Any faculty member who fails to award special status to representatives of “Diversity” will probably, like Nicholas Christakis, then Master of Yale’s Silliman College, wind up being hounded out of his job.

Robert Weissberg describes how good intentions and compassion, over time, destroyed academic standards and created an entitled class of tyrants.

[W]hat changed in my department of political science was obvious: more bureaucratic paperwork, additional departmental offerings on race and ethnicity, a neglecting of traditional political science subjects, and untold meetings that accomplished nothing. Less obvious was the extra time spent by faculty personally tutoring struggling minority students and recruiting affirmative-action candidates at professional meetings. It’s hard to estimate all the hours taken away from our teaching and research responsibilities as a result.

Almost nobody challenged the underlying logic of this make-the-numbers pathway. Everyone just knew that this was the route to equality and justice.

Nor was there any need for bureaucratic heavy-handedness or incentives. Everything was voluntary, and since I taught American politics, a favorite among black students and an obvious place to attract more minority faculty, I was at the forefront of the campaign. That our efforts might be injurious to racial progress or create cures worse than the disease was unthinkable. Even today, it’s difficult to accept that our good intentions helped undermine the university’s commitment to intellectual excellence. Nevertheless, our fingerprints are all over the crime scene.

Subverting intellectual standards was most pervasive in the classroom, where many minority students were ill-prepared for rigorous college courses. Undeserved grades (“B-minuses” vs. “C-minuses”) were commonplace, as were overlooked breaches of the academic code.

One of my students, a troubled junior-college transfer, submitted a dreadful paper, an unambiguous “F,” but he also accidentally included the $25 invoice from an Internet site (“My Professor Sucks”). I did not fail him or begin proceedings to have him expelled. Instead, I consulted our department’s undergraduate advisor on how he could drop the course despite the official drop-date having passed. This was arranged, and he continued his college career.

Even blatant plagiarism was ignored, since it was apparent that culprits would never be prosecuted, and even filing charges put one’s career at risk.

In a particularly bizarre case, a colleague received a clearly plagiarized paper and, rather than bring expulsion proceedings, offered to forget the matter if the student would submit an original one. The student again plagiarized, and my colleague took the case to the dean of students. He explained that this was the sixth such episode involving the student, but the incidents were ignored since the dean believed that confronting the student might cause him to drop out.

Classroom discussions with black students were conducted gingerly. When one of my black students explained that some blacks resided in crime-ridden slums because such awful locations were given to them by whites, I said nothing. I learned to pre-emptively avoid any taboo topic that might risk accusations of racism. When receiving papers that made inaccurate assertions on race-related issues, I refused to pick a fight. In my comments, I might sheepishly offer, “Not sure,” but then I’d assign a respectable (though unearned) grade.

A walking-on-eggshells policy applied equally to graduate students, though here the stakes were more consequential, since Ph.D. recipients might one day teach thousands of students. Again, progress toward the degree was paramount, and foolish ideas were seldom challenged. Simultaneously, standards were lowered for passing comprehensive exams and for dissertation proposals.

In some instances, faculty virtually wrote dissertations for struggling students. These students were also discouraged from enrolling in demanding courses, such as Statistics, that might prove essential for future research. To repeat, it seemed axiomatic that the advanced degree itself was the goal, not providing the best possible education.

Lowered intellectual standards applied equally to faculty recruitment and were widely accepted as the price of progress. An almost religious faith held that intellectual deficiencies would somehow be only temporary. I recall one recruitment-committee meeting at which faculty took turns gleefully reading aloud embarrassing mistakes from a black candidate’s dissertation, including multiple misspellings of the names of well-known political figures. No matter.

Drinking the Kool-Aid hardly stopped at initial recruitment. Minority candidates were hired and continued past multiple reviews, including tenure and promotion to full professor. As was the case with students, serious discussions involving hot-button issues were off limits. We were there to help make the numbers, and we gladly acquiesced.

In a few decades, what began as improvised, temporary measures to move the needle on racial progress hardened into the official academic culture.

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Ismael Cruz Córdova will be the first person of color to play an elf, Arondir “a silvan elf,” onscreen in a Tolkien project.

The Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien auctioned the rights to the stories originating in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings and the winner was Jeff Bezos’s Amazon paying $250 million.

Comes the new Numenorean series that begins streaming September 2nd, long-time readers like myself, I expect, are going to feel that Christopher Tolkien did not get nearly enough, considering what Amazon and their millennial screenwriters and “showrunners” J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay will be doing to J.R.R. Tolkien mythical universe, in particular, repopulating it with characters of their own, and especially with characters whose raison d’être is not even a dramatic goal, but mere politically correct “diversity.”

Vanity Fair spilled the beans on what is coming back in February:

Amazon’s series will also broaden the notion of who shares the world of Middle-earth. One original story line centers on a silvan elf named Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Córdova, who will be the first person of color to play an elf onscreen in a Tolkien project. He is involved in a forbidden relationship with Bronwyn, a human village healer played by Nazanin Boniadi, a British actor of Iranian heritage. Elsewhere, a Brit of Jamaican descent, Sir Lenny Henry, plays a harfoot elder, and Sophia Nomvete has a scene-stealing role as a dwarven princess named Disa—the latter being the first Black woman to play a dwarf in a Lord of the Rings movie, as well as the first female dwarf. “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”

When Amazon released photos of its multicultural cast, even without character names or plot details, the studio endured a reflexive attack from trolls—the anonymous online kind. “Obviously there was going to be push and backlash,” says Tolkien scholar Mariana Rios Maldonado, who is not affiliated with The Rings of Power, “but the question is from whom? Who are these people that feel so threatened or disgusted by the idea that an elf is Black or Latino or Asian?”

Catch the final note of intimidation in the second paragraph of the Vanity Fair summary. Get in line! Dare to object to the intrusion of extraneous and inconsistent characters and complete infidelity to J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagined world and text, and YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MAKES YOU! A BIGOT! A RACIST! AN UNPERSON! THE NEXT SUBJECT OF TWO MINUTES HATE!

Well, too damn bad, Señorita Maldonado. I don’t feel “threatened,” but, yes!, I am already disgusted with the prospect of some self-important, brain-washed-at-school, 1980s-born twerps misusing their opportunity of working with the products of J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination and brain to intrude their own completely incongruous and abrasively obnoxious political ideology.

It is perfectly obvious to every reader of the LOTR that Tolkien’s fantasies represent an alternative mythical pre-modern European world. Eskimos, Japanese, Cowboys and Indians, astronauts, sexual deviants, and the notion of Affirmative Action are all missing.

Tolkien was born in 1892. His sensibility is fundamentally Edwardian, and his viewpoint is completely Northern-European-centric, more than that: England-and-Scandinavian-centric. Persons of color are represented, as Haradrim pirates, as dark-skinned wild men, and, of course, possibly, one could argue, as Orcs. One will look in vain to find Dutchmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, or Slavs.

There was no depiction whatsoever of female dwarves, and presumably Tolkien had his own reasons for omitting them. There can be no possible legitimate justification for Amazonian twerps putting in what a great author and creative genius left out.

Entertainment Weekly, today,

One new character is Isildur’s sister Eärien, played by Ema Horvath. Invented for the series, this bright and ambitious young woman has dreams of being an architect. Horvath describes her as being “on the cusp of womanhood,” adding that “she’s still quite insecure and naïve about the way the world works.” Tolkien wrote that Elendil had two sons: Isildur and Anárion. (At the start of Rings of Power, Anárion is off screen.) When it came to inventing new details like Eärien, McKay and Payne say they and the writers’ room approached the task almost like historians, poring over Tolkien’s work to “excavate” details and common threads they could weave into a larger narrative.

For fans worried about conflicting canon, McKay and Payne point to one of Tolkien’s published letters, where he wrote about wanting “other minds and hands” to create art in his legendarium. “We feel like we’re taking up the gauntlet that he himself put down,” Payne adds. “He gave us what we like to say are the stars in the sky that we have to connect and draw the constellation in.”

The diversity of the cast has also been scrutinized. For the first time, Middle-earth will be populated by multiple actors of color, including those playing dwarves, elves, and more. It’s a decision that’s been key to the show’s DNA from the start, and [Cynthia] Addai-Robinson [who plays Tar-Miriel, the last legitimate ruler of Numenor] says to complain about that diversity would be to go against the very spirit of the source material. “[Tolkien] explores many themes, but one of them is the idea of people of different ethnicities, backgrounds, and walks of life all coming together for a common cause,” she says. “For me personally, as a viewer, I would have the expectation that [the show] would reflect the real world, as well as the world as I aspire it to be.”

So much for Legitimacy! If we’re unbound by any obligations of fidelity to the author’s vision and we’re going to go right ahead and “reflect the real world” and have a go at making “the world as [we] aspire it to be,” well, we certainly don’t want to grow old and die. We clearly need to climb aboard the ship with Ar-Pharazon the Golden, break the Ban of the Valor, invade the Undying Lands, and go for Equity and Diversity of Immortality!

Tolkien might have liked the idea of other people writing fan fiction spin-offs set in Middle Earth, but he certainly would have expected his epigones to respect the Middle Earth he created as he defined it, and to confine their creative innovations to new storylines and personages consistent with the world as he invented it. He would have been absolutely infuriated by the intrusion of sanctimonious left-wing egalitarian ideology and identity group politics.

It’s clear that the new Amazon series will be certainly as bad as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which at least was watchable and had some good things in it. But it looks perfectly possible that it’s going to be every bit as bad as Jackson’s The Hobbit movies (which were terrible), or worse.

Amazon may butcher Tolkien’s Numenor as completely as they made a hash of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.

Sophia Nomvete plays dwarven princess named Disa and will be the first Black woman to play a dwarf in a Lord of the Rings movie, as well as the first female dwarf. And she’s missing her beard!

This literally is capitalismhttps://t.co/6VSdrrm9Xs

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 13, 2022

Pic taken at Camp Lejeune chow hall. pic.twitter.com/gF7YJEs2Zc

— plɹoʍ uʍop-ǝpᴉsd∩ (@patriotmimzy) July 11, 2022

Who knows? Maybe he lost a bet.

Video obtained by the Daily Mail shows 17 heavily-armed Uvalde cops, wearing body armor, first retreating from the sound of gunfire, then slinking in the hallway, apparently waiting for the punk Ramos to run out of ammunition or die of old age.

Uvalde cops RESTRAINED colleague, whose daughter was one of 22 dead, from taking down school shooter, before 17 of them ran away from gunfire.

Footage of the Uvalde police response to the shooting was leaked on Tuesday.

It shows how Salvador Ramos, 18, sauntered through the halls at Robb Elementary School carrying an AR-15 as a teacher called for help.

He then walked into two classrooms and fired for two and a half minutes, shooting off 100 rounds.

The new video shows Sheriff’s Deputy Felix Rubio in the hallway, in tears being held back by fellow officers, feet away from where his 10-year-old daughter Lexi was shot dead.

The first officers arrived three minutes later, but stood back, with one seen checking his cellphone.

Nothing happens until Border Patrol agents ran to the classrooms and began firing at Ramos, killing him.

Two teachers and 19 children were killed in the May 24 massacre.

Cowardly Uvalde policemen restrained a cop whose daughter was one of the 21 slaughtered in the horrific school massacre, leaked surveillance footage from inside the building shows.

Two officers held sheriff’s deputy Felix Rubio back by his shirt as he wiped away tears while gunman Salvador Ramos went on his brutal rampage in a classroom down the hallway.

The devastated father could be seen with his hand clasped over his mouth as he feared for the life of his 10-year-old girl Lexi, who was later found dead.

One brazen officer was shown walking in front of him and pumping sanitizer from a wall mount on to his hands despite the carnage around him.

The footage, which was leaked to a local news outlet on Tuesday and mutes the sound of children screaming, shows Ramos’ approach to the school, him firing on two civilians and then quickly entering the school.

A little boy appears on screen as he starts to edge around the corner but turns around and runs away when he spots the gunman.

A later segment sees armed police storm into the building and start to move down the hallway before 17 cowardly flee back the way they came and away from the 18-year-old shooter.

In total, the leaked footage shows cops stalled in the hallway for 77 minutes, checking their phones and running away from gunfire as Ramos fired more than 100 rounds at children in two classrooms.

It is the latest shame to be brought on the local officers, who were lauded as heroes immediately after the attack on May 24, before details leaked out about their true actions.

I recommend watching the larger version of the video here.

In the older, now vanished America, they use to pick guys to be cops, looking for the kind of man who was tough and not afraid of criminals. It would be a cold day in hell that any of the numerous men in my family who were police would have hesitated one moment to go down that hall and shoot that little nutcase full of holes. And it would have taken more than those seventeen Uvalde cops to stop him from going.

Me looking in the bathroom mirror first thing in the morning. pic.twitter.com/katzM54PZt

— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) July 9, 2022

HT: Vanderleun.

Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) is brilliant, but, alas! ungodly prolix, addicted to digressions, and someone who does not self-edit. His latest Substack special combines his characteristic witty insight with all of the above mentioned flaws.

This one may be partially pay-walled, but in this case that could be a feature rather than a bug.

The customary color-coding of the culture war is boring. Let’s get Tolkien-pilled and talk not about red and blue, but hobbits and elves. …

We know who are the hobbits and who are the elves. We know who is on top and who is on the bottom. (Of dwarves and orcs, we shall not speak.) We know what the elves want: they want to live beautiful lives. We know what the hobbits want: they want to grill and raise kids.

Dear hobbits: you can only lose the culture war. Even when elves use political power to impose elf culture on you, you cannot use political power to impose hobbit culture on elves.

I mean, sometimes (rarely) you can. It never works out well. I suppose that in theory you could massacre all the elves. You don’t seem up for that in practice. As an elf… I have to regard that as a good thing. But it leaves you, dear hobbits, in a real bind.

If there was a way to impose hobbit culture only on hobbits, there might be a case. But our country is not configured to support separate rules for elves and hobbits. If it was, it would be a different country. Maybe a better country—but it isn’t.

The only way to impose hobbit culture is to impose it on everyone—including elves. Elves do not like to be told what to do by hobbits. Even advice makes elves mad. It is outrageous and disrespectful. And when hobbits coerce elves… utterly unacceptable. Even if any such coercion is only symbolic, it is a profound violation of elven rights. Your elf will not just be mad—he will explode—wronged in every fiber of his being. … Read the rest of this entry »

Babbling Beaver:

MIT’s Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women & Sexuality seeks to forge new “liberatory conceptions of space and time in the contexts of racial justice, abolition, disability rights, queer/trans ecologies, human development, death studies and practices, embodiment, community building, and more.

Send proposals (and your pronouns) here.

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What we need is an academic conference discussing How In Hell Did These Whackjobs Ever Get Academic Positions? and What Exactly, Beyond Firing, Should Be Done To The Adminstrators Responsible?

Babylon Bee:

1: Spray Febreze on the Oval Office curtains to get the old man smell out: Step one to draining the swamp is giving it a flowery scent.

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