Education

Discrimination By Any Other Name

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Colleges and universities have become masterful at the sophistry of claiming that their discrimination isn’t discrimination, not really. A new example from Berkeley is very close to the line.

The Berkeley Law chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine announced over the summer that it had altered its bylaws to prohibit “speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel and the occupation of Palestine.” Eight other student groups adopted similar bans. In response, two lawyers filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights claiming that the ban amounts to antisemitic discrimination. DOE is investigating.

The lawyers, Arsen Ostrovsky and Gabriel Groisman, argue,

The student groups at Berkeley Law are being willfully deceptive. Rather than simply exclude Jewish speakers, they exclude speakers who have expressed and continue to hold views in support of Zionism. Zionism refers to the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and liberation in their ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel. It is not merely a “viewpoint” as the Dean suggests, but rather something that has for millennia formed an integral and indispensable part of Jewish identity. A rejection of those who identify as Zionists, which is a vast, overwhelming majority of Jews, is therefore no different to excluding anyone else on the basis of their faith, shared ancestry or national origin. And Title VI of the Civil Rights Act specifically states that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in … any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title VI also provides protection from discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.

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On The Freedom Of Speech Front…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Strangely, many of the same people who are claiming that democracy is hanging by a thread or two are also trying to fray a rather obvious thread, the right to free expression and free speech. Since that First Amendment thingy is a bear, they have to find ways around it that will stifle ideas, opinions and arguments that interfere with the “greater good”.”” (as they see it, natch). Or pretend the First Amendment “isn’t what it is” (#64).

Recent developments:

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Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #4: Imagine…If John Lennon Had Graduated From Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

If John Lennon had graduated from Harvard (and not been assassinated, of course) he might have written the ridiculous insufferable screed I just read in my anniversary report. I knew the author as a freshman, and did not enjoy the experience: the fact that he appears to be just as big a jerk today as he was when he was 18 confirms my long-held conclusion that maturity is a myth and most people don’t change as much as we would like to think.

Of course this guy is obsessed with climate change. He is downcast about the “prospects for the future of human civilization,” seeing “pending catastrophe” due to our “abuse of Mother Nature,” and there’s “very little time” to turn things around. No, Al Gore was not in my class.

Millions are going to die, “water wars” will rage, nuclear wars are inevitable, and hoards of climate-displaced refugees in the millions will roam the earth. Everyone must reduce their carbon footprint to zero–ZERO!—immediately, “not next year, not in five years, but now” or we are doomed. That means, this expert says (I can’t figure out what his real area of expertise is, but I don’t care, either), going cold turkey on fossil fuels and buying electric cars or, presumably, using bicycles and roller skates. Airplanes are right out, I guess.

He goes on to lecture on the need to abandon “tribalism,” self-interest, nations, success (“tribal dominance”) basic human aspirations and ambitions, all of it, because it is these maladies that have brought us to this perilous state. I’ll give him credit for one thing: at least he realizes that the kind of ascetic existence that he demands of humanity can’t possibly occur under the current governmental and societal structures, though he never has the guts to come right out and say what he’s advocating: world dictatorship by some body or individual who is wise and beneficent. For that would be the only way his formula for survival could ever be carried out, and that formula is exactly as absurd as Lennon’s lyrics in “Imagine.” It can’t happen, won’t happen, and most important of all, shouldn’t happen. Two and a half pages and 2,000 words of environmental, utopian virtue-signaling, all culminating in an urgent, indeed hysterical exhortation to not only do the impossible and impractical, but also do it without any reasonable assurance that such radical measures will work.

Good plan!

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Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #3

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I have just a few general observations this time.

  • I know I have mentioned this before, but I can’t get past it: it is remarkable to me, but maybe it shouldn’t be, how many of my classmates regard climate change as their greatest concern for the future.These are (mostly) smart, analytical people, yet climate change conventional wisdom has been successfully implanted in their brains by relentless media hammering and by cognitive dissonance (that is, what the “good” people believe must be good and true) so deeply that they are incapable of perceiving obvious logical fallacies. The people society trusts to devise substantive and practical solutions to our problems are stuck in the “Do something!” mode. Scary.
  • Trump Derangement rages.
  • So does wilful historical revisionism. One Democrat wrote that his wife was an “Eisenhower Republican” but had abandoned the current Republican Party because it had become too radically conservative. Eisenhower Republicans would make today’s GOP seem like the Antifa. Kennedy Democrats were more conservative than today’s Republican Party.
  • By far my favorite ethical weirdness, though, is the widespread obsession with exaggerating the significance of the January 6 Capitol rioting while referring to it as both an “insurrection” and a bleak portent of the decline of democracy. This opinion is coming from the class that overwhelmingly supported the student take-over of the Harvard administration building and cheered the students who battled riot police who tried to clear out the mob! That invasion of Harvard offices was just a microcosm of the Capitol riot, a foolish and doomed tantrum, except that the students were angry that their school was supporting a war over which they had no authority or control, while the Capitol rioters were protesting what they believed was a perversion of a Presidential election that had rendered their votes and rights effectively null and void. While the students were never held accountable for their civil disobedience, the Capitol rioters have been severely punished. After decades that should have made them wiser, the former students who never held any fantasies that their brief take-over of university offices would allow them to overthrow the Harvard administration now solemnly claim that a few hundred jacked-up idiots with bear spray and sticks thought they could take over the United States government.

Gee, What A Surprise: The Left Thinks American Education Is Just Fine

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The results of the above poll, commissioned by Yahoo News, shouldn’t surprise anyone, though apparently it surprised Yahoo. The poll, it says, reveals  “a deeper and more distressing divide. According to the Yahoo News/YouGov poll, faith in the American Dream — the ideal, embodied by education, that each successive generation will be better off than the one that came before it — is becoming increasingly polarized as well.In other words, Republicans are not only much more likely than Democrats to believe American education is getting worse. They’re also much more likely to believe that American life is getting worse.”

Here are some other “other words”: A frightening number of Democrats believe that American education is good because it indoctrinates the young into leftist belief systems, cant and ideology. They feel life in the U.S. is  getting better because more censorship, racial preferences, nanny-state programs, and restrictions on individual rights will be the inevitable result of the Left’s takeover of the entire educational establishment. Continue reading →

Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #1

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As I have noted, I deliberately missed my class’s big reunion intentionally, disgusted with what the school has become and the unethical values it now imposes on its students, alumni, applicants and other sho rely upon it to be a force for enlightenment in the nation. Interestingly, several classmates (none of whom I ever met) sent me their approval of my protest and the stated reasons for it in my class report, but none emailed. All arrived in handwritten letters. Either they think my views are so out-of-date that I communicate in quill and parchment only, or they do.

Anyway, I am slowly working my way through the hardbound tome, which is over a thousand pages long and in small print. Its statements by members of the class provide a fascinating and useful set of clues about the current state of mind the more pampered, “privileged” Boomers are in—for one thing, those who did write (a lot of them didn’t) are even more verbose than I am. Also notable is how many of the survivors of the original campus protests are just as vulnerable to facile conventional wisdom among their peer groups now as they were when they were praising Ho Chi Minh, promiscuous sex and the habit of being stoned much of the day.

I have always thought that maturity is a myth.

With this post, I’m launching what might be a continuing series, but who knows what horrors lie in those 1000 pages? I have already been horrified by the number of my classmates who feel that the Earth is endangered by global warming, which they view as the Most Important Thing Ever, though none of the people writing that appear to be in the scientific community.

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More Evidence That The Public Is In Need Of Basic Education Regarding The Constitution And The Bill Of Rights…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The online petition can demand until it is blue in the face, if petitions could be blue in the face, or had a face, for that matter.

The comments of the citizen in the video clip are 100% First Amendment protected speech. There is no valid argument to the contrary. Signatories of such a petition have announced that a) they don’t believe in free speech; b) they want the government to censor individual opinions they disagree with and c) they are unfit to participate or benefit from a democratic republic, preferring a totalitarian government provided its agendas aligns with those of the petition-signers.

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Stanford Goes Big Brother With A Newspeak List

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That’s Isaac Asimov above, expressing his doubts that attempts at vocabulary restriction by totalitarians actually works.

I don’t think the ethical issue is whether efforts to “compress” language are successful. The issue is what the effort tells us about the people and institutions who make those efforts. The latest is Stanford University.

Stanford’s IT department released an list x of “harmful language” that it wants erased from the school’s websites, and, by extension, campus discourse.The list is an outgrowth of the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” which aims to “eliminate” words that may be deemed “racist, violent, and biased.”

The IT department’s censorious document is a mess, a mixture of apples, oranges and passion fruit. Some of the words and phrases marked as unacceptable are rude and archaic. Others are completely innocent as well as useful, condemned because they might have been used somewhere, sometime, by someone in a derogatory context.

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Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding ‘Groomer’”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is complicated. Humble Talent’s Comment of The Day, in addition to being sparked by Mrs. Q’s comment, also responded to the comment on Mrs. Q’s Comment of the Day by dekerivers, whose quote begins Humble Talent’s post. All are relevant to the assertions about the term “groomer” made by RL Stroller, which are discussed here.

Got all that? Good…now, as my dad used to say in such situations, explain it to me.

***

“From my perspective as a gay man, teachers and school programs today are designed to foster a child to see themselves as who they are and allow for the expression of their individualism, which includes sexual orientation and identity.”

From my perspective as a gay man, if that actually all they were doing, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. Oh sure, there are legitimately Americans who still hate the fact that gay people exist, so *a* conversation would be going on, but it wouldn’t be this one.

And that, I think, basically encapsulates my disagreement with you: You ignore too much. you accept to much. You have done what so many people who identify with the acronym have done and taken in some awful people who have done shitty things and wrapped them up in the protection of inclusivity.

Just recently, during the Balenciaga SNAFU… There was a contingent of people saying that the moral panic du jour over pedophilia was an attack on LGBTQ people. Now, I believe that was a poorly designed shock campaign gone bad… But no one mentioned gay people. No one mentioned groomers. This is something the LGBTQ community took upon themselves, and I’m left standing at the outside of that, horrified at the implication. I don’t know how much lifting that + does for you, but it apparently does some heavy lifting elsewhere. I make it simple: Pedophiles don’t get to sit at my table. I don’t see an attack on pedophiles as an attack on me. I don’t know what exactly went on in Balenciaga’s office space, but it was fucking dumb, and no skin off my ass if they get called out.

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Comment Of The Day: “A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding ‘Groomer’”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

And now an important word from Mrs. Q that I wish could be circulated and read far and wide, on the post, A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding “Groomer.” (I’ve just got to find a way to get more readers here. I’m sorry, Mrs. Q. You deserve better.)

***

Gays Against Groomers is not a conservative group at all. The people in GAG are mostly gay or trans and stand against sexually inappropriate indoctrination of youth as well as against modifying the bodies of kids in the name of gender theory. This group has been denied services from several companies including payment processing and merchandise makers.

GAG’s crime, of course, isn’t that they’re “conservative” but that these renegade gays and trans citizens aren’t going along. In the world of progressivism, not knowing your place as a minority is even worse than being conservative. This is why people call GAG an “anti-gay transphobic hate group”— which of course makes no dang sense.

The Department of Justice has used the word Groomer for years. I read some of the DOJ’s reports on school grooming by teachers and other staff. This has been an unsaid issue for decades. The difference now is that the grooming is more diffuse in schools and done by woke staff who don’t see any issues down the road with exposing kids, including LGBT kids, to sex and gender identity concepts that are not age appropriate and that should be discussed with parents first.

Yes, this is grooming because such exposure seeks to eliminate innocence and circumvent parental moral teaching.

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