Category: Leftism and Political Correctness

Political Correctness and Left-Wing Bias in the Universities

Liberal profs admit they would discriminate.

Captive Minds: Conformity and Campus Intellectuals  Excerpt (emphasis added):

Working for four years at this prairie college, I had many opportunities to see political correctness in action: in our so-called “equity” hiring practices, in changes to our course offerings to highlight racial and sexual diversity, and in the unfailing faux-reverence with which all aspects of Aboriginal literature and culture were treated, even down to a discussion about whether, in a job advertisement, we should refer to Canada by its indigenous name of Turtle Island.

But this was not a matter of political correctness alone: it was collective thinking in its most blatant form. There were striking parallels to what Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind analyzes as the intellectual’s not-unwilling accommodations to Party orthodoxy. Milosz was interested not only in the compulsions of totalitarianism but in the significant emotional and psychological attractions of the Communist system: the reassurances and rewards of ceding responsibility for judgment, and the manifold reasons why an intellectual could find himself at home in conformity. Can it be that, even free of threat or compulsion, many intellectuals will choose to surrender their independence of thought? C.S. Lewis wrote about the seductive pleasures of belonging in “The Inner Ring,” brilliantly highlighting the desire planted deep in the heart of every human being to be approved, acknowledged as “one of us” by people we admire. To get into that charmed circle, Lewis warned, many of us will assent to nearly anything.

No matter the reigning orthodoxy — in our department it was, as in the vast majority of English departments across North America, Leftist, anti-Western, feminist, and multiculturalist — the desire to fall in line, and to compel or outlaw those who do not, seems to be an enduring fact of human nature.

Milosz's Captive Mind is essential reading.  Your humble correspondent has of course read it, but he has yet to blog it.  He really ought to. 

In the Face of Totalitarians

In the face of totalitarians one cannot retreat into one's private life for they, being totalitarians, won't allow any private life.  So the conservative is forced willy-nilly to become an activist against his natural tendency.  He must draw a line in the sand and say "This far but no farther."

A minor example.  My friends Peter and Mike who teach at community colleges in Maricopa County, Arizona, were on the rant once again yesterday morning over the smoking ban that went into effect on 1 July.  This draconian ruling forbids smoking anywhere on campus, including parking lots and closed cars in such lots.  Bear in mind that reasonable smoking restrictions were already in effect and that my friends, only one of whom smokes, had no objection to them.

Now what is behind the new ruling?  Nothing but lust for power and a desire on the part of its promoters to outdo themselves in pursuit of PC thereby earning 'brownie-points' with the higher-ups.  (I intend 'brownie-points' as a double-entendre with an allusion to brown-nosing.)

And so the breakfast conversation turned to means of combating the insanity: massive disobedience, smoke-ins, and libertarian 'flash mobs':  the tweets go out, the students and faculty assemble quickly to blow some smoke and then just as quickly disperse.  Imagine several such mobs assembling and dispersing at different open-air campus locations on a single day.

The people charged with enforcement would be overwhelmed, the ruling would be flouted into risibility, and then ignored.

Mockery and derision are powerful weapons and perfectly legitimate when one is dealing with willfully stupid and morally stunted Pee-Cee power-heads.

Companion post:  The Conservative Disadvantage

Photo ID: Eric Holder’s Assault on Common Sense

I was shocked (shocked!) to hear over breakfast a while back that my friend Peter L. will vote for neither Obama nor Romney.  All my posts about how politics is a practical business, how it's always about the lesser of evils,and about how foolish it is to let the best become the enemy of the good have fallen on deaf ears.  But I won't give up on old Peter: he's worth saving from the remnant of his liberal folly.

When you vote for a president, you are not voting for just that one person.  You are voting for his entourage as well.  And for Obama that entourage is a sorry  lot including as it does Eric Holder who became Attorney General.  Remember the outrageous suit his Justice Department brought against Arizona re: S. B. 1070? (See my Arizona category for 1070 posts.)  Now the issues raised by S. B. 1070 are complex.  But the issue raised by photo ID laws is not.  It's a very simple issue and there ought not be any dispute about it whatsoever.  And yet our esteemed Atty Gen'l is going after states with photo ID laws making irresponsible accusations of 'disenfranchisement' and comparing the requirements to poll taxes.

Anyone with common sense ought to be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, a manner to inspire confidence in the citizenry, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc., are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the possibility of fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as one.

Suppose you don't have a driver's license.  How hard is it to get a photo ID?  Not very hard.  In Arizona it costs only $12 and is available at any DMV office.  And it's good for 12 years.  That comes to a dollar a year.  That's a hell of a deal, especially when you consider all the other things you can do with that nifty photo ID such as open a bank account, cash checks, use credit cards, buy alcohol and tobacco products, apply for store credit, secure a library card, etc.  You can now start doing all the things that normal citizens do.  Ain't that grand? You can stop being a nonentity.  Remember what your Uncle Quine taught you, "No entity without identity." If you tell me you don't do any of those things, and don't have any desire to do them, then why are you so interested in voting?  You don't have a bank account, or cash checks, etc., but you have a burning desire to vote?

If you are 65 or older or a recipient of Social Security disability benefits you can get the ID for free.   So what's your excuse for not securing a photo ID?  If you  are that lazy, how informed will you be about the issues on which you have such a burning desire to vote?

Liberals feel that the photo ID requirement will 'disenfranchise' many blacks and other minorities.  This shows that we conservatives have a higher view of you minorities than do your 'keepers,' the Dems. 

Some people want to play the 'numbers game.' They claim that there have only been a few cases of voter fraud.  If you think that, then I refer you to the work of John Fund and Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.  And please note that the number of convictions in courts of law for voter fraud is bound to be much much lower than the actual cases of voter fraud.  And if there are. contrary to fact, very few cases of voter fraud, then, by the same token, there are very few people who lack photo ID. 

But there is no need to play the numbers game at all.  It's matter of principle. Will we have a election system that is credible and worthy of respect or not? 

Those who oppose photo ID have no good reasons, but they have plenty of motives, and I fear that they are of the unsavory kind. 

Who Built the Internet? Obama’s Straw Man Fallacy

This just over the transom:

With respect to your post about how "you didn't build this blog" — really bad example. You built the blog, but Big Government built the internet that allows you to transmit it it to potentially billions of people. So, it's exactly an illustration of what Obama was talking about — you and businesses and everyone are dependent on public infrastructure for rich and fruitful lives.

It's an excellent example.  You must be a liberal.  Here is what Obama said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Let's go through this sentence by sentence.

1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort.  "No man is an island."  No one pulls himself  up by his own bootstraps.    But of course no conservative denies this.  Not even libertarians deny it.  What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down.  He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.

2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure.  But there is no necessary connection to Big Government.  I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school.  And my teaching jobs were all at private schools.  Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education.  That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well.  Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools.  There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school.  A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of course, he is a rare exception.

There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one  grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play.  It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education.  It is also important to  point out that the federal Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S.  But that is a huge separate topic.

3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government.  Obama is confusing the products of collective effort wth the products of government effort.  It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it.    One can work with others without the intrusion of government.  He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure.  The first is a genus, the second a species thereof. 

4. How did the Internet begin?  This from a libertarian site:  "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network."  So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.

But what do we mean by 'Internet'?  Those huge interconnected mainframes?  That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure.  But don't forget the peripherals.  For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC).  Did Big Government provides us with PCs?  No.  It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage.  It was private companies like IBM.  And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed.  Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy?  Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs?  No, but it did provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo.  Germans are great engineers.  But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.

How do you hook up the PC to the Internet?  Via the phone line.  (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government.  Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?)  To convert digital information into analog information  transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem.  Who gave us the modem?  Government functionaries?  Al Gore?  Was Obama the mama of the modem?  Nope.  Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977.  In the private sector.

Back in the day we operated from the  C prompt using DOS commands.  That was before the GUI: graphical user interface.  Who invented that?  Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft.  All in the private sector.

And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)?  Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector.    The WWW is not the same as the Internet.  The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.   The government did not give us the WWW.

Returning now to the blog that I built.  I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No.  That too is in the private sector.

And then there are the search engines.  Did the government give us Google?

Obama is a mendacious no-nothing, a disaster for the country, and the emptiest of empty suits.  Just read his awful speech.  You liberals need to wise up. If you vote for him, you will seal your own doom and get what you deserve for being stupid. 

The Three Greatest Scams of Our Time

Here.  Excerpt:

These three chimeras [the Palestinian faux “narrative,” the environmental craze, and the Obama myth] generally manifest the morbid sense of victimhood and hatred of the modern West that is the most contemptible and dangerous feature of our contemporary world. Israel is a tiny outpost of enlightened modernity that the world wants to see snuffed out and replaced by medieval barbarism and tribal fanaticism; the global warming hoaxers want to roll back technological progress to a condition like that well before the industrial revolution, even before the rise of agrarian societies; and Barack Obama is the first president of the United States who actually despises—and has stated overtly his desire to “fundamentally transform”—the founding principles and way of life of the freest and most dynamic society ever known.

What sustains these programs of dissolution is not truth but a semblance of truth rooted in fantasy, misrepresentation, invention, and dinning repetition. Serious critique and sincere skepticism are dismissed as mere conspiracy, as disrupting the recitals we have come dotingly to believe in. Myth is received as reality and “narrative” euchres objective analysis and the pursuit of fact. In our fable-ready time, the real story is the story itself. This is where we are today. Where we will be tomorrow does not inspire confidence.

Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Everybody profiles.  Liberals are no exception.  Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school and with whom they associate.  

The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.  It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  We should all condemn blind prejudice.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior. 

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past exerience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam.  My prejudgments about rattle snakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them?  Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates.  Liberals are especially discriminating.  The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in.  Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways.  That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction. 

'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.  Unjustly.  What's wrong with profiling?  We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.  Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense.  But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a five-minute romp.  Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona.  On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class.  On the other side of the street, Hells Angels are coming out of their club house.  Which side of the street would you feel safer on?   On which side will your  concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.

Their brains are addled by the equality fetish:  everybody is equal, they think, in every way.  So the vigorous 20 year old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape.  The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding.  And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City. 

Garry Wills on What it Means to Vote for a Republican

Excerpt:

To vote for a Republican means, now, to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. It does no good to say that “Romney is a good man, not a racist.” That may be true, but he needs a racist South as part of his essential support. And the price they will demand of him comes down to things like Supreme Court appointments. (The Republicans have been more realistic than the Democrats in seeing that presidential elections are really for control of the courts.)

When dealing with a delusional leftist such as Wills should one attempt to reason with him or resort to mockery and derision?  Probably both.  But at the moment I am not in a derisive mood.  I'll content myself with a couple of obvious points, the obviousness of which does not preclude the necessity to repeat them often.

1. Leftists typically refer to their opponents as 'anti-government.'  But surely Mr. Wills can understand that if one is for limited government, then one is for government.  Since Wills undoubtedly understands this, he lies when he characterizes the tea party as anti-government.  By lying he announces in effect that his intentions are purely polemical and that he is out to win at all costs, like a good leftist, who will doing anything to win: the end justifies the means.

Wills cannot possibly not understand that the debate is not about government vs. no government, but about the size, scope, and reach of government.  He knows this; he distorts the issue nonetheless because his is the mendacity endemic on the Left.

2.  And of course, good leftist that he is, Wills plays the race card.  He speaks of the "racist South."  Now there are plenty of rednecks down there and some of them are racists. But what you have to understand about leftists is that they are virtuosos of semantic inflation: 'racist' in their mouths means the same as 'conservative.'  Actually, it is even worse than this: 'racist' for a leftist doesn't have even this fixed meaning: it is an all-purpose semantic bludgeon the meaning of which expands or contracts like an accordion depending on the ideological needs of the moment.  Label your opponents racists to avoid confronting their ideas.  That's their shabby tactic.

Tobacco Insanity in Maricopa County and the Need for Smoke-Ins

SmokeinPeter and Mike teach in the Maricopa County Community College system.  One teaches at Scottsdale CC, the other at Glendale CC.  Over Sunday breakfast they reported that, starting 1 July (if I got the story straight), no smoking of tobacco products will be allowed anywhere on any CC campus in Maricopa County, Arizona.  And that includes parking lots and closed cars in parking lots.

Now I would like to believe that our liberal brethren possess a modicum of rationality.  But with every passing day I am further disembarrassed of this conceit of mine. The evidence is mounting that liberals really are as stupid and lacking in common sense as many on the Right say they are. 

What does common sense suggest in a case like this?  Well, that no smoking be allowed in classrooms, libraries, laboratories, restrooms, administrative offices, hallways, etc., and perhaps not even in individual faculty offices during consulation hours or if the smoke will make its way into occuppied public passageways.

This is a common sense position easily buttressed with various aesthetic, safety, and health-related arguments.  The underlying principle is that we ought to be considerate of our fellow mortals and their physical and psychological well-being.  It is debatable just how harmful are the effects of sidestream smoke.  What is not debatable is that many are offended by it.  So out of consideration for them, it is reasonable to ban smoking in the places I listed above.  But to ban it everywhere on campus is extreme and irrational.  For no one but Tom is affercted by Tom's smoking in his car and while striding across the wind-blown campus.

You say you caught a whiff of his cigaratte as he passed by?  Well, he heard you use the 'F' word while blasting some rap 'music' from your boom box.  If Tom is involved in air pollution, then you are involved in cultural and noise pollution.  You tolerate him and he'll tolerate you.

You say you smell the residual ciggy smoke on Peter's vest?  That's too bad.  He has to put up with your overpowering perfume/cologne or look at your tackle-box face and tattoo-defaced skin.  Or maybe you are a dumb no-nothing punk wearing a T-shirt depicting Che Guevara and you think that's cool.  We who are not dumb no-nothing punks have to put up with that affront to our sensibilities.

But there really is little point in being reasonable with people as unreasonable as liberty-bashing tobacco-wackos.  So I think Peter and Mike ought to think about organizing a smoke-in.  In the 'sixties we had love-ins and sit-ins, and they proved efficacious. Why not smoke-ins to protest blatantly extreme and irrational policies?

There must be plenty of faculty and staff and students on these campuses — and maybe even a few not-yet-brain-dead liberals — who would participate.  Hell, I'll even drive all the way from my hideout in the Superstitions to take part. We'll gather in some well-ventilated place way out in the open to manifest our solidarity, enjoy the noble weed, and reason – if such a thing is possible — with the Pee-Cee boneheads who oppose us.

By the way, that is a joint old Ben Franklin is smoking in the graphic.  In this post I take no position on the marijuana question.

Companion post:  Is Smoking Irrational? Other such posts are collected in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. 

Popcorn Too? Food Fascists Gone Wild

Here.  First soda pop, then popcorn, milkshakes . . . .

The trouble with nanny-state liberals  is that they do not understand or value the liberty of the individual , a liberty which includes the liberty to behave in ways that may be foolish.  If you grant the state the power to order your life there will be no end to it.  Right now, in Germany it is illegal to homeschool one's own children!  Every day brings a new example of governmental overreach.  We do not exist for the state; the state exists for us.  Our wealth is ours, not the state's.  We don't have to justify our keeping; they have to justify their taking. The same goes for such health-related issues as obesity.

Please no liberal nonsense about an 'epidemic' of obesity or obesity as a public health problem.  True, we Americans are a gluttonous people as witness competitive eating contests, the numerous food shows, and the complete lack of any sense among most that there is anything morally wrong with gluttony.  The moralists of old understood something when they classified gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins.

Obesity is not a disease; so, speaking strictly, there cannot be an epidemic of it.  There are two separate issues here.  One is whether obesity is a disease.  Here are some arguments pro et con.  But even  if it is classified as a disease, it is surely not a contagious disease and so not something there can be an epidemic of. 

I know that 'epidemic' is used more broadly than this, even by epidemiologists; but this is arguably the result of an intrusion of liberal ideology into what is supposedly science.   Do you really think that 'epidemic' is being used in the same way in 'flu epidemic' and 'obesity epidemic'?  Is obesity contagious?  If fat Al sneezes in my face, should I worry about contracting the obesity virus? There is no such virus.   

Obesity is not contagious and not a disease.   I know what some will say: obesity is socially contagious.  But now you've shifted the sense  of 'contagious.'    You've engaged in a bit of semantic mischief.  It is not as if there are two kinds of contagion, natural and social.  Social contagion is not contagion any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck. 'Social' in 'socially contagious' is an alienans
adjective.

Why then are you fat?  You are fat because you eat too much of the wrong sorts of food and refuse to exercise.  For most people that's all there is to it.  It's your fault.  It is not the result of being attacked by a virus.  It is within your power to be fat or not.  It is a matter of your FREE WILL.  You have decided to become fat or to remain fat.  When words such as 'epidemic' and 'disease' are used in connection with obesity, that is an ideological denial of free will, an attempt to shift responsibility from the agent to factors external to the agent such as the 'evil' corporations that produce so-called 'junk' food.

There is no such thing as junk food.

There are public health problems, but obesity is not one of them.  It is a private problem resident at the level of the individual and the family.

Subprime College Educations

Another chapter in the decline of the West.  Excerpts (emphasis added):

In his Encounter Books Broadside "The Higher Education Bubble," Reynolds says this bubble exists for the same reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and sometimes subprime mortgages/student loans, with the predictable result that housing prices/college tuitions soared and many borrowers went bust. Tuitions and fees have risen more than 440 percent in 30 years as schools happily raised prices — and lowered standards — to siphon up federal money. A recent Wall Street Journal headline: "Student Debt Rises by 8% as College Tuitions Climb."

[. . .]

The budgets of California’s universities are being cut, so recently Cal State Northridge students conducted an almost-hunger strike (sustained by a blend of kale, apple and celery juices) to protest, as usual, tuition increases and, unusually and properly, administrators' salaries. For example, in 2009 the base salary of UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion was $194,000, almost four times that of starting assistant professors. And by 2006, academic administrators outnumbered faculty.

The Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald notes that sinecures in academia's diversity industry are expanding as academic offerings contract. UC San Diego, while eliminating master's programs in electrical and computer engineering and comparative literature, and eliminating courses in French, German, Spanish and English literature, added a diversity requirement for graduation to cultivate "a student's understanding of her or his identity." So, rather than study computer science and Cervantes, students can study their identities — themselves. Says Mac Donald, "'Diversity,' it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism."

She reports that UCSD lost three cancer researchers to Rice University, which offered them 40 percent pay increases. But UCSD found money to create a Vice Chancellorship for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an Administrator of Diversity Education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center. It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a Diversity Program Coordinator; an Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards Understanding Diversity Certificates in "Unpacking Oppression"; and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in "Understanding Diversity and Social Justice." California's budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from creating a new Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Outreach to supplement UCSF's Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Learning Center (which teaches how to become "a Diversity Change Agent"), and the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellor's Advisory Committees on Diversity, and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of Women.

Are we in Cloud Cuckoo Land yet?

New PC Expression: ‘Customers of Size’

Or at least it was new when I first ran an ancestorof  this post on the old blog back in 2008 (26 July).

……………..

No doubt you have heard of 'people of color' not to be confused with 'colored people.' (But what exactly is the difference in reality?) Just this morning I discovered that some airlines are now referring to fat passengers as 'customers of size.' I am not making this up.

A 'customer of size' is defined by Southwest Airlines as one who is "unable to lower the armrests  (the definitive boundary between seats) and/or who compromise[s] any portion of adjacent seating . . . ."

As one who has been 'compromised' by obese flyers on more than one occasion, I can only applaud the policy if not the PC expression.

The tort against the English language is similar to that of dropping qualifiers. Thus a high quality journal is referred to as a 'quality' journal. But  since every journal has some quality, high, low, or middling, why should 'quality' get to stand in for 'high quality'? Why should 'intercourse' get to go proxy for 'sexual intercourse'?  Similarly for 'chauvinism' and 'male chauvinism.'  Since we all have some color or other, why are only some of us 'people of color'?  And since all of us have some size or other, why do some bear the distinction of being 'customers of size'?  Just because I'm not fat, I don't have a size?

Just because my body is not misshapen, I don't have a shape?

'Fat' is perhaps rude. But what is wrong with 'obese'? 

It is interesting to note the difference between 'sexual intercourse' and 'male chauvinism.'  'Male' here functions as an alienans adjective: it shifts or 'alienates' the sense of the term it qualifies: a male chauvinist is not a chauvinist.  'Sexual,' by contrast, in this context is a specifying adjective: sexual intercourse is a species of intercourse in the way that male chauvinism is not a species of chauvinism.

Recent talk of dummy sortals occasions the observation that 'dummy' here is an alienans adjective.  It is not as if sortals come in two kinds, dummy and non-dummy.

If I were to write a book, Sortals for Dummies, that would be a point I'd make early on.

For more fun with alienans adjectives see my Adjectives category.

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff  is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term.  He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead.  So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do?  They attack him.  His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them.  Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal — not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

HentoffRelated posts:

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment.  I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Robert Paul Wolff: “The Left Has Had All the Good Songs”

Anarchist philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, over at The Philosopher's Stone, writes,

While I was making dinner, Susie put on a CD of Pete Seegar [sic] songs. I was struck once again by the oft-remarked fact that for half a century, the left has had all the good songs. That cannot be irrelevant.

By the way, the old commie's name is 'Seeger' not 'Seegar.'  In the ComBox, some guy confuses him with Bob Seger! The Left has had all the good songs over the last 50 years?  Nonsense.  Here are 50 counterexamples.

The really interesting case is Bob Dylan.  The Left can of course claim the early topical songs such as Only a Pawn in Their Game and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.  (Not that we contemporary conservatives don't take on board all that was good in these critiques of racism and Jim Crow.)  But it wasn't long before Dylan distanced himself from politics and leftist ideology, a distancing documented in My Back Pages.  And then came the absurdist-existentialist-surrealist phase represented by the three mid-'sixties albums, Bring It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.  After that, the motorcycle accident and another attitude adjustment culminating in a couple of masterful albums, John Wesley Harding and New Morning, in which religious and conservative themes come to the fore.

I'll give just one example, Sign on a Window, from the October 1970 album, New Morning.  The song concludes:

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch  rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me 'Pa'
That must be what it's all about
That must be what it's all about.

To appreciate the full conservative flavor of this song, listen to it in the context of  "Masters of War" from the protest period and It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) from the absurdist-existentialist-surrealist period.