Hold on to your cranium.
This is a real person. Unfortunately.
This morning an esteemed commentator, while discussing Melissa Harris-Perry, fell for one of those “if you fall for it, it’s a hoax and you’re an idiot, if you don’t it’s just satire so mock anyone who did” websites that I have designated Unethical Websites in more than one month. Here’s the reason why he did: to rational people, the things card-carrying members of the extreme progressive/ Democratic axis are prone to assert, say or write with complete sincerity so often consist of content that just a few years ago would be considered proof positive of creeping insanity that it is nigh impossible to tell the difference. For example, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton want to expand Social Security. I was already preparing this post when the hoax site responsible for the quoted Harris-Perry story was reported, and it send me back again to check this one. It really is true, and thus tells us something quite disturbing, as I will specify later. The op-ed by Dr. Barbara Savoy is much more ridiculous than the parody.
The Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle asked Dr. Savoy, who teaches women and gender studies at The College at Brockport, a SUNY institution (Its tuition is $33,235 per year), to write an op-ed on gun control. She did, and here is a shortened version. You really should read the whole thing, though:
I voted for Barack Obama. Twice. During his 2008 presidential campaign, my two daughters, partner, and I ate every meal in our house on Obama placemats. We bought these at our local supermarket, plastic-coated, plate-sized paper rectangles with an image of his face framed by colors of the flag….
As Obama’s 2012 campaign approached… I dug into our old dining room cupboards, and found our worn but resilient Obama placements. I dusted them off, and once again, my family and I ate all of our meals looking at his image….
I am disappointed because his presidency could have done more for our country, and sadly, the many taken lives who cannot read this essay….But gun violence can be averted. Can our country ever be free from senseless gun-crime?
Firearm possession should be banned in America; President Obama can orchestrate this directive. His presidency can be remembered as a remarkable turn in United States history where a progressive leader forever changed the landscape under which we live and work. This is his legacy. To establish gun control laws in America that will reduce high levels of male violence and usher in a culture of peace and civility.
Barack Obama is the president of the United States. He can change the country. He can do it today. I believe in him.
That’s right…
- A phD professor has never heard of the Second Amendment, and doesn’t have a clue about how the government works and what the President’s role is.
- She and her family have been indoctrinated into the Obama cult of personality since 2008.
- She really believes that Obama can act as a dictator whenever he wants to, that this is fine, and that he should use this fictional power to “ban” guns, which will involve seizing them by force in a totalitarian display of power.
- The Democrat and Chronicle saw this op-ed as printable, and its ignorance of the U.S. Constitution was deemed either trivial or editors were unaware of the Second Amendment itself.
- Families pay over $120,000 to a school whose standards permit someone like this to indoctrinate their children.
There is good news. In the comment section online, there is virtually unanimous disgust about this. As one comment pointed out, however, the op-ed is in the print edition. How many readers will absorb this earnest plea for dictatorship and just smile, nod, and think, “Wow, I didn’t know he can do that!”
What I didn’t know, and in fact wouldn’t have believed, is that the vile recipe of educational indoctrination/ news media bias /cult of personality / ignorant base that is threatening to become the essence of the Democratic party has progressed this far, anywhere.
If only this were satire….
__________________________
Pointer: Amy Alkon
Ethics Alarms 
I think it is becoming more and more difficult to write political satire and parody, because the reality of it all is becoming more and more bizarre, so that it is difficult to distinguish between them.
That’s why I quit reading science fiction.
Science fiction is labeled as such, and people reading don’t really believe that Michael Velentine Smith lives on Mars. Some people today cannot separate utopian ideals or that thought experiments as a dramatic setting and NOT real. I really would not want to live in most SF worlds as they are stages and with enough window dressing to be ‘other.’ As stages they usually lack depth. Science fiction has been more dystopian than not for 30 years, we’re catching up.
I think you’re confusing science fiction — which extrapolated quite realistically into the future — with fantasy or comic books or television idiocy. An astonishing amount of SF has come to be, for good or ill, in inventions, social structures, interpersonal relationships, cultural upheavals, weapons and warnings. What humans can think of, humans will try (and frequently come) to realize.
I’m reminded of a PhD Professor (assuredly NOT of ‘gender studies), who I once heard respond to a student’s answer to a question like this: “Your fundamental premise is so far off the mark; your thinking so bizarre; your grasp of the problem so flawed, that your answer isn’t even good enough to be dignified by calling it WRONG, since that would suppose some understanding of the question.”
Gender Studies is a particularly insipid branch of the “studies” tree. No understanding of any part of real life is required, in fact, it is actively eradicated in the “education” process. I’m really hoping that all “studies” students, graduates, and in particular, professors, will be kind enough to point themselves out to us as clearly as this one. It will save time and lives.
That’s one theory about why the paper published this.
I don’t believe it.
Pray tell what kind of employment opportunities are there for a person with a degree in gender studies?
Military officer, as a bachelor’s degree is required for OCS.
Grievance industry.
I’m already in outright mourning for the state of American higher education!
A shitposter on Reddit?
I was about to say much the same, Granny. Whenever you see a collegiate title with “studies” at the end, you can pretty well rest assured that this belongs to someone who is incompetent in dealing with the real world and owes his position to some leftist, politically correct form of chicanery. Can you imagine how much money our bloated and ineffective diploma mills could save (not to mention bureaucracies and major corporations) if they would simply scrap all “studies” departments, similarly based degree curricula, “human rights commissions”, sensitivity programs and “diversity” nonsense? They might actually become affordable and respectable again! The taxpayers, the legislatures and the alumni groups can do this, too. Just cut their funding or their custom. It always works.
Re-purpose the “studies” professors to teaching janitorial work and grounds maintenance “studies”.
Useful phrase to learn if one graduates with a degree in gender studies: “Do you want fires with that?”
Do you want fires with that. [Darn autocorrect.]
Do you want fries with that?
I wondered…
That’s supposing you have to have fires to have fries.
If they did that, Joe, their students might just learn something valuable that would allow them to make a living or start a business. Then they wouldn’t take up some worthless graduate program, causing those schools to shut down and your monster university to shrink back to a small state college. A lot of professors would lose their jobs and be forced to work for those students doing honest labor… a fate worse than death!
“Studies” of ANY subject…right up there with “Underwater Basket-weaving”.
No, underwater basket weaving is much more intense. First, you need SCUBA certification. Then, you actually have to learn how to weave baskets (a marketable skill).
Then you can get a job at an underwater hippie colony!
In microbiology class, we studied the life cycles of microbial colonies. One such cycle is log phase, a period of exponential growth, also marked by a high degree of virulence. This is proceeded by lag phase, and followed by death phase. I can’t help but wonder if some deleterious social phenomena run a similar course. If so, there’s reason for hope. At the very least, my musing is no more insane than the lady depicted above.
Why the focus on tuition? SUNY is a bargain.
Lets not pretend the private colleges that charge more than twice as much don’t have people just as nitwitty indoctinating their students.
Rationalization #22
A state university that charges roughly half of what a degree in medicine costs, for an undergraduate in transvaginal victims studies, isn’t what I’d call a bargain. The job prospects look grim, too. “Yes, my degree in whining makes me the perfect fit in your for-profit concern. Three questions before I decide if I should grace you with my presence: where’s my office, what’s your diversity policy, and why are you objectifying me?”
The only use for such a degree is if one intends to become a military officer through the services’ officer candidate schools.
No, sadly it’s not. There are many jobs now that just require “a bachelor’s degree”. The B.A. is the high school diploma of today.
Reading the unexpurgated version is worthwhile. You took out the really nutty parts, Jack. I think you should amend this post to simply include the whole, crazy thing.
Given the glasses, maybe she’s stepped onto the campus right out of a Larson cartoon.
Could you post the uncut version?
It’s an ethics issue: I don’t like to post whole articles except in very special circumstances. The publication deserves the link. I similarly don’t care for it when someone “re-blogs” something I wrote without asking first.
I think the entire piece constitutes signature significance. This addled, smarmy woman has been declared a Doctor of Philosophy by an institution of higher learning and has been allowed to mold young minds for a living. Horrifying. Melissa Harris Perry is worse, but this woman and the tower in which she’s allowed to flourish need to be shown in the light of day.
Wow. Just wow.
I can undersdtand why a normal man would want placemats with pictures of Samantha Justine Rice (see here to find out who she is. ) It would be creepy, but understandable.
With Barack Obama? That is completely wack and even creepier than the example above. And to add to that, she admits it. I doubt a normal man would admit to using placemats with images of naked models.
Can you imagine what other Obama memorabilia she has, particularly those that require batteries?
Well, fortunately the Supreme Court upheld a law that forbade racial inequality in university admissions.
As for reproductive freedoms, I wonder if she heard of Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).
I am sure Jack Marshall agrees with this.
Sadly, even the most decent societies have not fully gotten rid of the lust to kill and terrorize.
Obama can start by disarming his security detail; no legislation needed for that.
If he were to try to ban guns by executive fiat, the first person to introduce articles of impeachment would be a Democrat.
“Can you imagine what other Obama memorabilia she has, particularly those that require batteries? ”
Missed the keyboard, this time but got the screen. Happily, wiping the coffee off cleaned it up rather well.
It seems president Obama has disappointed everyone from the far right religious gun nuts all the way to gender studies professors. We’re all united at last.
When he was elected to a second term, I rather thought that he would manage to piss off most Dems with either his arrogance and dictatorial manner which is now often aimed at them, or his destruction of the Democratic party, as a glance at down-ballot results will confirm. I believe that the Dems may have won the battle by electing Obama, and lost the war by electing Obama for a second term.
It is obvious in DC that many, and maybe most, Democrats in the power structure are horrified and angry about Obama, but lack the guts and principles to go public with it.
Maybe you could elaborate on this in a post. I’d love to here more.
That’s almost a moot point now with his time growing short. The question is, do they feel the same way about Hillary, but also lack the will to challenge Herself?
Sadly, Jim Webb could not get enough support in the primaries.
Some people may wonder if he should have run for President in 2008.
Webb would have disappeared from candidacy as soon if not sooner in 2008, given the hysteria the D party was indulging because of Obama.
It is a shame Webb dropped out. He is/was the only Democratic candidate that knows/knew the difference between an enemy and an opponent.
Base on his last comment and the look on his face, he seems to have decided Cooper was the former.
Jim seems like a reasonable Democrat because he’s substantially conservative.
Well, to defend this woman, how is a professor of gender studies supposed to know anything about the Constitution? My guess is that she fell asleep a lot in her high school civics class. Apparently she thinks she’s living in some banana republic where the president can do pretty much what he wants.
My guess is that she did not have a civics class in high school. If the professor is representative of only a fraction of today’s academia, this country is doomed to suffer the banana republic she thinks she is in.
She probably went to a college where this is what was taught in the civics class. Remember, most universities are staunchly Communist.
You sure put a lot of bait on that hook.
I went to a college where it was not a Democracy/Communism question. Everyone was positive that Communist was the ‘correct’ system. The question was what type of Communism we should have. We had the Trotskyists (SPARK), the Maoists (with MIMnotes), the Marxist-Leninists, even the Stalinists. What type of views do you have when you graduate from such a school? You have views exactly like this woman.
These are the kind of people who have physiological reactions to the sight of firearms…
I really do feel bad for them.
It would be wrong to make an NRA-ILA donation in her name, wouldn’t it? Her reaction to the thank you card would just amuse me.
My thought: I seriously wonder if this woman, given a keyboard and computer with internet access, could find her local municipal code, let alone state statutes and regulations to see what laws are applicable in any given instance. Should she be successful in this task, I’d like to see what she has to say when someone does something she dislikes but she knows is not prohibited by law. I know the answer….
To be fair she did say “orchestrate”:
“She really believes that Obama can act as a dictator whenever he wants to, that this is fine, and that he should use this fictional power to “ban” guns, which will involve seizing them by force in a totalitarian display of power.”
I assume by orchestrate, she means using his last year in office to lead a bipartisan movement to enact constitutionally amending legislation repealing the 2A prior to follow on legislation banning firearms.
Maybe that’s what our leftist professor (but I repeat myself) is trying to say…
Benefit of the doubt anyone? Anyone?
Not me.
She’s a fascist idiot.
Stop!
She’s a left winger! Remember, some academician back in the 70s got tired of ALL the totalitarians looking like left wingers, so instead of a linear “left-right” political spectrum, he developed a 2 dimensional political field to push the totalitarians away from the Left only.
She’s not a fascist! Only right wingers are fascists (never mind that they look a lot like typical left wing totalitarian states).
He would not be able to get even Democrats on board.