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The Diversity Delusion How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture Heather Mac Donald

By on September 10th, 2018

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/diversity-delusion

By the national bestselling author of The War on Cops: a provocative account of the erosion of humanities and the rise of intolerance

America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.

The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk.

But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author’s decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which everyone can discover a common humanity.

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Leo III’s 1300-Year-Old Lesson: Understand Islam to Defeat Jihad By Andrew G. Bostom

By on September 10th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/leo-iiis-1300-year-old-lesson-understand-islam-to-defeat-jihad/

Tuesday (9/11/2018) marks the 17th anniversary of the cataclysmic jihad terror attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. Thirteen centuries ago, August 15, 718, under the wise and stalwart leadership of Byzantium’s Leo III, the Arab Muslim jihad siege of Constantinople was broken, and the invaders—and Islamdom—suffered an ignominious defeat. These events are described with unique lucidity, and unbowdlerized knowledge of their animating Islamic, and Christian motivations, in Raymond Ibrahim’s compelling new book, Sword and Scimitar. Would that today’s U.S. and other “Western” leaders re-consider their largely feckless policies against the resurgent jihad depredations of our era (~34,000 acts of jihad terror since 9/11/2001), and re-examine Leo III’s timeless words, and actions.

Leo III’s alleged eighth-century reply letter to the contemporary Muslim Caliph Umar II, who had invited the Byzantine Emperor to renounce Christianity, and adopt Islam, was preserved by the eighth (to tenth?) century Armenian chronicler, Ghevond. Ibrahim’s Sword and Scimitar re-introduced me to both Leo III’s letter, and the great linguist and Islamologist Arthur Jeffrey’s (d. 1959) annotated 1944 English translation, and analysis of Ghevond’s rendering of it, which was succinctly characterized in my 2005 compendium on jihad:

Leo’s reply is an extensive and well-written defense of the major tenets of the Christian religion. In it the Byzantine emperor, who was as zealous in his Christian faith as Umar was in his, refuted Islam on the basis of the Christian Gospel, as well as the basis of the Koran.

Together, Jeffrey’s translation, with its guiding commentary, and Ibrahim’s equally learned, but broader, historical analysis in Sword and Scimitar, make plain that Leo III thoroughly understood, Islam, and its core jihadist doctrine, in both theory and practice.

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Are We Setting a Generation Up for Failure? Part II By Madeleine Kearns

By on September 9th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/jonathan-haidt-coddling-of-the-american-mind-college-experience/

Jonathan Haidt on what happens when today’s youth show up at college.

What is happening at American universities? Jonathan Haidt, moral psychologist and critically acclaimed author, provides answers in his latest book co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation For Failure, which is now on sale. Yesterday Haidt discussed what’s been going wrong in childrearing in the past few decades. Today he’ll discuss what’s been happening when today’s youth show up at college.

Madeleine Kearns: In your new book you and Greg Lukianoff argue that overprotection is badly affecting the development of young people today. Previously, we discussed where the “bad ideas” referred to in your book’s title originated and the damage they do before young people go to college. Here, we’ll discuss what’s been happening since “iGen” started arriving on college campuses around 2013.

Today’s young people are arriving at university expecting safety, you observe, so why can’t we simply make colleges safe spaces to meet those expectations?

Jonathan Haidt: We certainly could. If someone has a plan for raising kids in a safe space that would extend all the way to the age of 85, and they could be confident that the child will stay in the safe zone as an adult, then you could do it. But if you want kids who will go out and get a job and do something in the wider world, then you have to let them fly on their own at some point. I think it is a national tragedy that Americans — on the whole, not everyone — overprotect their children all the way through high school. If we extend that overprotection through college, it would make things worse.

MK: Some people think the emphasis on safe spaces and microaggressions, etc., is overblown. What do you say to that?

JH: There was a spate of articles in early 2018 arguing that despite the presence of a few dozen high-profile anecdotes, the survey data shows that nothing is really changing.

At Heterodox Academy [a politically diverse community of academics who endorse viewpoint diversity on campus] we claim you can’t think well unless you have good critics. Those articles were written by some good critics, particularly Jeff Sachs [a political scientist at Acadia University in Canada]. And what our good critics have shown us is that nationally representative data on college students doesn’t show big shifts in attitudes about free speech. Rather it shows small shifts in some of the directions we’re talking about — if you limit the analysis to the little data we have on iGen. If you look at Millennials, there are no shifts. The debate helped me to refine my thinking. I now see that if you look at all 4,500 American institutions of higher education you’re not going to see much happening at the great majority of schools, particularly those that are non-selective or non-residential. But if you focus on elite schools, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast, the dynamic has changed sharply, and the change happened only once iGen began arriving on campus, in 2013. [iGen refers to the generation after the Millennials; it begins with birth year 1995.]

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Keith Windschuttle: Captain Cook and the Great Game

By on September 7th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/captain-cook-great-game/

Margaret Cameron-Ash’s ‘Lying for the Admiralty’ demonstrates how Cook discovered Bass Strait and drew deliberately misleading maps, presenting Van Diemen’s Land as a peninsula and disguising his discovery of Sydney Harbour. His goal and that of the Admiralty was to mislead the French.

The book’s title is Lying for the Admiralty (Rosenberg, Sydney, 2018) and instead of a subtitle to spell out its subject matter, its cover has a portrait of Captain James Cook and a map of New Holland with its east coast uncharted, as it was before the great navigator’s first expedition. For a brief moment I thought this might be another assault on Cook, adding to the indignities his reputation suffered from the graffiti attack on his statue in Sydney last September. The accusation of lying sounded like the now well-entrenched leftist campaign to discredit him on the 250th anniversary of his epic voyages of discovery, which began when he left Plymouth Dock on August 26, 1768.

Author Margaret Cameron-Ash quickly dispels any such thoughts. Her introduction confirms that Cook was not only a great man but a loyal English patriot who was not above preparing charts, log books and journals which, with the approval of the British Admiralty, provided misinformation to deceive the navigators of foreign powers. Cook was a player in what Rudyard Kipling later called the “Great Game” of spying and deception in the geopolitical rivalry among the European powers for maritime supremacy. Cook’s discovery of the Australian continent’s east coast, and the information he kept secret about it, were critical manoeuvres in this rivalry.

This is both a compelling new take on the political climate behind the founding of Australia and an exciting, page-turning work. It is easily the best book I have read all year, and one of the best in many a year. It is located within the same revisionist version of Australia’s origins that Alan Frost has been pioneering since the 1990s in his books Botany Bay Mirages, The Global Reach of Empire and his recent popular summaries Botany Bay and The First Fleet.

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Liberalism as Imperialism By Yoram Hazony

By on September 6th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/liberalism-as-imperialism-dogmatic-utopianism-elites-america-europe/

The dogmatic utopianism of elites on both sides of the Atlantic is not without its costs.

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Mr. Hazony’s latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism. It appears here with permission.

My liberal friends and colleagues do not seem to understand that the advancing liberal construction is a form of imperialism. But to anyone already immersed in the new order, the resemblance is easy to see. Much like the pharaohs and the Babylonian kings, the Roman emperors and the Roman Catholic Church until well into the modern period, as well as the Marxists of the last century, liberals, too, have their grand theory about how they are going to bring peace and economic prosperity to the world by pulling down all the borders and uniting mankind under their own universal rule. Infatuated with the clarity and intellectual rigor of this vision, they disdain the laborious process of consulting with the multitude of nations they believe should embrace their view of what is right. And like other imperialists, they are quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition from those who they are sure would benefit immensely by simply submitting.

Liberal imperialism is not monolithic, of course. When President George H. W. Bush declared the arrival of a “new world order” after the demise of the Communist bloc, he had in mind a world in which America supplies the military might necessary to impose a “rule of law” emanating from the Security Council of the United Nations. Subsequent American presidents rejected this scheme, preferring a world order based on unilateral American action in consultation with European allies and others. Europeans, on the other hand, have preferred to speak of “transnationalism,” a view that sees the power of independent nations, America included, as being subordinated to the decisions of international and administrative bodies based in Europe. These disagreements over how the international liberal empire is to be governed are often described as if they are historically novel, but this is hardly so. For the most part, they are simply the reincarnation of threadworn medieval debates between the emperor and the Pope over how the international Catholic should be governed — with the role of emperor being reprised by those (mostly Americans) who insist that authority must be concentrated in Washington, the political and military center; and the role of the papacy being played by those (mostly European, but also many American academics) who see ultimate authority as residing with the highest interpreters of the universal law, namely, the judicial institutions of the United Nations and the European Union.

These arguments within the camp of liberal imperialism raise pressing questions for the coming liberal construction of the West. But for those who remain unconvinced of the desirability of maintaining such a liberal empire, the most salient fact is what the parties of these disagreements have in common. For all their bickering, proponents of the liberal construction are united in endorsing a single imperialist vision: They wish to see a world in which liberal principles are codified as universal law and imposed on the nations, if necessary by force. This, they agree, is what will bring us universal peace and prosperity. Ludwig von Mises speaks for all the different factions when he writes:

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Irish realities Christopher Montgomery

By on September 5th, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7214/full

Books tell you very little about things that happened to you but a lot about the people who write them. It’s not a very original thought: I first heard something like it as a teenager watching Sir Geoffrey Howe on Newsnight after the first televised dramatisation of Mrs Thatcher’s fall. “Ah,” the great man sighed, “so that’s how it was, you think, when you see how it was in a room you weren’t in. But then you see yourself and realise, no, it wasn’t like that at all.” Journalists are rarely in written-about rooms, but, poor social eunuchs, are cursed forever to write about them. And by some distance the most baleful consequence of Brexit has been all the books about it.

The fleetest of these was Brexit Revolt, written by staff at this magazine. It being the first Brexit book launch party, I went: it was also the last I could bear. The late Helen Szamuley, a Brexiteer schismatic of the finest sort, came up to me and said, “Oh, you were a director of Vote Leave.” Eye-narrowing pause. “You didn’t deserve to win.” Only one sorrowful lot suffer more from Brexit having won than other Brexiteers and that’s the Most Oppressed People Ever. And no book is more lamentable than Brexit And Ireland (Penguin, £9.99) by RTE’s Europe Editor, Tony Connelly.

Imagining a banshee keening in your ear, forever, is an improvement on the experience of reading this dreary, repetitive book. But it, and its Northern Ireland-born author, illustrate our great problem with Ireland: our ignorance of its self-pity. It’s impossible for all but the most determined Briton to comprehend the passive-aggressive neurotic skulking to our west. But if forced to finish this book, you will benefit from yet another of Brexit’s miraculous boons and see quite how odd the Irish view of reality is.

For example, did you know that during the referendum Ireland’s European Commissioner, by his campaigning in the UK, “made a real contribution [to Remain]. He might even have swung quite a number of votes”? Since you struggle to name our own Commissioner a nagging doubt troubles you about this eccentric claim. But there’s more. Phil Hogan, for it was he who swung the votes, was not the only Irish official to campaign in our referendum: their ambassador and six ministers did likewise. Who am I to say whether this was happily counter-productive in addition to being markedly unwise, but the fact is that they did it.

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Woodward and the Mystery of Trump How does a chaotic White House get so much done? By James Freeman

By on September 5th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woodward-and-the-mystery-of-trump-1536098699Bob Woodward is preparing to release the latest book describing a chaotic Trump White House led by an unhinged ignoramus. Also in the news today, the manufacturing revival promised by the alleged ignoramus is in full swing.

As is his custom, Mr. Woodward includes in his new book a great deal of material from anonymous sources. The result, according to his colleagues at the Washington Post, is a “a harrowing portrait of the Trump presidency.” The Post reports:

A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead.

Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.

According to the book, the most senior of the President’s aides thinks the President is out of his mind:

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly frequently lost his temper and told colleagues that he thought the president was “unhinged,” Woodward writes. In one small group meeting, Kelly said of Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

This afternoon, the White House released a statement from General Kelly that referenced a similar report from NBC in May:

The idea I ever called the President an idiot is not true. As I stated back in May and still firmly stand behind: “I spend more time with the President than anyone else, and we have an incredibly candid and strong relationship. He always knows where I stand, and he and I both know this story is total BS. I’m committed to the President, his agenda, and our country. This is another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump and distract from the administration’s many successes.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump and White House Say Woodward Book Is Fabricated, ‘Nasty’ By Justin Sink and Shawn Donnan see note please

By on September 4th, 2018

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/kelly-says-he-didn-t-call-trump-idiot-disputing-woodward-book?srnd=premium

Woodward has been shown before to be a prevaricator….”In 1976, AIM published a 12-page demolition by the noted author, Victor Lasky, of Woodward and Bernstein’ s The Final Days. We asked Mr. Lasky to take a close look at Bob Woodward’s most recent book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Mr. Lasky found the book “so bereft of substance as to make the adventures of Baron yon Munchausen appear genuine.”rsk

Donald Trump and his allies attacked a soon-to-be-published book by legendary investigative journalist Bob Woodward that portrays the president as mercurial, untruthful and inept and his staff as consumed by infighting and disdainful of their boss.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly denied Tuesday an assertion by Woodward that he called the president an idiot. A former lawyer to Trump, John Dowd, denied calling his client a liar. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said she had never heard Trump propose assassinating Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Defense Secretary James Mattis disputed belittling the president as acting like a fifth-grader.

“It’s just nasty stuff,” Trump said of Woodward’s book in an interview Tuesday with the Daily Caller. “I never spoke to him. Maybe I wasn’t given messages that he called.

Trump’s spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called Woodward’s latest book a collection of “fabricated stories.”

The Washington Post published excerpts Tuesday of Woodward’s book “Fear,” a deeply reported examination of the Trump presidency. The book portrays an administration consumed by brutal infighting and a president whose anger at Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation can paralyze the West Wing for days at a time. Close advisers quietly maneuver to control Trump’s impulses and prevent political and national security disasters.

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Nationalism is not a dirty word Bruce Abramson- A Review of Yoram Hazony’sYoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism.

By on September 2nd, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7235/full

Over the past few years, nationalism has returned to the front pages. The Western intelligentsia is almost uniformly appalled. They decry the cynical leaders using nationalist sentiments to exploit the uneducated masses. They counter with a flawed syllogism they deem so simple that even those masses can understand it: Nationalism caused two world wars. World wars are bad. Therefore, nationalism is bad. For masses too dim to grasp even that argument, they simplify it further: Hitler was a nationalist. Curiously, the masses remain unpersuaded.

Readers content with that level of analysis should avoid Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism. Hazony has the audacity to pose thoughtful questions: what is nationalism? If you’re not a nationalist, what are you? Is all nationalism the same, or are there different types of nationalism? Are there good nationalisms as well as bad ones? Did nationalism really cause two world wars? Was Hitler’s National Socialism actually a nationalist movement? If not, what are examples of nationalism?

Hazony frames the discussion early on:

[N]ationalism . . . is a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference. This is opposed to imperialism, which seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime . . . Either you support, in principle, the ideal of an international government or regime that imposes its will on subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary; or you believe that nations should be free to set their own course in the absence of such an international government or regime.

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Off The Shelf: Seasons Change By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on September 1st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/book-review-the-russian-revolution-revisionist-history-sean-mcmeekin/

EXCERPT

Some observations about the Russian Revolution, and about Sean McMeekin’s new revisionist history of it.

Editor’s Note: Every week, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes an “Off the Shelf” column sharing casual observations on the books he’s reading and the passing scene.

“…….Luckily, in the midst of all this, I assigned myself the utterly light reading of Sean McMeekin’s blockbuster revisionist history, The Russian Revolution. Actually, I’m not even kidding. Compared with the history books I was reading in earlier editions of this column, the death counts in this one were much lower. Fewer long descriptions of mass torture; Stalin is not yet in full flower in this volume, which follows in the tradition of Richard Pipes’s history of the same. McMeekin’s book, however, does more to locate Lenin’s success as due to the assistance and wishes of Germany.

I was raised in an era where Communism was largely detested and laughed at even on the left. By the time I got to Bard College (where McMeekin teaches now), the presence at the school of an Alger Hiss Chair of Social Science was kind of a joke among the politically aware on campus. In fact, I still have a hard time taking McMeekin’s conclusory warnings against radical socialism and Communism seriously precisely because it all seemed so obviously discredited in my life, even in places that vestigially venerated Alger Hiss. Still, I’m grateful for McMeekin’s work, which corrects the dim and entirely incomplete picture of the Russian Revolution given to me in my high-school education.

McMeekin is very helpful in making observations about the state of pre-revolutionary Russia:

The strength and also the weakness of autocracy was that there were few intermediary institutions between the tsar and his subjects to absorb and dampen popular frustrations. Labor unions were illegal. There was no national parliament to focus the government’s attention on social problems. In the brief era of liberal concessions that had followed Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856), Tsar Alexander II had allowed the creation of small provincial assemblies known as zemstvos in 1864, but their power had been substantially curtailed by his more conservative successor, Alexander III, in 1890, when the zemstvo councils were subordinated to regional governors appointed by the tsar.

Pre-revolutionary Russia was also shocked by its embarrassing showing in a war with Japan in 1905, a conflict that began in divergent interests and could even be said to have made a permanent mark on Tsar Nicholas II, in the form of a three-and-a-half-inch scar, given to him in all the way back in 1891 when a Japanese police escort lunged at him with his saber.

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