Given recent posts on the University of Delaware’s bizarre indoctrination programme and my comments on corrupting students’ probity, it may be worth revisiting an extract from an interview with Theodore Dalrymple, presented here in longer form. The second paragraph below was brought to mind by Dr Shakti Butler’s claim that “all white people” are racists. I was trying to imagine how a student might react to this assertion and, given the context, how disinclined they might be to respond realistically – and what that unrealism might entail.

My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s… It was always clear that my father’s concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov… I think the great disjunction between my father’s expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement…

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect, and is intended to.

Examples of how the obvious can be ignored with great determination can be found here, here, here and here.

Thanks to ‘flu, I’m preoccupied with the question of exactly how much mucous the average human head can produce. (More than I’d have thought possible, it seems.) Until normal service is resumed, please feel free to browse the archives, or watch some short films, or peruse the greatest hits. The ephemera archive contains somewhere in the region of 700 or so items, so there ought to be something in there to help you pass the time.

Back shortly. Cough.

A victory for FIRE: 

“The University of Delaware has dropped an ideological re-education program that was referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The program’s stated goal was for the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism… Universities often cannot defend in public what they try to do in private, and the situation at Delaware was no exception… While we are pleased that this program is over, it is stunning that it ever existed at a public university in the United States.”

Meanwhile, at the University of Maine, at Tufts, at Duke, and in Seattle’s public schools…

Loving the neighbours. // Vilayanur Ramachandran on phantom limb pain. // Levitating lamp. Not a pretty thing. More. (h/t, Microscopics.) // Images, maps and films of Saturn and its moons. // The Giant Impact Hypothesis. How the Moon came to be, probably. // Soviets in space matchboxes. (h/t, Monoscope.) // Google Sky. // Flash Earth. // A layman’s critique of catastrophic man-made global warming theory. More. (h/t, The Thin Man.) // Impressive bridges.  (h/t, Stephen Hicks.) // The Millau Viaduct. A personal favourite. // How to move an obelisk. // On the evils of lipstick and infidel fashions: “Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed.” // “In only a minority of institutions – approximately 25 per cent – was radical material found.” // Robert Spencer on “Islamophobia”. // The not-so-secret sins of faded revolutionaries. // “The true social parasites are those who demand collectivism for other people while being themselves relatively protected from its consequences.” // What is typography? // Via Coudal, making spiders from scissors. // Make your own Bumble Bee Transformer. // Chinese toy factory workers. // A range of Tokyo vending machines. // One particular vending machine, photographed repeatedly by Ryuuichi Ikeda. Every day, for two years. More. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // South Park: Imaginationland, part 3. Will Butters save the day? // Aroma advertising. (h/t, Metrolander.) // Aromatherapy pens. // Hitler’s flatulence. // Beef made easy. Loin, sirloin, shank and brisket. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s pork chops and gravy.

Further to this, and via Ace, here’s the revenge of bizarro Star Wars.

Avert your eyes, children. Don’t look directly at it.

Via the comments to this, The Thin Man directs readers’ attention to an extraordinary story regarding the University of Delaware and its efforts to correct improper thought:

Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

The University’s “Life Diversity Facilitation Training” document also includes the following definitions:

REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behaviour by people of colour toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give “preferential treatment” to people of colour over whites. In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’ [Page 3]

And,

A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of colour (called “blaming the victim”). Responsibility for perpetuating and legitimizing a racist system rests both on those who actively maintain it, and on those who refuse to challenge it. Silence is consent. [Page 3]

The training document is “presented” by Dr Shakti Butler, who is described here as “a creative and visionary bridge builder” and an “inspirational facilitator”, whose “consulting, writing, and lecturing style supports her use of mind, body, and Spirit or Consciousness as an approach to challenge deeply embedded beliefs and generate new questions.” Presumably, Professor Stanley Fish has no objection to “bridges” being built in this way, or to the term ‘racist’ being applied to “all white people… living in the United States.” And presumably he still believes that students “don’t have to worry” about the spread of campus speech codes and other neurotic sensitivities. Again, I beg to differ. One of the surest ways to erode a person’s probity is to make them repeat in public, among their peers, things they know to be untrue. The more ridiculous the lies, and the greater the mismatch with reality, the greater the effect. That is what is happening here.

Update, via the comments:

Like many other “activists”, Butler obviously isn’t opposed to racism per se. She isn’t arguing for a reciprocal moral principle – i.e. that people shouldn’t be prejudged on the basis of their skin colour or country of origin. She’s simply encouraging paranoia, victimhood and disaffection among students, while apparently indulging her own bizarre racial revenge fantasies. Fantasies which others may begin to share after prolonged and coercive exposure to this lurid nonsense. Having redefined racism as “prejudice + power”, is Dr Butler concerned by her own abuse of influence, or the power wielded by academic institutions like Delaware, or Duke, or by other likeminded educators, administrators and activists? Is she troubled by her own unsupported, overtly racist, efforts to indoctrinate? It seems not. Perpetuating this anxious, non-reciprocal outlook may be politically useful to some leftist ideologues and opportunist pressure groups, or those with serious mental health problems; but it isn’t clear how believing “all white people” are racist helps anyone see further than the colour of a person’s skin. 

Update 2:

Delaware’s Vice President for Student Life, Michael Gilbert, responds to FIRE’s criticisms – evasively and inaccurately. In turn, FIRE responds to Gilbert, rather well, I think. Significantly, Gilbert makes no mention whatsoever of Dr Shakti Butler’s overtly racist and paranoid training document, despite its key role in Delaware’s “diversity facilitation.”

Update 3:

One down in Delaware.

Update 4:

On emasculated liars. 

Feel free to make a donation. I’m going to need trained lions.

Gail Herriot unearths John Ellis’ observations on Tacitus, Terry Eagleton and the political correctness of ancient Rome.

A sophisticated man of letters, disillusioned and even embittered by the flaws, inconsistencies, and retrogressions of a great civilization, deludes himself that a world of primitive innocence and natural goodness exists in peoples who are untouched by the advances of that civilization. So intense are his hostile feelings toward his own society that he is unable to see the one he compares it to with any degree of realism: whatever its actual qualities, it is endowed with all of the human values that he misses in his own. Consequently, he sees his own culture not as an improvement on brutish natural human behaviour but as a departure from a state of natural goodness… Tacitus wanted to see in the Germans the answer to everything that bothered him about his own society, just as the campus radicals of our own time are tempted to see in the contemporary Third World an absence of rank consciousness and hierarchy, of capitalism and greed, of the strong coercing the weak, and of men lording it over women and treating them as playthings.

The whole thing. Related. And. Also. Plus. 

While we’re on the subject of campus censorship, this may be of interest. In a review of Evan Coyne Maloney’s film Indoctrinate U, Professor Stanley Fish argues that criticism of “speech codes” is misplaced:

Then there’s the matter of speech codes. This is a fake issue. Every speech code that has been tested in the courts has been struck down, often on the very grounds — you can’t criminalize offensiveness — invoked by Maloney. Even though there are such codes on the books of some universities, enforcing them will never hold up. Students don’t have to worry about speech codes.

Setting aside for a moment the loaded and often ludicrous nature of campus speech codes and their potential for malicious exploitation – and setting aside the enormous waste of time, effort and money that attempts to enforce them entail – Fish’s claim is still glib and disingenuous. Perhaps Professor Fish imagines that every student unfortunate enough to be charged with a speech code violation – say, for causing “embarrassment” while on college property – has the perseverance and wherewithal to challenge those codes and fight their enforcement in court – a process that may take months, even years, and no small amount of money.

Given the loaded nature of many speech codes – and given the leanings of those most keen to implement them and most keen to file complaints – unilateral license can be given to the feelings and beliefs of certain “protected” groups. It would be naïve to assume that some members of those groups – and of some groups in particular – won’t exploit that advantage for purposes of their own. If designated victim groups discover that they receive compensation for injured feelings, or some other leverage, then those groups have an incentive to be “offended” all the more – and all the more emphatically. Thus a climate is created, and possibly a feedback loop. Professor Fish may assume that the pretentious, neurotically ‘sensitive’ atmosphere in which such codes exist – despite their alleged ineffectiveness – is a trivial, costless matter and something to be dismissed out of hand. But students on the receiving end may disagree. 

Related, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And.

Protecting your livestock from atomic attack. With good planning and lots of hay. (1965) // Online B-movies. Attack of the Monsters!, The Atomic Brain! A festival of trash. // Shrooms. Unwary mushroom enthusiasts learn stern moral lesson. (h/t, Fungus the Boogyman.) // Attempts to draw time not entirely successful. (h/t, Infosthetics.) // Behold the mechano-titans! Very big digging machines. More. And. // The Earth is hollow. I did not know that. // The clouds of Jupiter. // High-resolution images of Mars. Taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. // Via Coudal, the blog of unnecessary quotation marks. // “In a mediocracy, real cultural progress is impossible because it requires conditions that are incompatible with a commitment to egalitarianism.” // Christopher Hitchens on the term ‘Islamofascism’. // The Conservative Muslim Forum affirms right to disassemble democracy: “If a political party wishes to campaign for the abolition of democracy in the UK and its replacement with a totalitarian system, why should it not be free to do so?” // F-14 low flyby and sonic boom. (mpg) // David Mach’s coat hanger gorilla. // Brooklyn woman finds 7-foot python in toilet. (h/t, Ace.) // The 31 wheel roller suit. (h/t, The Thin Man.) // South Park: Imaginationland. Part 2. // Classic London Cafés. From the golden age of Formica. // Via Coudal, how to make vodka pills. // Baby mouse wine. // And, via Metrolander, Who put the Benzedrine in Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine?

Further to this, this and this, here’s Walter Williams on speech codes, ‘sensitivity’ and shoehorning claptrap into soft student brains: 

When college admissions officials make their recruitment visits, they don’t tell parents that their children will learn “whiteness is a form of racial oppression”, or that they sponsor racially segregated orientations, dorms and graduation ceremonies.

Related: Evan Coyne Maloney’s Indoctrinate U. (h/t, Stephen Hicks.)