K.C. Johnson on dogmatic faculty, the Duke rape hoax, and why due process matters: 

It was, I think, unprecedented, the sort of behaviour we saw from the Duke faculty. Faculty members essentially chose to exploit their students’ distress to advance a campus pedagogical agenda, to push their own ideological vision and to abandon any pretence of supporting fairness, due process and the dispassionate evaluation of evidence… A complete abandonment of any pretence of objectivity, of any interest in the truth.

Ann Althouse parses Hillary Clinton and is taken aback by what she finds:   

Read it again and see how shocking it is. Not only did Hillary completely turn her back on “balancing competing values” and “more thoughtful conversation,” she doesn’t want to allow people on one side of the conversation even to believe what they believe. Those who care about gun rights and reject new gun regulations should be stopped from holding their viewpoint. Now, it isn’t possible to forcibly prevent people from holding a viewpoint… but the question is Hillary Clinton’s fitness for the highest office, and her statement reveals a grandiose and profoundly repressive mindset.

Somewhat related, Jayson Veley on the joys of modern schooling:   

Andrew Lampart, a student at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, Connecticut, was assigned an in-class debate on gun control during his “Law & You” course. While preparing for the debate during study hall, Lampart logged onto the school-provided internet and found that students were forbidden from visiting The National Association for Gun Rights… “I used my study hall to research gun control facts and statistics. That is when I noticed that most of the pro-second amendment websites were blocked, while the sites that were in favour of gun control generally were not… I found it nearly impossible to get solid information to debate my side of the argument.”

Meanwhile, a book critical of modern feminism, but written by a feminist, catches fire mysteriously. And Perry de Havilland discovers another classic Guardian sentence. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Franklin Einspruch on the new censors: 

For a long while I’ve been trying to interest my friends in the art world to get behind freedom of speech in a bigger way, to recognise that the very health of the marketplace of ideas depends on its openness to entry and its freedom of transaction… This usually doesn’t persuade anyone who isn’t already liberty-minded to begin with. So next I resort to self-interest. We creative types rely on that openness to function. If we don’t stand in defence of hate speech — not the content, just the right to express it — any mechanisms for cutting it off will eventually be used against us. If injured feelings take on the seriousness of injured bodies, we will become a society that pulls art off of walls, cancels performances, and strikes essays from public view. Sadly, this usually doesn’t work either, because the targets of accusations of hate speech typically lean right, and the art community leans left. 

Franklin also links to this Pew survey of social media use, which suggests that self-described progressives are statistically much more likely to ban or block people with whom they disagree. A finding that may not be entirely shocking to regular readers. 

And somewhat related, Greg Collins on the unremarked privileges of the self-appointed privilege police: 

The paramount privilege at universities is not race, class, or gender, but intellectual soft despotism… A student whose worldview clings to that of university administrators and professors has the advantage of accessing university resources, money, and time to drive his cause. These instruments are far more powerful in granting benefits to politically preferred groups in higher education than subconscious biases in favour of particular races or classes. It is a privilege when your views conform with those of more than 90 percent of your professors. It is a privilege when your worldviews are blessed by a proliferation of like-minded commencement speakers and guest lecturers. And it is a privilege when you have university resources, money, and time within fingertips’ reach to wield to advance your political cause. 

As an illustration of this leverage, Collins mentions one of many sabotaged speaking events – a talk by the conservative writer Don Feder at the University of Massachusetts in March 2009, the subject of which was, or would have been, free speech. Within 20 seconds of opening his mouth, Feder had been interrupted, shouted down and called a racist, before being screamed at repeatedly and assailed with epithets about his daughter. Despite his pleas for civility, Feder was unable to speak for more than three minutes without further, often deafening interruption by members of the International Socialist Organisation and Radical Student Union. Footage of the disruption can be seen here. Despite the students’ prolonged attempts to intimidate Feder and prevent the intended discussion taking place – a goal they accomplished – campus officials later claimed that Feder “chose to discontinue his speech.” An interesting, and revealing, choice of words.

Christina Hoff Sommers on feminist scholarship: 

The problem with a lot of research on women is not so much that the authors make mistakes — we all make mistakes — the problem is that the mistakes are impervious to criticism.

For a flavour of that imperviousness and some feminist reactions to being corrected, see also this. 

Glenn Reynolds on unsustainable ideologies: 

I’m reminded of what Robert Heinlein said about hippies: “Hippydom is not itself a culture (as the hippies seem to think) as it has no economic foundation; it can exist only as a parasitic excrescence to the ‘square’ culture.” So too with the academic humanities, which have largely squandered the moral and intellectual capital they once possessed by adopting the roles of adversaries to, rather than preservers of, the larger culture. This, too, turns out not to be sustainable.

That adversarial role-play has been discussed here many times, along with its descent into psychodrama. 

And Ed Driscoll discovers there are no socialists in divorce court: 

Michael Moore, who has spent his entire career attacking capitalism, wealth, and Wall Street, is suddenly very protective concerning the capital, wealth and investments he has amassed over the years. As Christian Toto writes at Big Hollywood, “Far-left filmmaker Michael Moore is divorcing his wife, and the looming court battle looks ugly already.” Christian links to this Smoking Gun report, which notes that “the couple’s combined assets are likely worth tens of millions of dollars,” including “multiple substantial residences and multiple companies.”

But America’s most outspoken socialist, being an outspoken socialist, deserves nine properties, including an agreeable Upper West Side apartment valued at $1.27 million and, naturally, a mansion. This, remember, is a self-described multimillionaire who told the world, quite boldly, “Capitalism did nothing for me.” 

As always, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

A message from the young thinkers of the University College London Union: 

This Union resolves to… struggle against fascism and the far-right… with the perspective of fighting the root cause of fascism – capitalism.

Apparently fascism is “far-right” – a claim that Mussolini and Hitler, avowed socialists, might have found puzzling – and is caused by capitalism. And not caused by, say, dogmatic collectivism and its endless justifications for authoritarian urges. Urges not unlike those of the Union itself, with its intent to ban student groups that it deems both “sexist” and “anti-Marxist,” and which therefore must be met with “unconditional resistance.” To say nothing of the Union’s somewhat ambitious plan to bring about “a socialist transformation of society.”  

Via BenSix. 

Tim Worstall reads The Lancet, where socialism trumps reality: 

Lifespans are still getting longer, communicable disease continues to reduce, age adjusted cancer rates are falling: there’s simply no evidence at all that the health of the population is declining. So, given that we’ve not got any sign whatsoever of declining health, it’s very difficult indeed to say that increasing inequality is causing something that isn’t happening.

And again here. When supposedly learned people talk unironically about “social justice,” a good mental response is “yellow alert.”

Some random thoughts from Thomas Sowell: 

In Thomas Piketty’s highly-praised new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he asserts that the top tax rate under President Herbert Hoover was 25 percent. But Internal Revenue Service records show that it was 63 percent in 1932. If Piketty can’t even get his facts straight, why should his grandiose plans for confiscatory global taxation be taken seriously?

Why indeed? 

And via D in the comments, Aurelius marvels at the wonders of modern academia. Specifically, the winning oratory in the Cross Examination Debate Association’s national championship. I implore you to watch the video of highlights. It’s a thing to behold, serving as both a bold new standard for eloquent persuasion and a measure of the education these young ladies have received. Here’s a very brief transcript:

Uh, man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs, uh, the, inside the trauma of representation that turns into the black child devouring and identifying with the stories and into the white culture brought up, uh, de de de de de, dink, and add subjectively like a white man, the black man!

Go Team Dada. Embrace the jive.

As always, feel free to share your own links and snippets below.