Race

More Cultural Bulldozing: Political Correctness Gets H.P. Lovecraft, Woodrow Wilson Of The Geeks

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments
The bust says it all...

The bust says it all…

Really bad and dangerous ideas take hold and thrive because, like a particularly deadly virus, they pop up in so many places at once, especially dark corners and exotic locals. The current progressive contagion of airbrushing history, toppling icons and cultural bulldozing–one of several  habits of successful totalitarians being embraced by the left these days—is such an idea. As usual, defenders of this thought-inhibiting and unjust practice behave as if it is the epitome of common sense and virtue, when in truth it is the  opposite.

To the credit of the followers of the World Fantasy Award (for literature in the fantasy an horror field), the administrators’ decision to cave to political correctness and retire an H. P. Lovecraft bust (designed by black humor cartoonist Gahan Wilson) as its symbol—H.P. was like, Woodrow Wilson, a white, Western culture supremacist —was not met with universal approval. Nonetheless the Award’s head honchos did it.

They did it to mollify the social justice zealots in the organization’s midst, who insisted on sending the message that currently non-conforming ideas and beliefs should be punished decades or even centuries later by pretending that legitimate and important contributions to art, politics, science and civilization didn’t exist, if the man or woman involved stepped across a political correctness line that didn’t exist when it was stepped over. All it takes to justify eradicating any honor, recognition or symbol of cultural gratitude is for a major historical figure in any field to have been shown to have engaged in, thought about (or consorted with those who engaged in or thought about) practices that the current culture, with assistance of many years of debate and experience that the toppled never had, now finds misguided, objectionable, offensive or wrong.

The proper punishment for this retroactive crime, these spiritual brethren of Stalin believe, is banishment, rejection and shame in the very field where the individual’s positive accomplishments reside. This is necessary to keep future generations from being influenced by ideas that might trigger discomfort among true believers of the official creed.

Thus, reason doctrinaire Princeton kids who have figured out The Great Truths at their tender age, Woodrow Wilson’s major contributions of strengthening and burnishing the name of the college, leading the United States for two terms, including through a world war, and devising the concept of the United Nations, no longer warrant respect and memorial, because he was, like so many other Southerners of his time, an unapologetic white supremacist. Of course, so was Abraham Lincoln and much of the nation, but that cuts no ice with the practitioners of merciless presentism. It isn’t just the views of the long dead that are being punished, you see. It’s a warning to non-conforming thinkers alive yet. Watch out! it says. Your thoughts, inspirations and ideas are impure and wrong, and you are still vulnerable to real punishment, not just the post-mortem fate of being defiled and forgotten. Continue reading →

I Don’t Understand: Why Doesn’t The Life of Donald E. Gates Matter To Black Lives Matter?

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

GATES

This week, a federal jury found that District of Columbia. police framed Donald E. Gates, an innocent man, for a 1981 rape and murder of a 21-year-old Georgetown University student.  Gates, who is African American, was imprisoned for 27 years. Two days after the verdict, the city settled with Gates for $16.65 million in damages.

The trial determined that two D.C. homicide detectives,Ronald S. Taylor and Norman Brooks, both now retired, largely fabricated  the confession Gates was supposed to have made to a police informant. The detectives also withheld other evidence from Gates’ defense attorney. You can read the whole horrible story here.

There are a couple of aspects of this story, and others like it, that I don’t understand at all.

One is this: why aren’t the two detectives going to prison? Their conduct has cost the city’s taxpayers eight figures in damages, it has already cost an innocent man the prime of his life, and what is their penalty? I would support capital punishment for police like these. Destroying a man’s life, breaching a public duty, shredding public trust, using the law for evil— few murders do so much damage. It makes no sense for there not to be life imprisonment, execution, something to announce to the community that police and law enforcement officers will and must be held to the highest standards, and suffer greatly when they fail to meet the lowest. From what I can tell, these evil detectives—that’s a fair description, isn’t it?— aren’t even going to lose their pensions. Continue reading →

Airbrushing History, Again: If Woodrow Wilson Is At Risk, Can George Washington Be Far behind?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

woodrow-wilson

While Paris was bleeding, the predicted anti-white black student power play spread from its origins at Yale and the University of Missouri to 23 other campuses (so far). None of the new outbreaks of victim-mongering, black-dictated apartheid  and outrageous demands had any more justification than the Mizzou Meltdown, but they all entered the competition. Some highlights:

  • Amherst students demanded a crack-down on any free speech in the form of criticism of Black Lives Matters or the protest goals.
  • Dartmouth’s Black Lives Matters members roamed through the campus library, verbally assaulting white students attempting to study.
  • Smith College held a sit-in, and barred reporters-–the new breed of campus freedom-fighters just don’t like that pesky First Amendment—unless they promised to cover the protest positively. There’s one more school that doesn’t teach basic American rights and values….
  • Occidental College is in the middle of a me-too imitation of the Mizzou stunt, with students occupying a three-story administration building all this week, demanding that a series of actions ranging from racist to just unreasonable to oppressive, in the name of “safety” and “diversity”, of course. They are also insisting that President Jonathan Veitch resign. Predictably, the leftist faculty which helped make the students this way are fully supportive. Read the demands here; my favorites: demanding an increase in tenured black professors and black doctors (a racist demand: there is no mention of ability; color is enough); funding for the student group for black men, which is racist and counter-diverse by definition; and “elimination of military and police rhetoric from all documents and daily discourse.”

Freedom of speech is so passe.

  • The crazy is getting stronger: The University of Vermont-–from the lands where Bernie Sanders roams— hosted a three-day retreat for students who “self-identify as white,” called  “Examining White Privilege: A Retreat for Undergraduate Students Who Self-Identify as White.”  The goal was to give students “the opportunity” to “conceptualize and articulate whiteness from a personal and systemic lens”  and “recognize and understand white privilege from an individual experience.” This, I submit, has absolutely nothing to do with education, and everything to do with self-obsession and narcissism.

Ah, but my favorite is Princeton, which finding itself third among its fellow Ivies (as usual), this time in concocting an embarrassing and offensive student protest, decided to go for broke.This week, members of the Black Justice League walked out of class and occupied the building that houses the Princeton administration’s offices. They demanded that the school reject “the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson,” formerly president of Princeton before becoming a President of the United States and Democratic Party icon, by removing his name from anything bearing it. They also demanded “cultural competency training” for Princeton professors and assistants (that is, forced re-education and ideological brainwashing, academia style) teaching at Princeton, courses on the “history of marginalized people,” that is, approved leftist narratives, and  the setting aside of public spaceto be  restricted to the use and enjoyment of black students only, which is properly called self-segregation and racist exclusion.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Second Democratic Candidates Debate, Part 2 of 2

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Dems three

The transcript is here.

Part I is here.

6. Sooner or later, a Democrat is going to have to answer a question about the “safe places,” microaggressions,” college campus meltdown that is, I think, just gathering momentum, and choose between alienating the young black base that elected Barack Obama, or horrifying people who believe in free speech and thought, presumably a few iconoclast Democrats and a lot of independents. Significantly, CBS didn’t ask Sen. Sanders that question.

Well, it’s significant if you  believe that CBS is protecting the Democrats. As we saw in Bernie’s coddling of Black Lives Matter, and know from the fact that he’s a Marxist at heart, he doesn’t really expect to be nominated and has no spine (see Part I), Sanders was a good bet to fully endorse the anti-free speech position taken by the students at Yale, Amherst and Mizzou. That would have put the whole Party, which right now is Hillary, on the spot. Surely CBS would never do that. The alternative is to believe that last night’s journalists were inept.

Only Hillary was asked the question, and she ducked it with something akin to what Olson Johnson called “authentic frontier gibberish”:

DICKERSON: Secretary Clinton, you told some Black Lives Matter activists recently that there’s a difference between rhetoric in activism and what you were trying to do, was — get laws passed that would help what they were pushing for. But recently, at the University of Missouri, that activism was very, very effective. So would you suggest that kind of activism take place at other universities across the country?

CLINTON: Well, John, I come from the ’60s, a long time ago. There was a lot of activism on campus — Civil Rights activism, antiwar activism, women’s rights activism — and I do appreciate the way young people are standing up and speaking out. Obviously, I believe that on a college campus, there should be enough respect so people hear each other. But what happened at the university there, what’s happening at other universities, I think reflects the deep sense of, you know, concern, even despair that so many young people, particularly of color, have…You know, I recently met with a group of mothers who lost their children to either killings by police or random killings in their neighborhoods, and hearing their stories was so incredibly, profoundly heartbreaking. Each one of them, you know, described their child, had a picture. You know, the mother of the young man with his friends in the car who was playing loud music and, you know, some older white man pulled out a gun and shot him because they wouldn’t turn the radio down.Or a young woman who had been performing at President Obama’s second inauguration coming home, absolutely stellar young woman, hanging out with her friends in a park getting shot by a gang member.And, of course, I met the mothers of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and so many of them who have lost their children.So, your original question is the right question. And it’s not just a question for parents and grandparents to answer. It’s really a question for all of us to answer, every single one of our children deserves the chance to live up to his or her god-given potential. And that’s what we need to be doing to the best of our ability in our country.

DICKERSON: All right, over to Kevin Cooney.

Hilarious.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Second Democratic Candidates Debate, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Debate

[The transcript is here]

1. Before the debate even started, Mediaite posted an article (here)  about how the Democratic National Committee appears to be intentionally scheduling what few debates it is allowing to guarantee as low a viewership as possible. The logic. of course, is to minimize the opportunities for Hillary Clinton to make a gaffe or have to answer an uncomfortable question with too many people watching.

It is impossible to prove this short of an intercepted e-mail with the smoking gun words, but it’s a compelling theory. Why else, Joe Concha asks, would the DNC schedule all debates on weekends, especially when Saturday is the least watched TV night—by far—of the week? Why would last night’s debate, the last before the Iowa Caucus, be scheduled against the TV broadcast of the undefeated University of Iowa football team as they take on Big-10 rival Minnesota? (For those few Democrats in Iowa who don’t root for the local college, there’s the Oklahoma-Baylor game on ABC, one of the premier games of the college football season.)

[Personally, I don’t watch young college men in the process of giving themselves concussions and brain damage, or cheer for schools that warp their budgets by spending and making obscene amount of money on sports played by  students in name only while positioning them to extort administrators when campus activist pull their strings, like in the University of Missouri. But that’s just me.]

The next debate takes place on Sunday, January 17th on PBS in Charleston, S.C. Aside from the fact that choosing the little-watched PBS already guarantees a reduced audience, that debate will compete with the divisional round of the AFC playoffs.

2. John Dickerson, the new host of Face The Nation and the moderator last night, was also criticized in advance of the debate for being a hand-picked Democratic partisan. Of course, the odds are that any broadcast journalist would be ( a study released last week showed that 93% of journalists are Democrat/progressive, leaving Independents and Republicans to split the remaining 7%) but only Dickerson authored a red-meat anti-Republican screed for Slate earlier in the Obama Administration  with the memorable lines,

Go for the Throat! [I] f he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party…

Fears that Dickerson would lob nothing but softballs at his fellow Democrats proved to be unfounded, however, to his credit.  In fact, a high percentage of his questions were CNBC-style accusations or “when did you stop beating your wife?” queries  (NOT to his credit) like this one to Martin O’Malley:

“Is the world too dangerous a place for a Governor who has no foreign policy experience?”

What’s the answer? “No, it’s not too dangerous a place…” or “Yes, it’s too dangerous for an amateur like me…”? That’s an unprofessional, unfair question, and everything Ethics Alarms said about the CNBC moderators applies to Dickerson. O’Malley just ducked the question and talked about something else, which is the only alternative to a Ted Cruz, “You know, you guys are shameless hacks” response. I much prefer the latter. Continue reading →

On Immigration, Speech Suppression, War, Terrorism, Police and More, It’s Cultural Death By Compassion Poisoning

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Think of the children!Compassion is a wonderful thing. A nation cannot govern or even survive, however, using compassion as its guiding ethical principle. The United States currently seems hell bent on disproving this fact, and is well on the way to confirming it. It is too bad that this is true, and we should all agree that it’s  a damn shame that you can’t run a successful democracy without periodically inflicting pain, creating suffering and harming some human beings in order that many more can live in peace and pursue their lawful ambitions and desires. Nonetheless, that is an immutable fact of existence. Government policy that attempts to deny it is not merely incompetent and naive, but ultimately suicidal. A culture that elevates compassion above all other values like responsibility, accountability, prudence, process and proportion is betting everything on the inherent goodness and rationality of humanity. History tells us it’s a losing bet.

When I woke up to the horrible news of the Paris attacks, and after I had finished simultaneous laughing and crying about the fact that President Obama picked yesterday to proclaim that the threat of ISIS had been “contained,” it suddenly occurred to me that the majority of the crises this nation struggles with today are  linked by the same cultural and leadership malady. The United States increasingly is unwilling to accept the reality that governance is utilitarian, and that punishment, deterrence, sacrifice, pain, retaliation and accountability are indispensable tools that must be used and used unapologetically. The alternative is chaos, and chaos is what we are facing.

An impressive number of these crises have been in the news this week: Continue reading →

The Mizzou Meltdown: Unethical Quote, Perfect Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
Anyone who believes this doesn't understand the concept of "free speech." Fortunately, one of the purposes of a liberal arts education is to teach students what...oh. Right.

Anyone who believes this doesn’t understand the concept of “free speech.” Fortunately, one of the purposes of a liberal arts education is to teach students what…oh. Right.

There is no way, I have suggested, that the actions and rhetoric from the protesters at the University at Missouri clamoring for “safety” and an end to incidents of upsetting speech have any place to go except campus censorship by force. To the extent that the African- American students’ conduct has wider aspirations that extend beyond the campus to U.S. society, they threaten free speech, communication and thought in our society as well. Of course, it must have these aspirations: college is supposed to prepare one for the real world, not to render you more vulnerable to its challenges.

Since the defining character of progressive rhetoric in 2015 is double-talk and ambiguity (for example, “immigration reform,” which really means “no illegal immigration enforcement,” or “mass incarceration,” which means “blaming criminal activity on laws and law enforcement rather than too many people choosing to break laws”), it has been hard to get an explicit statement out of sympathizers that confirm my conclusion. Their intent has been clear, as in the episodes where journalists have been muscled away from “safe” places. Others have interpreted the students’ complaints and demands to require censorship by threat of sanctions, as shown by the Mizzou police e-mail telling students to report “hateful or hurtful speech or actions” and their perpetrators, laying the foundation for an elite, racially-based group of campus inquisitors who have the power to define the hate and haters and send them to a metaphorical stake. The students’ words, however, have remained oblique.

Fortunately, here comes Mizzou student body VP Brenda Smith-Lezama to clarify. She was talking to MSNBC about the declared “safe spaces”—which means, for those who need another translation, this means “places on campus where the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply”—and spat out this:

“I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here. I think that it’s important for us to create that distinction and create a space where we can all learn from one another and start to create a place of healing rather than a place where we are experiencing a lot of hate like we have in the past.”

Fortunately, Brookings Institute (That’s the liberal one, remember) Senior Fellow Jonathan Rauch, and the author of “Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought”,  had just offered the rebuttal to Smith-Lezama confused view of education in an op-ed the day before. He wrote in part… Continue reading →

Desperately Seeking A Justification For The Unjustifiable Mizzou Meltdown, And Failing

/ Jack Marshall / 83 Comments

protest-mizzou

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Janelle Moss, an African American issues columnist, presented an aggressive, dishonest and insulting justification for the destructive black student protests at the University of Missouri. In an earlier essay, I described them as an “I’m mad at the world and somebody has to pay for it” tantrum. I’m sticking by that description, despite the ennobling spin being put on it by apologists, many of whom are trying to blunt the damage being done to civil rights advocacy by the events of the last several days.

[N]owhere in this still-young week has there been a better example of the tension between the conservative and liberal views of race and the politics around it than behind the podium where University of Missouri President Timothy M. Wolfe stood and resigned Monday,” she wrote.  This is setting up Wolfe’s speech as a straw man. He was forced to resign, and ordered to do it without making matters worse. He was also protecting himself, and, I believe, was a weak and inept leader. How nice to be able to take a hastily written statement by such a dubious representative of any group and declare it the exemplar of “conservative views on race.”

Moss’s introduction was smoking gun proof that this was an example of an advocate picking out evidence to support what she already was committed to supporting, and atrocious evidence at that.

“The Fix is aware that some Americans are inclined to reject, outright, the idea that some words — those that we choose to express our ideas, what we say at critical moments and that which we do not mention — have deeper, often multi-layered meaning, ” she writes.  I don’t know what she thinks she is saying. “Many Americans” reject the idea that words have meaning? “Multi-layered” meanings? Who? Who believes that? What she is trying to do is to justify her next “proof,” which is junk science.

She consulted two minority social scientists, who have clear biases of their own (but coincidentally aligned with hers)  to psychoanalyze what Wolfe said in resigning, and allowing her to use their self-serving diagnosis (one has a book out about “dog-whistle” racism; the other makes his living writing and teaching about how racist the U.S. is) of a short and quickly composed speech to read not just Wolfe’s thoughts but to attribute them to all “conservatives.” The result is, or should be embarrassing. Continue reading →

Bulletin To African-American Activists, Progressives And The University of Missouri : Racial Biases, Slurs, Insults and “Microaggressions” Are Immutable Facts Of Life, And Nobody Can Make You “Safe” From Them In A Free Country

/ Jack Marshall / 106 Comments

It is clear now, as I initially expected, that what the black student tantrum that brought down the leadership at the University of Missouri wanted is encapsulated by the first gesture by the school’s new puppet regime. This:

Police email

Ah, what a wonderful wonderful world it would be, the race-grievance mob believes, if we could arrest and punish anyone who doesn’t like us, looks at us with a stink-eye, sneers at us or calls us ugly names!  That would make them love their neighbors! The entire Missouri fiasco was nothing but a Kafka-esque satire on this dream. It is one that is constantly fertilized by social justice warriors who increasingly favor totalitarian methods, and who maintain that “hate speech” is immune from the the First Amendment.

The new tactic, apparently, as I read the head-exploding memo above, is to leap right past “hate speech” to banning “mean speech” and “not very nice speech.” Rather than teaching their delicate and misguided students to learn what fat kids, ugly kids, flat-chested girls, 90 pound weakling guys, people with stutters or birth defects,  people who are weak, or not very smart or obnoxious or poor,  people who look different or wear strange clothes or have accents or smell different or who have handicaps or Asperger’s, or infamous parents, or old (my mother complained constantly about the “microagressions” she got from young people)… or, from the other side, those who too smart or too sexy or too articulate or too rich… have to learn in order to become self-sufficient, confident and not to be at the mercy of bullies, assholes and fools all their lives, the University of Missouri (and Yale, and many institutions to come if we can’t successfully humiliate those schools into rationality) are joining with the growing authoritarian wing of the progressive movement to advocate the suppression of free thought and expression. They think this will end racism. They think it is possible to make human beings “safe” from cruel and unjust social interactions.

Not in a free country, it’s not. Continue reading →

Ten Ethics Observations On The Resignation Of University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe

/ Jack Marshall / 91 Comments

dominoes2

…for nothing, as far as I can see, except being in the wrong job when an “I’m mad at the world and somebody has to pay for it” tantrum by some of the black students got out of control.

Observations:

1. I have searched and searched for a substantive reason for the upheaval. There is apparently nothing there. The university, the education of students and two men’s career’s (the University’s Chancellor has also been forced to resign) have all been disrupted, and for no good reason, except that some students decided it was a good time to grandstand. This makes the entire episode unjust by definition.

How ironic it is supposed to be about “justice.”

2. The main driver of events was graduate student Jonathan Butler, who started a hunger strike to force Wolfe to resign”for justice.” Given a chance to explain his position by the Washington Post, he had nothing definitive or constructive to offer, just vague dissatisfaction:

“I’m saying, even if you can’t really understand systemic oppression and systemic racism, is the fact we can’t be at a university where we have values like “Respect, Responsibility, Discovery and Excellence” and we don’t have any of those things being enacted on campus, especially in terms of respect. I’m on a campus where people feel free to call people the n-word, where people feel free as recently as last week, to used [their] own feces to smear a swastika in a residential hall. Everything that glitters is not gold. We really need to dig deep and be real with ourselves about the world we live in and understand that we’re not perfect but understand that just because we’re not perfect doesn’t mean we don’t start to understand and address the issues around us.”

Right. Some kids in a car that may not have been students and another individual on campus who has not been identified used  racial epithets. Some mentally deficient person, also unidentified, drew a swastika on campus using human excrement. (This type of incident tends to be a hoax  as often as not.) What exactly is the president of a university supposed to do about such things ? Wolfe mandated “sensitivity courses” for everyone on campus, which is already too much. I would refuse to attend. I would not respect anyone who did attend.

Heck, I might start a hunger strike.

It works. Continue reading →