hailed before the politically correct inquisition.
The Power-Line principals probably made the better choice originally, back when they started out blogging anonymously. Come to think of it, most of the group bloggers at Maggie’s Farm still blog under names like Bird Dog, the Barrister, and the News Junkie.
I don’t know Paul Mirengoff personally, but I have had enough contact with him in blogging to know perfectly well that Paul is a kind and generous person, and a gentleman. It is obvious to me that Paul has no particular animosity against Yaqui Indians, Amerindian religion, or even the teachings of Don Juan. He merely thought that an exotic cultural theme was an inappropriate choice for the center-stage position in a memorial service for ordinary Americans.
I will miss Paul Mirengoff’s commentary extremely, and regard the closing down of his personal blogging as a major loss to Conservatism and to the national public debate. And I devoutly hope that Paul does come back someday soon under a nom-de-guerre. In the meantime, he has my sympathy and best wishes. Nil illegitimi carborundum.
Riding a wave of liberal guilt and political correctness, Egyptian officials have demanded that Western museums generally empty their Egyptian exhibitions and return antiquities recovered by Western scholarship. Targets for such demands have included the Rosetta Stone currently in the British Museum, the Berlin Museum’s bust of Queen Nefertiti, and a number of reliefs depicting a journey in the Afterlife from the Louvre. Only the Louvre has so far capitulated to Egyptian demands.
It ought to have been obvious that irreplaceable art objects and antiquities are more accessible to larger audiences and to scholars, and considerably safer, in museums located in the West.
Hyperallergic has a collection of photographs of the damage to the Egyptian Museum from Aljazeera.
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This Red Alert from the security consultancy Stratfor suggests that security forces might have been behind the (clearly limited) vandalism to the museum, attempting to create a pretext, and support, for a crackdown on demonstrators.
The Egyptian police are no longer patrolling the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Hamas armed men are entering into Egypt and are closely collaborating with the [Muslim Brotherhood]. The MB has fully engaged itself in the demonstrations, and they are unsatisfied with the dismissal of the Cabinet. They are insisting on a new Cabinet that does not include members of the ruling National Democratic Party.
Security forces in plainclothes are engaged in destroying public property in order to give the impression that many protesters represent a public menace. The MB is meanwhile forming people’s committees to protect public property and also to coordinate demonstrators’ activities, including supplying them with food, beverages and first aid.
Ron Ross, at the American Spectator, vents over the insanity of our government’s refusal to use profiling as the basis for airline security.
The Transportation Security Administration’s controversial passenger screening policies demonstrate just how distorted our priorities have become. We have maneuvered ourselves into being more terrified of being accused of racism than we are of death.
Political correctness is the equivalent of a societal lobotomy. Political correctness prevents us from using basic logic and common sense when we make large and small choices. We know what we need to do to make ourselves safer but we’re in denial about what we know.
As John Smith, a columnist for Las Vegas Review-Journal, asked in a recent column, “Patting down my disabled daughter makes us safer?” The answer to that question is no, and everyone knows the answer is no. The obvious absurdity of our policies is the backdrop of why so many travelers are frustrated and angry.
How ridiculous is it to pretend that all passengers have an equal probability of carrying weapons or explosives? Our rejection of profiling is a rejection of behavior that we use so much we lose sight of how essential it is in our lives. The TSA is behaving as if there are no outward signs of a passenger’s likelihood of committing a terrorist act.
Our policy makers are pretending that probability is irrelevant in making choices and designing policies. Taking into account probability is second nature to any normal person. If probability didn’t matter, you might as well go fishing on dry land as on a lake or river.
When we refuse to consider probability we severely reduce the probability of achieving our objectives—in this case preventing the violent deaths of innocent people. Refusal to consider probability in making choices is a symptom of insanity. A strong intuitive sense of probability is an indicator of intelligence.
Political correctness is making us look like fools who don’t even have an instinct for self-preservation.
Spiegel identifies the USA as the most serious victim of the leaked revelations.
The leaks demonstrate that political correctness overcame common sense and allowed a sexually perverted individual to obtain a position of responsibility which he could betray to serve his own personal grievances and agenda. Homosexuals are commonly unethical, emotionally unstable, and hostile to their own country and conventional society. Bradley Manning should never have been in the US Army in the first place, and still less should he ever have been give access to national and international secret communications.
Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information — data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built. Never before has the trust America’s partners have in the country been as badly shaken. Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public — as have America’s true views of them.
A 15-year-old school girl resident of the multiracial Sandwell Council homes neighborhood in the West Midlands near Birmingham was arrested recently on charges of inciting religious hatred. The teenager had posted on Facebook two weeks earlier a video in which she burned on school property an English-language edition of the Koran in front of an audience of schoolmates.
On Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy was also arrested for posting threats on Facebook in response to the video.
Both teenagers were released on bail, and their Facebook accounts were eliminated.
The British press quoted an Islamic organization’s spokesman who advised readers that burning Korans was one of the most offensive acts imaginable in the eyes of more than a billion Muslims worldwide.
It’s not the Koran which is sacred to British authorities, of course, it is political correctness which trumps freedom of expression. You can still insult Christianity as much as you like.
Mark Hyman knows what needs to be done with regard to airline security, abolish the contemptible and offensive TSA and abandon political correctness, start following Israel’s example and profile.
It is long past time to disband the TSA. Replace it with an effective, free market system that actually works.
Critics of the TSA’s naked body scanners and intrusive pat-downs (including its genital probing) miss the biggest problem with this agency. It is the TSA’s premise that the 89-year old great-grandmother in a walker, the soccer team comprised of 11-year old girls, the two-year old toddler on the family vacation, the airline crewmember and the soldier traveling home from Iraq pose the same potential threat to airline safety as the Middle Eastern man traveling alone, without luggage, on a one-way First Class ticket that was purchased with cash. The TSA is fueled by political correctness run amuck. Its sole accomplishments to date have been establishing a sizable airport presence and humiliating passengers.
For a number of years following 9/11 I regularly flew between Baltimore and Atlanta. I was saddened at the all-too-frequent sight of a soldier dressed in his camouflage uniform on the way to or from his two-week R&R with boots off and the contents of his backpack strewn across the floor as a TSA agent nosed through the belongings to see what potential threat faced other air travelers.
No one has been spared the unwarranted indignities and gross violations of privacy perpetrated by the TSA.
In 2002, then-75 year old Congressman John Dingell (D-MI) was forced to strip down to his underwear because his artificial hip set-off alarms on the magnetometer. The issue is not that Dingell should undergo the same invasive inspections as everyone else. Instead, it is that the 99% of American airline passengers who do not raise meaningful red flags should not be subjected to such invasive inspections. (As an aside, I happen to believe members of Congress pose a greater threat to the American way of life when they are voting than when flying.)
Then-U.S. Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) was asked to produce a picture I.D. at the Washington National Airport security screening area before a 2002 trip. Reagan National is the airport used by nearly every member of Congress when flying. Burns showed the TSA screener his U.S. Senate identification. The official refused to accept the government-issued I.D. but allowed Burns to proceed to his flight when he produced his Sam’s Club shopping card as proof of identification.
Retired Brigadier General and former South Dakota Governor Joe Foss nearly lost his Medal of Honor when TSA officials threatened to confiscate it from him during a 2002 screening of his carry-on belongings. Believing the medal could be used as a weapon, the TSA screeners fortunately relented when the 86-year old showed them a photograph of President Franklin Roosevelt presenting the medal to him for his WWII heroics.
In 2003, a U.S. Army medic who was wounded in Afghanistan when he was shot in the jaw was grossly mishandled at San Francisco International Airport. His jaw wired shut, the soldier was given a small pair of wire clippers to use in the event he became air sick in order to keep from choking on his vomit. TSA officials confiscated his wire clippers and he was forced to fly from San Francisco to Texas even though flight attendants informed him there was nothing on board the aircraft to open his jaw in an emergency.
In 2004, a chartered airline flight rotating an Army unit back to the U.S. from an Afghanistan deployment was stranded on the tarmac at San Francisco airport for hours during a layover. The troops were not permitted to deplane to purchase food and drink nor to use the bathroom. TSA officials ruled the soldiers posed a threat to airport security because the unit’s weapons were stored in the cargo hold of the aircraft.
This quarantine of troops returning from combat is not isolated. A planeload of servicemen were detained at nearby Oakland airport on their last layover while en route Hawaii in 2007 after departing Kuwait a day earlier. In spite of having all baggage x-rayed and hand-searched before boarding their aircraft in southwest Asia, the troops were ordered by TSA to deplane near an outdoor baggage handling area if they wanted to stretch their legs. TSA prohibited them from entering the terminal as they posed a threat to airport safety. Troops returning from Vietnam may have been spat upon but at least they were permitted to visit the snack bar and men’s room.
Last year a retired assistant police chief who observed she had been chosen for additional screening with uncanny regularity during her frequent travels asked a TSA screener why it appeared so many women had been selected for secondary screening on that particular day. The answer, said the screener, was that cross-gender pat-downs were not permitted and on that TSA shift there was a shortage of male screeners so women were singled-out for further scrutiny.
One commercial airline pilot confided his frustration at continually being subjected to x-ray screenings and pat-downs. He told me that in the first 1500 feet of elevation after take-off and the last 1500 feet before touch-down that no other crewmember in the cockpit could prevent him from using the jetliner as the ultimate weapon if he wanted to fly the aircraft into the ground. “I’m in complete control and no one can stop me.”
Another commercial pilot who is a licensed Federal Flight Deck Officer and is permitted to carry a sidearm onboard his aircraft reports that half of the time after checking in with the TSA he is whisked through security. The rest of the time he is instructed to place his weapon in his carry-on bag and run it through the x-ray machine to determine if he possesses any objects that might pose a threat in flight. It is as if the script writers on Saturday Night Live are making up the rules.
It is not as if the TSA is a highly professional workforce merely following asinine rules. In 2003, TSA baggage screeners at La Guardia airport were given the answers in advance of their certification exam to ensure an appropriate number of screeners were cleared to work. ...
Congressman John Mica (R-FL) reported that under the watchful eye of the TSA, at least 17 known terrorists evaded screeners and traveled on 23 occasions from eight U.S. airports utilizing SPOT methodologies. Among these was the failed Times Square bomber who was apprehended just prior to boarding his flight to Dubai. Meanwhile, TSA screeners continue to poke, grope and fondle longtime airline crewmembers who are merely trying to do their job.
Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that “at least 23” TSA workers have been fired since 2007 for stealing from passengers. There are numerous reports of TSA workers having also been fired for drug use, perpetrating pranks on passengers and other misbehavior. From a numerical standpoint, more TSA employees than terrorists have been caught who pose a threat to Americans.
The rash of reports of TSA officials humiliating passengers and overstepping the bounds of common decency underscore the agency is indeed broken. One surmises it is only a matter of time before it is discovered that naked body scanner operators are swapping graphic images of runway models and other attractive people who are forced to enter the voyeurs’ playground. ...
Obviously U.S. airports require a competent security screening program. Two programs offer a model. Anyone who has crossed from Tijuana into California at the busiest border crossing in the world has witnessed U.S. border agents who observe, profile and question the public in order to narrow the field to those who legitimately require secondary inspection.
The same is true of the system at Tel Aviv Airport. Airline security officials in Israel are not required to be politically correct and give the third degree to a Danish school teacher on holiday for every Palestinian they further scrutinize. Israel’s El Al Airlines has had a rather impressive security record and it does not rely on humiliating elderly widows or terrorizing toddlers.
Charles Krauthammer celebrates the latest American folk hero, the 31-year-old programmer who sparked a nationwide revolt against against the Kafkaesque indignities visited upon ordinary travelers by the Transportation Safety Authority.
John Tyner, cleverly armed with an iPhone to give YouTube immortality to the encounter, took exception to the TSA guard about to give him the benefit of Homeland Security’s newest brainstorm – the upgraded, full-palm, up the groin, all-body pat-down. In a stroke, the young man ascended to myth, or at least the next edition of Bartlett’s, warning the agent not to “touch my junk.”
Not quite the 18th-century elegance of “Don’t Tread on Me,” but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm, it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch. ...
That riff is a crowd-pleaser because everyone knows that the entire apparatus of the security line is a national homage to political correctness. Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives – when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone.
The ultimate idiocy is the full-body screening of the pilot. The pilot doesn’t need a bomb or box cutter to bring down a plane. All he has to do is drive it into the water, like the EgyptAir pilot who crashed his plane off Nantucket while intoning “I rely on God,” killing all on board.
But we must not bring that up. We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.
The junk man’s revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy. Metal detector? Back-of-the-hand pat? Okay. We will swallow hard and pretend airline attackers are randomly distributed in the population.
But now you insist on a full-body scan, a fairly accurate representation of my naked image to be viewed by a total stranger? Or alternatively, the full-body pat-down, which, as the junk man correctly noted, would be sexual assault if performed by anyone else?
This time you have gone too far, Big Bro’. The sleeping giant awakes. Take my shoes, remove my belt, waste my time and try my patience. But don’t touch my junk.
The Daily Mail reports on an outrageous demonstration of Islamic insolence in London yesterday.
Islamic protesters sparked fury today after they burned a model of a poppy and deliberately broke the silence at Armistice Day commemorations in central London.
As millions of Britons fell silent to remember those who have died in war, members of a group called Muslims Against Crusades clashed with police during an ‘emergency demonstration’ in Kensington, west London.
As the clock struck 11am, the Islamic protesters burned a model of a poppy and chanted ‘British soldiers burn in hell’.
They held banners which read ‘Islam will dominate’ and ‘Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell’. ...
The protest, in Exhibition Road, near Hyde Park, involved about 50 people while about another 50 counter-demonstrators had to be kept apart from the group by a line of police.
Three men were arrested at the scene – two for public order offences and one for assaulting a police officer. ...
It is thought Muslims Against Crusades is a splinter group of Islam4UK, founded by Anjem Choudary.
Freedom of speech has never traditionally included the right of the foreign enemy to propagandize and insult a country’s war dead in its capital in time of war.
A responsible government would round up these demonstrators and deport them back to their native homelands. The privilege of residency ought to be considered to entail minimal obligations of loyalty and civility. There is an element of real insanity in the manner in which government officials transatlantically have become so hypnotized by extravagant and politically correct interpretations of liberal rights theory that even more basic moral obligations have become obscure to them.
Any government which asks its citizens to fight and die on its behalf has a primal obligation to uphold and vindicate the cause for which they fight and to honor their service and sacrifice.
How do Ivy League universities make sure that they are only admitting reliable conformist tools these days? By incorporating loyalty oaths to liberal group think and political correctness in the application process.
Glen Ricketts and Peter Wood describe the college applications diversity essay in the latest National Association of Scholars newsletter.
The CAO [Common Application Online] at Yale, for example, asks prospective students:
A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.
That’s virtually identical with what you can expect to find at dozens of other institutions, where “diversity” is cultivated with tedious uniformity.
Let’s weigh this question. The first sentence simply asserts that the “range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences” adds to the “educational mix.” Few people would doubt that, and the sentence is no doubt written to command bland assent. But if we force it to stand up for inspection, it displays a remarkable intellectual slovenliness. When we go to college, we do indeed benefit from encountering people with views and experiences other than our own. But that encounter depends on something else: a shared commitment to the broader purposes of education. The enlivening “mix” that Yale would like to foster requires students, at some level, to put aside differences at least long enough to consider one another’s views.
The “diversity” doctrine doesn’t necessarily prevent that deeper sharing from taking place, but it does cut against it and urges students instead to huddle inside their pre-chosen identities. The Yale CAO question is the first of a long series of subtle steps that teach students to lead with their particularities and to cultivate a kind of group vanity.
The second sentence in the assignment (“Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.”) is a masterpiece of question-begging. What of the student who has slowly and painfully worked his way out of psychological isolation or social alienation to achieve a sense of identification with the larger community? Such a person would seem to have no acceptable answer to the task of explaining “the importance of diversity” to his own life. Would the Yale admissions office look favorably on the student who answered, “I have found ‘diversity’ to be a cudgel by which self-appointed elites attempt to enforce their preferences over others. Diversity to me has been the experience of having my individuality denied, suppressed, and demeaned. It is a word that summarizes a smarmy form of oppression that congratulates itself on its high-mindedness even as it enforces narrow-minded conformity.”
No, any student really seeking admission to Yale wouldn’t say such a thing. But chances are very good that a great many students harbor insights very much like that. They know their ethnic or racial categorization, their socio-economic status, and other such characteristics matter far more to admissions offices than their actual thoughts about who they are.
These “diversity” essay questions are never innocent. They are a tool to keep college applicants aligned with the dominant ideology on campus, which continues to favor group categorizations over both individuality and the broader claims of shared community.
I would not have gotten in in the current era. No doubt about it.
I would have written a belligerent and full-throated denunciation of group identity and privileges, ruthlessly pointing out its inconsistencies, contradictions, and hypocrisies, making the argument for intellectual diversity, and I suppose I would have attended some very different college from Yale.
NPR has terminated its contract with Juan Williams, one of its senior news analysts, after he made comments about Muslims on the Fox News Channel.
NPR said in a statement that it gave Mr. Williams notice of his termination on Wednesday night.
The move came after Mr. Williams, who is also a Fox News political analyst, appeared on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday. On the show, the host, Bill O’Reilly, asked him to respond to the notion that the United States was facing a “Muslim dilemma.” Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”
Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly. ...
NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”
Here are the comments that got Williams fired.
Your tax dollars fund National Public Radio and pay the salaries of the representatives of the arrogant and intolerant left who enforce political correctness at the expense of freedom of thought and expression. Let’s hope the next Congress does something about this.
Last Wednesday, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity annual pledge hazing ritual took the form of open defiance of political correctness. Pledges were required to march across the Old Campus, blindfolded, hands on each other’s shoulders in a human chain, chanting deliberately outrageous expressions of anti-feminist machismo.
Some of the slogans used included: “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f—- dead women.”
Persons of normal intelligence would realize, of course, that the purpose of such an activity would be to test the courage and commitment of those aspiring to join the fraternity by subjecting them to an ordeal exposing them to personal humiliation and to a certain amount of genuine risk.
Since America and Yale are both presided over today by prigs and nincompoops with less than normal intelligence and overdeveloped faculties of indignation, the risk was clearly a bit greater than the officers of Yale’s DKE chapter had expected.
Deep thinkers in the national media and the Academe, people like Tracy Clark-Flury at Salon, the management of Yale’s Women’s Center, Yale College Dean Mary Miller , and Feminist and Queer Studies Prof Melanie Boyd who doubles as Special Advisor to the Dean of Yale College on Gender Issues, all got their knickers in a twist and began blathering about “hate speech,” “sexism,” and “verbal assault.”
Inevitably, a forum on “Yale’s Sexual Climate” (which I would have guessed would be intensely favorable) was held, allegedly representing “the first step in a long process of dialogue and systemic change.”
An apology was extorted from the fraternity’s president, the international DKE organization suspended the Yale chapter’s pledge activities, and the virago enforcer of political correctness indulged in a few threats.
I wouldn’t say the question of disciplinary action has disappeared from the conversation,” [Melanie] Boyd said.
One Yale Daily News commenter found it ironic that DKE was being so thoroughly pilloried for tongue-in-cheek outrageous expressions, while the Yale Women’s Center in complete earnestness has taken the following positions:
Women who choose to act as stay-at-home moms are traitors to their gender
Capitalism is anti-feminist
The United States is the most anti-woman nation in the world
All hierarchies are by definition patriarchal since hierarchy and structure are masculine constructs
Post-birth abortion should be legalized (see: Peter Singer)
There is no biological difference between men and women – it is entirely a social construct
The overwhelming majority of men at Yale actively and knowingly attempt to oppress women in their everyday lives
Gendered pronouns (ie: he or she) are relics of a bigoted society.
Marriage is sexual slavery
Letting the man pay on a date is tantamount to prostitution
Directed Studies is an attempt to defend the patriarchy
Women who vote Republican are brainwashed
Religion was designed to oppress women
Condoms are patriarchal since they put men in control of safe sex
Condoms are feminist since they let women avoid pregnancy
Men should be required to submit their DNA to a database upon entering college, since 1 in 4 women is raped in college.
