Academia Anthropology Politics

Elsewhere (143)

November 11, 2014 by David 95 Comments

Susan Kruth and Harvey Silverglate on educational environments and the things you can’t say in them: 

On campuses across the country, hostility toward unpopular ideas has become so irrational that many students, and some faculty members, now openly oppose freedom of speech. The hypersensitive consider the mere discussion of the topic of censorship to be potentially traumatic. Those who try to protect academic freedom and the ability of the academy to discuss the world as it is are swimming against the current… Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement — a disorder whose spread in academia grows by the day.

Note how the code words and euphemisms that have replaced salty language have become so numerous that readers now struggle to guess what the offending word was. See also this. 

Thomas Sowell on the current occupant of the White House: 

People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs. You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do. When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.

And Peter Suderman reminds us why tar and feathers should never be out of fashion: 

Professor Jonathan Gruber was, by most accounts, one of the key figures in constructing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. He helped design the Massachusetts health care law on which it was modelled, assisted the White House in laying out the foundation of the law, and, according to the New York Times, was eventually sent to Capitol Hill “to help Congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation.” Jonathan Gruber, in other words, knows exactly what it took to get [Obama’s] health care law passed. And that’s why you should take him seriously when he says, in the following video, that it was critical to not be transparent about the law’s costs and true effects, and to take advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter” in order to get it passed.

Note that our progressive Professor Gruber is happy to admit deceiving the electorate – deliberately, at length and on a grand scale – in order to get his own way. Along with $400,000 in consultancy fees.  

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 




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