Little soap hands. 

“Actual soap, shaped like little hands.” In a bag. $12.00 

Or, slightly larger soap hands. $10.00

Busy today, but feel free to browse some short films or peruse the greatest hits, or just rummage around in the archives.

KC Johnson has begun to wind down his outstanding Durham in Wonderland blog, which details the infamous Duke “rape” case, along with the PC prejudice and general bad faith of various “activist” faculty members. Those with an interest in tenured ideologues and hokum merchants will find plenty to entertain, and it’s worth casting an eye over this table, which prompts the following comment from a DIW reader:

“Looking at the departmental affiliations of the good guys it’s hard not to conclude that the widest gulf on campus is not the one separating black and white or the one separating men and women, but the one separating the quantitative, fact-based disciplines from what the humanities have deteriorated into. Whether universities survive as useful institutions will depend on whether the anti-rationalists can be exorcised.”

I’m not exactly sure how the culprits (and the cultural environment in which they flourish) might be “exorcised”, so I guess large swathes of academia will continue to decline, in terms of both substance and reputation. Or perhaps there will come a point at which drastic measures have to be taken in order to save the institution from the accumulation of parasites on its back. Maybe parents will no longer be willing to pay $40,000 a year for their children to be misled and stupefied at the hands of, say, Wahneema Lubiano, who labels herself a “post-structuralist teacher-critic leftist” and who sees no reason to distinguish between her role in the classroom and her bizarre political “activism”.

Related. And. (H/T. The Thin Man.)

Here’s footage of British troops unwittingly testing LSD, circa 1953/54. The experiments were supposedly to determine the drug’s value as a “non-lethal incapacitating weapon.” Hilarity ensues. One soldier attempts to feed the birds by climbing a tree. “The efficiency of the rocket launcher team was also very impaired.”

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Related. And.

Today seems as good a day as any to read Daphne Patai’s article on academia and denial, Letter to a Friend: On Islamic Fundamentalism, written September 11, 2006.

“It’s true I share your distaste for all types of religious fundamentalism. But that doesn’t prevent me from noting the different demands and agendas of each type, as well as their numbers and influence in the real world today… Nor, if one tracks their actions, which is far more important than their rhetoric, does it appear that each type of fundamentalism is equally harmful, equally destructive in its influence around the world… If you are still tempted to worry as much, as you wrote, about Christian fundamentalists as about Muslim ones, just ask yourself about the agenda of each group, their numbers, their geographical presence, their past and present violent actions, the political responses to them, and the sort of press they each get in the West.”

More. Related. And.

Published in 3:AM magazine, here’s my discussion with the Muslim novelist and exile Tahir Aslam Gora. On Islam, freedom and denial.

“It seems to me that the ideas being expressed most freely are far from tolerant and those who call for a more open-minded formulation of Islam are most likely to be intimidated or suppressed. One might note the recent experience of the reformist author Taslima Nasreen, whose book launch ended in her being violently assaulted by Islamic lawmakers and members of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, whose piety entailed throwing chairs at a terrified woman. Hyderabad police even filed a case against Nasreen for allegedly ‘creating religious tensions’ and writing ‘provocative literature’ – which rather highlights the scale of the change in outlook that’s required.”