Another great column by Victor Davis Hanson.
Category: Leftism and Political Correctness
Political Correctness: The Phrase and the Concept
William Voegli claims that the phrase first entered the American vocabulary in 1991. I don't know about that, but I do know that the concept is much older: PC derives from the CP, as I explain in Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness.
German Home Schoolers Seek Asylum in USA
Home-schooling is illegal in Germany. So, "In 2008, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike left Germany with their five children and came to the United States asking for refugee status as an oppressed minority."
So they left Germany to seek asylum in Left-Fascist Amerika. There is a touch of irony here. Well, we are not as far gone as the "land of poets and thinkers." (Heinrich Heine) Not yet, leastways.
The reason for the disallowance of home schooling is that the powers that be don't want the formation of "parallel societies" (Parallelgesellschaften). That's a real knee-slapper given the green light to Muslim immigration and the Islamization of Germany. No "parallel societies" unless they are politically correct parallel societies.
The Pee Cee, you see, are 'inclusive.' Even unto their own extermination. The Germans seem especially PC-whipped.
It is perhaps not irrelevant that the Romeikes are Christians. Nor that ". . . one of the oldest universities in Germany inaugurated the country's first taxpayer-funded department of Islamic theology. The Center for Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen is the first of four planned Islamic university centers in Germany." (Ibid.)
Read about the Romeikes here. It turns out that their request for asylum was denied.
Lest We Profile . . .
Well, we are all equally apt to engage in terrorism, right?
Wise up, liberals. To help you, I wrote the article below. PeeCee can get you killed. (Image credit: Sam Harris)
Next Stop the Twilight Zone: Forbidden Descriptors
Here. Hardly a day goes by without a half-dozen new examples of willful liberal stupidity. It has to be willful: nobody could be this inherently devoid of common sense.
The PC-Whipped Germans
This is unbelievable. (HT: Mike Valle)
Copy Editors and Political Correctness
The Recent Referrers list pointed me to this old Feser post that links to a similar protest of mine. Excerpt:
At least the PC “non-sexist” stuff is not entirely the fault of copy editors, however. Many publishers of academic books and journals insist on this “inclusive language” nonsense, and it is an outrage. It is bad enough that one has to listen to PC-whipped academics at colloquia and the like gratuitously inserting “she” into their talks and comments wherever they can so as to prove their feminist bona fides. At least there one can just roll one’s eyes, say a quick prayer for the poor soul, and move on to the refreshments. But to have this ideological use of language foisted upon one by an editor is no more defensible than a requirement that all submissions reflect (say) a commitment to direct reference theory or four-dimensionalist metaphysics.
Ed outdid himself with the coinage 'PC-whipped.' I trust my astute readers will understand to which similar expression he is alluding.
Liberal Education and Government Abuses
Peter Berkowitz has an excellent column under an awful title: Tenets of Liberal Education Underpin Government Abuses. (I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that Berkowitz chose the title.) The problem is not liberal education. The problem is the hijacking of liberal education by leftists, and the PoMo Prez who is a product of left-hijacked educational institutions. Excerpt:
The administration’s misleading of the public reflects a teaching that is common to much literary theory, sociology, anthropology, political theory, and legal theory on college campuses today: Knowledge is socially constructed, and therefore the narrative is all.
The very word 'narrative' should raise eyebrows and and set off your LBD (leftist bullshit detector). A narrative is a story, and stories needn't be true. Talk of narratives is a way of suppressing the crucial question: But is it true?
Knowledge is socially transmitted, but not socially constructed. The very notion is incoherent.
Universities as Leftist Seminaries
'Seminary,' like 'seminar,' is etymologically related to 'semen,' seed.
mid-15c., "plot where plants are raised from seeds," from Latin seminarium "plant nursery," figuratively, "breeding ground," from seminarius "of seed," from semen (genitive seminis) "seed" (see semen). Meaning "school for training priests" first recorded 1580s; commonly used for any school (especially academies for young ladies) from 1580s to 1930s. Seminarian "seminary student" is attested from 1580s.
The universities today are places where the seeds of leftism are planted in skulls full of mush.
See Harvey Mansfield, The Higher Education Scandal.
"Today’s liberals do not use liberalism to achieve excellence, but abandon excellence to achieve liberalism."
L.A. Schools: No Suspension/Expulsion for Willful Defiance
I said a few entries back that liberals lack common sense. Here is further proof, as if further proof is needed:
This week, the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second-largest in the
nation—decided to end the practice of suspending or expelling students for
"willful defiance," starting this fall. District officials said the practice
disproportionately affects minority students' education and leads to more
disciplinary problems for students down the line.
Both the policy and the justification for it are insane. That the policy is crazy is self-evident to anyone of sound mind. The justification too is completely crack-brained. It assumes that the only reason minority students are disproportionately affected by the old expulsion rule is because they are unjustly discriminated against on the basis of their skin color. But that is obviously false: the minorities are disproportionately affected and 'overrepresented' among the ones expelled because they are disproportionately trouble-causing. It is not their skin color, but their bad behavior that explains why they get expelled and suspended more often.
Liberals cannot see this because they are blinded by their politically correct notion that all groups are equal in every respect and so differential outcomes have to be chalked up to racism. Too many liberals are willfully stupid people in willful defiance of common sense and we ought to expel them from the precincts of the reasonable before they do any more damage to educational institutions.
Contemporary liberals have something like the opposite of the Midas Touch. Everything King Midas touched turned to gold. Everything a liberal touches turns to dreck.
Or can you think of a counterexample?
What is to be Done?
What is to be done about the threat of radical Islam? After explaining the problem, Pat Buchanan gives his answer:
How do we deal with this irreconcilable conflict between a secular West and a resurgent Islam?
First, as it is our presence in their world that enrages so many, we should end our interventions, shut down the empire and let Muslim rulers deal with Muslim radicals.
Second, we need a moratorium on immigration from the Islamic world. Inevitably, some of the young we bring in, like the Tsarnaevs, will yield to radicalization and seek to strike a blow for Islam against us.
What benefit do we derive as a people to justify the risks we take by opening up America to mass migration from a world aflame with hatred and hostility over race, ethnicity, culture, history and faith?
Why are we bringing all of the world's quarrelsome minorities, and all the world's quarrels with them, into our home?
What we saw in Boston was the dark side of diversity.
Buchanan is right. We will never be able to teach the backward denizens of these God-forsaken regions how to live. And certainly not by invasion and bombing. Besides, what moral authority do we have at this point? We are a country in dangerous fiscal, political, and moral decline. The owl of Minerva is about to spread her wings. We will have our hands full keeping ourselves afloat for a few more years. Until we wise up and shape up, a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands is only common sense.
Common sense, however, is precisely what liberals lack. So I fear things will have to get much worse before they get better.
The Liberal Quota Mentality Illustrated Once Again
If blacks make up 12% of the student population, then blacks ought to make up 12% of school expulsions. Fair is fair. Discrimination on the basis of skin color is wrong. But in Clark County, Nevada, in 2009-2010 black student expulsions were at 43% of the student population. So Clark County is racist. Blacks are being targeted just because of their skin color.
How could anyone resist such cogent reasoning?
It is shocking but true: minority students are overrepresented in expulsions and suspensions.
Any morally decent person should be able to appreciate that justice demands that minority students be represented proportionately.
Story here.
Companion post: Diversity and the Quota Mentality
Your Federal Right Not to be Offended
Related: Of Black Holes and Political Correctness: If You Take Offense, Is that My Fault?
We were talking of Hawking. I said 'black hole.' You heard 'black ho' and took offense . . . . Is that my problem?
Do you really want to maintain that something is offensive just in virtue of someone's taking it to be offensive? Do you really think that there is no call for a distinction between the objectively offensive and the merely subjectively offensive?
If you are that preternaturally deficient in intellect, then I am offended, deeply and personally offended.
Critical Thinking Versus Utopian Thinking
Critical thinking is not necessarily opposed to the status quo. To criticize is not to oppose, but to sift, to assess, to assay, to evaluate. The etymology of krinein suggests as much. A critical thinker may well end up supporting the existing state of things in this or that respect. It is a fallacy of the Left to think that any supporter of any aspect of the status quo is an 'apologist' for it in some pejorative sense of this term. After all, some aspects of the status quo may be very good indeed, and others may be unimprovable without making things worse in other respects.
The notion that critical thinking entails opposition to the status quo presumably has its roots in the nihilism of the Left. Leftists are often incapable of appreciating what actually exists because they measure it against a standard that does not exist, and that in many cases cannot exist. It is the leftist Nowhere Man who judges the topos quo from the vantage point of utopia. There is no place like utopia, of course, but only because utopia is no place at all.
Just as leftists do not own dissent, they are not the sole proprietors of a critical attitude. Kritische Theorie as used by members of the Frankfurt School is a tendentious and self-serving expression.
The Madness of Liberal Moralizing
Heather Mac Donald's piece starts off like this:
The paradoxes of liberal morality were on glaring display last week. The Obama administration OK’d the sale of “Plan B” post-coital emergency contraception over the counter without prescription (or parental consent) to girls as young as 15. At the same time, the City Council moved a step closer to banning anyone under the age of 21 from buying cigarettes (the legal age is now 18).
Holy smoke! (Or as my boyhood pal Joe Odegaard used to say, fumus sanctus!)
The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is 'tobacco.'
For more on the antics of the 'tobacco wackos,' see my Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms category. There is plenty there to get you libruls 'up in arms.'