Posted: December 12, 2023 by datechguy in Uncategorized
Answer: The both decided their affirmative action hires (Claudine Gay & Jodie Whitaker) must not be seen as failures no matter what the results are.
The BBC saw the rating for Doctor Who crash and burn during the uber woke (as opposed to regular woke) years of her tenure but it would have been unthinkable for the first female doctor who Jodie Whitaker lovingly call Dr. Karen by the good folks at Nerdrotic so they continued to carry her allowing the crashing and burning to continue to the point where not even the return of David Tennant, Catherine Tate and Russell T Davies could saving the ratings numbers.
Now comes the Harvard board having the first black woman president of Harvard not only on national TV being unable to declare calling for the extermination of the Jews against Harvard policy but exposed as a serial plagiarist. Harvard is getting pilloried all over, donors are running for the doors BUT again the first black woman to be president of Harvard MUST NOT be allowed to be perceived as a failure, must NOT be shown to be unqualified and must NOT have the suggestion that she is causing damage perhaps irreparable, to the school’s reputation.
Therefore the Board of Harvard, while having concerns, has decided to stand by her leading Ed Morrissey to quip
Indeed. And now I wait with bated breath to see what Beege can discover on the question of how one gets fired at Harvard, if not for anti-Semitism and academic fraud. Any opposition to identitarian policies and DEI/CRT pedagogy would be an obvious guess
As I have written several times, higher education is an absolute mess, from its leftist culture to its ambivalence toward educating students about essential subjects.
Having suffered through numerous attacks at three universities for my conservative viewpoints, I have some suggestions on how to correct the problems in higher education.
First, eliminate tenure, which provides lifetime jobs and propagates the leftist culture. After only seven years, faculty members who are usually in their twenties when they arrive on campus don’t have to worry much about what they say or do for the next 40 or so years after tenure.
Faculty members play an important role in hiring new faculty. It’s a bit like closed union shops where you only get accepted if you share political viewpoints or know someone already on the inside.
Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria acknowledged recently that higher education policies “use race, gender, and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.” I guess a broken clock can be right twice a day!
Second, eliminate nonprofit status for private colleges and universities. Since these institutions have become political petri dishes, make them pay for their antics.
Third, look seriously at the amount of tax dollars that flow to higher education. Institutions of higher education get more than $1 trillion in tax money from various governmental agencies. State and local governments allocated about nine percent of their total budgets—more than the amount paid for highways and roads. About four percent of the federal budget goes to higher education—much of it in loans to students who end up heavily in debt.
I am heartened that the public is starting to see that the emperors have no clothes.
Americans’ attitudes about higher education have turned sharply negative in the past decade. In a Gallup poll, the percentage of young adults who said a college degree is important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Another poll found that about a third of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. In another Gallup poll, almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.
Partly as a result of these attitudes, the number of college students has dropped dramatically in recent years. In the fall of 2010, more than 18 million undergraduates were enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021.
It’s time for individuals, colleges’ boards of trustees, and government entities to take a good, hard look at what higher education has become and make sure that the trends of intolerance and leftist thinking stop now!
I was looking up an old post of mine from the internet archive and accidently came across this piece from 2012 concerning showing some things never change:
The Common Thread of the left: Today Israel & Hamas
by Datechguy | November 23rd, 2012
The latest in our series of the common thread of the left
As of this writing a “Truce” is in effect between Israel & Hamas. The left and media during this crisis has pilloried Israel
NBC News reporter Ayman Mohyeldin seemed to take a strong position, rather than just reporting, on the United States’ role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He effectively blamed the unresolved crisis on the United States’ refusal to recognize Hamas and for not doing enough to reign in Israel’s military actions.
This ignores the fact that this wasn’t a crisis when Israel was being shot at, it only became a crisis when Israel began shooting back. (emphasis not in original post DTG)
Back in mid-June, during the great Paris weapons show, the Rafael pavilion was absolutely the busiest around, and everybody wanted to look at the new, exciting, Iron Dome system, the greatest achievement in rocket defense ever. But by the end of the show, Rafael hadn’t made a single sale. The Arrow sold well, other systems did great – Iron Dome wasn’t moving. So they contacted their big clients, the serious ones, and asked what gives. And those clients told them no one except Israel has any use for these things. Because in any normal, sane country, if some hooligans were to start targeting civilians with rockets – the army would go and kill them. emphasis mine
So in public Israel needs to show restraint, in private Hamas and their rocket firing friends are “some hooligans” than normal people would just go kill?
I object to the use of the term “Hooligans” it’s not like they are a bunch of bikers dragging their murdered people behind them as they ride…oh wait:
The six “were caught red-handed” with high-tech filming equipment to take videos of military positions, according to a security source quoted by the Hamas Aqsa radio. The men were shot.
Militants hooked the body of one alleged spy to a motorcycle and dragged him through the streets of Gaza City.
Yeah that sounds like “hooligans” to me.
If you are as old as me you remember when Reagan called the Soviets an “Evil Empire” the left went absolutely nuts. Speaking the truth aloud is just not done…but more on that tomorrow
Hamas tortured and murdered 25-year-old Israeli hostage, Sahar Baruch, who was taken to Gaza following the October 7 terrorist attack, the Israel media reported Sunday. Baruch, an engineering student at Ben-Gurion University, was kidnapped by terrorist intruders from his family home in Kibbutz Be’eri, a small community in southern Israel.
Earlier this week, Hamas claimed that Baruch had died during a failed attempt by the IDF to rescue hostages. But the propaganda video released by the terrorist group after Baruch’s death show his disfigured face with eyes gauged out—showing signs of similar sadistic torture and mutilations carried out by Hamas during the October 7 massacre.
A Hamas spokesman suggested Sunday that the terror organization could kill all of the presumed 137 hostages in its custody if Israel does not accede to its demands.
Abu Obeida, a familiar spokesman for Hamas who had not been seen for several weeks, released a video in which he made the threat clear.
“Neither the fascist enemy and its arrogant leadership… nor its supporters… can take their prisoners alive without an exchange and negotiation and meeting the demands of the resistance,” he said, according to the Times of Israel.
It is not clear if Hamas would deliver on that threat. The hostages are the only leverage that Hamas has over Israel, and it uses them as human shields. The Hamas leaders in exile — in luxurious accommodation in Doha, Qatar — would also likely to preserve the hostages alive to ensure that Israel negotiates with them, rather than killing them (as it has promised to do, eventually).
All of this comes down to calling evil good and pretending that objective truth doesn’t exist in order to win political points, oh and arab money freely flowing.
For many Netflix subscribers, their focus is on the next week’s release of the second part of the final season of The Crown. While I have enjoyed the series, the first batch of Season Six of The Crown was a huge disappointment for me.
A more enjoyable use of your time–75 minutes to be precise–can be found by watching Radical Wolfe, a documentary about the legendary writer Tom Wolfe, a pioneer of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s who later, and seamlessly, made the transition into fiction, penning one of the greatest novels ever, The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Radical Wolfe, which had a brief theatrical run this autumn, is directed by Richard Dewey. It is filled with interviews of Wolfe; Jon Hamm narrates passages from Wolfe’s work. The documentary is based on an Esquire article by Michael Lewis.
Gay Talese, Tom Junod, Christopher Buckley, and Lewis are among the writers interviewed for Radical Wolfe.
Buckley’s father, conservative firebrand William F. Buckley, says here. “Tom Wolfe is probably the most skillful writer in America. I mean by that is that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”
“If you want to be a writer,” Wolfe, who died in 2018 said of himself, “you’ve got to be standing in the middle of the tracks to see how fast the train goes.”
“Nobody is writing like Tom Wolfe today,” Junod says in Radical Wolfe. “And no one has written like Tom Wolfe.”
Wolfe is someone America needs now. Oh, to have seen him running loose among the hypocrites at COP28.
The title of the film comes from Wolfe’s 1970 essay for New York magazine, Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s, when Wolfe, after co-opting an invitation to a fundraiser for bail money for some Black Panthers held at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue home, skewered the liberal virtue signaling culture, even before that term existed.
Oh yeah, phrases. Phrases!!! Besides “radical chic,” Wolfe coined the terms “the right stuff,” the title of his of his rollicking yet informative bestseller about the early days of the space program, and “masters of the universe,” the group that Sherman McCoy, the lead character in The Bonfire of the Vanities, placed himself in.
Not mentioned in the documentary while Wolfe didn’t create the now-common phrase “pushing the envelope,” which is used repeatedly in The Right Stuff, he popularized it.
The repeated use of ellipses (…) and multiple exclamation points (!!!) are a trademark of Wolfe’s early work.
As with the fetid film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Radical Wolfe tiptoes around race. Wolfe was a master storyteller and, strictly in the storytelling sense, race presents a crucial ingredient for any narrative–conflict. The Reverend Bacon character in Bonfires, an Al Sharpton knockoff, is a comic foil. Fareek “The Cannon” Fanon, an African American college football star in Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man in Full, comes across as a boor when he confuses lead character Charlie Coker’s old moniker as a 60-Minute Man, not as a football starter on both defense and offense, but as a man who could, let’s say, “do it” in bed for 60 minutes.
Black people can be boors in Wolfe’s world. As can white people. As can everyone. That’s the way it ought to be. Because that’s the way society is.
In Wolfe’s takedown of ugly glass-box and faceless architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, he gives a rundown of the horrors of public housing, and joyously recalls the response when tin-eared bureaucrats in St. Louis–after decades of failing the residents of the city’s housing projects–finally did the unthinkable. They asked the tenants of the notorious Pruitt-Igoe homes, most of them Black, what they wanted done to the buildings. Their response? They chanted, “Blow it up.”
And the bureaucrats did just that. Why isn’t this poignant story in Radical Wolfe?
Wolfe was always coy about his political stance. “I belong to the party of the opposition,” he says in the documentary. But I suspect he was a slightly conservative, with a strong libertarian bent.
Despite the quibbles I mentioned, I loved Radical Wolfe. Oh, one more thing. To capture the Varoom!!! Varoom!!! uniqueness of Wolfe’s genius, a surreal mashup, along the lines of the one in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, would have been a welcome addition.
Last year, Netflix sent a message to its workers that not all of its programming–not these words of course–will kowtow to wokeism. Radical Wolfe is a big step in the right direction for the streaming service. Next year Netflix will stream a six-episode limited series based on Wolfe’s A Man in Full. It will star Jeff Daniels and Diane Lane.
Keep it up, Netflix.
But I have one more quibble. Radical Wolfe is rated TV-MA for–wait for it–language and smoking.
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