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Ruth King

Academia Doesn’t Get to Define ‘Racism’ for the Rest of Us By Robert VerBruggen

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/racism-debate-sarah-jeong-academia-cannot-define-words/

The latest controversy stems from a deep confusion about how language works.

A “descriptivist” is someone who studies how language is used. A “prescriptivist” is someone who tells other people how to use language correctly. And while these are often framed as opposing camps, they need not be: A thoughtful descriptivist realizes that strongly established usage patterns should generally be treated as rules by someone who wants to communicate effectively; a thoughtful prescriptivist realizes that the rules emerge from constantly evolving usage patterns.

There’s a certain strain of prescriptivism, though, that merely seeks to impose rules on other people’s language, often on nothing more than one’s own say-so. Overwhelmingly, these folks are harmless-if-annoying self-appointed “sticklers” who insist, for example, that you must not split infinitives or start sentences with conjunctions. But ill-founded prescriptivism also rears its head with political terms, and we’ve been seeing a bit of that lately from the woke left.

Some academics who study racial matters use the word “racism” to mean not “dislike of people on the basis of race,” which is how most people use it, but rather something like “prejudice plus power” or what is more clearly called “institutional” or “systemic” racism — meaning, conveniently, that members of minority groups by definition cannot be racist. And as Scott Alexander noted at Slate Star Codex back in 2014, parts of the Left are no longer willing to admit that this is a departure from standard usage by saying something along the lines of, “I suppose a group of black people chasing a white kid down the street waving knives and yelling ‘KILL WHITEY’ qualifies by most people’s definition, but I prefer to idiosyncratically define it my own way, so just remember that when you’re reading stuff I write.”

Many simply point to academic definitions, as though academia had the power to redefine words for the rest of society; that, of course, is not how language works.

Betsy DeVos’s Loan-Forgiveness Rule Gets Slimed by the College Cartel By Frederick M. Hess & Cody Christensen

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/betsy-devoss-loan-forgiveness-rule-slimed-by-college-cartel/

The new standard is clearly better for colleges, taxpayers, and students who are willing to repay their debts.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has issued new guidelines on federal student-loan forgiveness in an attempt to more sensibly balance the rights of borrowers and taxpayers. Predictably, the higher-education cartel and its media allies were aghast. The New York Times headlined its story “DeVos Proposes to Curtail Debt Relief for Defrauded Students.” Other headlines included “Betsy DeVos’ Message to Students: You Have the Right to Be Ripped Off” and “Betsy DeVos’ New Proposal Aligns Her With For-Profit Colleges Over Debt-Saddled Students.” The Center for Responsible Lending’s Ashley Harrington huffed that the proposal was “a roadmap for institutions seeking to abuse students.”

What made this so bizarre, even by the standards of the mud-slinging higher-education debate, is that it’s unclear whether all students seeking loan forgiveness have actually been defrauded. Indeed, the impetus for DeVos’s action was the likelihood that the previous rules, put forward under President Obama, were going to put taxpayers on the hook for billions to bail out students who hadn’t been victimized.

Certainly, one can quibble about the particulars of the new rule — including an unfortunate and arbitrary provision stipulating that only borrowers who enter into default can apply for borrower defense. But to allege, for example, that DeVos is curtailing “Debt Relief for Defrauded Students” is to beg the key question.

The new guidance concerns a provision of the federal student-loan program known as “Borrower Defense to Repayment.” This is a mechanism for forgiving the loans of students who attend colleges that engage in fraud, such as by misrepresenting program information or future employment and earnings. So far, so good.

The problem is that the Obama administration, as part of its larger crusade against for-profit colleges, issued guidance that created an astonishingly far-reaching definition of fraud — opening the floodgates for across-the-board loan discharges, at taxpayer expense, if “public interest” minions could show merely that colleges made modest, inadvertent mistakes in marketing or advertisements.

Smith College Employee Investigated for Following School Policy By Tom Knighton

https://pjmedia.com/trending/smith-college-employee-follows-policy-now-investigated-for-doing-so/

Have you ever followed the rules of your job, only to land yourself in hot water because of it?

For most of us, if it happened, it was soon resolved because, yes, we followed the rules. It’s a pain in the rear, but it’s soon taken care of and life goes on.

For a staff member of Smith College, that may or may not happen.

You see, the staff member saw what he believed to be a man lounging in the common area of a building at a women’s college during the summer. That seemed suspicious, so he called it in as Smith College policy requires him to do.

The campus police arrived and investigated and found out that it was a student, though one with an extremely short haircut, one short enough to offer a bit of confusion as to the sex of the individual without a more thorough examination.

I’m sure the student wasn’t happy about that, and who could blame her? Being called a guy isn’t exactly cool, and I get a woman being upset about that, even if it’s based on a mere glance.

However, what is the student is most upset about? Well, she’s black and so now it’s a whole racial thing.

As The College Fix reported, “With no evidence, the teaching assistant and residential advisor claimed on Facebook last week that the incident was an example of racism.”

GOP’s Special Election Wins Counter Media Spin By Adele Malpass

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/08/gops_special_election_wins_counter_media_spin_137760.html

The media narrative from Tuesday night’s special election in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District is that even a loss is good news for Democrats. What’s been under-reported is that Republicans won the vast majority of the 11 special elections for U.S. House and Senate seats held since the 2016 election.

One of the races, in California’s 34th Congressional District, was won by a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic district. In the remaining 10 special elections, where Republicans were defending seats, eight were won by Republicans.

The media narrative is that Democrats’ “success” in making some of these races close has broader implications for the November midterms. Not so. Only in Alabama, where Doug Jones beat flawed candidate Roy Moore, and in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, where Conor Lamb beat Rick Saccone, can Democrats claim true victories.

Special elections are a minority party’s dream come true. They are all about turnout, which poses a challenge given that they are held at off-cycle times, and involve open seats. Incumbents usually have enormous advantages of money, name identification and organization. However, since the 2016 election, the advantage was negated in five of the 11 special elections. These were held to replace Cabinet appointees in the Trump administration, all of whom had strong support in their home states and districts: Jeff Sessions, Mick Mulvaney, Tom Price, Mike Pompeo and Ryan Zinke.

Trump pushes prison reform with successful state leaders by Gabby Morrongiello

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/trump-pushes-prison-reform-with-state-leaders-who-have-found-success

President Trump will spend Thursday afternoon huddling with administration officials and state leaders to discuss a path forward for prison form in Congress, something his administration has privately pushed for in recent weeks.

The 4 p.m. roundtable at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey will include four Republican governors, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Lousiana, and Attorneys General Pam Bondi and Ken Paxton of Florida and Texas, respectively.

White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley noted in a statement Thursday that each of the participants hail “from states that have already implemented” reforms similar to those contained in the First Step Act, a bill that passed the House in May and could be the foundation for a bipartisan deal in the Senate.

The president and his team have been working behind the scenes in recent weeks to modify the legislation to include changes to current sentencing laws and measures that would target recidivism rates among previously incarcerated individuals.

According to the Washington Post, the White House is in close contact with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah on the issue.

But efforts to amend the prison system and reduce sentences for crimes like nonviolent drug offenses could be met with resistance among conservative lawmakers who typically support the president. Some have even suggested that Attorney General Jeff Sessions could complicate matters given his longstanding hard-line views on criminal justice.

“With all that I have done to help Sessions, to keep the president from firing him, I think [he] ought to stay out of it,” grassley told the Post on Thursday.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Lazy Eye by Linda Goudsmit

A lazy eye, technically amblyopia, is a childhood disorder of sight in which each eye sees a single object but the brain does not fuse the two objects into one single object – the child sees double. Double vision is intolerable to a human being so the brain turns one eye off – hence the name lazy eye. The vision in the turned off eye weakens sometimes to the point of blindness. The goal of treatment is to have both eyes see the object and for the brain to fuse the twin images into a single object. Treatment for amblyopia is designed to force the patient to use the lazy eye. Usually the child wears an ocular patch over the strong eye that forces him/her to use the weaker eye thereby strengthening its vision. Treatment is extremely uncomfortable for the child and often resisted because the vision in the lazy eye is so much weaker than the vision in the strong eye.

So it is with cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a theory developed in the 1950s by American psychologist Leon Festinger who said that inconsistency between thoughts or between thoughts and actions leads to discomfort (dissonance) which motivates changes in thoughts and behavior. When the cognitive dissonance becomes too overwhelming the person turns one of the thoughts off. People cannot tolerate double vision and they cannot tolerate inconsistency – they seek homeostasis.

According to Festinger, “The motivation to reduce dissonance is directly proportional to the magnitude and importance of the discrepant cognitions, and inversely proportional to the magnitude and importance of the consistent cognitions.” So, the more important the subject of the discrepancy the more motivated the person is to end the discordance.

Cognitive dissonance in the 21st century has been weaponized and is the preferred leftist strategy being used to destabilize and drive America crazy – it is a malicious tool of social engineering that impels behavior change. The purpose of leftist cognitive dissonance is submission to its tenets of political correctness, moral relativity, and historical revisionism. The left wants its contradictory ideas and norms to overwhelm the population with anxiety so that traditional norms are turned off and unconventional leftist norms accepted. The left wants one eyed vision.

Summer is a time for Jewish unity and saving Jewish lives By Karna Feinstein-Cohen

http://washingtonjewishweek.com/47645/summer-is-a-time-for-jewish-unity-and-savi

Working for Jewish unity should have been an imperative for Jews the world over this summer. All summer long Islamic terrorists in Gaza have been sending incendiary kites in order to set fire to Israeli farmland and forests. The terrorists have also been launching barrages of missiles aimed at Israeli civilian neighborhoods. One firebomb balloon landed in the yard of a kindergarten in the southern Israeli moshav of Tkuma. All of this while the Jewish people were in the midst of the very season when we mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple.

To make matters worse, there were reports of Jews in the United States and in Britain seemingly showing more concern for our adversaries than our fellow Jews. News headlines about Kaddish being recited for Hamas terrorists, Birthright participants being led off of tours to learn about “the occupation,” and Jewish summer camp counselors conspiring to teach their campers the Palestinian narrative seemed all too frequent this summer.

That is why the news that a Magen David Adom ambulance was donated by a coalition of synagogues in suburban Philadelphia was especially encouraging and heartwarming to hear just before Tisha B’Av.

Unfortunately, at this time, Israelis need to know that Red Magen David Adom ambulances must be depended upon once again to save the lives of Jews.

The Talmud Bavli in Sanhedrin 37a states: “Anyone who saves the life of one of the children of Israel, the verse ascribes him credit as if he saved an entire world.”

New Heights of Turkish Hypocrisy by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12817/turkish-hypocrisy

According to a 2015 news report, there were only 1,244 Greeks left in Istanbul at that time. In addition, even those tiny minorities are reportedly leaving Turkey in increasing numbers, to escape the instability and aggression they suffer in the country.

Many Muslim Turks who are on the receiving end of Erdogan’s human-rights abuses, seem shocked by the current undemocratic events in Turkey. They should not be; such abuses have been going on in the country for decades. The Turks are likely to continue living under the oppression that they themselves have created.

Erdogan needs to be reminded that it is not Israel — a vibrant and flourishing democracy with equal rights for all its citizens — whose behavior is reminiscent of dark chapters in history. It is Turkey.

During a parliamentary meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on July 24, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel the “most Zionist, fascist, and racist state in the world.” Referring to the recent passage by Israel’s Knesset of the “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People,” Erdogan attacked the Israeli government’s view as “no different from Hitler’s obsession with the Aryan race.”

In fact, there is nothing “fascist” or “racist” in Israel’s new law. On the contrary, as David Hazony noted in the Forward:

“This law has been in the works at least since the early 2000s, a time when two major forces arose that threatened the Zionist project as it was historically understood. The first was the rise of ‘post-Zionism,’ a small but passionate intellectual-political movement that explicitly repudiated the idea of a ‘Jewish state’ and sought to transform the country into a “state of all its citizens” by stripping it of any connection to Jewish history, peoplehood, or symbolism.

Hamas Blackmail, Media Silence by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12808/hamas-corruption-media-silence

Hamas’s strategy is to remain in power forever; to achieve that goal, it is prepared to do anything. Hamas has always acted out of its own narrow interests while holding the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip hostage to its extremist ideology and repressive regime.

“Those who claim to be confronting Israel are nothing but corrupt, extortionist bribe-takers. Today, every politician in the Gaza Strip is well aware of the fact that the corruption at the border crossings has become the norm of the official establishment, and not actions by individuals or a certain apparatus.” — Hassan Asfour, former Palestinian Authority minister, human rights activist and political columnist.

Here one always needs to ask: where is the role of the international media in exposing Hamas’s corruption and exploitation of its own people? Why is it that the mainstream media in the West does not want to pay any attention to what Asfour and other Palestinians are saying? The answer is always simple: As far as foreign journalists are concerned, if Israel is not the one asking for bribes or blackmailing the Palestinians, there is no story there.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip, says it wants Israel and Egypt to keep the border crossings with its coastal territory open on a permanent basis. The message that Hamas has been relaying to Israel and Egypt has been along the lines of: If you seek a cease-fire, you must reopen, on a permanent basis, the Kerem Shalom commercial border crossing (with Israel) and the Rafah terminal along the border with Egypt.

It is worth noting that the Kerem Shalom border crossing has been open for most of the time in the past few years, with Israel allowing the entry of goods and medical supplies into the Gaza Strip. Recently, Israel shut down the border crossing temporarily, but only after Palestinian rioters had set the terminal on fire at least twice in the previous weeks. Israel’s decision temporarily to shut down the Kerem Shalom also came in response to hundreds of kite and balloon arson attacks launched from the Gaza Strip against Israel, and which have set fire to more than 30,000 dunams (more than 7,400 acres) of land in southern Israel

The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Model Loses in the Midwest If socialism is so popular, why aren’t the socialists winning? Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270979/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-model-loses-midwest-daniel-greenfield

“Abdul El-Sayed’s Campaign Is a Test for Leftism in the Midwest,” New York Magazine declared.

That was on Sunday.

On Monday, ThinkProgress called El-Sayed’s campaign one to prove “Democratic socialism can win in the Midwest.”

On Tuesday, socialism and leftism failed the Midwest test.

Bernie Sanders, socialism’s confused grandpa, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialism’s new model, had flown out to campaign for El-Sayed’s gubernatorial campaign in Michigan. A Guardian article sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation had dubbed the Muslim socialist candidate, “The New Obama”.

El-Sayed had run on socialized medicine under its current misleading brand of “Medicare for All.” It had proven financially unviable everywhere from Vermont to California. And Michigan’s finances make it an especially terrible candidate for socialized medicine. But socialism is having a moment. Or is it?

Bernie Sanders, Linda Sarsour and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the entire left, couldn’t manage to drag El-Sayed over the finish line in a state with a large Muslim population. And El-Sayed didn’t just lose.

He lost badly.

The media had been trying to build up El-Sayed as another Ocasio-Cortez while repeatedly claiming that there was a tight race. The election showed that there had never actually been much of a competition.

El-Sayed isn’t socialism’s only Midwestern misfire. A few days ago, the New York Times was touting Cori Bush as the woman to pull off Ocasio-Cortez’s playbook in the “heartland”. Like El-Sayed, Cori Bush was running on a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for All” and free college.

Bush was a Black Lives Matter organizer. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to campaign for her. Like Cortez, Bush was supposed to beat Rep. Lacy Clay, a CBC hack welded to his seat by identity politics, by applying the same insurgent tactics that had allowed Cortez to beat Rep. Joe Crowley in New York.