Among the great ironies surrounding the state of academia is the continued insistence on hearing more and more “marginalized voices” and increasing “diversity” on campus, as if there is some kind of archaic conservative establishment making that difficult to do.
One would likely be hard-pressed to find a more left-leaning group than college professors and admissions officers, who prioritize pulling marginalized groups out of their marginalization and adding people of diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds to campus conversations.
Yet in their efforts to achieve a more egalitarian conversation, left-wing academics and their students completely ignore (at best) and marginalize (at worst) students and the rare colleague who disagree with them politically.
And therein lies the ultimate irony: The very voices that decry inequality in all its manifestations either accept or turn a blind eye to the stunning dearth of conservative academics and the de facto censorship of right-wing students on overwhelmingly left-wing campuses.
Were it some other group suffering such a marginalization, there is no doubt that the left would be up in arms, crying discrimination and demanding rectification.
Some might even call such a monopoly on prevailing campus orthodoxy a type of “privilege,” defined as an asset “of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to,” to quote Peggy McIntosh, the matriarch of privilege’s modern construction.
While the marginalization of right-wing thinkers on campus in no way compares to the experience of black Americans throughout history, it might behoove left-wingers on college campuses to think about the various privileges from which they benefit simply by being members of the overwhelmingly dominant group in their academic communities.
Tal Fortgang, “38 ways college students enjoy ‘Left-wing Privilege’ on campus”, The College Fix, 2015-06-24.
January 14, 2017
QotD: The intellectual monoculture of universities
October 1, 2015
January 21, 2015
“Sir, please put the Sriracha down. Now!”
Megan McArdle worries that the otherwise welcome introduction of spice to the awesomely bland North American diet of yesteryear may have gone just a tad too far:
It has come to my attention that some of you are becoming unable to eat good food unless it is spiced to within an inch of its life.
I’ve been noticing this for a while. It started with friends who put hot sauce on everything, even on dishes that were perfectly good without hot sauce. With dinner party hosts who proudly declared that the secret to good cooking was just to douse something in Cajun spices until you noticed the powder forming drifts on the side of the pan. With people who reported that an Asian restaurant was “good” because it had left their taste buds numb for hours.
Then, during the holiday season, I saw a Slate food writer declare that American apple pie is not as good as French apple pie because it is “bland and goopy,” and I began to suspect that something had gone seriously wrong with our food culture. When I saw an article on restaurant chefs who are daring to bring back prime rib, I became sure of it.
I’m as excited as anyone about the majestic spread of foreign food throughout our nation’s urban downtowns, its strip malls and cookbook aisles, its fruited plains and amber waves of grain. I can’t think of a national cuisine I don’t like, and that includes foods that will sear the taste buds off a water buffalo’s tongue at 20 feet.
I love me some spices … but I also like the idea of not feeling my tongue in pain for hours after I’ve finished eating my meal.
May 18, 2014
When #hashtags don’t deter modern-day barbarians
Victor Davis Hanson on the limitations of #hashtag activism to combat real-world evil:
Nigeria’s homegrown, al-Qaeda linked militant group, Boko Haram, brags openly that it recently kidnapped about 300 young Nigerian girls. It boasts that it will sell them into sexual slavery.
Those terrorists have a long and unapologetic history of murdering kids who dare to enroll in school, and Christians in general. For years, Western aid groups have pleaded with the State Department to at least put Boko Haram on the official list of terrorist groups. But former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team was reluctant to come down so harshly, in apparent worry that some might interpret such condemnation as potentially offensive to Islamic sensitivities.
Instead, Western elites now flood Facebook and Twitter with angry postings about Boko Haram — either in vain hopes that public outrage might deter the terrorists, or simply to feel better by loudly condemning the perpetrators.
[…]
But if we are postmodern and sensitive, what do we say or do about premodern racists with nuclear weapons, like the North Koreans?
A recent article from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency suggested that President Obama “does not even have the basic appearances of a human being … It would be perfect for Obama to live with a group of monkeys in the world’s largest African natural zoo and lick the bread crumbs thrown by spectators.”
How does the West deal with a mentality like that, originating from a country armed with nuclear weapons? Pyongyang owns no television show that we can boycott, no sports team that we can root against.
What do we do in the face of 19th-century evil that is unapologetic, has lethal weapons at its disposal, and uses savage rhetoric to goad us? Tweet it to death?
What about the sultan of Brunei, who just enacted sharia law that orders stoning for women found “guilty” of adultery or for homosexuals engaged in sex acts? That is a different sort of war on women than that invoked by Sandra Fluke, who lamented that she did not have free birth control from the government.
June 4, 2013
Sanandaji – Sweden’s problem is too many libertarians
Okay, that headline is unfair, but Tino Sanandaji does go out of his way to include the vast hordes of notoriously dogmatic and highly influential Swedish libertarians as part of the problem triggering the recent riots:
While immigrant unemployment is high, recent unrest can hardly be blamed on austerity. Successive governments have poured billions into problem areas in public investments, with limited success. In addition to free health care and other services, a family of four in Sweden is entitled to around $3,000 in welfare benefits each month. Last year, every middle-school pupil in one of Husby’s public schools received a brand-new iPad. (A total of 2,300 tablets have been distributed to local schools.)
Nor is Islam the cause of the riots. Radical Islamism is a problem, but it’s not related to this unrest. Most rioters appeared to be secular, even atheist. Some were Christian Assyrians. Frankly, most young immigrants in Sweden today do not care much about Islam. A far more potent influence than Islam on the Swedish ghetto is American gangster rap.
[. . .]
Making matters worse, multiculturalism morally privileges Third World cultures over Western culture. It preaches a modern version of original sin, damning Western civilization for historical crimes such as colonialism and racism. Much of public discourse today is devoted to endlessly reciting the historic crimes of the West. The problem with this discourse is not that the West is innocent of these crimes; it is not. The problem is that the blame-the-West interpretation of world history is one-sided. Endlessly recounting Western crimes against humanity while ignoring similar crimes committed by non-Westerners creates a dark and biased image of Western civilization. Meanwhile, the West’s contributions to humanity — such as democracy, the scientific revolution, human rights, and the industrial revolution — are downplayed or falsely credited to other cultures.
Resentment toward the West makes integration harder. Immigrants learn — and make use of — the message of victimhood, which fosters hostility toward their host society. And claiming victim status is appealing from a psychological perspective, as it confers moral superiority. Immigrants who wish to integrate and adopt a Swedish identity are accused of “acting white” or being “an Uncle Tom.” The latter is not a translation from Swedish; the American phrase “Uncle Tom” is the actual term of abuse.
In the face of this litany of crimes, Swedes have developed a deep sense of collective guilt and consequently lack the cultural self-confidence to integrate immigrants. The former leader of the Social Democratic opposition famously stated: “I believe that this is why Swedes are jealous of immigrants. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that binds you together. What do we have? We have Midsummer’s Eve and other lame things.” Not to be outdone in the department of self-abasement, the current right-of-center prime minister added: “The fundamentally Swedish is merely barbarism. The rest of development has come from outside.” Note that this fierce hostility toward Swedish culture does not originate with Muslim immigrants; it comes from Swedish elites, including liberals to the left and libertarians to the right (there are no conservatives in Sweden). Swedish libertarians are, if possible, even more militantly hostile toward Sweden as a nation-state and to the very notion of patriotism.
While I’m sure that Swedish libertarians exist, I have to say that they’ve managed to stay pretty carefully out of my view.
November 25, 2012
UK bureaucrat removes foster children from home of UKIP supporters
I heard about this case yesterday, and I’d hoped that it was just a mangling of the report, not an appallingly bad exercise of municipal power:
The stunning decision by Rotherham Council to remove three children from a foster home (where they were happy) because the foster parents support UKIP shows that the “culture war” here in Britain is being waged not by the Right, but by the Left.
Joyce Thacker, the council’s director of children, who said her decision was influenced by UKIP’s sceptical take on multiculturalism, is the mirror image of those mad American right-wingers who want to outlaw abortion clinics and homosexuals. Unlike them, though, she is in a position of power. Hers is the latest in a series of increasingly chilling actions of this nature taken by bien-pensant officials.
[. . .]
The special interest of the Rotherham case — and no doubt why Ed Miliband was so quick to condemn it — is that in five days’ time the town has a parliamentary by-election. Labour is already in a bit of trouble here — about 80 of the 114 members present at the meeting to select its candidate walked out in protest after the favourite, local man Mahroof Hussain, was excluded from the shortlist. Many of them said they wouldn’t campaign for the woman Labour chose, Sarah Champion.
October 23, 2012
Bilingualism and multiculturalism, “the Siamese twins of Canadian social policy”
In Maclean’s, Heather Scoffield wonders if the twin keystones of “official” Canadian identity (as defined by the Liberal party in 1969) are actually in opposition to one another:
Have the two forces that have defined Canadian culture for the past 40 years — multiculturalism and bilingualism — turned on each other?
The final release of 2011 census data this week will offer Canadians some insight into the answer.
On Wednesday, Statistics Canada will publish language data showing how many people speak English, how many speak French, and how many speak a myriad of other languages — a consequence of increasingly diverse immigration.
In the last census, in 2006, the number of people who called French their mother tongue was almost — but not quite — on par with the number of people who identify other languages as their first.
If the trend lines continue, as the experts expect they will, they could cross come Wednesday. Measured in terms of percentage of the total population in Canada, French is expected to continue its long, slow decline as a mother tongue and “other” languages will continue their ascent, with the number of allophones — those with a mother tongue other than Canada’s two official languages — surpassing their francophone counterparts.
So have we reached the point where the twin forces unleashed during the 1970s are now competing forces, with multiculturalism drowning out bilingualism?
August 24, 2012
The diminishing importance of borders in a supranational world
At sp!ked, Angus Kennedy reviews The Significance of Borders, a new book by Thierry Baudet:
A controversial Dutch columnist for NRC Handelsblad, a lawyer and historian at the University of Leiden, Baudet argues that representative government and the rule of law is impossible without the nation state. But today, he argues, the nation is under attack from two directions.
First it is under attack from supranationalism, that is, from institutions like the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Security Council, and, most dramatically, the European Union. So while nations retain sovereignty at a formal level, increasing degrees of ‘material sovereignty’ have been acquired by supranational organisations. Baudet argues, for instance, that the official aim of the EU ‘is the negation of the concept of statehood’, because the nation state is held responsible, most notably by German theorists, for war. The EU’s immanent federalist logic leads to the necessary extension of its bureaucratic power (taking more and more countries into its orbit). Or — as an illustration of the attack on the democratic basis of national sovereignty — take the contempt in which the ECHR holds Britain for denying convicted prisoners the right to vote: this despite the fact that parliament voted 234 votes to 22 against the proposal. It seems the ECHR is happy to demand Britain change laws upheld by its own democracy.
Second, self-government is also under attack from below. Firstly, in the form of multiculturalism and its official support, legal pluralism (where the law is applied with cultural ‘sensitivity’ rather than justly). Secondly, from cultural diversity, which rejects the idea of a British or a Dutch identity in favour of overlapping multiple, provisional and lightly held, identities. Baudet gives the example of the Dutch crown princess, Máxima, who declared in 2007 that ‘the Dutch identity does not exist’, that the world has ‘open borders’ and that ‘it is not either-or. But and-and.’ When royalty — once the very symbol of national sovereignty — refuses to discriminate between citizens and outsiders, then even the most ardent internationalist might begin to smell a rat.
As Baudet argues, without a community of interest, a ‘we’, there is nothing. He notes that the ECHR outlaws ‘discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’. Everyone must be treated equally. Baudet is correct to point out that such a widely drawn attack on discrimination ‘must necessarily implicate the citizens’ indifference towards those criteria’. Any form of particularity, of which nationality is one, is denied in the name of a totalising universality. The effect is not the widening of ‘minds and sympathies’ but rather their ‘Balkanisation’. In the process, the law becomes ‘no longer “ours” or “from within”, but from “out there”’. Our responsibility is eroded and our capacity to decide for ourselves (however we constitute that ‘we’) is further diminished, both at the level of the nation state, historically the basis for constituting a self-governing ‘we’, and at the level of the individual citizen.
July 19, 2012
Multiculturalism and suttee in the Raj
ESR on a famous incident in British India in the 1840s:
The first lesson is for the various sorts who call themselves “multiculturalists” and “moral relativists”. Napier showed us that these ostensibly liberating doctrines actually translate into “might makes right” — that, in the absence of a common normative ethical framework, disputes about “custom” will be won by the tribe with the most ability and will to use force.
The second lesson is for people who, having noticed than relativism and multiculturism are a road to ruination and blood, then argue that we must fall back on religion as the only possible source of truly universal ethical norms (If God is dead, is anything permissible?). Notice that the would-be widow-burners are priests? The “custom” they are arguing for is exactly their bid in the game of if-you-accept-my-religious-premises.
Napier, in promising those priests a hanging, says nothing of any religious counter-conviction of his own. And it would make no difference to the lesson if he had — except, perhaps, to underline the point that religion is just another form of tribal particularism and thus fundamentally unable to lift us away from the bloody muck of might-makes-right.
September 28, 2011
Ed West: The utopian pipe dreams of the European project
Ed West bids an unfond farewell to the Euro (and the European Union):
The diversity delusion and the euro delusion are both symptoms of a similar pseudo-religious mania. Both sprung from a noble attempt to ensure that the horrors of 1914-1945, inspired by nationalism and scientific racism, were never repeated. Both make them more likely to be repeated. Jean Monnet, architect and first president of the European Coal and Steel Community, conceived the idea of a United States of Europe in order to ensure such wars never happened again, through a new empire in which nationalism had been erased. Because Monnet was opposed by Charles de Gaulle, who favoured a Europe of nations, he therefore he developed the “Monnet method” of “integration by stealth”, a policy that ultimately led to the tragedy of economic union.
Perhaps more influential still was Alexandre Kojeve, who set up the embryonic European Union and influenced a generation of pro-EU thinkers in France. He came up with the “end of history” theme, whereby national boundaries and exclusive communities would wash away and a new world without borders would emerge. The EU’s vapid motto, United in diversity, reflects this neo-Christian utopianism.
Without exception the guilty men of Europe also shared, and still, share, the diversity delusion. The Liberal Democrats have entirely signed up, and most of the Labour Party too, although the Tories must share the blame too. Only one senior Tory spoke up against both mass immigration and the Common Market, Enoch Powell (who was also a voice in the wilderness in opposing Keynesian policies — only Paul the Octopus in recent years has been more right). Powell’s provocative language certainly helped his opponents, but as immigration is by its very nature a more toxic subject, so milder opponents have been silenced, leaving only the cranks, oddballs and extremists to represent opposition to this new utopia. This in turn makes it easier to present critics as extremists, just as even a couple of years ago opponents of the euro were labeled extremists and xenophobes. Contrary to what proponents of this delusion claim, it is not about xenophobia or racism; the issue, as Charles Moore wrote on Saturday, is one of sovereignty, and sovereignty relies on the legitimacy that only nations can provide.
Instead, as Roger Scruton noted, European intellectuals tried to “discard national loyalty and to replace it with the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment… The problem… is that cosmopolitan ideals are the property of an elite and will never be shared by the mass of human kind.”
The European project was a utopian idea, and I suspect that Britain’s peripheral part in the third great stupid, European idea of the last century will soon be over. National loyalty, whatever the elites feel, is here to stay. I guess we’re all extremists now.
June 24, 2011
“Damn! Another cursed Mordecai!”
Barbara Kay takes issue with the token that Montreal has chosen to commemorate Mordecai Richler:
Mordecai Richler is Canada’s biggest claim to literary fame. If he had been born and lived in any other province but Quebec there would have been an outpouring of ideas on how to commemorate his life and achievements: perhaps renaming streets in his honour, building schools bearing his name, or erecting a statue featuring the disheveled genius wryly peering over his pince-nez at a smoked meat sandwich on wry…er, rye.
Instead Montreal’s political mandarins have decided he is getting a gazebo — a crummy little open pavilion at the foot of Mount Royal, with no known connection to the author. A place for people to come in out of the rain. Not quite a public toilet, but close.
That’s like naming the change house at an outdoor skating rink after Margaret Atwood, a pellet dispenser at the zoo after Yann Martel, or a maintenance shed after Margaret Laurence. But then, if Mordecai Richler had been born outside Quebec, maybe he wouldn’t have been inspired to the kind of savage indignation that made him such a household word (and often not in a good way) in his native Montreal.
She provides a rather more appropriate memorial gesture:
Here’s an idea: Montreal is riddled with potholes. The French for “pothole” is “nid-de-poule,” literally a chicken’s nest. How about if the word is officially changed to “mort-de-caille(ou)” which means “death of stone” (well, death of pebble, close enough). Henceforth let all Montreal potholes be called Mordecais. In this way, his name will forever be on every Montrealer’s lips, because Montreal potholes are ubiquitous and eternal, and yet not in a good way – “Damn! Another cursed Mordecai!” I think Richler himself would have appreciated the irony, and approved.
June 9, 2011
December 31, 2010
Hidden agendas come to light in “Little Ethiopia” debate
An article at the Globe and Mail pushes the idea of designating part of Danforth Avenue in Toronto as “Little Ethiopia”. The comments were far more interesting than the original article, especially some rather inflammatory comments from “Gus66” (some of these comments have already been removed by the G&M moderators):
Canadian Centralist: “People don’t want to live in a foreign community. That is why immigrants what to live with people from their own race, that is why they want “little” communities from home. If home was so great, why did they leave in the first place?”
Gus66: “C.C. Go back to Pickering and live in your nanas basement…..!”
[. . .]
sore throat: “The statement was made that there would be no tax implications.
“We heard that before, in another ethnic situtation, and when the dust settled it was proven to indeed require tax dollars.
“Just saying blanket statments such as you made will come back to bite your butt. And you can keep your modern multicultural and pluralistic society — give me a totally integrated societly with no enclaves for any ethnic group anytime.”
Canadian Centralist: “Special interest groups always require taxpayer funds.”
Gus66: “Deepest throat I saw your name on Kyle Rae’s contribution list…When it’s rainbow flags it’s okay but when people want to spend their own money we call them freeloaders. Which gay couple are you?”
[. . .]
Nick Barlas: “Since the time DECA [Danforth East Community Association] started our neighbourhood has become bullied. No class, no honesty from your residents who only care about ramming their interests down everybody’s throats. I loathe the days people like you migrated back into the cities. You came back into the “ethnic” neighbourhoods and now you are bossing immigrants around? You guys are shameless and deserve to be sued. I hope your names get published and you are expressing your views as DECA because you deserve to be sued.”
[. . .]
Gus66: “landed immigrant in East York, home of the European people who’ve been living there and owning the area. All of sudden we have a bunch of snot faced yoyos telling us what to do?
“First of all, go pay your mortgage. Not a member = no rights, so shut your pie hole!
“Second, get off your little ponies… You own squat on another street and have no business telling businesses what to do with their money or how to manage their affairs. That is up to the businesses.
“Why don’t you stroll down the street with your nuncycles to some other hoods and try to pull this stunt on those BIAs? Hate mongerers. Because you think you’re smarter than the landlords and businesses in the area? Whose respect do you command? Own nothing, sitting on your well-fed behinds. You’re talking about tax payer respect with Rob Ford, newsflash geniuses, business people support Rob Ford, snot nosed DECA geeks do not and are a bunch of flaky NDPers and NOTHING MORE.
“You’re worse than maggots and parasite…sucking up someone else’s blood for yourselves. Bunch of cheap bimbos who pretend they care but really a bunch of spineless buffoons.”
[. . .]
Gus66: “Who are you weasels? I suggest you send a registered mail of yourselves to that BIA. I have four buildings just on that street and I will not put up with your antics. I have buildings all over the city, paid off, yes my grease haired g-parents came to this country like these immigrants do every day to make a living. Got a problem with that? No landmass belongs to anyone people. We all have rights, stuff it.
“Greeks started off in the back of the kitchen. Now the Sri Lankans who were in the back are buying stores. Are you going to go to their stores and tell them you don’t want them to have a chance before they started?
“TRY DEMOCRACY, not HARASSING stores. I’ve got dozens of stores all around the city and you people are the biggest goof balls. If you want your hood to improve, shove your winy twats over and let the real business people make decisions for themselves.
“I’ll rent all my stores to these people. They pay their rent, they’re clean and they RESPECT. One way or another, all your kind does is look for freebies and drink beer at your houses….”
