Satirizing leftists is pretty easy when all they have is one tactic:  screaming “HATE!!”  “HOMOPHOBIA!!”  “RACIST!!”  “BIGOT!!”

That trait is on full display in this video by filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney, whose movie Indoctrinate U was an inspiration for Bias Incident:  The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novel.

I wish they mp3 players and this song back when I went to college.  I would have had to play this for a couple of my old profs.

I recently read David Berlinski’s brilliant little book A Tour of the Calculus. In it, he observed about the medieval Hindu mathematician Bhāskara:

[he] demonstrated correctly that the square root of three plus the square root of twelve equals three times the square root of three, an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University.  (It is pleasing to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)

That problem, I must admit, took me two tries and three minutes to solve, but then again, I majored in history and went to law school.  So I can see how an English professor would be at sea with it.  I’ll explain how it’s done at the end of this post.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that majoring in English or some other humanities subject (to say nothing about those stupid “oppression studies” majors) is a complete waste of time and money.  All the astute reader has to do is read a bit of the journals that print “research” in these subjects to know that these subjects are nothing but chicanery hiding behind impenetrable jargon.  The superstars in these subjects are the worst offenders.  It’s tough not to laugh at people who call academic luminary Judith Butler “one of the ten smartest people on the planet.”

Why?  Because Judith Butler inspired one of my favorite moments in Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novel, the moment when Jeff Jackson reads a bit of his professor’s writing.  The professor’s jargon ridden prose was based on an actual prize-winning sentence from the work of Prof. Butler.  That prize is one given for bad academic writing.  The late, great Denis Dutton had this to say about Butler and her writing:

Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, admired as perhaps “one of the ten smartest people on the planet,” wrote the sentence that captured the contest’s first prize. Homi K. Bhabha, a leading voice in the fashionable academic field of postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner.

“As usual,” commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, “this year’s winners were produced by well-known, highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated by the fact that the winning entries were all published by distinguished presses and academic journals.”

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton commented elsewhere about this sentence:  “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.”

I wonder if Butler is capable of demonstrating what that medieval Hindu mathematician was capable of demonstrating: that the square root of three plus the square root of twelve equals three times the square root of three.  I’ll show you how to do it myself.  Here goes: (you can stop reading now if you have no interest in math).  The square root of twelve can be broken down into the square root of four times the square root of three.  Now, the square root of four is the number two, so we’re left with two times the square root of three.  Add to that the square root of three and you have three times the square root of three.  Presto.  And I did it without even having to mention “Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects.”

Okay, so Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Musical is still in the earliest stages of planning.  So, this will have to do for now:

Four, count ‘em four universities now have a course on Lady Gaga.

Hat tip:  Wintery Knight.

My friend Stuart Schneiderman had this to say about Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Correct Novel:

I’ve been reading my friend Ari Mendelson’s fine and compelling new novel: Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novel. Link here.

It tells the story of a naive young man who goes to college to experience intellectual freedom and who quickly discovers that the academy has long since abandoned even the pretense of free inquiry.

Like all good novels, Mendelson’s has a ring of truth to it. Incidents similar to the ones he describes happen on college campuses all the time. If they do not happen more often, the reason can only be that students have learned that they will be severely punished for deviating from the party line.

As long as it’s the correct opinion.

Crystal Mangum, the former stripper who falsely accused members of the Duke University lacrosse team of sexually assaulting her in 2006, is competent to stand trial on murder charges in the death of her boyfriend, a Durham judge ruled Wednesday.

I wish a similar fate to all who falsely accuse the innocent of serious felonies.

The title of this post is taken from a speech from Evan Sayet, available here.

If people want to live their lives being utterly indiscriminate, that’s up to them.  But the sad thing is that the Left has taken control of education in western nations from Kindergarten through graduate school.

Here’s a pretty darn sad story about a classroom full of Canadian high school seniors students made utterly indiscriminate from more than a decade of leftist propagandizing.

Here’s how their teacher Stephen L. Anderson describes the scene:

I was teaching my senior Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies—multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha. Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital. I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions.

But I was not prepared for their reaction.

 

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff .”

Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

Of course, Evan Sayet’s quote about the Left being utterly indiscriminate is slightly inaccurate.  The Left does not fail to discriminate.  It does not really believe that all cultures are equal.  If the oppressors in the story were Christian instead of barbarian and if, instead of cutting off the nose and ears of their victim they told the girl that she could not “marry” her female lover, the classroom would have been deafening with screams for the blood of the bullies who would downtread that poor girl.  (Blogger Fred Reed coined the term “downtread” reasoning that if somebody is downtrodden, somebody must be downtreading them).

The left is not just indiscriminate about the difference between civilization and barbarism.  It’s also indiscriminate about the difference between vice and virtue, which I learned just a few weeks ago.

Here’s the author of the above quoted article on how the left cannot tell the difference between the misguided courage of a Taliban fighter and cowardice (sort of like the cowardice of those despicable enemies of freedom who would sue people to make the government correct their thinking).

One reason might be this: For thousands of years, most thinkers assumed that virtue was something specific; it could be described, and could be distinguished from not-virtue (vice). Courage, for example, was a virtue—a cardinal virtue. Cowardice was a vice. One ought, they said, to aim for courage because it is intrinsically worthy, and avoid cowardice because it is intrinsically a disgrace. Those thinkers are—in the students’ terms—judgmental!

In recent decades, a new view has taken root. The new view is that courage and cowardice have no intrinsic reality. Neither does the classical virtue of justice or the vice of injustice. It all depends on how you feel about things, which in turn depends on your culture. That underlies the students’ inability to move from “I feel bad” to “This is wrong.”

One outcome has been the popular convention that all cultures are of equal value. If Afghan men see their treatment of women as just, then it must be so. We lack any legitimate basis for saying it isn’t. One common way of putting it is that our ancestors were bigoted imperialists who didn’t see the worth of other cultures.

How would a traditional philosopher respond to that? Well, if he believes that virtue and vice (right and wrong) exist in some sense, even as abstractions, he would likely say that most cultures excel in some virtues but not in others.

The Afghan culture, for example, excels in the virtue of courage; it produces many brave suicide bombers. But it falls behind in the virtue of justice, especially where women are concerned. The traditional philosopher would insist that this is an objective assessment, based on evidence, and that no one who makes it can properly be called a bigot.

A different culture may excel in justice, but fall behind in courage. That is a particularly unfortunate combination because people vaguely understand that when a woman is mutilated for running away from an abusive husband, a terrible wrong has been done. These students, after all, were not a Taliban mob, cheering the mutilators on. They do not speak up for fear of criticism for the one remaining sin—passing judgment. Again, from the traditional perspective, it is not bigotry to say that their cowardice is a vice. It is a vice.

The students could not go from their vague discomfort to a rational ethical conclusion because they have never learned traditional philosophy of ethics. Therefore, their objections have no force and, for all that they sense injustice, they will likely do very little good in the world. And the “accept everyone, accept everything” assemblies they attend unwittingly feed the problem: They learn to accept gay rights in North America and stoning gays in Afghanistan.

Theirs is an education to avoid at all costs.

Heather MacDonald, a great and notable sayer of Things That Must Not Be Said has this great article about the budget cuts in California Universities.

Basically, California has been wasteful and wanton in spending its citizen’s money.  This wastefulness is now starting to pinch the budgets of California’s universities.  So, what goes on the chopping block?  Well, it’s certainly not the masters degree program in computer engineering.  Our young people need those skills to compete in a modern, technological economy.

Certainly, you would think, that wouldn’t be cut.

Well, you’d think wrong.

Maybe you’d think that some of the nation’s top cancer researchers employed by California universities would have a better shot at keeping their jobs?

Again, you’d think wrong.

Of course, not everything was on that chopping block.  No, siree.  The diversity thugs kept their narcissistic and oppressive little rackets going.

Well, you might think, if California’s cutting cancer research and computer science degree programs, at least the diversity enforcers won’t be getting bigger budgets next year, right?

Wrong.

But they’re not adding diversity programs that only duplicate the diversity programs already in existence.  They’re not, right?  Please say I’m right this time!

You must be thinking about a world in which the insane Left doesn’t control our Universities!

I can imagine the sourpuss diversity thugs whipping up their jackbooted minions into a frenzy in the style of Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

“They can take our math, our chemistry, our physics  but they will never take away OUR DIVERSITY!!!”

Frankly, what this most reminds me of is this, the most disgraceful thing ever said by an American in uniform:

Indeed, it would be a tragedy if we couldn’t find a cure for cancer.  But it would be a bigger tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty in the War on Cancer.

As the World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novelist, I have a great admiration for Charles Murray because he so frequently says Things That Must Not Be Said.

He’s got a new article out today in the American. The upshot?  Men have bigger brains than women.  And what do all those extra neurons do?  Well, those neurons give men better visual-spatial ability than women.

Give me a minute here before I continue writing.  It’s news like this that lays me out on the floor in laughter at all those ignorant feminists.

Remember that big flap in 2005 in which Harvard President Lawrence Summers had to kiss the jackboots of sourpuss feminist groups for daring to speculate whether women might be “underrepresented” in mathematics because of innate differences in ability between men and women? Well, it turns out that Summers’s speculation is likely right.  I wonder if those feminists are now going to issue an apology to Summers?  I’m not holding my breath.

It seems to me that it’s not a good idea to believe the rhetoric of the Left.

For years now, people who like the institution of marriage just the way it’s always been have been told by Leftists that redefining marriage to include same-sex-couples would lead to no changes at all in the institution.  No changes at all.

Well, the movement known as “Conservative Judaism” drank the Kool-Aid and now allows gay “marriages.”

What the first thing that happened?

Well surprise, surprise!  It’s this:

But according to Michaelson, (a gay activist interviewed for the quoted article– ed.) while traditional marriage looks appealing to some gay and lesbian Jews, others bristle at the idea of imbuing same-sex unions with language that would imply that one party owns the other. These dynamics came into play for Michaelson when he was planning his own wedding, which took place in September.

“I didn’t want a photocopy [of traditional marriage] for a number of reasons,” he said. “For feminist reasons I don’t like kiddushin anyway, and for LGBT reasons it didn’t feel authentic to me to copy a model meant for a man and a woman to my situation.”

Instead of falling back on traditional marriage rites, Michaelson wrote his own legally binding ceremony based on the concept of nedarim, or vows.

“I didn’t feel like purchasing my husband, and hopefully no men feel like they are purchasing their wives,” he said. “Zooming back, one of the challenges for Conservative Judaism is how to accommodate both people who want something pretty straightforward and people like me, who want to create their own rituals and services and liturgy.”

Rabbi Jill Hammer said that she had similar concerns in planning her 2004 wedding with her female partner. “We were not comfortable using [kiddushin] as our template for marriage,” she said. “Not every couple understands it this way, but talmudically there is a lot of difference between the way a woman and a man are treated. We were looking for something else.”

So, which is it?  We need to have equality (which would imply an identical ceremony) or do we need to have something different?

The Left takes us for idiots.  Remember this next time you are tempted to believe Leftists when they say they have no interest in more serious matters like using the government to force people they oppose to shut up.

Well, if he’d add it a little bit about stoicism and the resilience of the human spirit, he’d pretty much hit all the major themes of Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novel.