Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, as George Santayana once said. Slightly before him, Karl Marx claimed that history repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce. Both of these Dead White Males are arguably right, if only the latter still continues to inspire people, though not with this particular quote.
Throughout the developed world – with the notable exception of Poland – Gen Ys or the Millennials veer strongly to the left. Young people have always done so, but the current crop would make even their proud Baby Boomer grandparents blush in their enthusiasm for collectivism. It’s not just that in countries like the United States or Australia two thirds of them vote for the parties of the left – after all, the left can be a broad church, from Tony Blair to Jeremy Corbyn – but they positively heart socialism: 63 per cent of Australian university graduates and over the half of the American cohort. Those who literally cannot remember the past are very keen to repeat it – let’s hope that this time only as a farce.
The Millennials can’t remember very much – and they don’t learn very much either. It’s easy being hot for socialism or communism when you actually have a very little idea of what it is and what it did throughout the 20th century. And the Ys have that ignorance in spades; one third of them think that George W Bush killed more people than Stalin and 42 per cent have never heard of Mao – but over 70 per cent agree with Bernie Sanders. Some research suggests that only 15 per cent actually have a correct understanding of socialism. It’s not just politics; the Millennials are the most woefully undereducated and miseducated generation in a very long time. To be fair, that’s not strictly their fault; that attaches itself again to their Boomer grandparents who have been in charge of our failing education systems during this time. Combine the modern indoctrination-cum-dumbification taking place in schools and universities with the attention span-killing impact of information technology and social media, and you have a barely literate cohort, which is simply not equipped with the necessary mental tools to learn about the real world even if they wanted to.
Any surprises that socialism is now nearly synonymous with Gen Y?
Arthur Chrenkoff, “Socialism as a Millennial religion”, The Daily Chrenk, 2019-02-19.
March 22, 2019
March 17, 2019
QotD: McGill University
… if the freedom to speak harsh truth and engage in adventurous social critique means nothing at McGill, it is doomed at younger universities — especially those that have materialized, or been promoted to new feudal rank, during the ongoing academic bubble era.
The stakes are high. We all enjoy a laugh at McGill’s perception of itself as the Canadian Harvard, but if there is one university from which others in our country are bound to take ethical and stylistic cues — well, McGill probably is Harvard.
Colby Cosh, “Scary Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: an alternate view of the storm engulfing McGill”, National Post, 2017-03-27.
March 16, 2019
QotD: Teaching critical thinking
Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole.
Above all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason — then prioritizing the latter over the former.
I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.
To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.
I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”
Suddenly, it occurred to me that the disconnect between the way most people (including employers) define critical thinking and the way many of today’s academics define it can be traced back to the post-structuralist critical theories that invaded our English departments about the time I was leaving grad school, in the late 1980s. I’m referring to deconstruction and its poorer cousin, reader response criticism.
Both theories hold that texts have no inherent meaning; rather, meaning, to the extent it exists at all, is entirely subjective, based on the experiences and mindset of the reader.
Rob Jenkins, “Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think”, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, 2017-03-23.
March 14, 2019
Life in the modern academic paradise
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian recounts his time in the idyllic Ivory Tower of modern academia:
Imagine you’re some kind of Gulliver-type explorer, and you reach an island of perfect bliss. Clear air, gentle breezes, balmy temperatures, and all the delicious food you can eat. And the natives! They live to serve you, completely unconstrained by anything so antiquated as Western sexual morality. Limitless 5G internet. Anything you want to eat, drink, watch, read, do, say, insert, or have inserted, it’s all yours at the snap of your fingers. Got it?
Now imagine that the rulers of this little slice of paradise do nothing but sit on the side of the road all day, smashing their own toes with ball-peen hammers.
That’s life in a college town. The Left run everything. They set the admissions requirements. They have unlimited budgets, and since they do, the entire commercial ecosystem exists only for them. All cuisine is “fusion,” you have to drive to the next burg over to find milk that comes from cows, and every single item of public culture — from sidewalk graffiti to public radio to experimental theater troupe — does nothing but flatter them. There is no fetish so outre, no practice so bizarre, that you can’t find at least one other enthusiastic participant. It’s intersectional genderfluid heaven….
…. and every single person in it is miserable. I’m serious — if it’s not too far out of your way, drive down to your nearest college town, and just watch the faces. You might glimpse a grinning undergrad or two — they’re too young and dumb to know better; they’ll be fully reeducated by junior year — but you can spot the tenured faculty solely by their scowls. The only thing that temporarily alleviates the existential horror of their lives is getting outraged by something, which — since, again, they control everything — means tilting at windmills is their only sport; they play it with a cutthroat intensity the football coach can only dream of.
How can you not be fascinated by that? To utterly refute the view of man as homo economicus, all you have to do is watch the facial expressions of people who are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. It’s one hell of a show…
March 13, 2019
How to Do Research
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 12 Mar 2019Ever wondered how exactly I make the magic happen in my deep-dive videos, like Dionysus, Aphrodite and King Arthur? Wonder no longer! Today I’m dishing out all the answers in this extra special bonus video I made in three days!
We’ve… we’ve been REALLY busy, guys. March is CRAZY.
March 8, 2019
Education schools and the bloat of university administration
Remember the old joke:
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, teach gym educational studies.
As far as higher education is concerned, the joke is on us:
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, those were my first encounters with an alternate curriculum that was being promoted on many campuses, a curriculum whose guiding principles seemed to be: 1) anything that could be construed as bigotry and hatred should be construed as bigotry and hatred; and 2) any such instance of bigotry and hatred should be considered part of an epidemic. These principles were being advanced primarily, though not exclusively, by college administrators, whose ranks had grown so remarkably since the early 1990s.
Everyone knows about the kudzu-like growth of the administrative bureaucracy in higher education over the past three decades. What most don’t know is that at many colleges, the majority of administrators directly involved in the lives of students — in dorms, conduct hearings, bias-response teams, freshmen “orientation” programs, and the like — got their graduate degrees from education schools.
Ed schools, such as Teachers College at Columbia, or Penn’s Graduate School of Education, have trained and certified most of the nation’s public-school teachers and administrators for the past half-century. But in the past 20 years especially, ed schools have been offering advanced degrees in things like “educational leadership,” “higher education management,” and just “higher education” to aspiring college administrators. And this influx of ed school trained bureaucrats has played a decisive role in pushing an already left-leaning academy so far in the direction of ideological fundamentalism that even liberal progressives are sounding the alarm.
To anyone acquainted with the history and quality of American ed schools, this should come as no surprise. Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism — not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice — is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
More than three decades later, a comprehensive, four-year study of ed schools headed by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, found that the majority of educational-administration programs “range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” Though there were notable exceptions, programs for teaching were described as being, in the main, weak and mediocre. Education researchers seemed unable to achieve even “minimum agreement” about “acceptable research practice,” with the result that there are “no base standards and no quality floor.” Even among ed school faculty members and deans, the study found a broad and despairing recognition that ed school training was frequently “subjective, obscure, faddish, … inbred, and politically correct.”
Stephen Fry on Political Correctness and Clear Thinking
The Rubin Report
Published on 4 Apr 2016Stephen Fry (actor and comedian) joins Dave Rubin for a quick discussion about political correctness, clear thinking, V for Vendetta, free speech, and his decision to quit Twitter.
This is a bonus edition of ‘The Sit Down’ on The Rubin Report, filmed on the set of Larry King Now.
What are your thoughts? Comment below or tweet to Dave: https://twitter.com/RubinReport
Watch more on Ora TV: http://www.ora.tv/rubinreport
Find us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rubinreport?ty=h
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Stephen Fry
Actor, Author, and Comedian
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Care about free speech? Tired of political correctness? Like discussions about big ideas? Watch Dave Rubin on The Rubin Report. Real conversations, unfiltered rants, and one on one interviews with some of the most interesting names in news and entertainment. Comedians, authors, and influencers join Dave each week to break down the latest in politics and current events. Real people, real issues, real talk.
March 6, 2019
QotD: Teaching evolution in the “Bible Belt”
I teach college in a small city in Arkansas, deep in the American Bible Belt. I am a historian of Africa and in my department that means that I also teach a world history survey. I always start with the expansion of modern humans out of Africa and their encounter with other types of humans: Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Denesovians and what seems like an ever-growing list of newly discovered human-like creatures. It’s less the case now, but when I started twenty years ago this part of the course was initially met with polite but firm resistance, which gradually gave way to a sort of furtive curiosity. I eventually realized that even my cleverest students knew very little about human evolution except that it was false and that they were supposed to reject it. They came to the university having been taught that evolution was part of a larger attack on their faith and values, but they had never really been exposed to anything but a sort of parody version of it. A small number of them accepted evolutionary theory, but being a Darwinian in rural Arkansas was usually more about youthful rebellion and non-conformity than it was about informed, rational consideration of evidence.
Once we got past the denunciation or acceptance of evolutionary theory as a form of tribal affiliation, I found students to be deeply curious about it. It was such a taboo subject that their high school teachers had only skimmed over it and often with some careful personal distancing from the material. So the opportunity to delve into the details of this forbidden knowledge was intellectually thrilling for them. Despite the excitement engendered by the topic only a few changed their minds; most did not.
My students had grown up in communities where evolutionary theory was so wrong, so contrary to the accepted worldview of all decent people, that the only acceptable way to talk about it was to denounce it or reject it. The result was that most of my students rejected evolution, but getting a chance to learn about it was profoundly exciting, even if most of them were too conformist (these were Honors students after all) to change their positions.
Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.
February 17, 2019
QotD: Nanotechnology and quantum computing
When I say Quantum Computing is a bullshit field, I don’t mean everything in the field is bullshit, though to first order, this appears to be approximately true. I don’t have a mathematical proof that Quantum Computing isn’t at least theoretically possible. I also do not have a mathematical proof that we can make the artificial bacteria of K. Eric Drexler’s nanotech fantasies. Yet, I know both fields are bullshit. Both fields involve forming new kinds of matter that we haven’t the slightest idea how to construct. Neither field has a sane ‘first step’ to make their large claims true.
Drexler and the “nanotechnologists” who followed him, they assume because we know about the Schroedinger equation we can make artificial forms of life out of arbitrary forms of matter. This is nonsense; nobody understands enough about matter in detail or life in particular to do this. There are also reasonable thermodynamic, chemical and physical arguments against this sort of thing. I have opined on this at length, and at this point, I am so obviously correct on the nanotech front, there is nobody left to argue with me. A generation of people who probably would have made first rate chemists or materials scientists wasted their early, creative careers following this over hyped and completely worthless woo. Billions of dollars squandered down a rat hole of rubbish and wishful thinking. Legal wankers wrote legal reviews of regulatory regimes to protect us from this nonexistent technology. We even had congressional hearings on this nonsense topic back in 2003 and again in 2005 (and probably some other times I forgot about). Russians built a nanotech park to cash in on the nanopocalyptic trillion dollar nanotech economy which was supposed to happen by now.
Similarly, “quantum computing” enthusiasts expect you to overlook the fact that they haven’t a clue as to how to build and manipulate quantum coherent forms of matter necessary to achieve quantum computation. A quantum computer capable of truly factoring the number 21 is missing in action. In fact, the factoring of the number 15 into 3 and 5 is a bit of a parlour trick, as they design the experiment while knowing the answer, thus leaving out the gates required if we didn’t know how to factor 15. The actual number of gates needed to factor a n-bit number is 72 * n^3; so for 15, it’s 4 bits, 4608 gates; not happening any time soon.
It’s been almost 25 years since Peter Shor had his big idea, and we are no closer to factoring large numbers than we were … 15 years ago when we were also able to kinda sorta vaguely factor the number 15 using NMR ‘quantum computers.’
I had this conversation talking with a pal at … a nice restaurant near one of America’s great centers of learning. Our waiter was amazed and shared with us the fact that he had done a Ph.D. thesis on the subject of quantum computing. My pal was convinced by this that my skepticism is justified; in fact he accused me of arranging this. I didn’t, but am motivated to write to prevent future Ivy League Ph.D. level talent having to make a living by bringing a couple of finance nerds their steaks.
Scott Locklin, “Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit”, Locklin on Science, 2019-01-15.
February 14, 2019
QotD: Knowing how to find out is an essential skill
The thing is, you don’t have to be an expert on everything. Simply knowing the basics and the relevance is enough in many cases. You have the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips so knowing how to look things up is more important than memorization. Einstein allegedly said he had no reason to memorize how many feet were in a mile because he could find in any book. Today, you can find the details off your phone or laptop in seconds. What you need is an understanding of how to find it.
That’s the first thing a modern person needs to know. How to look things up on-line is an essential skill in the modern age. Working with young interns years ago, I was surprised to discover that none of them knew how to be curious. I had to teach them how to find things on-line. They had no idea how to discover the world by inference. What I ended up telling them is always ask what a thing is, not where a thing is. What is its nature, what does it do. Who thinks it is important. Enter those things in a search engine and you will get close to what you seek.
This is probably obvious to most reading this, but there is a reason browsers have bookmarks and there are services that let you synchronize your bookmarks on all of your devices. Most people store knowledge and then remember where they left it. That has its place, but when searching for things on-line, you may, whether you realize it or not, be looking for unknown unknowns. By thinking about what a thing or event is, you will find things like it or related to it that you never considered or simply did not know existed.
This will no doubt strike some as pedantic, but in the modern age, the ability to quickly acquire necessary information is probably the most valuable skill and therefore, the most essential of knowledge. All of us have at our fingertips the totality of human understanding. Knowing how to quickly dig through it to find what it is you need is vastly more useful and important than the ability to remember how many feet are in a mile or where the book you learned it is on your book shelf.
The Z Man, “Essential Knowledge Part I”, The Z Blog, 2017-01-13.
February 1, 2019
January 22, 2019
“I grew up in pre-history, or rather in Portugal (in some ways, same thing) in the 60s”
Sarah Hoyt on “toxic masculinity” and the rise of angry feminism:
… it’s such a just-so story it spreads and hides. It hides so well that people don’t realize they’re infected. But its distorting effects twist society’s processes to the point that something vital stops working.
Yes, the entire myth of “toxic masculinity” is one of these. It was born of the disappointment of feminists. Look, in the days when women were actually held back, those that made it were exceptional people.
Since I grew up in pre-history, or rather in Portugal (in some ways, same thing) in the 60s, where sexism was matter of fact and every day, I can tell you that, yes, to have the same grades as a boy you needed to work twice as hard, be brighter, more nimble, and more consistently good. Any boy started out with a good 20% on me in any teacher’s head, because “boys are smarter” wasn’t disputed, or even questioned.
So I understand that in the early twentieth century, women that made it to positions of prominence, where they became known for professional excellence, had to be GOOD at it. Amazing, in fact.
And even then, they might hit a glass ceiling, because they were the nail that stuck up. Everything conspired to bring them down.
Female liberation was played against this. People looked at these women, knew what they’d achieved against what obstacles, and dreamed that “if only women were allowed to be on an even footing with men, they’d be the best at everything. Every woman would be a leader.”
This is a form of insanity, because women are still human, and most humans are … average. That’s why they call it “average.”
But you can see how what they saw would deceive them.
Except that the obstacles were removed and women … were people. Sure. There are exceptional women, just as there are exceptional men, but in many ways, even with contraceptives, we women are still running with our legs in a biological sack. Oh, men too. They’re just different sacks. And men’s impairments, in a way, apply better to business, to creating, to competition.
Look, it’s become “sexist” to refer to PMS and women’s hormonal cycle as being at all different than men’s hormonal gearing up. Yeah. Any ideology that requires me to ignore my lying eyes in favor of their theory is bad-crazy which can destroy society, so these are my middle fingers. Reality is what it is.
Rowan Atkinson Live – Headmaster kills student
Rowan Atkinson Live
Published on 24 Jan 2014One of the most loved clips from Rowan’s vast back catalogue, a hilarious sketch where the angry teacher played by Rowan invites a father in to talk about the trouble with son…
Whether mesmerising us with the sheer visual mastery of Mr. Bean, beguiling us with the acerbic wit of Edmund Blackadder, or simply entertaining us as the suave, but rather hapless British Secret Agent Johnny English, you surely won’t have escaped the comic genius that is Rowan Atkinson.
In Rowan Atkinson Live, co-written with Richard Curtis (4 Weddings & a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually) and Ben Elton, Atkinson runs the whole gamut of his remarkably versatile 30 year career, with sketches, mimes and monologues that are guaranteed to have you shedding tears of laughter. Performing live on stage alongside ‘straight man’ Angus Deayton, the show features a number of original and familiar routines, including sketches that appeared in the original Mr. Bean series.
I first heard this sketch many years ago (pre-internet days when we knapped our own flint) on an audio tape of clips from the Dr. Demento radio show, put together by my friend William. He didn’t know the performer, so he titled it “Fatal beatings”.
December 31, 2018
7 Things You Should Know About Free Speech in Schools: Free Speech Rules (Episode 1)
ReasonTV
Published on 13 Dec 2018Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law. The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools, from black armbands to ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus.’
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—————-Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law that’s written by Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA, and the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.
The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools:
1) Political and religious speech is mostly protected.
Students, from first grade to twelfth, can’t be punished based on their political or religious speech. As the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.”2) Disruptive speech is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that “materially disrupts schoolwork” — for instance, because it prompts fights.3) Vulgar or sexual speech is not protected.
Schools can also punish students for using vulgarities or sexual innuendos.4) Praising drugs is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that seems to praise drug use, and probably also alcohol use and other crimes, at least when the speech doesn’t seem political.5) Official school newspapers are the school’s own speech.
Courts see the newspaper as the school’s own speech, even if students are the ones who write it.6) This only applies to public schools.
Under the so-called “state action doctrine,” the First Amendment doesn’t limit private schools, even those that get tax breaks or government funds.7) California is different. Some states, like California, have passed laws that provide more protection to students.
Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not. This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.
December 27, 2018
QotD: The deep state
The deep state is no myth but a sodden, intertwined mass of bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy that constitutes the real power in Washington and that stubbornly outlasts every administration. As government programs have incrementally multiplied, so has their regulatory apparatus, with its intrusive byzantine minutiae. Recently tagged as a source of anti-Trump conspiracy among embedded Democrats, the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans and apolitical functionaries of Bartleby the Scrivener blandness. Its spreading sclerotic mass is wasteful, redundant, and ultimately tyrannical.
I have been trying for decades to get my fellow Democrats to realize how unchecked bureaucracy, in government or academe, is inherently authoritarian and illiberal. A persistent characteristic of civilizations in decline throughout history has been their self-strangling by slow, swollen, and stupid bureaucracies. The current atrocity of crippling student debt in the US is a direct product of an unholy alliance between college administrations and federal bureaucrats — a scandal that ballooned over two decades with barely a word of protest from our putative academic leftists, lost in their post-structuralist fantasies. Political correctness was not created by administrators, but it is ever-expanding campus bureaucracies that have constructed and currently enforce the oppressively rule-ridden regime of college life.
In the modern world, so wondrously but perilously interconnected, a principle of periodic reduction of bureaucracy should be built into every social organism. Freedom cannot survive otherwise.
Camille Paglia, “Hillary wants Trump to win again”, Spectator USA, 2018-12-04.
