How Dare You Try To Educate Us
Again the audience erupted in shouting, with one young man saying he was upset at her audacity to speak to the audience with such information.
Further to this, Heather Mac Donald visits UCLA and attempts to share statistics with unhappy students.
Ms Mac Donald is of course scolded for her impertinence, loudly, repetitively and at length, and this sharing of relevant data and neglected perspectives is denounced as proof of her supposed embrace of “white supremacy,” and of her “capitalist, imperialist, fascist agenda.” Acknowledging statistics is, we’re told, “violent in itself.” Ah, academia, that temple of the mind.
Update:
And again, only more so, at Claremont McKenna College:
Thirty minutes into the speech, police officers told [Ms Mac Donald] to cut it short, and she was given a four-officer escort through a side door.
You see, if you’re invited to speak on campus and you say things that challenge leftist prejudice, there’s a good chance you’ll need an armed police escort to protect you from the mob of budding intellectuals.
It’s glorious. When she started talking about how mass immigration affects wages, not exactly a controversial point, their answer was to chant “Say it loud! Say it clear! Immigrants are welcome here!” That’ll show her. Mindlessly chanting and repeating stock non sequiturs has certainly become the mark of quality education and I’m overjoyed to see the progress of the leaders of tomorrow.
But it has the Authority of Rhyme. Can’t you see? It’s the chemistry. Nothing is wrong when said in song.
As they take over the stage, one of the unlovely ladies shouts at the top of her lungs, “This is not an intellectual conversation.” Meaning, presumably, that any facts and evidence that run counter to her prejudices are irrelevant or inadmissible, and the rest of us should simply defer to her bellowed morony. Which rather makes me wonder what she and her associates are doing at a university in the first place. And indeed, why they’re permitted to remain there, if this is how they behave when their assumptions are challenged.
“You have no right to speak!”
How about “you have no right to taxpayer subsidy”?
And note that, despite the utterly selfish and insulting behaviour of the BLM clowns, Ms Mac Donald offers them a chance to address the audience directly in a vaguely civilised way, asking them how much time they’d like. This is immediately rebuffed as “white supremacy” and the clown show continues. Presumably on the basis that idiot chants are all they have.
In BLM Bizarro World, Ms Mac Donald is an “anti-black fascist” and must be “shut down.”
The devil horns lend their claims so much gravitas.
there’s a good chance you’ll need an armed police escort to protect you from the mob of budding intellectuals.
How bad does it have to get before we can call it a cult?
And in other, utterly unrelated news:
Imagine my surprise.
Guilt
Self-hate
First world mental illness
How bad does it have to get before we can call it a cult?
And note that once again, as so often, we have a contrast between, on the one hand, a speaker who presents evidence and arguments and who offers to address any questions and disagreement, and on the other, a mob barking slogans and determined to stop any debate happening at all.
I think it may be time to modify Mr. Garrison’s advice and have the police start doling out wooden shampoos to these knuckleheads. I wouldn’t have said it after the first occurrence but this type of thing has happened too often, at too many different places, for it to be allowed to continue. Let them know if they want a reasoned discussion it’s available, if they just want to shout down people who make them feel bad about themselves then it’s stars and tweety birds time.
Not that it would ever happen of course but a man can dream.
For all the Washington Post’s hyperbole about ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’, this is how democracy dies. When people can’t have reasoned discussions in places of higher education then we are halfway down the slope to tyranny. Remember, Mao’s fun loving Red Guards were mostly young, impressionable, university students, and didn’t the Cultural Revolution turn out well.
I’ve often (my dear wife would be justified in saying TOO often) summed up the twin political philosophies warring today as The Business Club and The Drama Club.
Heather McDonald: Facts, figures, actual scientific studies, reasoned conclusions: Business Club.
UCLA studenten: silly rhymes, ahistorical posturing, lack of any empirical evidence for their position, ad hominem slander, childish cartoons: Drama Club.
As my fellow USA commenters might agree, we’ve been ruled for the last 8 years by The Drama Club. For all his reality-show trappings, our current President seems to appoint Business Club members for actually doing all the work, and I’m expecting to see a marked difference in results.
Oh, and the spell-checker wanted to replace ‘hominem’ with ‘Eminem’.
We’re doomed.
Argumentum ad Eminem : attack on an opponent’s genuineness as a Slim Shady, rather than his argument.
Nothing is wrong when said in song.
Well, that couplet proves it!
The Washington Post’s hyperbole about ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’
If only they meant it as a warning, not a goal.
Actually, David’s co-blogger Kate refers to the 8 Mile Rule.
Love that Eminem clip. Who could really slam Trump–he is loud and proud. Lesson in that.
Hipsters getting into “college”, summarized:
Seven years?
Seven years?
Four years undergrad, one year post-grad, two years before the parents kick them out of the house.
As I prefer to call him in the presence of younger folks “Slim Shouty and the lost city of WORD”.
Seven years?
Four years undergrad, one year post-grad, two years before the parents kick them out of the house.
Five years as an undergrad getting a double major in “communications” and “international studies”, a year “working” as an “intern” at a “startup”, a year signed up with an online diploma mill buying a piece of wallpaper with a label of “accelerated learning uber mega executive deluxe hyper master in business administration”.
Four years undergrad, one year post-grad, two years before the parents kick them out of the house.
You forgot these folks (those this post describes, not the ones running the blog):
http://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2017/04/ever-wonder-why-those-kids-are-so-keen.html
There’s a part of me which desperately wishes to believe that these are nothing but a small group of rich, upper-class twits and don’t represent the majority of college aged students. Alas, I think the rot is spreading too far and too fast.
Seven years?
Well, in California the U of C and UC systems game the classes so it is very difficult, near impossible to graduate in 4 years. Most need an extra year to get all the units for a useful degree (like business rather than gender studies).
That extra year = $$$ for larded administration
Sporkatus
Argumentum ad Eminem
Very good, sir. Very good.
The world is insane.
silly rhymes, ahistorical posturing, lack of any empirical evidence for their position, ad hominem slander, childish cartoons: Drama Club.
The gulf between the protestors’ characterisations and what Mac Donald actually writes does suggest an element of role-play on their part. See also the thuggish tantrums against Charles Murray, Ben Shapiro, etc. This is compounded by the fact that the protestors seem both unprepared for any factual correction and then utterly unconcerned with whether their smears are even remotely credible. It isn’t about reality; it’s narcissistic theatre.
Though the word theatre doesn’t quite convey its malign intent.
Drama Club.
These clowns also seem to be emotional junkies, for want of a better term, in that there’s a cultivation of gratuitous emotional drama, however ill-informed or dishonest it may be, one that gets quite competitive. They need something to rail against, and to be seen railing against. The idea that, as a would-be intellectual at an expensive university, you might strive to develop the habit of emotional detachment, of being able to look at an argument without instantly succumbing to rage or gushing or sympathy, is practically anathema. And yet the people who exult in this kind of hair-trigger emotionalism, and who regard it as a credential, also like to blather about critical thinking.
The contradiction escapes them, apparently.
Harry Stein on the cultivated delinquency that greeted Heather Mac Donald. I do like the phrase “incipient fascist children.”
I don’t. “Fascist” is practically watered down to an emotive exclamation, and this hardly seems like the right place to start using it in a precise meaning, considering the massively nationalistic aspect of Original-Fascism that I’m not seeing here.
I’d say the better parallell is to the Red Guards, and as such, “Incipient communist children.”
I’d say the better parallel is to the Red Guards, and as such, “Incipient communist children.”
Yes, I generally avoid the word fascism for those reasons and opt for authoritarian or totalitarian, depending on degree. But I liked the way it evokes the fact that, while absurd, these youngsters are actually quite sinister, in both their methods and stated ambitions. Sadly, “communist” doesn’t have quite the same emotional connotations, at least to a wider audience. And it doesn’t quite convey the irony of it, or the projection involved.
http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Published/161733R1.P.pdf
Please tell me that this is the babblings of a resident at some asylum rather than the considered decision of judges
“Please tell me that this is the babblings of a resident at some asylum rather than the considered decision of judges”
Or possibly McDonalds wasn’t hiring but the courts were when the activist amoebae of academia finally got the push from their Women’s Studies degrees.
I’ve just seen the blind dates section of the Guardian (yep, it’s another gay one) where one of the protagonists states:
Any awkward moments?
Potentially when I asked if she’d ever been taken up the Shard before.
I’m totally ignorant of the current practices of women in comfortable shoes but is this normal?
@Paul Carlson: Well, the judge got one thing very right.
Insert commentary on statolatry here. Apart from that line, I must agree that the opinion is really impressively shitty, particularly the “extraordinary poem” that doesn’t rhyme, doesn’t scan, doesn’t alliterate, and generally doesn’t do anything other than try to fit the square peg that is the word “famous” into a round hole where one could use some other term like “familiar”.
Bonus embarassment points for the “renowned” Naomi Nye, with or without middle name, having fewer google hits than my own real name, and I have never held public office or the like. (Perhaps the most newsworthy thing I did was place 15th in a national high school math contest.) This opinion strikes me as the literary equivalent of the judge having a wank, demonstrating just how good he feels about it.
“I’d say the better parallel is to the Red Guards, and as such, “Incipient communist children.””
Same bird, different feather, as I reflected, the other day, for the umpteenth time while looking at a photo of a book-burning by Nazi students in the 1930s.
Though, the Red Guards really showed, along with the malevolence, the sheer insanity of their contemporary equivalents.
Paul,
Yep, my first reaction was “insane”…now it’s “sinister”.
As I pointed out above, there is something seriously wrong when biological sex is dismissed as outdated.
“..the usual conservative claim [is] that Left wing students are delicate “snowflakes” who are simply too spoiled or rich to handle conservative dissent. Instead, Greer urges conservatives to admit the truth: these supposedly effeminate Millennials are actually operating as effective political soldiers. Conservative sneering at “snowflakes” is framed as tough-guy mockery of noodle-armed progressives, but it’s really an act of moral cowardice.”
A left-leaning student or racially conscious non-white will set foot on a campus and find a whole network of tenured radicals, lavishly funded resource centers, set-aside housing, and even entirely artificial academic departments (Multicultural studies, Queer Studies, etc) designed to indoctrinate, radicalize, support, and defend any given extremist campaign.
Conservative sneering at “snowflakes” is framed as tough-guy mockery of noodle-armed progressives, but it’s really an act of moral cowardice.
The problem with dismissing such people as merely “snowflakes,” as creatures of improbable delicacy, is that it doesn’t address the fundamental dishonesty, spite and petty malice that’s common to their behaviour. “Snowflake” suggests something transient and effete, something harmless, which doesn’t capture the psychological malevolence and delight in mob harassment, both of which are signatures of the phenomenon.
Heather Mac Donald describes her experience at Claremont McKenna College, where even her guest accommodation was surrounded by hundreds of chanting morons:
In a saner world, you’d think that participating in this kind of harassment and gratuitous mob obstruction – denying access to other students and in effect hounding an invited speaker off campus – would invite the risk of suspension, with any repeat offence resulting in immediate expulsion. But apparently not:
Which is why it will happen again, and most likely escalate.
Greer urges conservatives to admit the truth: these supposedly effeminate Millennials are actually operating as effective political soldiers.
They are indeed extremely effective, and dangerous, and we can forget this when we mock their seemingly idiotic or childish behavior. There’s a whole ‘Diversity’ industry devoted to supporting them on campus, as well as the majority of the media and many in Government and the Courts. They have enormous power and influence, and they use it well.
However, he goes further by noting the frank anti-white hatred which is at the heart of the “diversity” agenda. “Diversity in today’s America simply means having fewer whites around,” he writes. “Segregation, such as universities having racially exclusive dorms and events, is great as long as that racial exclusion doesn’t mean ‘white only.’”
Too many people are unaware of this: they need to wake up.
the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking. An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised
When does *their* harassment of women count as misogyny?
*crickets*
Incidentally, Dr. Jordan Peterson has lost his research grant, so he’s set up an Indigogo campaign to raise money from private backers instead. If you’d like to support Dr. Peterson, please follow the link.
When does *their* harassment of women count as misogyny?
It saves a lot of time and head-scratching once you realise that, despite their displays of piety, the Mao-lings don’t actually have principles in any meaningful sense. Principles tend to be reciprocal and consistent, pretty much by definition, and they often place restraints on how one might behave. And given the thrill of harassing people, frustrating them, scaring them, and given the Mao-lings’ delight in mob coercion and imposing themselves on others, anything that might inhibit that buzz, that sense of power, simply won’t do.
More on the Mao-lings and their methods here:
Ah, but look at the face of enlightened, compassionate progress:
And remember, if you call it “social justice,” assaulting faculty, blocking fire escapes and trapping women – and triumphantly giving the finger to anyone who disagrees – will be applauded as righteous and heroic.
Related.
Related.
One more time, lefties project.
Having covered the spread of this phenomenon for over a decade now, it’s strange how each new fit of thuggery, each incremental escalation, is often met with a kind of weary resignation, as if it were just one of those things, and would somehow go away or get better by itself. There’s a temptation to stand on a box and ask, “Excuse me, do you realise that your values, your freedoms, a cornerstone of your civilisation, are being actively corroded at a disturbing rate?” It’s not entirely unlike the scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy when Zaphod visits the offices of said guide and shouts, above deafening explosions, “Do you know your building’s being bombed?”
I’m finding this stuff to be very depressing – triggering even – so I’m off to find some kittens.
Found this, not kittens and OT but worth keeping an eye on?
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/04/msm-silent-ben-carson-finds-500-billion-error-hud-audit/
theresa,
Audit a few more 3-letter federal agencies, and that could add up to real money.
Oh, and that $500 Billion? That’s not any “error”, that’s “skim” and became Democrat Party “walking around money”. It just didn’t buy enough votes in enough states this time ’round.
“Snowflake” suggests something transient and effete, something harmless, which doesn’t capture the psychological malevolence and delight in mob harassment, both of which are signatures of the phenomenon.
Whereas everything in your paragraph is true, it must be remembered that these snowflakes, with but few exceptions, are the truly privileged, and have never really faced any adversity in their useless existences. Their tantrums are always confined to places where they know they will get no real pushback, or face any real adversaries (e.g., “Occupy Oakland” never leaving the Berkeley campus).
In the real world, they are indeed snowflakes because if, or when, normal people get fed up with their crap and start dishing out much needed punishment, extra-judicial corporal or otherwise, or if they get the Kent State moment they they seem to think they want, they will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
In the real world, they are indeed snowflakes because if, or when, normal people get fed up with their crap and start dishing out much needed punishment, extra-judicial corporal or otherwise, or if they get the Kent State moment they they seem to think they want, they will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
In years past, normal people could easily ignore the rantings of these few, given that they were confined to insulated college campuses, and most the students would ultimately grow up once they graduated and obtained their first mortgage. Social media, however, has allowed the loons to broadcast their rantings to the world. The professor I linked above previously could have screamed his invective in peace in the faculty lounge. Now, via Twitter, the whole world knows. (See also, the various harridans populating feminist Tumblr, who heretofore were limited to screaming at their cats or a couple of Shulamith Firestone posters on an otherwise blank wall.)
These people are rousing a sleeping giant, as the election of Trump portends. It will not end well.
Heather Mac Donald was interviewed about her experience by Fox News.
“These people are rousing a sleeping giant, as the election of Trump portends. It will not end well.”
They seem to forget, at least here in the states, which side has the guns…
“allowed the loons to broadcast their rantings to the world”
Not to mention recruit, indoctrinate and organize other potential loons. In the past, each village had an idiot; now the idiots have worldwide association, technology and coordination.
What’s the acknowledged ratio of malcontents to normals required for effective widespread chaos to take hold? Surely there must be some studies on this…
“It will not end well.” I live in hope that it will end very well, with mass casualties for the totalitarians. We never really had a proper cull after the fall of the Berlin Wall like we did with the Nazis. The time is coming when we will have to address that.
At some point, someone will, for the first time in their coddled, sheltered lives, tell them “no” and mean it. It certainly does not appear to be university administrators…
I don’t like to refer to anti-fascists as fascists because I notice that everyone who calls others fascists are bloody fascists.
They said the same thing after 9/11, and that does not seem to have gone as expected.
In other but related news, it looks like a student in Texas has committed suicide after being subjected to a Title IX witch-hunt:
http://watchdog.org/292821/male-accused-student-commits-suicide-school-railroading/