The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

I’m Not Going to Say Student Radicals Are Merely Corrupt Hustlers …

Posted on | November 29, 2015 | 26 Comments

. . . because, obviously, most of them are sincere in their desire to destroy Western civilization as we know it. However, we cannot ignore the way campus “diversity” operates as a shakedown racket:

With their campuses rocked by social justice protests, anxious Ivy League presidents are trying to appease campus radicals with huge payouts to left-wing identity programs. Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, apologized to protesters (“we failed you”) and wrote a campus-wide letter promising to create a new “university center” for the study of “race ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity.” He also pledged to double the budget for the African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic cultural centers, and to devote new resources to “educating our community about race, ethnicity, diversity, and inclusion.”
Not to be outdone, Brown University President Christina Paxson has answered protests by unveiling a $100 million program for creating “a just and inclusive campus community.” Among the budget items: “expand mentoring resources for students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and first generation college students”; create “workshops” to “foster greater awareness and sensitivity on issues of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression”; and “promote university-wide research and academic programming on Power, Privilege, Identity and Structural Racism.”
There is no doubt that there is still racism, sexism, and homophobia on college campuses, just as there is everywhere else in our society. But the idea that it can be stamped out with still more diversity training, still more cultural centers, and still more identity studies programs is a fantasy.

(Hat-tips: Instapundit via Ace of Spades HQ.)

What makes me the most angry about this is that every intelligent person should be able to recognize this “social justice” hustle for the phony scam it so obviously is. Anyone who has read Tom Wolfe’s 1970 classic Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers understands how this bogus game operates and, as Friedrich Hayek so eloquently explained, “social justice” is a mirage. There is no such thing as “social justice,” which is why SJWs Always Lie.

The politics of “Equality” is fundamentally dishonest, because human beings have never been equal at any time in the past, nor is it possible that we will be equal at any time in the future. Activists and politicians who promise to bring about “equality” through social-engineering schemes and so-called “progressive” economic policies are engaging in deceit that begins with the false assumption that every kind of inequality is evidence of injustice. It’s wrong for some people to have more than others, the “progressive” would have us believe. To quote Ronald Reagan: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”

Question: What percent of students at Ivy League universities have ever watched a video of that 1964 speech?

Probably about the same percentage who know who Friedrich Hayek is, which I’m going to guess is a tiny single-digit minority. Our nation’s elite universities are home to some of the most ignorant people on the planet.





 

Category: Education

Comments

26 Responses to “I’m Not Going to Say Student Radicals Are Merely Corrupt Hustlers …”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 29th, 2015 @ 7:14 pm

    I will say it…

  2. RS
    November 29th, 2015 @ 7:30 pm

    The student perpetrators of these protests are mere drones in the service of a larger more insidious agenda. It used to be that those of us in the Humanities, i.e. literature, philosophy and history, functioned as keepers of received wisdom of the ages, both the good and the bad, as grandiose as that sounds. What these modern “Grievance Studies” industries are doing is destroying the memory of that wisdom in favor of the banal and the trivial. In part, it is because Leftist/Progressives desire “achievement” without effort. Why take the long slow hike through the canon when one can shoot to the front of “B.A.-ville” by whining for four years.

    More insidious, however is the desire to create a civilizational tabula rasa upon which to re-create Man Progressivism’s image: unthinking and easily controlled by an aloof elite.

  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 29th, 2015 @ 7:36 pm

    Try getting a real job

  4. robertstacymccain
    November 29th, 2015 @ 8:01 pm

    “More insidious, however is the desire to create a civilizational tabula rasa upon which to re-create Man Progressivism’s image: unthinking and easily controlled by an aloof elite.”

    The idea of mankind as a tabula rasa can be traced to those philosophers who, whether attempting to explain the human condition or to advocate some ideal social order, tried to imagine what man’s life was like in some primordial “state of nature.” This sort of exercise was especially popular with 18th-century French philosophes, and inspired 19th-century radicals like Karl Marx to suggest that our existing social institutions were inherently unjust, and thus, by destroying society through revolution, we could bring about a most just society.

    These radicals have destroyed empires, and destroyed vast sums of wealth, and have destroyed the lives of millions of human beings, and where is the “just” society? The same place we find the mythical “state of nature” — nowhere. It has never existed, and will never exist. Man is a social creature, who cannot exist except within a system that requires him to cooperate with others to gain the means of preserving his life, of generating children and providing for their care. It is vanity to speculate about human life without the family and, as the family gives rise to the clan and the tribe, so also these lead eventually to the nation. There must always be some law, some common understanding of right and wrong, if man is to live a life of peace. The right of property, and the owner’s inherent right to defend that property, must be acknowledged as necessary for the improvement of the human condition. To go mucking around in some imagined past in search of a “state of nature” prior to the recognition of these basic institutions — the family and private property — is fantasy, or else to imagine a subhuman existence. Indeed, if we look at certain outcomes of socialist policies, it would seem that a common result is a subhuman condition, but don’t get me started on Detroit now . . .

  5. Fail Burton
    November 29th, 2015 @ 8:54 pm

    The most successful affirmative action movement in America is the one which has successfully attached itself to the KKK. But then, failure is easy. “Ivy League” has become a watchword for stupidity. Too bad these idiots don’t study physics. They’d understand that for every action there is an equal reaction. I see a lot of “safer-spaces” in our future, and mine is the one everyone wants to get into. Too bad; no shirt, no shoes, no brains, no service.

  6. Fail Burton
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:00 pm

    That’s funny, I thought it was the ’60s-80s post-structuralists who opined on how “before the law” emerged “before the law.” That is the gibberish Judith Butler borrowed where she at times uses the term “law” and “heterosexuality” interchangeably to demonstrate largely imaginary social constructs. Of course Butler has it backwards; she wrongly believes both the law and the breasts on her chest are a “fiction.”

  7. RS
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:18 pm

    I don’t disagree with you, but I was using “tabula rasa” in a metaphorical sense, as opposed to a “Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau” philosophical sense. We see a generation of people who have no sense of the past. They cannot see that what is supposedly new is, in fact, a rehash of ideas which have been tried and found wanting centuries, if not millennia before.

    This insulation from the past is by design. It is accomplished via the emphasis on identity to the point where we have students announcing that “dead white males” have nothing to say to anyone who is not white and male and heterosexual. Thus, the received wisdom is ignored, and if its ignored long enough, it is forgotten.

    And that’s when it comes back to bite civilization in the ass–Gods of the Copybook Headings and all that.

  8. Adobe_Walls
    November 29th, 2015 @ 10:31 pm

    This is why leftism in all it’s forms, must in the end fail. It relies entirely on the creation of the ”new man”.
    Conservatism, however (as our founders conceived it) takes man as he is and relies on his virtues to temper his vices.

  9. RS
    November 29th, 2015 @ 10:58 pm

    This is why leftism in all it’s forms, must in the end fail.

    Unfortunately, “failure” is a new Dark Age.

  10. CrustyB
    November 29th, 2015 @ 11:03 pm

    I’m paraphrasing Thomas Sowell here (again) when he said, “No wonder ‘social justice’ has been such a political success for more than a century . . . . the term has no defined meaning,”

  11. DeadMessenger
    November 29th, 2015 @ 11:44 pm

    What do you expect? Modern “universities” are full of loathesome bottom feeders who think the phrase “work ethic” means mandatory minimum wage imposed by the government.

    I hope I live to see the looks on their faces someday when these little Marxist slugs have to start giving over 30%+ of their paychecks in taxes in order to support the section 8 entitlement whores next door, who thank them by raping their daughters and stealing their sons’ bikes for dope money. Or just for fun.

    ‘Cause, you know, you reap what you sow.

  12. Matt_SE
    November 29th, 2015 @ 11:54 pm

    The thought has crossed my mind that the SJWs see the university system is unsustainable, and like banana republic dictators are trying to raid the coffers on the way out.
    The Ivy League schools have large endowments.

  13. DeadMessenger
    November 30th, 2015 @ 12:10 am

    Here we go…an article in Psychology Today about student wusses.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201509/declining-student-resilience-serious-problem-colleges

  14. DeadMessenger
    November 30th, 2015 @ 12:16 am

    I vote for the one involving manly highlanders wearing their clan tartan and carrying weapons. And bottles of Glenmorangie.

    Full disclosure: I’m partly Scot, after all, and a crazy highlander at that. My clan’s tartan:

  15. SJW phobia is a Nigerian email scam. | Dark Brightness
    November 30th, 2015 @ 3:15 am

    […] What makes me the most angry about this is that every intelligent person should be able to recognize…. Anyone who has read Tom Wolfe’s 1970 classic Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers understands how this bogus game operates and, as Friedrich Hayek so eloquently explained, “social justice” is a mirage. There is no such thing as “social justice,” which is why SJWs Always Lie. […]

  16. gastorgrab
    November 30th, 2015 @ 10:48 am

    Call it what it is;

    EMOTIONAL JUSTICE NOW!!! EMOTIONAL JUSTICE NOW!!!

  17. robertstacymccain
    November 30th, 2015 @ 10:57 am

    Indeed, it is unfair for some people to be happy while others are immersed in misery. A progressive policy will make us all equally miserable.

  18. Dana
    November 30th, 2015 @ 12:03 pm

    They’d have to actually get jobs that did not involve flipping hamburgers or scooping popcorn into bags to pay that much in taxes. The Special Snowflakes™ will be the ones living in the Section 8 housing, not the ones supporting it.

    If they are so weak that they are injured when someone microassails them, they will never win the the real world’s competition.

  19. Durasim
    November 30th, 2015 @ 12:25 pm

    It’s about time that at least one academic official showed some fortitude.

    http://www.okwu.edu/blog/2015/11/this-is-not-a-day-care-its-a-university/

  20. DeadMessenger
    November 30th, 2015 @ 12:43 pm

    Well, it is a fact that to exist and to move up in the corporate world, you have to be not only thick-skinned, but brutal. One’s minority status or “identity” may allow some traction up front, but not for very long.

  21. Quartermaster
    November 30th, 2015 @ 12:54 pm

    Indeed! A Christian University headed by a Christian. Imagine that!

  22. Quartermaster
    November 30th, 2015 @ 12:55 pm

    Yes instead of “trickle down” prospertity we get “gushing up” poverty.

  23. Quartermaster
    November 30th, 2015 @ 1:00 pm

    They’re just a reincarnation of the 60s campus radicals. Those “individualist” nitwits would get fired up by professors, who would then quietly slink away to watch the chaos they had incited.

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