Tuesday, September 29th, 2015
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, - The Atlantic
Stephan: Thomas Jefferson, upon founding the University of Virginia, where I went to school said: "This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." Two centuries later something very different is happening in American education. It starts in pre-school and goes on all the way through university. We coddle students, we avoid controversies that are not easily reduced to bumper stickers, we discourage original thought if it makes people uncomfortable. This excellent essay discusses what this means at the university level. It's pathetic, and it is going to produce a generation of intellectual wimps, who lack the capacity for clarity and disciplined fact-based thought
Mr. Jefferson’s University of Virginia “Lawn.”
Credit: lincolnperry.com
Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a […]
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Tuesday, September 29th, 2015
John Fea, Chair of the History Department at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, PA - The Raw Story/History News Network
Stephan: Theocratic Rightists, through their vehicle the Republican Party have two intellectual characteristics: First, They profess to love American history while in fact they loathe history because it shows that their policies do not produce social wellness. Second, they dislike science because their priorities are faith and belief not facts. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in South Dakota, a state which has been dominated by Republicans for most of its history. I read this article and saw it in the context of the first piece in today's edition. It left me feeling slightly queasy.
South Dakota classroom
Credit: Shutterstock
In case you haven’t heard, the South Dakota Board of Education has dumped early American history from its K-12 curriculum.
When I heard about this decision, a quote from one of the great nineteenth-century observers of American life came to mind. During the 1830s a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville traveled throughout the United States and studied the character of American society. His observations would later be published in his Democracy in America—a work that is just as important to our national identity today as it was when it first appeared in 1835.
In Chapter Two of Democracy in America Tocqueville laments the way that individualism—an idea at the heart of American democracy—destroys a citizen’s appreciation of the past.
“Among democratic nations,” he wrote, “new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; those who […]
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Tuesday, September 29th, 2015
Jonathan Chait, - New York
Stephan: I know that about 11-12% of my readers are conservatives and probably Republicans. And I know, because they tell me so, that they think I am against the Republican Party. I write everyone who tells me this that they are wrong. My interest is very simple: Social values and the social outcomes those values translated into policies produce. If Republican policies produced life-affirming wellness from the individual to the planetary I would be a passionate Republican. But they don't. Republican policies produce, on the basis of facts, notably inferior social outcomes.
That does not mean I am a passionate Democrat, far from it. Many Democratic policies are little better than their Republican counterparts. To cite but one example I think Bill Clinton's administration was responsible for laying the groundwork for the collapse of 2008. George Bush triggered it, but the Clinton policies put in place the framework to make it happen.
On the issue of climate change, which I consider the most important challenge facing the world in my lifetime, Democrats have been weak and wimpy. But the Republicans. Well, the Republicans have been willfully ignorant and criminally negligent. What is not widely understood is that in this the Republicans are unique as a political organization. Here's the story.
Credit: www.niu.edu
On Tuesday, Jeb Bush proposed to eliminate the Obama administration’s regulation of carbon pollution, and, in keeping with his self-styled goal of “growth at all cost,” proposes to make any further climate regulation essentially impossible. In any other democracy in the world, a Jeb Bush would be an isolated loon, operating outside the major parties, perhaps carrying on at conferences with fellow cranks, but having no prospects of seeing his vision carried out in government. But the United States is different. Here in America, ideas like Bush’s fit comfortably within one of the two major political parties. Indeed, the greatest barrier to Bush claiming his party’s nomination is the quite possibly justified sense that he is too sober and moderate to suit the GOP.
Of all the major conservative parties in the democratic world, the Republican Party stands alone in its denial of the legitimacy of climate science. Indeed, the Republican Party stands alone in its conviction that no national or […]
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Monday, September 28th, 2015
Hannah Levintova, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This social psychosis over guns has got to be resolved. The actual death figures are beyond outrageous; I don't have a strong enough adjective for the reality. Today, since 1 January the police in the U.S. have shot and killed 865 men, women, and children. Mostly though Black men. Twenty seven percent of these people had established mental health issues. But that pales when measured against the total of people made dead by guns.
As this report states, from the inception of the country in 1776, including the Revolutionary War up and going up until the first of this year, 2015, that's 239 years, the total number of men and women killed in military action by guns is 656,397 plus. In just a bit over a tenth of that, 25 years, 1989 to 2015, 836,290 people have been killed by guns inside the borders of the U.S., a supposedly peaceful country. This is the description of social insanity.
Everytime I run stories about this gun death epidemic I get emails claiming the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to assure an armed citizenry fighting off a military assault. I think this is a gun wet dream, and I ask you to consider Syria, where precisely that situation is going on. Would you like to turn the U.S. into Syria. I suggest there are other ways to solve problems than civil war.
Finally, let me say once again: I have nothing against private gun ownership. It is the psychotic culture and behavior that has grown up around guns with which I am concerned. No other country suffers from this mental illness, and like any mental health problem an inability and unwillingness to talk meaningfully about the problem is a symptom of the problem.
On Monday, yet another deadly shooting—this time at Mississippi’s Delta State University—made national news. At least one person was killed, and as of Monday night, the suspect had not been apprehended.
This chart, pulled from an unrelated Center for American Progress report published on Monday, provides timely context on the prevalence of gun deaths in the United States. The chart tallies gun accidents, suicides, and murders, and shows that the number of gun deaths in the United States since 1989 exceeds the number of American combat fatalities in 239 years of US history—from the Revolutionary War to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Note: The military total pictured in the chart below represents only the number of American military killed in battle. The absolute total of US military killed in wartime since 1776 is higher, at more than 1.1 million, according to estimates from the Department of Veterans Affairs.)
The report does not just focus on gun violence, but looks at the positions of the current group of Republican presidential hopefuls on a number of conservative […]
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Monday, September 28th, 2015
David Ferguson, - The Raw Story
Stephan: And here we see the "good guy with a gun" scenario play out.
Pickup truck that was struck by bullets in Houston carjacking
Credit: KHOU Channel 11 News
Houston police say that an armed man’s attempt to stop a carjacking went terribly wrong on Saturday night when he shot the vehicle’s owner in the head, then fled the scene.
According to KHOU Channel 11 News, the shooting took place around 11:15 p.m. at a Valero gas station in north Houston.
Police officials say that two men jumped the owner of a Chevrolet pickup truck and absconded with his vehicle.
As the men struggled with the car-owner, a passerby produced a gun and fired multiple shots, missing the thieves but striking the victim in the head.
The shooter quickly gathered up his shell casings from the pavement and fled the scene.
The injured man was rushed to a nearby hospital where he is currently in stable condition.
Police recovered the stolen truck about two miles from where the shooting took place. No suspects have been apprehended […]
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