Heinous victim-blaming, slut-shaming crap.

Someone on my FB page asked for my thoughts on this article, in which the reprehensible "No means yes, yes means anal" rape apologism at Yale is blamed on the sexual license argued for by feminists. Yes, that's right. It's all the uppity bitches' fault.

A group of mostly female students is suing Yale University for allowing a “sexually hostile environment” to exist on campus.

The women, of course, have a point. After all, when frat boys are allowed to parade around the old campus chanting “No Means Yes,” or to hold up signs that read “We Love Yale Sluts,” I guess you could say that’s a sexually hostile environment.

But may I ask a question? What did you expect?

The rage, it knows no bounds.

I think this man is an asshole who is bitter on behalf of all jilted men that women are fighting for the right to fuck, but not with him. I mean, look at this.

The disgusting, intimidating behavior at Yale -- and on many college campuses -- is a classic example of the post-modern impasse. For nearly 50 years, academia, the feminist movement, and post-modern society have embraced sexual freedom as the ultimate good.

And the feminists led the way. They wanted to control their bodies; to be free from any consequences of sexual license.

He completely misses the point that women want to control their bodies, even though it's right there in his own description of their goals. The goal of feminism was never that women's bodies ought to be treated like public property; that is in fact the PRECISE WORLDVIEW that feminism is still fighting.

This asshole seems to think it's perfectly natural and inevitable that uppity women who have the nerve to do what they like with their sexuality should be treated like disposable whores, there for the taking by any man.

As far as I can tell, Colson literally CANNOT envision a world in which female sexuality is not controlled by somebody other than the woman herself. He presents an utterly insane and backward choice for women--either you let Jesus own your sexuality, or it will lay there unclaimed and men will just rape you all the time because you don't belong to anybody.

"Does the Christian view of sex promote intimidation, harassment, and brutish behavior like we’re seeing at Yale, or does it promote moral and ethical virtue?"

By treating female sexuality as something which must always be in the possession and under the control of a man, it certainly does promote intimidation, harassment, and brutish behavior. By treating this as the natural outgrowth of women thinking they can just walk around like they're human beings with a right to do things other than powerspawn babies for their husband and Jesus, he reinforces the slut-shaming and depersonalization of women who fuck that is the very basis of the rape culture we live in.

This man is an asshole. He is an asshole, he is an asshole, he is an asshole, and if you want the most obvious indication that he is an asshole, he is blaming feminism for the culture of degradation and rape on college campuses INSTEAD OF BLAMING THE RAPISTS. Why? Well, because boys will be boys, and it's always the woman's fault if she gets raped. She had to have done something to ask for it, right? Like demand the right to vote, to have or deny sex, to hold a job, to decide not to have children. The natural outgrowth of the fight for women to have these things is not RAPE. That is the natural outgrowth of SOMEONE BEING A RAPIST.

Things that have been on my mind lately...

Another run-down of random stuff.

Equal Rights for LGBT Citizens

Hoosiers discuss Prop. 8 and their experiences with gay marriage

Tiffany Dow, board member, Indiana Black Pride: “(Indiana is) not at the forefront, by any means. I believe there will be (legal same-sex marriage) at some point, but I think the only way it’s going to happen in the state is if it’s a federal thing.

“It’s kind of scary to me that with Prop. 8 passing, a right that was already given to people was taken away, at the hands of the voters. Any time you have minorities’ rights dictated by the majority, that’s certainly a civil rights issue.”(...)

There’s no amendment in the state’s constitution banning same-sex marriage. A proposal to amend the constitution has been pushed in years past, as opponents of gay marriage fear Indiana’s judges could strike down the law. Such a ban failed to pass out of the General Assembly in 2007 and again this year, which means the lengthy process to amend the state constitution would have to start from scratch in 2009. That’s unlikely to happen.

Democratic House Speaker B. Patrick Bauer has not shown a willingness to allow a floor vote. A constitutional amendment requires passage by two separately elected legislatures, followed by the approval of voters in a general election.

Today in Traditional Marriage

A husband and wife have been charged with torture and other counts after a bruised, terrified 17-year-old showed up at a gym with a chain locked to his ankle, claiming he had just fled his captors, authorities said Tuesday.

Kelly Lau Schumacher, 30, and Michael Schumacher, 34, were arrested late Monday, said Matt Robinson, a spokesman for police in Tracy. (...)

Kelly and Michael Schumacher are legally married—and they can stay legally married, even if they're found to be guilty of this horrendous crime. They can stay legally married even if the decomposing remains of twenty other teenagers are found buried in their backyard. Their marriage license cannot be revoked. If Michael dies in prison, Kelly can remarry—even if she's serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. If Kelly decides to divorce Michael, he can remarry—even if he's sitting on death row. He can remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce until he runs out of prison pen pals. Because the courts have declared that marriage is so fundamental a right that it cannot be denied to convicted rapists or to serial killers.

But it's a right that's denied to me and my boyfriend. Because we're both men and that ain't right.

Why churches fear gay marriage

American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn't declining, it's increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was negligible; no one refers to him, no one noticed his absence.

The possibility that a whole new generation of American males is being raised by women without men is very challenging for the churches. I think they want to reassert some sort of male authority over the order of things. I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women.

Monotheistic religions feel threatened by the rise of feminism and the insistence, in many communities, that women take a bigger role in the church. At the same time that women are claiming more responsibility for their religious life, they are also moving out of traditional roles as wife and mother. This is why abortion is so threatening to many religious people -- it represents some rejection of the traditional role of mother.

In such a world, we need to identify the relationship between feminism and homosexuality. These movements began, in some sense, to achieve visibility alongside one another. I know a lot of black churches take offense when gay activists say that the gay movement is somehow analogous to the black civil rights movement. And while there is some relationship between the persecution of gays and the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, I think the true analogy is to the women's movement. What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the traditional male-structured society.

Judge Removes Child From Lesbian Parents

Fayette Circuit Judge Paul Blake originally agreed to allow Kathyrn Kutil and Cheryl Hess to be foster parents for the infant girl, following a positive assessment by the Department of Health and Human Resources.

Court records show that the little girl was born to a drug addicted mother and the baby had had cocaine, opiates and benzodiazepines in her system. Shortly after birth the baby went through drug withdrawal. The father was unknown.

The Department placed the child with Kutil and Hess, who had been approved as foster parents, when it could not find any blood relatives of the mother.

But nearly a year later when the couple applied to adopt the little girl both the Department and Judge Blake balked. In his ruling Blake ordered the child removed saying the baby should be permanently placed in a home where the parents would be a married opposite-sex couple.

The ruling said that he had agreed to allow the women to foster the child because it was the best option at the time. But he never intended it to be permanent.

New York City LGBT Healthcare Found Lacking

A study by New York’s Public Advocate into the ways the LGBT community receives healthcare has found major barriers and recommends urgent action.

The report, Improving Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Access to Healthcare at New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation Facilities, was released by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum.

It specifically details the barriers LGBT New Yorkers confront in obtaining health care from New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC).

The report found that both were in sensitive to LGBT medical needs, that there often was homophobia and hostility from providers, and as a result many LGBT people in the city are not accessing basic healthcare services.

Religion

Pope Questions Interfaith Dialogue

In quotations from the letter that appeared on Sunday in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, the pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”

But Benedict added that “intercultural dialogue which deepens the cultural consequences of basic religious ideas” was important. He called for confronting “in a public forum the cultural consequences of basic religious decisions.”

Challenging the Order?

Salon.com interviews gay Catholic author Richard Rodriguez about gay marriage, the "Desert religions", and the power of women in religious life. What is striking about the piece, from my perspective, is how close he gets to endorsing a shift away from monotheism (or at least male-oriented monotheism) while discussing religion.

"The desert religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are male religions. Their perception is that God is a male god and Allah is a male god. If the male is allowed to hold onto the power of God, then I think we are in terrible shape. I think what's coming out of Colorado Springs right now, with people like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, is either the last or continuing gasp of a male hierarchy in religion. That's what's at stake. And women have a determining role to play. Are they going to go along with this, or are they going to challenge the order?"

While Rodriquez talks about how the traditional monotheisms feel "threatened by the rise of feminism", he seems unable to look outside the "desert religions" and see that millions of women are indeed challenging the order by leaving it entirely for a variety of faiths that are more egalitarian in outlook.

Why the Debate Over Creationism Matters

Recently I have been involved in a couple conversations with folks who aren’t really “informed” (I use the term loosely) creationists but have been hounded enough by creationists/biblical literalists who have drawn the battle line twixt themselves and evolutionists/biblical contextualists that they sit down firmly just on the creationists’ side of the fence — just in case evolutionists really are godless heretics. They’re not interested in getting into discussions about the origins question; while not wholly dismissive of those who accept the scientific consensus (biblical contextualists), they’re entirely content to live and let live. They can’t be bothered to investigate the issue on either the scientific or the biblical side, but, when pressed to mark where they stand, figure that they can’t go wrong if they just stick with the (perceived) default: interpreting Genesis as historical.

There are things I believe are true and right that I don’t become an activist for because of their essentially trivial nature; but there are a few reasons that I think this particular issue is no trivial, purely academic dispute.

Projecting Hostility

Conservative Evangelicals often project a hostility onto others that simply isn't there, and may in fact reflect an assumption that others are as hostile to them as they are, deep down, to others. My initial point was the irony of a more exclusive group calling a more inclusive group "less friendly". I can appreciate a good bit of irony, but things seem to have gotten seriously out of hand at this stage.

Thinking back to my more conservative days, I wonder whether a key reason for maintaining that one is facing hostility even when one isn't has to do with the Bible. The New Testament reflects contexts in which real persecution (arrest, imprisonment, even execution) were part of the church's experience. Might one reason conservative Christians treat the world as hostile in this way, even when they live in a country that safeguards their religious freedom, be that if the world they inhabit doesn't allow for direct application of the New Testament, then they simply don't know how to make sense of their lives? Could it be the desire for a simple hermeneutic (or conversely, fear of a more complex process of interpretation) that is at the heart of this phenomenon?

Education

Technology is driving down the cost of teaching undergraduates. So why are tuition bills going up?

On August 6, 2008, the Washington Post reported that tuition and fees at public colleges in Virginia will increase by an average of 7.3 percent this year. The article was four sentences long and ran in the Metro section, below the fold, in space reserved for unremarkable news. The drumbeat of higher education price increases has become so steady in recent years that it barely merits attention. But the cumulative effect is enormous: the average price of attending a public university more than doubled over the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation. The steepest increases came in the last five years.

And there’s nothing routine about the way college costs are weighing down lower- and middle-income families. Students are still going to college—in this day and age, what choice do they have? But some are getting priced out of the four-year sector into two-year colleges, while others are trying unsuccessfully to simultaneously hold down a full-time job and earn a degree. More students are going deeply into debt, narrowing their career options and risking catastrophic default. The lightly regulated private student loan market, which barely existed ten years ago, now controls about 20 percent of loan volume, burdening financially vulnerable undergraduates with high interest rates and few legal protections. State and federal governments have poured tens of billions of new taxpayer dollars into student aid programs, only to see them swallowed up by institutions with a seemingly unlimited appetite for funds.

For years colleges have insisted that rapidly rising prices are unavoidable because higher education is a labor-intensive business that cannot become more efficient. A forty-minute lecture takes just as long to deliver today as it did a hundred years ago, they say; a ten-page paper takes just as long to grade. Because efficiencies in other industries are driving up the overall cost of skilled labor, colleges have to offer salaries to match, which pushes productivity down. (Economists call this "Baumol’s cost disease," after the New York University economist who first made the diagnosis.) Regrettable for students, of course, but what can be done?

In fact, this premise is false. Colleges are perfectly capable of becoming more efficient and productive, in the same way that countless other industries have: through technology. And increasingly, they are. One of the untold stories in higher education is that the cost of teaching is starting to decline, but virtually none of those savings are being passed along to students and parents in the form of lower prices. Instead, colleges are pocketing the difference, even as they continue to jack up tuition bills. (...)

Since it’s effectively impossible to judge institutions by their outputs—that is, by how much students learn—the pecking order in higher education tends to be based on measures of inputs, like the SAT scores of incoming freshmen or the cost of a year’s tuition. As a result, price has become a symbol of quality instead of a component of quality. Colleges have many incentives to raise prices and none to lower them—indeed, lower prices send a negative signal to the market. Instead of increasing the number of customers, lower prices often drive them away. The U.S. News rankings reinforce this. Ten percent of a college’s score in those rankings is based on spending per student, while another 20 percent is based on factors like faculty salaries and small class sizes, which cost money to buy. Colleges that used the savings from technology to cut prices—and thus expenditures—would see their ranking go down. Their status diminished, schools would see their applications for admission and alumni donations fall as well.

Military

Obama and the Brass

The conventional wisdom seems to be that tension is unavoidable. Military leaders are, the theory goes, bound to be skeptical about a young president who didn't serve in the military, and who has articulated a withdrawal policy many in the Pentagon are skeptical of.

But there are at least two key angles to consider here. First, during the ongoing transition, Obama seems to be reassuring military leaders about his plans, and signaling to the brass, through his personnel decisions, that "he will do nothing rash and will seek their advice, even while making clear that he may not always take it."

Second, and just as importantly, Obama has an opportunity, which he plans to fully take advantage of, to make some changes that military leaders and Pentagon officials have wanted for years, but which Bush failed to even consider. Indeed, for all of the perceived conservatism of the military, Obama's vision and agenda for the Pentagon is far more in line with officers' beliefs than the current president's.

Soldiers Who Have Taken a Life More Likely to Defend Iraq War (Thanks to copperstewart)

Wayne Klug, a psychologist at Berkshire Community College, asked 68 Iraq War veterans about their experiences, their thoughts on the war and their opinions about Iraqis and Americans. Compared with soldiers who never saw combat and those who witnessed a death but were not involved, veterans who “were directly involved in an Iraqi fatality” were much more likely to consider the war to be beneficial to both countries.

So much fail. And yet...

This entry is not just about women or children. So if you, like McCain, don't care how many women's deaths the government causes, just scroll past all this stuff about women's "health" that makes no nevermind to you.

John McCain understands that before Roe v. Wade, unsafe abortions killed women. He said that. "I understand."

He still thinks Roe v. Wade was a mistake. Even understanding and admitting that without Roe v. Wade women die, McCain asserts that it was a mistake that should be repealed for the good of us all. Well. The good of people who matter; shouldn't take too much deliberation to figure out whether you're one of them (hint: you've already been born).



I think that any real "women for McCain" out there should see this video. As well as this one, in which John McCain scoffs at the value Obama places on the "health of the mother."



Ladies, do you get it yet? He thinks that if you're facing the "terrible decision" of whether to get an abortion, that you need someone who'll show compassion and courage. Compassion for your fetus (but disdain for you), and the courage to fight for policy that kills women. He doesn't just disregard women's autonomy. He's disregarding their lives.

I can't vote to put that in office. Neither should the women who, according to NPR and Planned Parenthood had no idea as late as February that McCain was as virulently anti-choice as he is.

They assumed that the "maverick" would break with his party to look out for them.

They assumed wrong. (Check his record yourself if you think this site is lying.)

John McCain. Wrong on education.

Wrong on Iraq.

Wrong on racial equality.

Wrong on health care.

Wrong on the economy.

Wrong on torture. (Despite his earlier principled stance on the issue.)

Wrong on Veterans' issues.

Can he do anything right? I mean, I realize he's a verifiable hardass. Much respect for that from this daughter of an active-duty military family. But the President's job is about more than being a hardass. Has McCain shown any readiness for the rest of those tasks? Or is he just playing the POW card and hoping voters will stop asking too many questions?

The real question is not why he's doing it. He's losing and he's dishonorable enough that he'll do anything to get himself into the White House. The real question is how his supporters can manage to wave these things away.

All I can think of is that it must be philosophy over fact all over again. It doesn't matter whom we hurt, as long as we're doing "the right thing." The "right thing," incidentally, has little or nothing to do with the outcome. As long as we're not Godless socialist elitist European-wannabes from fake America, we're in the right. You read that correctly. We're in the right, no matter who suffers.

It is a sick sick child who disobeys authority: APA

In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association added an interesting diagnosis to the DSM IV. Let's set aside their tendency to create diagnostic criteria for every imaginable human condition with fetishistic thoroughness. I'll assume you're aware that they do this, even if they're no longer classifying all homosexuals as victims of disease. I want to talk about a specific instance that has become a bit more high-profile recently.

The APA found a way to medicalize juvenile rebellion: Oppositional Defiant Disorder. No really. Never mind that Margaret Mead concluded that teen rebellion is largely a phenomenon of American culture. We won't worry about that. Here's what we'll worry about: the medicalization of deviance.

Now, this is nothing new. When a woman was unhappy in a life without any real agency, she was called a hysteric, her discontent being the result of her own sickness rather than oppressive conditions. They used to say that slaves who ran away from their masters must surely be mentally ill, for what slave in his or her right mind would do such an inconvenient and noncompliant thing?

It turns out that if your child has frequent temper tantrums, argues "excessively" with adults, and exhibits "active defiance and refusal to comply with adult requests and rules," he or she might be mentally ill. In the second grade classroom where I volunteered in high school, they called these kids "emotionally handicapped," and at least a couple were kept so tranquilized by medication that they slept through the day's lessons on a beanbag in the corner. The worst I observed in any of them (when sober) was one boy telling the other children what he'd read about extraterrestrials. Clearly this child is a threat to himself and everyone else around him. Someone call the APA.

Keep in mind that ODD isn't the same thing as conduct disorder. That's a separate disorder in which a child is actually acting out instead of simply making a nuisance of themselves verbally.

The official symptoms of ODD include "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules" and "often argues with adults." While ODD-diagnosed young people are obnoxious with adults they don't respect, these kids can be a delight with adults they do respect; yet many of them are medicated with psychotropic drugs. (Levine at AlterNet)

Because of the history of medicalizing deviance (exemplified by the historical diagnoses of female hysteria and drapetomania), this makes me nervous. It turns dissatisfaction with one's lot--and according noncompliance to those who perpetuate it--into a sickness, thereby delegitimizing it. Aside from the fact that it's annoying as hell, why would doctors encourage the delegitimization of noncompliant behavior? Levine offers an interesting suggestion.

While there are several reasons for behavioral disruptiveness and emotional difficulties, rebellion against an oppressive environment is one common reason that is routinely not even considered by many mental health professionals. Why? It is my experience that many mental health professionals are unaware of how extremely obedient they are to authorities. Acceptance into medical school and graduate school and achieving a Ph.D. or M.D. means jumping through many meaningless hoops, all of which require much behavioral, attentional and emotional compliance to authorities -- even disrespected ones. When compliant M.D.s and Ph.D.s begin seeing noncompliant patients, many of these doctors become anxious, sometimes even ashamed of their own excessive compliance, and this anxiety and shame can be fuel for diseasing normal human reactions.

If you need any further evidence that psychiatrists expect children to be as compliant as they are, check this out.

The skill of compliance—defined as the capacity to defer or delay one’s own goals in response to the imposed goals or standards of an authority figure—can be considered one of many developmental expressions of a young child’s evolving capacities in the domains of adaptation, internalization, self-regulation, and affective modulation. (Source here.)

Granted, I understand that kids need to learn that what they want is not always necessarily the best first priority, but the way this is worded suggests to me that Levine may be onto something. The "skill of compliance," of subordinating your will to the will of another, is so important that if you can't do it right... they may have to drug you.

If you need a further indication that compliant children are more valuable than noncompliant ones, chew on this.

One of the most pervasive ad campaigns draws on the rhetoric of homeland security to label youth defiance “The War at Home,” urging a corrections mentality on the family: “The focus of treatment should be on compliance and coping skills, not on self-esteem or personality. ODD is not a self-esteem issue; it’s a problem solving issue.” (Source.)

Norm Diamond suggests that delegitimizing noncompliance this way actually hampers the ability of diagnosed children to develop proper critical thinking skills. Critical thinking requires a willingness to question, to argue. If a child is judged to be excessively noncompliant by the authority figures who have an interest in seeing them comply (parents, teachers, psychiatrists treating them), the child may be too tranquilized by medication to actually turn their noncompliance into a vital cognitive skill. As a result, they won't develop that skill. He goes further (but not much further) and suggests that excessive compliance is much more alarming, and created a parody diagnosis of "Compliance Aquiescant Disorder," characterized by blaming of oneself or other individuals for social problems, staying restrained when outrage is warranted, and failure to argue back.

The fact that psychiatrists have medicalized ODD and not CAD says a lot about what they perceived to be "problem" behavior in children. That really takes away a lot of their credibility for me in diagnosing children with ODD. Another problem is that children with ODD are often going to present with comorbid mental illnesses like ADHD, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, or language impairments. For example, if a kid has ADHD and ODD, you can treat the ADHD and it'll generally help both.

Imagine that. You treat the mental disability that actually has a biochemical component, and the disorder characterized by resentment, frustration, and anger gets better! Who'd have imagined it, right? I guess this was news to these guys. "Clearly, characterization and treatment of oppositional defiant disorder on the basis of comorbid presentations is an area worthy of significant research attention. The high prevalence of oppositional defiant disorder within other clinical populations also deserves additional attention." You mean people being treated for mental illness can become resentful and rebellious? No way.

It seems to me that if by treating an actual illness you can simultaneously make ODD go away that ODD may not really make too much sense as a unique diagnosis.

Really, the best thing about medicalizing deviance from the point of view of the population with authority (men in the case of hysteria, whites in the case of drapetomania, and adults in the case of ODD) is that it isn't your fault. You haven't done anything wrong, and there's nothing wrong with society. The only changes that need to be made are within the twisted and maladapted mind of the disenfranchised "noncompliant" person.

Medicalizing the noncompliance of children does the same thing. It takes a child who is reacting in an understandable way to their environment and labels their mistrust of authority figures a disease. Studies show that children with ODD are more likely to have difficult home lives. According to this study, children with dysfunctional home lives are more likely to be the ones presenting with ODD. As the study states in its abstract, "families of oppositional defiant disorder youth with or without conduct disorder were characterized by significantly poorer cohesion and significantly higher conflict." It doesn't give any causation here. You could just as easily argue that they create hostile home environments as you could argue that the home environment makes them that way.

I am swayed toward the first argument because of the way I've read ODD is evidently managed.

Parents can help their child with ODD in the following ways:

• Always build on the positives, give the child praise and positive reinforcement when he shows flexibility or cooperation.


• Take a time‑out or break if you are about to make the conflict with your child worse, not better. This is good modeling for your child. Support your child if he decides to take a time‑out to prevent overreacting.
  
• Pick your battles. Since the child with ODD has trouble avoiding power struggles, prioritize the things you want your child to do. (American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry)

Look at these treatments. What doctors are telling parents is essentially, "It's not your fault your child has never learned to deal with conflict. They're just sick. Nonetheless, all the solutions we know to give you are changes you need to make in your behavior."

Here's my perspective on it. If a child comes from a home environment in which parents are, for example, handling conflicts in ways that make them worse instead of better, how are they supposed to know how to act when conflict occurs outside the home? The changes that parents are recommended to make suggest to me what kind of a home environment these kids are coming from.

Look in particular at the section about picking battles. It basically comes down to, "if you start a power struggle, the kid won't back down. So try not to turn everything into a dominance play." If I came from a home environment in which every suggestion was an enforcement of dominance, in which parents make conflicts worse instead of better by having emotional outbursts, I would probably develop a healthy distrust for the legitimacy of authority as well.

Oh, wait, that's right.

I did.

Here's the personal anecdote section. I realize that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," but there's something to be said for an insider perspective.

In retrospect, I was not a terribly defiant child. I was just told that I was by a parent who turned every conflict into a battle for dominance that we both knew I must lose. I learned the art of invisibility early on. Creep through the house silently to avoid attention if you can't afford to be noticed just then. Always come when you're called; drop everything, no matter how important. If you make a mess in a public area of the house, clean it up like you were never there, because if you can be detected you have created an inconvenience for the adult who must put things to rights. There is no respectful way to point out when a parent just plain is not making sense.

And y'know what? I humiliated teachers I didn't respect by mercilessly tearing apart every inconsistency and perceived flaw in everything they did, and I did it in front of everyone. Every single person who treated me like an idiot child got the full brunt of my open disgust that they were in a position of authority. Things were different in science classes, or social studies. Here were teachers who knew important things, things I liked. In these classes I took detailed color-coded notes, relished every project, and in general was the most attentive student around. Sometimes I was a dreaded troublemaker, and sometimes I was teacher's pet.

If a teacher gave me the slightest notice as a bright little girl who wanted something interesting to do, I'd probably have gone to war to defend their honor. My ability to control myself was not magically improved in classes I enjoyed, which means that my self-control or "compliance skill" was not the problem. The problem was that I didn't obey people I didn't respect.

I would have been diagnosed with ODD. I spent so much time submitting to an authority I perceived to be unjust that I absolutely would not let any other one like it have sway over me.

Tell me why we want children to learn to submit to perceived injustice again? In what was once alleged to be the land of the free and home of the brave, we are drugging children who are too free and brave for the comfort of authority figures who are accustomed to commanding the respect of subordinate humans instead of earning it. Why are we taking their side?

I'll end with a question posed by Levine on AlterNet (and I'll ask you to forgive his excessive blaming of "Big Pharma," because otherwise his argument is sound).

In every generation there will be authoritarians. There will also be the "bohemian bourgeois" who may enjoy anti-authoritarian books, music, and movies but don't act on them. And there will be genuine anti-authoritarians, who are so pained by exploitive hierarchies that they take action. Only occasionally in American history do these genuine anti-authoritarians actually take effective direct action that inspires others to successfully revolt, but every once in a while a Tom Paine comes along. So authoritarians take no chances, and the state-corporate partnership criminalizes anti-authoritarianism, pathologizes it, markets drugs to "cure" it and financially intimidates those who might buck the system.

It would certainly be a dream of Big Pharma and those who favor an authoritarian society if every would-be Tom Paine -- or Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Emma Goldman or Malcolm X -- were diagnosed as a youngster with mental illness and quieted with a lifelong regimen of chill pills. The question is: Has this dream become reality?

Damn, Gloria.

Gloria Steinem. You and I, we've had our differences. We have, really. There've been times when the phrase "calm the fuck down this isn't about vaginas" crossed my mind, and times when it came right out my mouth before I could stop it.

But you definitely nailed it this time. Thanks to kaiserbrown for linking this. I went ahead and linked to sources so that no one can claim Steinem's talking out her ass.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does."

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Damn, Gloria. 

They see me thinkin'... they hatin'...

A good quote was linked on another journal I read, and I thought I would relay it here. It's good.

[M]y problem is with the all too common accusation of intellectual arrogance being hurled at myself and most of my colleagues who defend science from pseudoscience, be that creationism, intelligent design, UFO claims, psychic powers, astrology or "alternative" medicine. The reasoning, such as it is, goes like this: how dare you, Dr. X (put here any name of any scientist who dares to write for the public), claim that so many people are wrong and you and a small number of other egg-headed intellectuals are right? Who are you to declare the truth of evolution and the falsity of intelligent design? What makes you the arbiter in deciding what is science and what is bunk? ...

Intellectual arrogance, in the utmost degree, is being displayed by those who dismiss out of hand the considerate opinion of someone who has studied a field for 25 years only because they cherish a particular religious worldview that has no independent foundation in reality. Arrogance, according to my dictionary, is "having an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities," and it seems to me to fit perfectly someone who has no technical background in a given field and yet pontificates endlessly about what is True and what is not.

-Massimo Pigliucci, "Intellectual arrogance" at Rationally Speaking

Here is where I assert what I know. I know some things about history, and the way cultures grow and develop. I know some things about religion, and what place it has for many people in their lives. I also know a couple of things about politics, particularly where it intersects with religion or culture (and in the latter case, this happens a lot). This isn't to say I'm actually an expert in any of these things. Sure, compared to someone without a degree in anthropology I've got decent credentials, but I have only a Bachelor of Arts, which in an academic subject means little. It means that most people I talk to with an education have a vastly higher amount of experience and expertise in the area they studied. It means that most people I talk to about anything important have at least studied something, and even if its only tangentially related they are coming to the discussion with a healthy respect for expertise, education, and fact.

Then there's the internet. The internet is where I find people who aren't college professors, or other folk who've proven themselves capable of studying various things. The internet is where I find people who glorify ignorance over education, and use anti-intellectualism as a shield and a mask for their own bitterness that they don't know jack, and for once they aren't getting away with pretending they do. The internet is where I find people who think that America will progress socially, economically, scientifically, and politically by being resentful of experts instead of being interested in what they have to say or how they came to their conclusions. The internet is where I find poor Republicans voting against their own interests, gay Republicans voting against their own interests, transsexual Republicans voting against their own interests, Pagan Republicans voting against their own interests, female Republicans voting against their own interests, and independents voting for whomever they can to avoid supporting "that popular guy."

The internet is where I'm reminded that even if the test scores are wrong and I am of average intelligence... that still means half the country is less intelligent than I am. And they'll never forgive me for it. These people are the same hateful brats I knew in grade school, the ones who encouraged smart kids to shut up, who still haven't forgiven kids like me who dared to get above ourselves and actually do our best. 

And this, my friends, is why I have not checked my friends page in days.

I'm not the captain of this ship...

...so there's no reason I should have to go down with it if McCain and Palin get elected. I'm evidently not the only person who feels this way.

From a link on admnaismith's journal.

Here is a link, and here's some of the text:

The bar was set so low for Sarah Palin's speech that she could have taken two giant dumps on the podium and been praised for not taking a third. She read the words on the teleprompter – written by George W. Bush's speechwriter – with gusto, but offered nothing but tacky denigrations of Barack Obama's character, along with a litany of complete and utter falsehoods.

(snip) 

In a way, tonight was calming. Because truly, if McCain/Palin wins an election over Obama/Biden, this country is so fucked as to warrant abandonment. If this guttersniping, lying marionette and her twisted, ghoulishly-grinning mentor are the people America wants, then the debate is over, les jeux sont faits, we know not to care anymore.

(snip)

I tell you, that's fine. Us elitists, you know, the ones with education, the ones that took an active interest in the world around us, the ones that flourished in the many-hued world of nuance and occasionally tried to make the world a better place - rather than hoarding as much as we could for ourselves and putting barbed wire and guns around it - We will opt out.

We might go to our own version of Coastopia, we might take our talents to another country. There will be a brain drain, the best and brightest fleeing to another place that doesn't make them sick to their stomach.

To be fair, it's begun already. America used to be the land where science advanced, and fifty years ago (or even about twenty years ago) the Hadron Collider would have been built here. Now it's in Switzerland, and whatever technology advances scientists make as a result of greater knowledge will create jobs on another continent.

And Americans don't even see it happening. They're too busy causing recurrances of preventable diseases, because they don't want to vaccinate their kids, killing not only themselves, but immunocompromised individuals depending on herd immunity. They're too busy keeping scientific knowledge about the advancement of life out of our schools because they don't want their kids learning theologically inappropriate truths. They're too busy preventing young people from learning to make responsible choices because they're far more afraid of free will than the Lord God who allowed Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and become more like him than less.

They're too busy turning our reputation for producing scientists into a reputation for producing xenophobic fanatical anti-intellectuals to realize that it is to our detriment to be xenophobic fanatical anti-intellectuals. They won't know until it's too late, and it's possible they won't even see it then.

And there's nothing I can do. There can be no dialogue here. There are a lot of people out there with nothing better to say than, "I hate intellectuals and I can't trust them and neither should you. Trust me instead, because I have no evident credentials and that makes me more credible."

I have a degree in a social science, which means neither of us can listen to the other without sanity loss. I don't know what to do but wave it away and walk off shaking my head.

Don't Know Enough About Obama?

His resume is available, and presumably has been for a while.

Undergraduate Education

Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA
Undergraduate, 1981-1983

Columbia University
B.A. Political Science with specialization in international relations
Thesis topic: Soviet nuclear disarmament

Graduate Education

Harvard Law School
J.D. magna cum laude 1988-1991

President, Harvard Law Review

Organizing and other work experience

1983-1984 Writer/Researcher for Business International Corporation. Helped companies understand overseas markets in the “Financing Foreign Operations” service and wrote for the “Business International Money Report”

1984-1985 Community Organizer for New York Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), promoting personal, community, and government reform at City College in Harlem.

1985-1988 Director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland on Chicago's South Side. While director grew the DCP staff from 1 to 13 and their budget from $70,000 to $400,000.

1992 Led Chicago's Project Vote! push. This effort resulted in a record number of voter registrations, over 600,000 in Chicago. 1)

Teaching

1993-2004 Visiting Law and Government Fellow, then Senior Lecturer, in Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Taught courses on the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law, on voting rights, and on racism and law. Helped develop a casebook on voting rights.

Law Practice

1993-2002 Worked as an associate attorney with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Represented non-profits and private individuals in urban development projects, voting rights cases, and wrongful firings. Filed major suit that forced the state of Illinois to enforce the Motor Voter Law and successfully argued a wrongful firing case before the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Illinois Senate 1996-2004

• Chairman, Health and Human Services Committee

• Spearheaded a successful bipartisan effort in Illinois to pass the broadest ethics-reform legislation by any state in 25 years, and also gained bipartisan support for his successful bills reforming death penalty interrogations and ending racial profiling by police. Worked with the Republican-led effort to reform welfare

• Also sponsored successful bills expanding tax credits and child-care subsidies for low-income working families, protecting overtime pay for workers, expanding health care for children, and providing job skills training for juveniles
  
  

Sponsored Bill Statistics

• Number of sponsored bills: 65

• Number of sponsored bills passed: 0

• Number of co-sponsored bills 364

• Number of co-sponsored bills passed: 5

www.opencongress.org

United States Senate 2004-present

• Member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

• Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs

• Member, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

• Member, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

• Member, Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs

• Shares responsibility for the bipartisan Coburn-Obama Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, requiring full online disclosure of all entities receiving federal funds, and the bipartisan Lugar-Obama Cooperative Proliferation Detection, Interdiction Assistance, and Conventional Threat Reduction Act of 2006, deepening non-proliferation work with WMD and including surface-to-air missiles, land mines, and other weapons that may be used by terrorists

Bills / Amendments Passed

• Barack Obama has introduced nearly 300 bills during his time in the U.S. Senate, and cosponsored close to 1,000 others. If you would like a full look at his legislative efforts, search the 109th Congress at http://thomas.loc.gov/bss/d109query.html and 110th Congress at http://thomas.loc.gov/bss/d110query.html

• S.AMDT.1041 to S.1082 To improve the safety and efficacy of genetic tests.

• S.AMDT.3073 to H.R.1585 To provide for transparency and accountability in military and security contracting.

• S.AMDT.3078 to H.R.1585 Relating to administrative separations of members of the Armed Forces for personality disorder.

• S.AMDT.41 to S.1 To require lobbyists to disclose the candidates, leadership PACs, or political parties for whom they collect or arrange contributions, and the aggregate amount of the contributions collected or arranged.

• S.AMDT.524 to S.CON.RES.21 To provide $100 million for the Summer Term Education Program supporting summer learning opportunities for low-income students in the early grades to lessen summer learning losses that contribute to the achievement gaps separating low-income students from their middle-class peers.

• S.AMDT.599 to S.CON.RES.21 To add $200 million for Function 270 (Energy) for the demonstration and monitoring of carbon capture and sequestration technology by the Department of Energy.

• S.AMDT.905 to S.761 To require the Director of Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Education to establish a program to recruit and provide mentors for women and underrepresented minorities who are interested in careers in mathematics, science, and engineering.

• S.AMDT.923 to S.761 To expand the pipeline of individuals entering the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields to support United States innovation and competitiveness.

• S.AMDT.924 to S.761 To establish summer term education programs.

• S.AMDT.2519 to H.R.2638 To provide that one of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to enter into a contract in an amount greater than $5 million or to award a grant in excess of such amount unless the prospective contractor or grantee certifies in writing to the agency awarding the contract or grant that the contractor or grantee owes no past due Federal tax liability.

• S.AMDT.2588 to H.R.976 To provide certain employment protections for family members who are caring for members of the Armed Forces recovering from illnesses and injuries incurred on active duty.

• S.AMDT.2658 to H.R.2642 To provide that none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to enter into a contract in an amount greater than $5,000,000 or to award a grant in excess of such amount unless the prospective contractor or grantee makes certain certifications regarding Federal tax liability.

• S.AMDT.2692 to H.R.2764 To require a comprehensive nuclear threat reduction and security plan.

• S.AMDT.2799 to H.R.3074 To provide that none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to enter into a contract in an amount greater than $5,000,000 or to award a grant in excess of such amount unless the prospective contractor or grantee makes certain certifications regarding Federal tax liability.

• S.AMDT.3137 to H.R.3222 To provide that none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to enter into a contract in an amount greater than $5,000,000 or to award a grant in excess of such amount unless the prospective contractor or grantee makes certain certifications regarding Federal tax liability.

• S.AMDT.3234 to H.R.3093 To provide that none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to enter into a contract in an amount greater than $5,000,000 or to award a grant in excess of such amount unless the prospective contractor or grantee makes certain certifications regarding Federal tax liability.

• S.AMDT.3331 to H.R.3043 To provide that none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to enter into a contract in an amount greater than $5,000,000 or to award a grant in excess of such amount unless the prospective contractor or grantee makes certain certifications regarding Federal tax liability.

• Senate Resolutions Passed:

• S.RES.133 : A resolution celebrating the life of Bishop Gilbert Earl Patterson.

• S.RES.268 : A resolution designating July 12, 2007, as “National Summer Learning Day”.

Other Bills Introduced

• S.J.RES.23: A joint resolution clarifying that the use of force against Iran is not authorized by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq, any resolution previously adopted, or any other provision of law.

• S. 453: Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2007. The Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2007 (H.R.1281), (S.453), would establish criminal penalties for acts of voter deception. Those who knowingly disseminate false information with the intention of keeping others from voting would face up to five years in prison under the legislation. The Act was sponsored by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) and 60 cosponsors in the House, and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and 15 cosponsors in the Senate. (20 Cosponsors)

• S. 2030: A bill to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require reporting relating to bundled contributions made by persons other than registered lobbyists. (1 Cosponsor)

• S. 2111: Positive Behavior for Effective Schools Act. A bill to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to allow State educational agencies, local educational agencies, and schools to increase implementation of early intervention services, particularly school-wide positive behavior supports. (3 Cosponsors)

• S. 2066: Back to School: Improving Standards for Nutrition and Physical Education in Schools Act of 2007. A bill to establish nutrition and physical education standards for schools.

• S. Con. Res. 46: A concurrent resolution supporting the goals and ideals of Sickle Cell Disease Awareness Month

• S. 2044: Independent Contractor Proper Classification Act of 2007. A bill to provide procedures for the proper classification of employees and independent contractors, and for other purposes. (6 Cosponsors)

• S. 2519: Contracting and Tax Accountability Act of 2007. A bill to prohibit the awarding of a contract or grant in excess of the simplified acquisition threshold unless the prospective contractor or grantee certifies in writing to the agency awarding the contract or grant that the contractor or grantee has no seriously delinquent tax debts, and for other purposes.

• S. 2433: Global Poverty Act of 2007. A bill to require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day. (9 Cosponsors)

• S. 2330: Veterans Homelessness Prevention Act. A bill to authorize a pilot program within the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development with the goal of preventing at-risk veterans and veteran families from falling into homelessness, and for other purposes. (1 Cosponsor)

So uh, yeah! That's totally the same as "doing nothing." It's completely impossible to discern what Obama thinks about anything. His education background tells you nothing, his background as an educator means nothing, and as a community organizer and legislator he did nothing.

Seriously, guys. I don't care who told you that Obama doesn't have any qualifications to speak of, but clearly they didn't check first, and you didn't check after hearing it.

He's not an unknown. It's pretty easy to see where he stands on all kinds of things. The problem isn't that he's vague or inconsistent. The problem is people who feel they have to make a big show of active participation in our government, but who don't actually want to think when they do it. People who feel pressure to vote, but no pressure to vote intelligently. They believe the first thing they hear from Rush Limbaugh or sourceless emails, or the same old lies from the McCain campaign that have been debunked again and again for people who care to look. Except many people don't, and McCain is counting on that.

He is counting on you being a lazy, gullible nitwit. That should be enough to motivate you to prove him wrong. Repeated lies do not become true just because they're repeated, or because they're repeated by people who got shot down in 'Nam. 

Prove McCain wrong. Think. It's not as hard as his campaign is hoping you'll believe.

Damn preppy popular kids!

Just when you think you've left behind all those kids in high school and junior high who hated popular kids and everything they liked just because they were popular, you start talking to people who mock Obama supporters for having a popular candidate, and who refuse to even look at his voting record or read his speeches simply because nothing popular can possibly be good.

So instead, like the goth kids smoking during lunch, they find a group willing to be noncomformists in the same comfortable ways they are. They've moved beyond dressing alike, standing alike, and smoking alike. We're adults now. Now all we have to do to be different for its own sake is say the same things because we all hate the same guy for the same reason.

Because they like him. Lots of people like Obama, and rather than disappear into a crowd of people who surely must be drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid of celebrity worship, we'll band together and drink a different flavor of Kool-Aid secure in the knowledge that at least there are fewer of us. And that makes us better.

I don't think that all the automatic and thoughtless dismissal of Obama is because of race. I don't. I don't think everyone who decided to vote against him and thought of excuses why only after the fact is doing it because they can't stand supporting a black guy. I think a great many of them still can't stand supporting something popular.

The Persecution Complex

To all those people who lament the impression that colleges and universities are biased against them?

To all those people who lament the impression that human rights groups are biased against them?

To all those people who lament the impression that foreign countries are biased against them?

To all those people who lament the impression that the media is biased against them?

Have you ever considered the possibility that all or some of these people might actually be right and you're the one who's wrong?

1. If educated people are often liberal, is it simpler to assume a broad-sweeping brainwashing conspiracy, or to assume that upon exposure to other views and the facts behind them people don't seem to remain conservative? If liberals claimed that universities had a conservative bias, you know that conservatives would be claiming that it's not their fault educated people lean right. Why do you let them get away with the anti-intellectual bullshit when you would never allow it from liberals?

2. If human rights groups tend to be liberal, is this a sign that they're all secretly members of the anti-conservative conspiracy bent on eradicating an entire school of thought from the face of the earth? Or is it simpler to assume that the liberal philosophy places a higher emphasis on the well-being of individuals, from which it follows naturally they'd care more about human rights?

3. Maybe the fact that everyone thinks you're acting like an imperialist dick means that imperialism makes you a dick. Calling you a dick and treating you like you're a dick when you're being a dick isn't biased. It's called "self-preservation."

4. Media coverage of the election doesn't have a liberal bias... it has a bias in favor of McCain. Conservatives loved the guy doing this study when it said the opposite, but now that they're the bad guys, suddenly the methodology must be wrong. See, you gotta be skeptical about the media if you're a conservative. A good unbiased source will agree with you. Never trust a source that doesn't agree with you. It's just that damned liberal conspiracy acting up again, but thankfully they're easy to detect. They say crazy things like "pissing off other countries makes them hate us," and "voodoo economics doesn't work" or "abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work." They're always pushing this ideological bias, so it makes them easy to detect and ignore.

All in all, I'm getting tired of the "I hate your evidence! You elitist liberals are always pickin' on us simple salt o'the earth conservatives. Just because I don't have any credentials in the field we're talking about doesn't mean that my opinion isn't just as valid as yours!"

Well, I'm an elitist bastard and let me tell you something. If I hear one more time about how educated people can't be trusted (because too much exposure to the diversity and complexity of reality brainwashes you liberal, see), or about how educated people are out of touch with reality (at least compared to people who've only ever exposed themselves to their own way of life), or some other bullshit excuse to cover the bitterness and resentment of uneducated people that educated people always abandon their cause... I'm going to have some kind of episode.

I don't know how to say it more simply than this. If education is a danger to your worldview, that is hard proof that your worldview needs examining. If entertaining other worldviews turns out to be a danger to your own, your worldview is a hell of a lot more fragile than you want to admit. If studying other cultures is some kind of threat to your own, your own culture isn't worth your slavish loyalty. If exposure to people who believe they can make the world better somehow erodes your reinforced sense of self-serving exploitative entitlement and privilege, perhaps that's a clue that you need to abandon that sense of entitlement.

There are too many people who resent educated people for learning a few new things and suddenly changing their minds. I didn't think I was a liberal. Sure, I thought that gays were human beings and so were women. Sure I thought that it'd sure be nice if college weren't a way to transform wealth into privilege so that the super-rich could claim they'd earned what they've got. Sure I'd love to have the first, last, and final say over when I carry a child. But I didn't think that made me liberal. I thought liberals were these frothing man-hating Communists out to create a man-free, gun-free Marxist paradise off the cost of California on a human-made island of singed bras.

I didn't realize what would happen to me. I didn't realize that once I left my town of 8,000 people I might really have a chance to learn how other cultures lived and what made them that way. I didn't realize that this would cause me to take a good hard look at my own culture. I didn't realize this was all part of the grand liberal mafia brainwashing conspiracy.

In short, reality turned out to have a liberal bias. Once exposed, I fell.

For all you conservatives out there... it could happen to you. I suggest you do what the Amish do. Drop out after eighth grade. Wouldn't want to start getting ideas and putting on airs. Wouldn't want to change your mind. Wouldn't want to become liberal or anything.

Drop out. Delete every news channel from your cable but Fox News. In fact, delete every channel but the televangelists. Burn every nonfiction book you own. Save yourselves before it's too late! Above all remember!

The liberals are sly. The liberals are stealthy. The liberals will find you.

YOU MAY ALREADY BE ONE.

Judge says UC can deny religious course credit

Judge says UC can deny religious course credit

A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC's review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

(snip)

"It appears the UC is attempting to secularize private religious schools," attorney Jennifer Monk of Advocates for Faith and Freedom said Tuesday. Her clients include the Association of Christian Schools International, two Southern California high schools and several students.

Charles Robinson, the university's vice president for legal affairs, said the ruling "confirms that UC may apply the same admissions standards to all students and to all high schools without regard to their religious affiliations." What the plaintiffs seek, he said, is a "religious exemption from regular admissions standards."

Conservatism: A Few Basics (Not as Boring as You Fear!)

Conservatism: A Few Basics

One of the characteristics of left-wing parochialism on campus is the casting of other outlooks through their popular, and not always accurate, manifestations in public life. For many campus dwellers, the word “conservatism” evokes images of Iraq and Cheney, or people in megachurches waving their hands, or judges in Salem in 1692. That’s what happens when an education system downplays conservative ideas, texts, and figures. Only the most extreme or oppositional versions of it stand out.

Academics should take conservatism more seriously. Here is a list of basic conservative canons as outlined by Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind. They derive from the lineage Kirk drew in that book, a roster that includes Edmund Burke, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Coleridge, Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and Irving Babbitt.

1. Belief in a transcendent order or body of natural law.

2. Acceptance of the variety and mystery of human existence.

3. Conviction that civilization requires hierarchy and order.

4. The connection of freedom and private property.

5. A trust in local customs and traditions over the visions of social engineers.

6. A preference for gradual change over revolutionary change.

Clearly, each one violates a reigning dogma or value in the humanities. No. 1 goes against social constructionism. No. 2 goes against the love of theory. No. 3 goes against egalitarianism. No. 4 goes against the reliance on government action. No. 5 goes against the faith in innovation and reform. And No. 6 goes against the cachet different kinds of radicalism possess in the field (“this book is a radical rethinking of . . .”).

So, when people contest the assertion of liberal bias in the humanities curriculum, they shouldn’t ask if conservatives are demanding affirmative action for themselves or Intelligent Design in the classroom. They should ask how often tradition, transcendence, hierarchy, capitalism, and gradualism are hailed as values in the classroom and quarterlies.

Posted at 11:43:01 AM on June 19, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Just Passing Through replied in the comments:

With Prof. Bauerlein finally—prodded by my comments, obviously—delivering a little essay instead of just cutting-and-pasting another stat summary, I wasn’t going to get in on this. Leave well enough alone, etc. Besides, I figured the dirty, hippy, half-witted commie pinko bed-wetters “a tired rambler,” “Anti-hypocrisy advocate,” “Roger,” and others would immediately check in to do battle with the smaller roster of righties, e.g., “CU Prof,” “S. Britchky.” So far, not really the fireworks I anticipated.

Therefore, I must, in the interest of a clearer debate, provide a colloquial translation of Prof. Bauerlein’s conservative canon:

1. Belief in a transcendent order or body of natural law. As the bumpersticker says, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

2. Acceptance of the variety and mystery of human existence. They do all them drugs and shoot each other ‘cause that’s just the way they are. Nothin’ we can do about it.

3. Conviction that civilization requires hierarchy and order. You can’t go around demonstratin’ in the street. Especially when there’s a war on.

4. The connection of freedom and private property. If I want to build it, I’ll build it. It’s my land. And if the county says I can’t, just let ‘em try and stop me.

5. A trust in local customs and traditions over the visions of social engineers. You ain’t from around here, are you? Well, around these parts, people like you just can’t come in here and live like you want. We’ve got our ways.

6. A preference for gradual change over revolutionary change. It’s always been done that way. May not be fair, but that’s only for a few folks. Maybe their grandkids’ll have it a little better, but for now, it’s just too bad for them.

Oh, one little cavil: Even the ardent lefties I know don’t “hail” their tenets in the classroom. Insinuate, maybe. “Hail” is a blurb verb, as in “Critics hail Broadway’s newest…,” etc. It’s crap writing and Prof. Bauerlein teaches English.

diogenes replied:

Both “Just Pissing Through” (#11) and “a tired rambler” (#3) illustrate beautifully the point that Mark made in his first paragraph. I know of no conservatives who sound like JPT’s “colloquial translations.” Rather, those sound like stereotypical lines from bad movies about brutish and reptilian people from the backwoods who resist the intrusion of more enlightened Yankees from the Ivy League. (“Deliverance,” anyone?)

In the interest of balance, let me suggest the Liberal counterpart to each of the six points from Kirk:

1. Belief in a transcendent order or body of natural law. —-“We Liberals, being the most-evolved form of life, are the final authority on things. Don’t try to tell us how the universe works; we’ll make it work the way that fits our current theories and wishes.”

2. Acceptance of the variety and mystery of human existence. —-We’re all exactly alike—physically, mentally, emotionally. Especially you little people. But we’ll make you all just like Us, only obedient to your betters.

3. Conviction that civilization requires hierarchy and order. —-The only hierarchy is that We Who Know make the rules for you little people. Within that framework, party down!

4. The connection of freedom and private property. —-Conservatives don’t understand the vocabulary. ‘Freedom’ means the right to do what We permit, not what you want to do. Remember that ‘Freedom is Slavery;” We’ll make you happier this way; trust me.
‘Private property’ means you can use it until We want it for something else. In the meantime, We’ll tell you what we think is the best use of the property.

5. A trust in local customs and traditions over the visions of social engineers. —-How quaint. As though you people who live in fly-over country could know how to do things in your own town, your own schools, your little “states.” We in New Haven and Cambridge and Manhattan THINK about things and thus KNOW what’s best for you. All you little people want to do is cling to your guns and your religion. But you WILL conform. We have Ways.

6. A preference for gradual change over revolutionary change. —-There’s no need to make the changes gradually, because we know what the world ought to be like, and the sooner the better. Delays simply run the risk of diluting our vision for your future. Moreover, We will not be secure in our power until the revolution.

The appalling arrogance of these two (and some other liberals among these responses) illustrates why it’s almost impossible to have an intelligent conversation with a liberal. “We (Liberals) THINK about things until we see that liberalism is correct, while you (conservatives) blindly accept what your traditions tell you. It’s perfectly obvious and beyond cavil that logic, tolerance, science, and virtue are the exclusive province of liberalism.” Moreover, the irritating fact that not all conservative think alike becomes the basis for charging Bauerlein and others of inconsistency and misuse of sources.
In “The Idiot,” Dostoyevski has a character say, “I have never known a liberal who would allow anone to have an opinion of his own, without immediately overwhelming him with abuse or something worse.”

He was right.

Joe Erwin added later:

Both “conservatives” and “liberals” have more complicated positions than those for which they are given credit. I think again of the statement once made my my post-doc advisor: “There are only two kinds of people; those who believe there are only two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” This series of comments includes abundant stereotyping of the “left” and “right” and the “liberal” and “conservative” perspectives. How can intelligent people be so small minded as to lump people into such groups? There may something that could be characterized as a “liberal syndrome” and a “conservative syndrome” in which those suffering from these respective maladies each hold a set of dogmatically defended values or beliefs (that in each case include stereotypes about the other).

Isn’t it all far more interesting and complex than this sort of polarized perspective on the world and its peoples? Left, right, up, down, north, south, east, west, and all shades and grades of n-dimensional hyperspace are in play. And within that matrix, one of the most powerful concepts is that at every level of function, variation occurs, and some things work better than others. Processes and mechanisms that do not work at all, that is, fail to function or are fatally flawed, do not survive. Ideas and techologies and systems and organisms that work well some or most of the time, at some level of organization, tend to persist. The classic psychological defense mechanisms, like stereotyping, overgeneralization, tearing down others to elevate ones own position, etc., all are effective enough of the time that they survive in the discourse of people like those who post here. As indicated in comment #48, the level at which most of this discourse has been conducted, with ad hominem attacks and unwarranted stereotyping, is not helpful.

Blessed be the Carnival.

First off, I encourage everyone to go check out the Carnival of Elitist Bastards. In honor of my fellow eggheads, I figured I'd quit linkfarming for a second and actually post something I'd written myself.

As long as I can remember I read several grade levels ahead of the other kids. What's more, I remembered what I read. When I ran out of books at home I hit the encyclopedia or my little illustrated-for-kids dictionary. I was a latch-key kid without cable TV, what else was I supposed to do?

One day in class, we were in the library and the teacher asked who knew what an encyclopedia was. I raised my hand, thinking that it'd be better if someone who knew the answer did so rather than the teacher calling on someone who didn't know. I told her that it's a book or set of books containing information in alphabetical order. Some subjects, such as art or history, have their own encyclopedia.

I wouldn't remember that definition to this day if not for the reaction I got. There was no relief that the other kids didn't have to answer. They recoiled like Puritans from a suspected witch. The teacher called on me again, and again, wanting answers from me. It only made it worse. I had transgressed. It turns out that the correct response to a teacher's question is to be one of his or her hapless victims so that other students can feel a solidarity in the face of all this horrid "schooling."

It was not until I was about twelve that I learned the trick. Until then I'd doggedly read and written and answered and done my best. Until then I got it wrong. The trick is to make people laugh. It's not that making people laugh will create happiness. Primates don't always (or even often) smile because they're happy. It's to relieve tension. It's a survival skill.

If you don't make them laugh, they will hate you.

So I became something of a class clown to bridge the social gap. People had an idea that I was smart, but because I danced and jigged and used my intelligence to make their day more amusing... I was okay despite the crime of intelligence. They knew I wasn't one of them, but at least I was in their service.

That's how I got through high school, and it got me through college. It was okay for me to know a few more things than other students as long as I used that knowledge to make them laugh. Gradually I came to rely on it. It became a mode of control. I had to make people smile, had to make people laugh, had to make them feel the way I wanted them to feel. It was the only power I had.

Unfortunately this doesn't work everywhere. My mother often proclaims her great pride in me, the first woman in the family to get a college degree. I'm the good kid, the smart kid, the world traveler and scholar who's making it without help from mom and dad. And yet I know she resents me as well. As glad as she is that I've accomplished what she wanted before she got knocked up, I think she resents me for being the one who did it, for being the one who went further.

I didn't really realize it until during an argument she brought up what was evidently supposed to be an example of my withering superiority. I used the word "obelisk" to describe something while in the car with my parents, and I guess it's not the kind of word that a wise daughter uses. When they didn't know what an obelisk was, it took me a second to find some less precise way to define it. To me an obelisk is an obelisk. Eventually I think I came out with "thin pointy tower" or something.

I guess my pause was too long, expressing some deep-seated disdain for these imbeciles I was trapped in a car with. During our recent argument, my mother commented defensively, "We can't all be as brilliant as Ashley Holmes."

What's the alternative? Treat her like she's stupid? Coming from a worldview that values intellect, it's hard to imagine wanting people around you to assume you're uneducated. It's hard to imagine wanting people to err on the side of dumbing themselves down for your poor benighted overloaded mind. I knew what an obelisk was, and I assumed she knew.

Both of these social failures, one in grade school and one only months ago, stem from the same sin. I slipped up and I didn't adequately hide my intelligence. I think it was Francois de La Rochefoucauld who said, "It is a great ability to be able to conceal one's ability." Great and valued. And necessary.

So I tip my hat to Dana and the others over at the Carnival. People need a space where it's safe to be intelligent and where you can assume other people value their knowledge... and yours. It is badly needed, and until the rest of the country catches up... Blessed be the Carnival of Elitist Bastards. Bastards unite!

GI Bill

McCain, I hope this follows you until November.



Ad courtesy of VoteVets.org.

Florida Teacher Accused of "Wizardry."

No really.

I... I just... what the hell. I started this evening pitying Florida because their state government has cheated them out of voting for the past couple elections, and kept them from having a voice in national politics. But uh... I'm beginning to see how idiots like that get elected.

Wizardry.

By RONNIE BLAIR | The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 5, 2008

LAND O' LAKES - The telephone call that spelled the end of Jim Piculas' career as a substitute teacher in Pasco came on a January day about a week after he performed the disappearing-toothpick trick for a group of rapt middle school students.

Pat Sinclair, who oversees substitute teachers in the Pasco County School District, was on the phone. She told Piculas there had been a complaint about his performance at Rushe Middle School in Land O' Lakes.

He asked what she meant.

"She said, 'You've been accused of wizardry,' " Piculas said.

He said the statement seemed bizarre to him, like something out of Harry Potter.

Piculas said he replied, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

He said he also told Sinclair, "It's not black magic. It's a toothpick."

The school district puts a somewhat different spin on the disappearing-toothpick incident.

Performing a magic trick at Rushe Middle is just one of the reasons the school district gives for dumping Piculas from the substitute-teacher list. The others are: Piculas did not follow the lesson plans, he allowed students on computers even though another teacher said not to, and he told the fifth-period student peer that she was in charge.

Piculas said those other reasons are just window dressing. He said he believes it all comes down to the disappearing-toothpick trick and a student who may have interpreted the trick as wizardry.

The trick requires a toothpick and transparent tape. A sleight-of-hand maneuver causes the toothpick to disappear then reappear. At least, so it seems. In reality, the toothpick hides behind the performer's thumb, held in place by the tape.

"The whole thing lasted 45 seconds," Piculas said.

He said the students liked the trick. He showed them how to do it so they could perform it at home.
One student in the Rushe Middle class apparently took the trick the wrong way, Piculas said. He said he was told the student became so traumatized that the student's father complained.

Sinclair wrote Piculas a letter, date Jan. 28, to say the district would "no longer be using your services." The letter mentioned magic tricks at the end of the list of other classroom offenses he is accused of committing.

The word "wizardry" does not appear in the letter.

"I think she was trying to downplay it because it sounded so goofy," Piculas said.

Piculas said he has tried to get a hearing before Superintendent Heather Fiorentino with no luck.

He tried to enlist the assistance of U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Palm Harbor, whose office forwarded his complaint to Fiorentino, but that effort reached a dead-end because the federal government has no say over who the school district hires as a substitute teacher.

He said he also sought assistance from United School Employees of Pasco, only to learn that substitute teachers aren't covered by the union contract.

Piculas had worked as a substitute teacher for eight or nine months, spending time at 15 schools. He said he also was working toward teacher certification with the dream of being hired full time.

That appears unlikely now. Piculas said he tried to apply for a job as a GED instructor and wasn't allowed to interview.

"My whole career is in limbo," he said.

Got this in my inbox... any thoughts?

BARACK OBAMA'S PLAN TO EMPOWER YOUNG WORKERS

*Paid for by Obama for America

Background: America's Young Workers Need Opportunity to be Restored

For too many young workers today, the American Dream seems further and further out of reach.

Despite the need for education to be successful in a "knowledge economy," our high school and college graduation rates are not growing enough. About one-fourth of our high school students don't obtain a real diploma, while less than a third eventually get a bachelor's degree. Those who grow up in affluent families are likely to attend college, while those in middle and lower-income families are much less likely to attend. In fact, the gaps in college attendance between families with more and less resources are growing larger with time. And those who do attend college, especially from less-affluent families, are taking longer to complete their degrees than ever before.[1]

These trends are driven at least partly by the dramatic growth in the costs of college tuition both at public and private universities. More and more students must juggle taking classes with working part-time or even fulltime. Financial aid is now driven less by need than in the past and the financing of Pell grants for low-income students has failed to keep up with inflation in tuition costs.

For those who never attend college, economic opportunities are diminishing. Employment rates for men with less than a college education have fallen over time. When they work, their jobs are less secure. And their earnings have fallen behind those of young workers with college degrees. At the same time, federal support for job training of these workers has fallen dramatically over time.[2] And with today's economic instability, young workers are likely to be the first to become unemployed and the last to be rehired.

These issues are as important in Indiana as anywhere in the country. Each year about 59,000 students here graduate from high school, and 45,000 try to obtain postsecondary education. They struggle each day with rising tuition costs and the challenges of getting more schooling. In the Indiana job market, over 400,000 workers aged 16 - 24 and 1.1 million aged 16 - 34 face a shrinking number of jobs, especially at good wages.

Barack Obama wants to restore meaningful opportunities to young workers and to make the American Dream achievable once again.

BARACK OBAMA'S PLAN TO EMPOWER YOUNG WORKERS

Address the Dropout Crisis: Obama will address the dropout crisis by signing into law his legislation to provide funding to school districts to invest in intervention strategies in middle school - strategies such as personal academic plans, teaching teams, parent involvement, mentoring, intensive reading and math instruction, and extended learning time.

Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Recipients of this credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of public service a year, either during the school year or over the summer months. Obama will also ensure that the tax credit is available to families at the time of enrollment by using prior year's tax data to deliver the credit when tuition is due.

Simplify the Application Process for Financial Aid: Obama will streamline the financial aid process by eliminating the current federal financial aid application and enabling families to apply simply by checking a box on their tax form, authorizing their tax information to be used, and eliminating the need for a separate application.

Support College Outreach Programs: Obama supports outreach programs like GEAR UP, TRIO and Upward Bound to encourage more young people from low-income families to consider and prepare for college.

Increase Investments in Job Training: Obama will increase funding for federal workforce training programs. He will expand and fully fund apprenticeship programs to help worker get credentials and skills in crafts with middle-class incomes and benefits.

Raise the Minimum Wage: Barack Obama will raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, index it to inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to make sure that full-time workers earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs. This will help raise the earnings of young workers.

Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and Encourage Paid Leave: For young people who must balance work, schooling and parenting, Barack Obama will seek to expand the availability of parental leave. The FMLA now covers only certain employees of employers with 50 or more employees; he will expand the FMLA to cover businesses with 25 or more employees. Obama will also expand the FMLA to cover more purposes as well, including allowing workers to take leave for elder care needs; allowing parents up to 24 hours of leave each year to participate in their children's academic activities at school; allowing leave to be taken for purposes of caring for individuals who reside in their home for 6 months or more; and expanding FMLA to cover leave for employees to address domestic violence and sexual assault. And, as president, Barack Obama will initiate a 50 state strategy to encourage all of the states to ado pt paid-leave systems. Obama will provide a $1.5 billion fund to assist states with start-up costs and to help states offset the costs for employees and employers.

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[1] James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine, "The American High School Graduate Rate; Trends and Levels," University of Chicago, 2007; and Maria Fitzpatrick and Sarah Turner, "Blurring the Boundary: Changes in College Participation and the Transition to Adulthood," in S. Danziger and C. Rouse eds. The Price of Independence: The Economics of Early Adulthood. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

[2] Harry Holzer and Paul Offner, "Trends in the Employment Outcomes of Young Men," Institute for Research on Poverty Discussion Paper, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003.