Apr 21, 2015 | Uncategorized
The “Black Lives Matter” campaign is based on as big a lie as the “campus rape culture” lie, the Rolling Stone magazine gang rape at the University of Virginia fraternity lie, the gang rape by the Duke University lacrosse team lie, the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” Ferguson lie, and all the other lies that animate leftist hysterias. Building hysterias based on falsehoods is a primary modus operandi on the left. One can even say that without hysteria there is no Left.
–Dennis Prager, “Black Murderers Matter”
Apr 19, 2015 | Uncategorized
In the last 10 years the world has had to endure the plague of the “New Atheists.” While not as deadly as those Moses helped visit upon the Egyptians, they are still excruciatingly annoying. Their arguments, such as they are, reveal a type of trite fundamentalism that continually begs the question, over and over and over. But not all atheists are New; one “Old” atheist is British philosopher John Gray, who recently penned a piece for The Guardian titled, “What Scares the New Atheists.”
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Apr 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
How can I teach my students to write decently when the English language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex? Our language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers. But in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state. In consequence we have all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like “chairperson” and “humankind” strut and preen, where he-or-she’s keep bashing into surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related deformities blossom like blisters; they are all markers of an epoch-making victory of propaganda over common sense.
We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away with it. Today, as college students and full-fledged young English teachers emerge from the feminist incubator in which they have spent their whole lives, this victory of brainless ideology is on the brink of becoming institutionalized. If we mean to put things right, we can’t wait much longer.
Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to one another and to our common past. The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise. Shakespeare’s most perfect phrases are miraculously simple and terse. (“Thou art the thing itself.” “A plague o’ both your houses.” “Can one desire too much of a good thing?”) The young Jane Austen is praised by her descendants for having written “pure simple English.” Meanwhile, in everyday prose, a word with useless syllables or a sentence with useless words is a house fancied-up with fake dormers and chimneys. It is ugly and boring and cheap, and impossible to take seriously.
–David Gelernter in,“We Came in Peace, for All Humankind: A decade of “Social Justice Warriors” waging all-out war against the dictionary.”
Apr 14, 2015 | Uncategorized
Recently I attended an evening gathering where I was introduced to a man finishing his doctorate in physics from Johns Hopskins. When he learned that I am a philosopher and theologian, he began pointing out to me that science is the only discipline that is rational and true. Everything else is a matter of belief and opinion. He told me that if something cannot be quantified or tested by the scientific method (whatever that means), it cannot be true or rational. Unfortunately this opinion is widely shared in Western culture. Science is believed by many to be the only field which is interested in truth and in which beliefs can be rationally assessed. But however widely this opinion may be held, it is nonetheless patently false.
–J.P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City, A Defense of Christianity
Apr 11, 2015 | Uncategorized
[T]hat is the problem—accredited social work schools are remarkably averse to actual change, and embrace only those aspects of their students they view as immutable. As long as what makes you different is something you have no control over—your heritage, skin color, or economic background—it is acceptable to CSWE and its dependents. Celebrating a lack of control is celebrating a lack of freedom, and is extraordinarily infantilizing. My friends at school were protected from my opinions, but not from the insidious idea that some opinions do not deserve to be aired. Our training suffered for it. Along with being taught to tolerate everything but disagreement, we were told that people, including our clients, could not make meaningful choices in life. That is bad for social work, bad for education, and, as a reflection of modern liberalism, dangerous for society.
–Devorah Goldman, “The Closing of the Campus Mind:Schools of social work are silencing conservatives.”
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