Tag: political correctness

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Common Sense folly ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

Iconoclasm Spasms

Jefferson Davis

As America stands upon a precipice of insolvency, as southern European nations undergo the spasms of sovereign debt catastrophe, as many of our citizens call the Chinese devaluations of their money “currency wars,” obsessing about political symbolism seems . . . a tad . . . trivial.

First it was the Confederate Flag. Now it’s Jefferson Davis.

He’s dead. And as a result of his 126 years in the “post-living” state, he quite literally doesn’t matter for the future of the United States.

And yet the Confederacy’s president (1861-1865) is in the news again. As Charles Paul Freund relates at Reason, the dead rebel prez has been having a figurative “bad summer.” How? The University of Texas has decided to move his statue into a museum, away from public eyes; some Georgians want to obliterate the Stone Mountain tableau that features Davis along with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee; there’s talk of renaming Virginia’s “Jefferson Davis Highway”; etc.

Davis died unrepentant, refusing to ask Congress for a pardon for his part in the Confederacy after the secessions of 1860 and ’61. And yet he was pardoned in 1978, posthumously, by the Democratic Congress and President Jimmy Carter, who yammered on in a Fordian “long national nightmare is over” fashion, saying the pardon would, at long last, “clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past.”

I’m not convinced it did a thing.

And about the current proposals? I don’t think any highway should be named after any politician. Of the other ideas, I don’t really care. Much.

Nevertheless, fights over political symbols have long been important. Why? My guess: to deflect our attention — away from the future, and to the past.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jefferson Davis

 

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education and schooling folly

Learning Zone or War Zone

College Safe Zones

Given the stated purposes of the university — discovering, learning, teaching, engaging in open intellectual discourse — you might suppose that the pitched battles on campus would be primarily intellectual in nature. Persons set forth a view, others criticize it or elaborate a positive alternative, etc.

Open intellectual change, however heated, is indeed often what transpires.

But on many campuses, we also witness efforts to muzzle opponents of ideas or policies. The censors contend that disagreement as such constitutes a kind of assault on them, one from which their delicate selves must be forcibly and un-delicately protected.

Thus, campus activists at Northwestern University have reported Professor Laura Kipnis for “sexual harassment” for arguing, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that “Sexual Paranoia [Is Striking] Academe,” as exemplified by prissy new rules about dating, jokes, the simplest of standard human interactions. According to her accusers, her article somehow creates a “hostile environment” for students eager to impose not only a Victorian screen on dating and talking, but also a screen, or lid, on any discussion of the Victorian screen. It’s just one example of a syndrome that could be multiplied ad infinitum.

What to do?

One thing, if you’re applying to college: omit as a prospect any school rife with the politics of repression. Boycott the anti-academic academy.

The second, larger solution: bypass the modern university altogether.

Modern technology can help with that. There are more and more ways to learn, and teach, with every day that passes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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College Safe Zones

 

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folly ideological culture media and media people

It’s a Disgrace

Crying Children

State-powered Puritanism is alive and well in the west. And freedom of speech is in its death throes.

Or so it seems in Great Britain. And the U.S. isn’t far behind, suggests Brendan O’Neill.

O’Neill, editor of the London-based Spike, recounts recent absurd assaults on freedom of speech, so frequent now in Britain as to be routine.

Consider the case of the malevolent hashtag. A hashtag is a label with a pound sign that Twitter-folk use to flag and meta-comment on their tweets. A soccer fan named Stephen Dodds thumbed the hashtag “#DISGRACE” to bemoan how Muslims attending a game were conspicuously praying during halftime. His tweet provoked an Internet uproar. Good. But Dodds was also reported to the police, who investigated his open hashtaggery for two weeks (!!).

And how about the case of the svelte-model-adorned subway ad that dares ask British ladies if they’re “beach-body-ready”? Uh oh. A direct psychic assault on those who will never be “beach-body-ready” in the super-model sense of the word. After feminists vandalized the ads, something called Advertising Standards Authority lurched to investigate — not the vandals, no: the blatantly anti-blobby sentiment.

Few opinions or postures fail to offend somebody.

What offends me is that we should ever be subject to arbitrary, government-backed assaults on our rights launched to satisfy persons especially thin-skinned and/or especially eager to stomp on the rights of others.

As with all fake rights, foisting a fake right to not-be-offended can only violate genuine rights. #DISGRACE.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Crying Children

 

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education and schooling folly

When Dinosaurs Roamed the Schools

Sticks and stones break bones, but words hurt more subtly. Old-school advice was that, growing up, one had to grin and bear it, let a few of our psychological wounds scab over, and get on with life.

But that is not “new school” wisdom. Nowadays, moved by a perhaps overweening sense of kindness (or politicized fear) educators tend to prohibit certain words, the better to protect some folks from taking offense.

The New York Post reports that, in a “bizarre case of political correctness run wild,” the people in charge of public schools have

banned references to “dinosaurs,” “birthdays,” “Halloween” and dozens of other topics on city-issued tests.

That’s because they fear such topics “could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students.”

Dinosaurs, for example, call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists; birthdays aren’t celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses; and Halloween suggests paganism.

Even “dancing’’ is taboo, because some sects object. But the city did make an exception for ballet.

The “educrats” say such exclusions are nothing new, and I believe them. They’re inevitable when you have a government-run school system that “services” a wide diversity of “clients.” The only real solution is to stop having the government run the schools. If you must support education with tax money, give vouchers to poor people. That would let a diversity of tutors and schools compete for parents’ and students’ attention . . . perhaps sometimes by catering to fears of dinosaurs, Halloween and dancing.

Odd, though, in one sense: If you really want not to “evoke unpleasant emotions in the students,” you could stop making them take tests. For most kids, tests are the most unsettling, truly horrifying aspect of schooling.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.