Heather Mac Donald on theories of crime.
If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?
KC Johnson on academic groupthink.
Essay after essay in the NEA’s annual higher-education publication complains about how professors lack respect from the public, without ever pausing to consider how the image of colleges and universities as the bastion of out-of-touch ideologues might have caused the problem.
Candace de Russy on Sociology 101.
It seems rather foolish to remain optimistic about the future of this nation when millions of its most “educated” are systematically being taught to loathe it.
Greg Lukianoff on campus censorship and learned intolerance.
Until 2007 Western Michigan University’s harassment policy banned “sexism,” which it defined as “the perception and treatment of any person, not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” I am unfamiliar with any other attempt by a public institution to ban a perception, let alone perceiving that a person is a man or woman. Even public restrooms violate this rule. […] These codes not only chill free expression by warning students of serious consequences for controversial speech — or even normal, everyday speech — but they also systematically miseducate kids to believe that free speech goes only as far as the most sensitive person in the room can handle.
And it’s worth bearing in mind that “sensitive” may actually mean passive-aggressive or dishonest, or the person with the weakest argument.
College students are placed in an unenviable position. They are constantly urged to argue, debate, discuss, question, and analyse the most important issues of the day, but they also often know stories of other students who were punished for taking the “wrong side” of an argument. […] When students come to believe that censoring rival points of view is not only permissible but laudable, the potential damage goes far beyond campus. Our colleges and universities produce our scientists, our business leaders, our lawyers, and our legislators. The habits formed in college inevitably seep into the other major social institutions.
As usual, feel free to add your own.
The sociology paper is incredible.
“Question: How does the United States “steal” the resources of other (third world) [sic] countries?”
Talk about begging the question.
As much as I loathe this sociology crap myself, I’m a bit suspicious about the vagueness of “…copy of an exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at a public college in the east”. Wouldn’t surprise me if the post itself isn’t rooted in someone’s sociology “experiment”.
As for Western Michigan University, given its location in Kalamazoo it seems they have a bit of a (geographic) perception problem themselves. Wouldn’t Southern Michigan University be more appropriate? I’ve begun to suspect that many of these lesser known universities over compensate in the PC area so that they can appear to have big-name university issues, both as grist for their faculty’s papers and for the free publicity. The U. of Delaware and it’s PC dorm policies from a few years back comes to mind.
“Decades ago, poor children became known as “disadvantaged” to soften the stigma of poverty. Then they were “at-risk.” Now, a Washington lawmaker wants to replace those euphemisms with a new one, “at hope.”
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=15948
Tim239,
Once you’ve gone that far down the Pomo road you’re hardly concerned with question begging! It’s just another “matrix of domination”, haha.
“Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904574638024055735590.html
When kids broke into my car for the third time the first thing I thought was ‘hey that’s social criticism. They’re telling me it’s wrong that I have a car and they don’t.’ Yeah, that’s what it was.
“Yeah, that’s what it was.”
A year ago, I caught a youth looking for ways to break into my neighbour’s house. He too must have been offering a withering critique of his milieu, driven no doubt by a need for “social justice.” If only I’d known. I assumed the little shit was just preying on those more functional than himself.
David,
”
I assumed the little shit was just preying on those more functional than himself.
”
I would have thought the predator to be more functional than it’s prey. Still, from the eyes of the prey, this may be different of course.
Did you go Batman on him?
-S
Heh. Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to do the gravelly voice or deploy my batarang. I spotted him from a first floor window as he crept around my neighbour’s back yard. The little shit looked up, saw he’d been spotted and fled. He returned a minute or so later and threw a branch up at the window in protest, to no great effect, then fled again. But his expression – pure animal hatred – was a thing to behold.
And I think it’s safe to say my neighbour is much more functional than the chav ape-child who was planning to rob him.
It’s a good thing your neighbor was not home and ::gasp:: threatened the little “social critic”:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/6957682/Myleene-Klass-warned-by-police-after-scaring-off-intruders-with-knife.html
Excuse if I have related this before, but our local government recently advised us that leaving a garage door open in the middle of the afternoon or leaving a garden gate open was issuing “an invitation to commit a crime”. Upon calling our local constable to confirm as much, a loooong conversation ensued with Mr. Po-po. When I suggested that someone poking around in my garage without a helmet was an invitation for me to crack them over the head with Mr. Louisville Slugger, things got weeeal qwiet. We did find common ground in that a woman prancing through the streets half naked was not an invitation to commit a rape, however. Maybe there’s hope for one of us.
XX If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased? XX
Because more peple are at home WATCHING the T.V when the scrote from next door trys to nick it?
KRW/WTP,
“We did find common ground in that a woman prancing through the streets half naked was not an invitation to commit a rape, however.”
Well, quite. And there is a double standard in the bien-pensant view of crime, as crystallised in the pages of the Guardian. One might compare the tone of the Guardian’s coverage of sexual assault (or racial attacks in which the victim has dark skin) with its coverage of other, equally serious crimes. As Theodore Dalrymple pointed out,
“If anyone were to write that he thought that rapists should not be locked up because they have had a difficult childhood, have psychological problems and aberrant personalities, including a tendency to take drugs and too much alcohol, and because prison does not work as evidenced by the fact that they often commit the same sorts of crimes on release, he would be (rightly) regarded as a moral idiot. Yet the very same arguments are trotted out, with every appearance of convincing the people who trot them out of their own moral superiority over those who do not believe them, with regard to the kinds of crimes that make the lives of many old people in this country (to take only one example) a torment.”
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2009/04/selective-outrage.html
A standard Guardian line – repeated every few weeks – is to bemoan prison overcrowding as inhumane while denouncing plans to build more prisons as “rightwing,” and thus pure evil. The point of the exercise is to display ostentatious sympathy for the designated underdog (as opposed to his victims). Guardian contributors have fretted over prisoners’ “right” to vote and the “poor quality of toothbrushes” available to burglars. In some circles, moral sophistication is measured by concern for the comfort of *perpetrators* of crime. And justice is to be determined by the number of cells currently available.
Wellderly for affluent and well-off aged people.
“If anyone were to write that he thought that rapists should not be locked up because they have had a difficult childhood, have psychological problems and aberrant personalities, including a tendency to take drugs and too much alcohol, and because prison does not work as evidenced by the fact that they often commit the same sorts of crimes on release, he would be (rightly) regarded as a moral idiot”
When you quoted that you forgot about Yasmin Alibi Brown:
“I am saying that the collapse of all restraint in our societies is breeding sicknesses and madness, and may be pushing some Muslims to the edge of reason.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-licentiousness-breeds-extremism-1863919.html
“the perception and treatment of any person, not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.”
On that criteria can you have a Woman’s Study course or a woman’s officer?
She meant edge of treason of course.
A fate worse than the typeface of calamity.