RUTHFULLY YOURS

This summer, the failure by Stanford University to adequately respond to threats of violence made by a Muslim student against other students dramatically illustrates that anti-Semitism does not rank anywhere near the same level of concern as hate speech against blacks or gays.

Indeed, the incident made clear that the justice system and even many Jewish groups were reluctant to act or even issue strongly worded rebukes. When Jews are the targeted hate population, many today give only weakly worded expressions of “concern,” but do nothing of consequence to stop anti-Semitism which only encourages more such expressions of hatred and endangers the safety of Jewish college students.

The incident at Stanford occurred in July, university student Hamzeh Daoud made violent threats on Facebook against pro-Israel students. Daoud had some stature on campus as a former student Senate member and a soon-to-be, residential advisor (RA) for a dormitory. He also worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was active in the terror-linked, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Daoud’s SJP involvement is a cause for concern. The anti-Semitic group, founded by Hatem Bazian, who raised money for a Hamas front and headed the UC Berkeley Muslim Student Association, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, is described by NGO Monitor as “the organization most directly responsible for creating a hostile campus environment saturated with anti-Israel events, BDS initiatives, and speakers.”

SJP routinely smears Israel by falsely characterizing it as an “apartheid state,” denounces Israel’s self-defense measures against Arab-Palestinian terrorism and supports the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state.

To be white, Christian, and proud of one’s heritage is now the kiss of death in academia.

There can be little doubt that the modern university, in its obsession with race, gender, and sexual orientation under the rubric of “social justice,” has violated its core mandate, which, in the words of Matthew Arnold from Culture and Anarchy, is to familiarize readers and students with “the best that has been thought and said.” The Academy has turned Arnold’s maxim on its head, instructing students in the worst that has been thought and said – and done. The curricular fetish of “social justice,” which is destroying the university as an institution of higher learning, continues to metastasize.

Indeed, the university as a social and cultural institution is a slow-motion train wreck picking up speed: equity hiring, affirmative action, anti-conservative and overt leftist politics, the “diversity and inclusion” myth on which the academy prides itself, groupthink, speech codes, snitch lines, trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, the attack on academic freedom – the list goes on.

The bogus issue that has recently acquired major prominence in the quagmire of campus politics is “whiteness,” especially the “hegemony” of straight white males and their champions, guilty, apparently, of every conceivable ill that has bedeviled the world since the first silverback descended from the trees. This is merely a prime manifestation of the reigning hysteria on college campuses, in particular its mephitic obsession with race. “The toxic racial climate of colleges looks to be perpetual,” warns Scott Greer in No Campus for White Men; anti-white ferocity “remains established as an unchallenged dogma.” There is no campus for some white woman as well. Witness the current vendetta against distinguished University of Chicago medievalist Rachel Fulton Brown.

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-

In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.

Darwin had also raised the question of why males in many species might have evolved to be more variable than females, and when I learned that the answer to his question remained elusive, I set out to look for a scientific explanation. My aim was not to prove or disprove that the hypothesis applies to human intelligence or to any other specific traits or species, but simply to discover a logical reason that could help explain how gender differences in variability might naturally arise in the same species.

I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles and enlisted Sergei Tabachnikov, a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, to help me flesh out the model. When I posted a preprint on the open-access mathematics archives in May of last year, a variability researcher at Durham University in the UK got in touch by email. He described our joint paper as “an excellent summary of the research to date in this field,” adding that “it certainly underpins my earlier work on impulsivity, aggression and general evolutionary theory and it is nice to see an actual theoretical model that can be drawn upon in discussion (which I think the literature, particularly in education, has lacked to date). I think this is a welcome addition to the field.”

So far, so good.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-university-is-ripe-for-replacement/

“Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.” — Stalin, interview with H.G. Wells

Beginning in early K-12 and continuing to the highest levels of university education, Leftist indoctrination is the gravest dilemma that afflicts education in North America, rendering it perhaps the most powerful instrument of anti-Western bias and socialist propaganda of the modern era.

Here my concern is with the abandonment of genuine scholarship, fact-based historical research, familiarity with the “Great Books” and the development of critical thinking habits, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The curriculum now in place is one of intellectual dysphoria promoting the circulation of false or unprovable narratives — Anthropogenic Global Warming, Islam as a religion of peace, the campus rape epidemic, toxic masculinity, the scandal of American history, the glories of “diversity and inclusion,” the benefits of socialism, to cite just a few among a veritable encyclopedia — and furthering the revolutionary project of social and political deconstruction. Education has been transformed into a grooming operation for social justice warriors, radical feminists, anti-white vigilantes and budding socialists.

Moreover, to compound the septic plunge into calamitous absurdity, the self-contradictory adoption as a kind of state religion of postmodern thought and doctrine — briefly, the suspicion of reason, the belief that reality is a conceptual construct, the rejection of fixed or objective truth — has served to turn the university into a parody of its original purpose, the pursuit of genuine knowledge.

Defenders of the status quo need to be taken not with a grain of salt but an entire salt mine. Case in point: Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders, a rabid anti-conservative, an apologist for Islam, a believer in rampant immigration, and one of the shoddiest journalists in Canada, fully rejects the charge of university malfeasance. Rather, he claims, the campus is “less radical, more tolerant, more open and more politically moderate than ever before.”

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/high-school-english-students-forced-to-learn-gender-bending-pronouns-and-anti-white-propaganda/

If you send your kids off to high school thinking they will learn how to diagram sentences and write competently, you may want to check their English requirements. John F. Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has other ideas about learning English that include gender-neutral pronouns, discussions of sexuality, and anti-white propaganda.

A student posted an assignment to social media, handed out by teacher Emily Thomson of Kennedy High’s English department, that detailed “power and privilege” in America which, according to the assignment, names “U.S. born,” “white people,” “Christians,” “middle, owning class,” “heterosexuals,” “men,” and “veterans” as the oppressors of non-white humankind. How this is not a violation of the school’s policy against discrimination based on race, creed, and sexuality is baffling.

In case you’re tempted the think the right column is not referring to the oppressors, think again. Here’s the very next image in the “Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege” program. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271241/her-too-bruce-bawer

Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Les Moonves, Al Franken: the list of high-profile persons who’ve been accused of using their professional power to sexually exploit others continues to grow. One of the most recent additions to the roster is a woman – a lesbian, in fact – whose name may mean nothing to you but who, like Weinstein in Hollywood and Franken on Capitol Hill, has long wielded considerable power within her own professional community. Her name is Avital Ronell, and she’s a 66-year-old “superstar” professor at New York University, where she’s a member of both the Germanic Languages and Literature Department and the Comparative Literature Department, and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where she’s on the philosophical faculty.

Ronell’s accuser, a young gay man named Nimrod Reitman, alleges that back in 2012, when he was one of Ronell’s grad students, she sexually assaulted him at her pied à terre in Paris, proceeded to flood his in-box with scores of romantic e-mails, and then, some time later, moved into his Manhattan apartment (and bed) when Hurricane Sandy cut off the electricity to her NYU apartment. When, after his graduation, he finally began resisting her aggressive moves – he says he was too worried about professional retaliation to do so earlier – she allegedly tried to sabotage his career.

A protégée of the late Jacques Derrida, Ronell practices what is known, broadly, as postmodern theory, churning out prose – at once playful, pretentious, and deliberately obscure – that’s meant to be a shot across the bow of the rational post-Enlightenment West. Half a century or so ago, professors in English departments taught literature. Philosophy professors taught the history of philosophy. Their present-day successors, such as Ronell, whom you can put in any and all humanities and social-sciences departments, because they’re all working pretty much the same scam, view themselves as doing something infinitely more consequential than passing on the great ideas of Western civilization.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/school-daze-are-here-again-help/

Boo-hoo:

Florida State University is launching a mandatory program to teach incoming students about “resilience” and “coping skills,” but will allow students to opt out if they have “experienced significant trauma.”

The new Student Resilience Project (SRP) is designed to help “strengthen student emotional and academic coping skills,” according to the “Frequently Asked Questions” on the program website. The “evidence-informed universal public-health style prevention program,” the website explains, is “intended to destigmatize mental health issues and encourage help-seeking” among students dealing with trauma or stress.

What kids with “mental health issues” are doing in college in the first place is left unexplained. Unless you accept the Left’s notion that everybody is insane….

While it is unclear how the program in funded, the SRP will reportedly cost over $300,000, including a $50,000 budget for “advertising costs,” according to Inside Higher Education. The program was developed by the Institute for Family Violence Studies (IFVS) at the FSU College of Social Work and features “highly engaging animation, videos, and numerous TED-talk style educational audio sessions from faculty and mental health providers.”

“Florida State University recognizes that some incoming students have experienced significant family or community stress,” Karen Oehme, director of IFVS, stated in a university press release. “Unmanaged stress responses can interfere with student success in college and cause long-term negative consequences.”

One is tempted to say, “oh, grow up,” or “study Shakespeare instead” — but that would be mean –CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mac-donald-diversity-ucla-20180902-story.html

If Albert Einstein applied for a professorship at UCLA today, would he be hired? The answer is not clear. Starting this fall, all faculty applicants to UCLA must document their contributions to “equity, diversity and inclusion.” (Next year, existing UCLA faculty will also have to submit an “equity, diversity and inclusion statement” in order to be considered for promotion, following the lead of five other UC campuses.) The mandatory statements will be credited in the same manner as the rest of an applicant’s portfolio, according to UCLA’s equity, diversity and inclusion office.

A contemporary Einstein may not meet the suggested evaluation criteria. Would his “job talk” — a presentation of one’s scholarly accomplishments — reflect his contributions to equity, diversity and inclusion? Unlikely. Would his research show, in the words of the evaluation template, the “potential to understand the barriers facing women and racial/ethnic minorities?” Also unlikely. Would he have participated in “service that applies up-to-date knowledge to problems, issues and concerns of groups historically underrepresented in higher education?” Sadly, he may have been focusing on the theory of general relativity instead. What about “utilizing pedagogies addressing different learning styles” or demonstrating the ability to “effectively teach and attract students from underrepresented communities”? Again, not at all guaranteed.

As the new mandate suggests, UCLA and the rest of the University of California have been engulfed by the diversity obsession. The campuses are infatuated with group identity and difference. Science and the empirical method, however, transcend just those trivialities of identity that UC now deems so crucial: “race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, gender identity and socioeconomic status,” to quote from the university’s Diversity Statement. The results of that transcendence speak for themselves: an astounding conquest of disease and an ever-increasing understanding of the physical environment. Unlocking the secrets of nature is challenge enough; scientists (and other faculty) should not also be tasked with a “social justice” mission.

But such a confusion of realms currently pervades American universities, and UC in particular. UCLA’s Intergroup Relations Office offers credit courses and “co-curricular dialogues” that encourage students to, you guessed it, “explore their own social identities (i.e. gender, race, nationality, religion/spirituality, sexual orientation, social class, etc.) and associated positions within the campus community.” Even if exploring your social identity were the purpose of a college education (which it is not), it would be more fruitful to define that identity around accomplishments and intellectual passions — “budding mathematician,” say, or “history fanatic” — rather than gender and race.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/the_permeation_of_propaganda_in_the_college_student_brain.html

In 1937, an editorial in The New York Times declared that “what is truly vicious is not propaganda but a monopoly of it.” Thus begins an article titled “Propaganda Techniques of German Fascism,” written by Clyde R. Miller and reprinted in the fifth edition of Modern English Readings (1946). This text was used by college students. There is nothing dealing with gender, white privilege, social justice, the religion of peace, or alleged microaggressions.

When pundits discuss the culture wars, it is essential to see how so many present-day textbooks have contributed to generations of young people who have, for the most part, never been exposed to how America’s ideals have shaped the country. Instead, students are indoctrinated by public school teachers with connections to Antifa. More chilling is that these same teachers publicly acknowledge they would not protect the rights of students who disagree with them.

Thus, the article by Miller is quite apropos at a time when the education establishment, as well as the hi-tech companies’ “monoculture,” seeks to monopolize the information highway. As Jeremy Carl writes:

The evidence of Silicon Valley’s hostility to the Right is everywhere. Prominent conservatives from Michelle Malkin to William Jacobson to Dennis Prager … – and an even greater proportion of those whose politics lean farther to the right, many of whom do not have access to mainstream media and rely on social media to fund their work – have seen themselves banned from major Internet platforms or had their content censored or demonetized. In most cases they are not even given grounds for their punishment or means of appealing it. While some more ‘mainstream’ conservatives may not feel excessively troubled by the banning of more provocative voices farther to the right, in taking this attitude they make a tactical, strategic, and moral mistake. They do not understand how the left operates. When voices farther to the right are removed, mainstream conservatives become the new ‘far-right extremists’ – and they will be banned with equal alacrity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/iced_americanos_and_dismantling_the_patriarchy.html

Brown University has censored one of its researchers who did a study on rapid-onset gender dysphoria. The study’s author is Lisa Littman, an assistant professor in behavioral sciences.

Littman noted that teen friend groups sometimes suddenly identify as transgender, all of them at the same time. Generally this occurs after the group goes on a spree of watching YouTube videos about transitioning and gorges themselves on social media sites dedicated to the subject.

“In the past decade, there has been an increase in visibility, social media, and user-generated online content about transgender issues and transition, which may act as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, an increase in visibility has given a voice to individuals who would have been under-diagnosed and undertreated in the past. On the other hand, it is plausible that online content may encourage vulnerable individuals to believe that nonspecific symptoms and vague feelings should be interpreted as gender dysphoria stemming from a transgender condition.”

Anyone in marketing knows that effective advertising reaps dividends; million dollars per minute Super Bowl commercials must pay off, or else they would disappear. Are the creeps who deliberately sow fields of adolescent sexual confusion on YouTube hoping to yield green pastures of pedophilic Parnassus? The creeps are not stupid; they know how to promote their brand. They also know where the potential victims hang out.