What in Hell…
…were the editors of The New Yorker thinking?
(Click for huge size)
What do they possibly hope to accomplish with this?
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
She knows what she is doing. A lawyer who goes to the shooting range. The worst kind. – Michael Crichton, Next, pg. 500
A great quote from one of the more disturbing novels I’ve read this year.
Hell, this decade.
No, They Don’t.
No, They Don’t.
Dr. Helen links to this interesting PJM column by Mike McNally, Teaching Human Rights to Toddlers. Here’s the portion I take exception to:
According to the UK’s Telegraph, the project “will see teachers explaining to children as young as three that people across the world live different lives but everyone has a right to food, water, and shelter.”
No. They don’t. If they did, some other entity would be obligated to provide them. They have the right to seek food, water, and shelter, but no inherent right to have them.
Further down in McNally’s piece comes this gem of observation:
Parents reading about this new obsession with teaching “rights” could be forgiven for thinking that schools should focus on doing a better job of teaching the existing three R’s before adding a fourth to the syllabus. Because, while a decade and more of bar-lowering by Labour has led to more British pupils leaving school with more paper qualifications every year, anecdotal evidence from universities and employers suggests that educational standards are plummeting.
And the rot begins in primary school. A government report last year revealed that forty percent of British children struggle to write their own name, or form simple words such as “dog,” by the age of five, while a quarter fail to reach the expected levels of emotional development for their age.
And with British teenagers leading most of Europe in binge drinking, violence, teenage pregnancy, and abortions, it could also be argued that instead of teaching children about “rights,” or worrying about their tolerance of food from other cultures, schools should be more concerned with teaching them “right,” as distinct from wrong.
Robert Heinlein published Starship Troopers in 1959, and from it came this canny observation:
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’
Looks like we’re still right on schedule.
UPDATE: Rachel has another example of a society where children are told endlessly about their rights, and nothing about their duties.
‘You can’t touch us, we’re 15, we can do what the f*** we like.
Heinlein would be so proud…
Tony Snow has Died
I can’t bring myself to go look at the vicious gloating from the Nutroots.
Sometimes I really can hate my fellow man.
UPDATE 7/14: Patterico looked in the LA Times online comments.
Weaker Ideas
Kim du Toit has an excellent education post up at Geopoliticus, The “Power” Elite, inspired by the piece from which I got last Saturday’s Quote of the Day, and another piece from Pajamas Media by Mary Grabar that I strongly recommend as well. Kim’s pretty insistent that you read both before his essay. I concur. Read ’em all.
I have one quibble. Professor Grabar says (and Kim quotes):
I blame it on women, specifically those women who, instead of working their ways into the club through rules of evidence, common values, and objective scholarship, have pushed in their alternate “ways of knowing.” The feminization of education has led to the idolization of Oprah. In the matriarchal upheaval in the academy, the great works of the canon that draw from our Western tradition, like Milton’s majestic Paradise Lost, are replaced by crudely rendered emotive investigations into oppression, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or any of the “multicultural” offerings in the latest anthology.
In addition to eviscerating the canon to add women’s writing, of whatever dubious value (personal letters, diary entries, popular books), the academic feminists’ project was to attack the base of our way of thinking, which they correctly traced back to the notion of a monotheistic God who created a universe with an order based on reason, however indiscernible that at times might be to those he endowed with reason. The matriarchs’ attacks began on linearity, logic, argumentation — the very notion of the individual thinking self. Theorists promoting the “maternal presence in the classroom” accused even the thesis statement of the freshman five-paragraph essay of having embedded within it masculine goal-oriented thinking that in a rapacious manner eliminates weaker ideas.
My only quibble is that it didn’t begin with women in academia.
The denigration of reason began with Kant – a point Ayn Rand made, in her own inimitable way, repeatedly.
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
America is the last thing standing between humanity’s intact testicles and the quivering blade of liberalism. – Rachel Lucas, No. You cannot possibly be serious.
I wish I could write like that.
TRUTH
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
Some people go through life thinking there’s a halo over their heads when that glowing ring they see is actually the sphincter of their own eternal asshat. – Pugs of War
The majority of them go into politics.
The IBMeraphim
The IBMeraphim*
In other good news this week, my order request for one of the 1,007 Italian-return M1 Carbines in “Service Grade” manufactured by International Business Machine Corp. made it to the offices of the Civilian Marksmanship Program at 10:00AM on Monday, July 7. Hopefully my order request will be one that is filled rather than rejected. Abby over at Bad Dogs and Such advises me that if the news is bad, I’ll probably hear fairly quickly. If the news is good, it will take 5-10 working days before I receive notice. At least, she tells me, that’s how it worked when she got her Saginaw S’G’.
* – “IBMeraphim” is a term from the five-book series by David Drake and S.M. Stirling, The General. If you’ve read them, you understand. If you haven’t, I don’t think I can explain it to you in less than 5,000 words, so I won’t even try.