The California city is named after the Catholic saint, the mother of St. Augustine. Her feast day is today, 27 August.
Now bring before your mind all of the wonderful place-names of Christian provenience. Do we have a plan to stop the barbarians when they, as they inevitably will, begin defacing, destroying, and re-naming?
William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:
Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status. Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.
I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis. In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.' And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations. One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table. One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.
In an abdication of authority that part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it. I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it. So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.
Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)
The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers. The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions. My chairman at the time was an officious organization man who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness. Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places.
Is Jones a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers. This is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.
I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance. Here is a review.
From his latest (emphasis added):
One of the arguments against Trump last year from critics ostensibly worried about the “integrity of conservatism” was that he would revert to Manhattanite liberalism. He hasn’t. But they have. They can be heard whining about his ban on cross-dressers and transsexuals in the military, his insufficient enthusiasm for Islamic migrants, and now his defense of Robert E. Lee.
Paul Ryan, deferring to the propaganda of the commissars, says Trump “messed up” with his post-Charlottesville remarks. Leave it to the stupid party to ratify the lies of the left. Trump said nothing untrue and has behaved far more honorably than his cowardly “conservative” critics. They joined the anti-Lee mob; he didn’t. Remember that the next time one of those critics clears his throat pompously about the “threat that Trump poses to the conservative movement.” Those who use that phrase the most advance it the least.
Neumayr punches effectively at the likes of Bozo de Blasio, Commissar Cuomo, Bret Stephens, and Bill 'Crack Up' Kristol.
Before we get under way, a song in celebration of President Trump's pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. A stinging rebuke to Obama & Co. and their contempt for the rule of law.
Bobby Fuller Five, I Fought the Law and the Law Won
………………………..
Canned Heat, Help Me. Help me consolate my weary mind. I love that 'consolate.'
Johnny Cash, Help Me.
Beach Boys, Help Me, Rhonda
Hank Williams, I Can't Help it If I'm Still in Love with You. Linda Ronstadt's version is wonderful, but does it get the length of the great Patsy Cline's?
Ringo Starr, With a Little Help from My Friends
Elvis Presley, Can't Help Falling in Love
Highwaymen, Help Me Make it Through the Night
Joni Mitchell, Help Me
Hank Locklin, Please Help Me, I'm Falling
Here is Skeeter Davis' answer to Hank.
And conservatives cheer. Of course. Paul Mirengoff gets it right:
Arpaio was accused by the Obama Justice Department and other left-wingers of targeting Hispanics. Indeed, the legal case that led to his conviction arose from claims of racial profiling. But in Maricopa County, the illegal immigrant population is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Had the County been plagued by mass illegal immigration by Koreans, chances are Sheriff Joe would have targeted Asians. And he would have been right to do so. Sheriffs shouldn’t be expected to check their common sense at the door.
To be sure, the pardon of Arpaio is, at least in part, a political act by a president who campaigned on a tough-as-nails immigration policy and who received Arpaio’s backing. But there’s a pretty good argument that the prosecution of Arpaio was also political.
It was the highly politicized, left-wing Obama Justice Department that chose to prosecute Arpaio in connection with the hot button political issue of enforcing immigration laws. The judge whose order Arpaio defied apparently was satisfied with civil contempt. Team Obama went criminal on the octogenarian sheriff. And it did so, according to Arpaio’s lawyers, just two weeks before he stood for reelection.
The pardon thus can be said to represent a political end to a political case.
Some may defend the pardon by comparing it to egregious pardons of the past, like President Clinton’s pardon of wealthy fugitive Marc Rich and President Obama’s pardon of a Puerto Rican terrorist. Arguing form [from] these outliers strikes me as misguided. Their pardons were so flagrantly unjust that the same argument could be used to defend a great many indefensible pardons.
No such argument is required to defend Trump’s pardon of Arpaio. It was a reasonable exercise of the pardon power.
Clinton and Obama used the pardon power destructively, pardoning scumbags. Trump used it constructively, pardoning one who upheld the rule of law.
You say Arpaio is a racist? Do you understand that illegal aliens do not constitute a race?
But there is no point in addressing liberals with rational arguments. They don't inhabit the plane of reason. They will ignore your arguments and go right back to calling you a racist. They have found that that works, and they are out to win by any means.
Other wives say to their men: "Why can't you be like so-and-so?" My wife regularly tells me that she's glad I'm not like so-and-so.
Grateful wife, happy life. I bless the day I found her.
'Profiling' drives liberals crazy, which is a good reason to do more of it. No day without political incorrectness. Here is a form of profiling I engage in, and you should too.
You are on the freeway exercising due diligence. You are not drunk or stoned or yapping on a cell phone. You espy an automotively dubious vehicle up ahead, muddied, dented, with muffler about to fall off, and a mattress 'secured' to the roof. The vehicle is within its lane, but weaving.
Do you keep your distance? If you are smart, you do. But then you a profiling. You are making a judgment as to the relative likelihood of that vehicle's being the cause of an accident. You are inferring something about the sort of person that would be on the road in such a piece of junk. Tail light out? Then maybe brakes bad. Weaving? Then maybe texting or sexting.
I don't need to tell you motorcyclists how important automotive profiling is.
You are doing right. You are engaging in automotive profiling. You are pissing off liberals. They will call you a racist, but keep it up and stay alive. We need more of your kind.
To say of Trump or anyone that he is divisive is to say that he promotes (political) division. But there is no need to promote it these days since we already have plenty of it. We are a deeply and perhaps irreparably divided nation. So it is not right to say that Trump is divisive: he is standing on one side of an already existing divide.
Trump did not create the divide between those who stand for the rule of law and oppose sanctuary cities, porous borders, and irresponsibly lax legal immigration policies. What he did is take up these issues fearlessly, something his milque-toast colleagues could not bring themselves to do.
And he has met with some success: illegal immigration is down some 50%.
Liberals call him a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe. That they engage in this slander shows that the nation is bitterly divided over fundamental questions.
Too often journalistic word-slingers shoot first and ask questions never. Wouldn't it be nice if they thought before their lemming-like and knee-jerk deployment of such adjectives as 'divisive'?
Language matters.
From William Voegeli, Liberals, Shipwrecked:
As a result, identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate. (emphasis added)
I have a confession to make. I voted for Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991. But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.
One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle.
Is there one Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this party of obstructionist crapweasels is bereft of moral sense. (I seem to be warming to my theme.) Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases.
Willie Horton was one bad hombre.
Aayan Hirsi Ali, Why is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals?
PayPal bans Jihad Watch.
Santa Monica tries but fails to prevent Dennis Prager from conducting.
Earlier this evening I was watching Tucker Carlson. He had a psychology professor on whose YouTube videos had been blocked by Google but then later unblocked. His name is Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. I had never heard of him, and his performance on Carlson's show was not particularly impressive. Having viewed his The Problem with Atheism, however, I am now impressed!
My finding of this video is serendipitous in that it ties in with a discussion I was having yesterday with Malcolm Pollack. Malcolm is a naturalist and atheist in the Dennett-Dawkins-Harris camp. He seems to think that an objective, agreed-upon, and life-enhancing morality has no need of a transcendent foundation, and perhaps also that there is no need that the majority believe in any such transcendent foundation. In an earlier thread Malcolm wrote:
. . . one can accept the principle of equality before the law, based on a fundamental sense of shared humanity and liberty, merely as a stipulation, a premise one accepts because one thinks it leads to a just society, without belief in a transcendent foundation in God. It is simply a choice that a person, or a society, can make; we do that with all sorts of other premises and conventions.
I replied:
Can someone who emphasizes the biologically-based differences between groups and sees cultural differences percolating up out of those differences [justifiably] appeal to a "sense of shared humanity" sufficiently robust to support equality before the law?
It may be that the West is running on fumes, the last vapors of the Judeo-Christian worldview and that your sense of equal justice for all is but a vestige of that dying worldview. Can belief in that moral code survive when belief in a transcendent Ground thereof is lost? The death of God has consequences, as Nietzsche appreciated.
This is the question that Professor Peterson addresses with passion and skill and with a slam or two at Sam Harris. (3:03) Peterson's point is essentially the one that Nietzsche made: belief in and respect for the authority of Christian morality stands and falls with belief in the Christian God. The death of God-belief in the West among the educated classes leads inevitably to moral nihilism.
Malcolm thinks we needn't drag the Transcendent into it; we can just agree on some set of moral conventions that will guide us. Sounds utopian to me. We don't agree on anything anymore: so how can we agree on this? Because it would be the rational thing to do to insure human flourishing?
But why should one care about the flourishing of anyone outside of oneself and one's tribe? Peterson raises the question of why it would be irrational, say, to exploit others for one's use and enjoyment. Why is it irrational for the strong to enslave the weak? How is pure naked self-interest irrational, Peterson asks. (3:53)
Your move, Malcolm.
At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going home to the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? He who loves the things of this world as if they are ultimate realities ought perhaps to hope that death is annihilation.
Too obscure
To be forgot
Here lies one real
Enough to rot.
Each day's newsfeed brings another dozen or so examples of how libs and lefties are losing their collective marbles and earning their epithets libtard and leftard. Here is just one recent example for your astonishment:
It was a story too dumb to be real: reports yesterday emerged from ESPN critic Clay Travis at Outkick the Coverage that ESPN had pulled an Asian announcer named Robert Lee off a University of Virginia college football game to avoid offending idiots. I have to admit, I didn’t think it could be true. How unbelievably stupid do you have to be to think that someone whose name is similar to a Confederate general – albeit absent the all-important middle initial – would lead to triggering and upset viewers if he called a Charlottesville-based sporting event.
Please pray for these sick puppies. Unfortunately, many of them are not just sick but vicious to boot which suggests that harsher treatments may be called for.
This relates to my earlier discussion with Dr. Novak. See articles referenced infra. A reader thinks the following syllogism establishes its conclusion:
b) The contingent does not have necessity from itself;
Ergo
c) The contingent is caused.
An argument establishes its conclusion just in case: (i) the argument is deductive; (ii) the argument is valid in point of logical form; (iii) the premises are all of them objectively certain. Establish is a very strong word; it is as strong as, and equivalent to, prove.
The argument above is a valid deductive argument, and the minor is true by definition. The major, however, is not objectively certain. In fact, it is not even true. The impossible doesn't have necessity from itself, but it has no cause since it doesn't exist.
But a repair is easily made. Substitute for (a)
a*) Whatever exists, but does not have necessity from itself, is caused.
Then the argument, for all we know, might be sound. But it still does not establish its conclusion. For the major, even if true, is not objectively certain. Ask yourself:
Is the negation of the repaired major a formal-logical contradiction? No. Is it an analytic proposition? No. Does it glow with the light of Cartesian self-evidence like 'I seem to see a tree' or 'I feel nauseous'? No.
So how can Novak & Co. be objectively certain that (a*) is true? This proposition purports to be about objective reality; it purports to move us beyond logical forms, concepts, and mental states. Nice work if you can get it, to cop a signature phrase from the late, great David M. Armstrong. (For the record: I reject Armstrong's naturalism and atheism.)
I conjecture that it is the overwhelmingly strong doxastic security needs of dogmatists that prevent them from appreciating what I am saying. They cannot tolerate uncertainty, and so they manufacture a certainty that isn't there.
That being said, Dr. Novak may like my Pascalian conjecture that it is due to the Fall of Man that we are in this suboptimal epistemic predicament, the predicament of craving certainty without being able to attain it.
