Kevin Williamson on cultural critic Lee Siegel and other student loan deadbeats: 

The justifications are piled high: [Siegel] comes from a modest background and finds it unfair that other people have had advantages denied him. He declares it “absurd” — making no case, only the declaration — that he could “amass crippling debt as a result, not of drug addiction or reckless borrowing and spending, but of going to college.” Never mind that his borrowing and spending was, in fact, reckless, and that an Ivy League degree or three is every bit an item of conspicuous consumption and a status symbol as a Lamborghini.

To default on a loan because you do not wish to pay it back is theft, in this case theft from all of us, since the federal government is on the hook for the loans in question… We hear variations on Siegel’s argument that education is a social good, that we should be glad to have spent whatever sum we spent in order to avail ourselves of his “particular usefulness to society.” This is an example of the special-snowflake philosophy of social organisation: Yes, your feminist slam-poetry collective is very, very impressive — but even T. S. Eliot went to the office six days a week when literary life wasn’t paying the bills.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for someone – a grown man in his fifties, writing in the New York Times – who believes that paying his debts as agreed, as millions of others do, would entail wasting his life, due to his enormously artistic “usefulness to society,” i.e., his self-imagined talent as a profound and insightful writer. A claim somewhat undermined by his own self-flattering article and its thin rationalisations. The short version of Mr Siegel’s article would be, “Fuck you, taxpayers. I’m an artist and intellectual.” But that wouldn’t present him in the all-important and very much expected Heroic Victim Light.

On the subject of student loans and baffling choices, see also this and this. 

Ed Driscoll probes the mental fever swamp of Ms Naomi Wolf. Including her theory that American troops building field hospitals in Liberia were actually there to secretly take Ebola back to the U.S., and thereby justify “emergency measures” and “quarantining Americans.”

Theodore Dalrymple shares a tale of underclass moral squalor and the role played by the state: 

Never in the book is there any recognition that a mother whose children meant “the world” to her should not leave them in the care of an obvious psychopath or go to bed so drunk that she does not even realise that she has vomited in her sleep.

Needless to say, it’s not a happy tale and not for the squeamish.

Michael J Totten relays the splendour of a notable megalomaniac:  

Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedov just erected a 69-foot statue of himself in the centre of Ashgabat, the capital [of Turkmenistan]. He’s up there on a golden horse atop an enormous slab of marble that looks like an iceberg. He’s compensating. Two years ago he fell off a horse at an official race. The only reason we even know this is because a brave person in the audience captured it on amateur video and uploaded it to the internet. All the other riders rode past him as he lay flat on his back in the dirt, but he was declared the winner regardless and awarded an 11 million dollar prize for his “performance.” This clown follows President Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in 2006 of heart failure. He renamed months of the year after himself and his family. He built a 60-foot statue of himself that slowly rotated so that his face was always in sunlight.

The first in a possible series.  

But really, Berdimuhamedov’s statue. You should see the thing.

Robert Stacy McCain on bedlamite feminism: 

In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, [Shulamith Firestone] declared that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.” Firestone called for “an end to the incest taboo, through abolition of the family,” so that “sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticise our whole culture.” She flatly declared “pregnancy is barbaric,” described women as “the slave class,” and envisioned a “new society” in which “humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality — all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged.” The fact that Shulamith Firestone was clinically insane (a paranoid schizophrenic who died alone in 2012 at age 67) might serve as sufficient rebuttal to her doctrine, but by the time her madness became evident — she was committed to a psychiatric unit in 1987 — the radical movement she helped launch had gained a solid foothold in academia, publishing, law and politics.

David Clemens on academia’s Clown Quarter and its self-inflicted decline: 

The Modern Language Association is the world’s largest organisation for scholars of literature and languages with about 24,000 members in over 100 countries. Like the rest of academia, the MLA leans solidly to the left, yet it still includes a “Radical Caucus” and a leftist “Politics and the Profession” subgroup. One older gent from the Radical Caucus sports a hammer-and-sickle lapel pin; another member works to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin’s reputation… Is there anything more absurd than a handful of academics retailing their revolutionary fantasies in the Grand Ballroom of a luxury hotel?

Professor Clemens was a voice of reason in the excellent documentary Indoctrinate U. 

And David Hookstead spots more campus leftists signalling their brilliance to an unworthy world: 

An upcoming workshop scheduled to take place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to teach campus radicals and socialists how to manipulate campus resources to advance their agenda… One of the group’s overall goals, according to their website, is to “reveal and challenge the North American university as a site working at the junction of settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and other systems of domination and exploitation.” The event includes sessions investigating what it means to be a thief, how to construct political narratives, and how to destabilise hegemonic spatial representations.

Given the costs of being a student whose time is spent engaged in pretentious Marxoid seething, and given how unlikely it is that such seething will attract employers or a salary, it may not surprise readers that the organisers are also very much opposed to “debt and hierarchies of knowledge.” Being expected to pay your bills as agreed – say, those misspent student loans – is, we learn, a “means of oppression.” Because destabilising hegemonic spatial representations is something that someone else should be forced to pay for.

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

Cornell University’s “protest community” of around 50 or so leftist students decided to celebrate May Day by disrupting a farewell party and sitting in a road and blocking traffic for over half an hour, while sharing their wisdom with the world. Or rather, sharing it with those on whom they could impose their screeching. Among their collective insights, the following: “Destroy masculinity. Fight the straightness… It is not okay to identify as straight.” Apparently, “masculinity and straightness… exist exclusively to marginalise and profit off of other people.” The declarations of profundity are varied and confusing, and get particularly, um, emotional around 2:42.

Previously. 

George Will on the dysfunctions of academia:  

What I want to talk to you about tonight is the amount of intellectual ingenuity that is now devoted to rationalising the disappearance of free speech… Today’s attack… is an attack on the theory of free speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech… What we have today is an attack on the very possibility of free speech. The belief is that the First Amendment is a mistake.

The bureaucratic farces and assorted psychodramas described by Mr Will may be familiar to regulars of this parish. Though it may be news to some that Texas Tech University, with an undergraduate enrolment of 28,000 people, now confines displays of WrongThought™ to a “free speech gazebo” some twenty feet wide.

Charles C W Cooke on the cultivated pretensions of student “radicals”: 

Take a look at this farcical missive from the Oberlin Review, in which around 150 students at the college claim repeatedly that Christina Hoff Sommers was coming to campus to present not a viewpoint with which many of the students vehemently disagree but rather an actual threat to student safety. Sommers, the signatories contend, is not an academic sharing her work, but a participant “in violent movements” and an accessory to “threats of death and rape.” […] Held hostage by the twin evils of mawkishness and self-indulgence, [the protestors] have taken to masquerading as the martyrs of the piece. You will note, of course, that none of the outraged parties at Oberlin were obliged to attend Sommers’s talk, or even to be on campus while she was being hosted. Had they wished, they could have sat the whole thing out with nary a word. Indeed, it was quite by choice they injected themselves into the event at all.

Ah, but a sense of moral proportion is of no use whatsoever to an in-group of narcissists, poseurs and passive-aggressive harpies. The kind of would-be intellectuals who, instead of doing something else, turn up out of spite to jeer and interrupt – thereby drawing attention to themselves – while making theatrical displays of how “unsafe” they feel when confronted with information they do not like. The kind of would-be intellectuals who claim that theirs is a campus “laden with trauma and sexualized violence,” who pre-emptively slander those who disagree with them, and who respond to criticism with the words, “We could spend all of our time and energy explaining all of the ways she’s harmful. But why should we?”

And Darleen Click quotes the deep, deep wisdom of professor of anthropology and ostentatious male feminist, Melvin Konner: 

In addition to women’s superiority in judgment, their trustworthiness, reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and violence, they live longer, have lower mortality at all ages, are more resistant to most categories of disease, and are much less likely to suffer brain disorders that lead to disruptive and even destructive behaviour. And, of course, they can produce new life from their own bodies, to which men add only the tiniest biological contribution — and one that soon could be done without… There is a birth defect… called maleness… To call being male a syndrome is not an arbitrary judgment.

Yes, “a birth defect… called maleness.” Thank goodness only the finest minds educate your children.