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| 5/24 |
| 2004/3/30 [Politics/Domestic/California, Politics/Domestic/911] UID:12934 Activity:nil |
3/30 English majors are all lefties!
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10762
\_ Starts out fun, but then launches into uncalled-for, irrelevant
ad-hominem attacks on authors championed by the liberal Liberal Arts
\_ No shit sherlock. It's always the dumb humanities kids who start
and take part in all the protests. Useful idiots indeed.
\_ Humanities students are no more or less dumb as a group than
engineering students. Propensity for blatant generalizations,
\_ prove it.
\_ Thanks for your comment, demonstrating that engineering
students can be just as dumb!
\_ can't prove your assertion, can you?
\_ I don't have to. The assertion that must be
proved is that humanities student --> dumb, which
is patently ridiculous.
\_ "patently ridiculous" means you have no factual
proof against the claim, right?
\_ Correct! There is absolutely no way to prove
humanities student --> dumb, its just small
dicked engineering student smug superiority
syndrome rearing its ugly head for the
zillionth time.
\_ how about entrance exam scores? or
relative performance in "neutral" classes?
or post college achievement? none of them
are perfect measures, but they would tend to
make claims of patent ridiculousness
silly.
\_ Yeah, but none of them would prove the
assertion at all.
\_ The assertion that humanities students
are dumb, or that they're no more or
less dumb? Certainly the first
assertion is the one requiring proof.
\_ by again refusing to answer the
question, i assume you realize that
while my suggestions would not
perfectly prove or disprove the
proposition, it would make your
claim of "patently ridiculous", well,
patently ridiculous.
\_ of course, you have completely misinterpreted
the post you replied to. a claim that dumb
humanities students do something does not
imply the claim that all humanities
students are dumb.
\_ Actually, the claim is that, as a group,
humanities students are as smart as engineering
students. To disprove this, you just have to
show, as a group, that one group is smarter than
the other, using some accepted metric
\_ great. what are the relative entrance
exam scores between the 2 groups? what
is their relative performance in "neutral"
classes? how do the post college achievement
of the 2 groups compare?
\_ Come to think of it, the claim is "no
more or less dumb". This implies the metric
is "common sense", not intelligence in
general. In this sense, it can be
reasonably claimed that humanities and
engineering students as groups have
similar levels of common sense (are no
less dumb than the other group).
\_ Why yes, that's pretty much what I meant.
At least someone gets it. For some
reason as soon as you say "intelligence"
some people here automatically assume
you must be referring to "ability to do
second order differential equations."
Sorry, I should have been more clear.
\_ Guy, you don't even understand that
the claim of stupid humanities kids
doing something is not equivalent to
a claim that all humanities students
are stupid.
\_ Does the common understanding of
"dumb" imply a lack of common sense?
Well, dumb originally meant the inability
to speak, as in "deaf and dumb". Does
that have anything to do with common
sense? "Dumb" came to mean, from WordNet
via dict, "slow to learn or understand,
lacking intellectual acuity". Does that
have anything to do with common sense?
Are you ascribing new meaning to the word
just to make your claim plausible?
\_ Someone please shoot this guy. His
pretentiousness is starting to make
my head hurt.
\_ Dewd, he already said sorry for not
being clear.
\_ Was he unclear? Or did he just
latch onto some non-plausible
excuse that would make his claim,
well, less "dumb"? I suspect the
latter.
however, can be found in almost any group of students. |
| www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10762 In short order, you discover that the study of literature has shriveled into a form of affirmative action, in which the dreary canon of dead white males is pushed aside to embrace diversity. As John Ellis notes in Literature Lost : The intellectual catastrophe that has overtaken the humanities is not just a by-product of affirmative action. It is affirmative action transformed into a curricular and intellectual climate. Many graduates of prestige humanities programs find their wayinto publishing. No surprise, then, that very little diversity exists in that rarified nexus in which literature meets politics. Todays prestige authors, who enjoy both critical acclaim and commercial success, are typified by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Barbara Kingsolver, Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and so on. These authors do not sell at John Grisham levels, but they enjoy far more cultural gravitas . Contrast the prestige of these authors with prestige authors on the right, or on the libertarian sidethat is, if you can name any beyond Tom Wolfe. Unfortunately, the rise of conservative and libertarian political nonfiction-Coulter, Olsen, OReilly-has no counterpart in fiction and the arts and letters generally. The PC squeeze on arts and letters is amusingly illustrated by Wanda Koolmatries My Own Sweet Time , published by Australia-based Magabala Press to enormous critical acclaim in 1995. Critic Dorothy Hewett wrote, This is the lively, gutsy story of an urban Aboriginal girl making it in the tough city counterculture of the mid-60s. But My Own Sweet Time s alleged literary qualities were instantly forgotten when the author turned out to be Leon Carmen , a white man. Carmen he claimed that as a white male, he could not get published, so he wrote in the guise of an Aboriginal woman. Carmen was, of course, the subject of considerable abuse and indignation. Carmen understood that the literary establishment fawns over a certifiably PC author who is rendered PC by race, class affiliation, and/or political position. Carmen simply anointed himself as politically correct by pretending to be a female aborigine. Clearly, the literary establishment approved the race/class/gender of My Own Sweet Times supposed author; The conflation of an authors identify with a books value is an error of the first order, but it is a politically correct error, so it lives on. Some PC-certified authors have enormous talent-that point is not in dispute. The point is much larger: todays exalted authors are certifiably politically correct, and therefore their works appear in bookstores around the world-and in undergraduate and graduate syllabi across the nation. Indeed, if youd like to conduct an amusing experiment, just contact a universitys humanities departments and inquire about classes that balance the left-liberal spectrum with works by conservative or libertarian authors. The Lefts embrace of authors who fight the power hit a zenith in the 1960s with authors such as Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. Todays younger generations of readers know Vidal and Mailer primarily for their political outbursts, not for their novels. That peculiar dynamic continues today with todays younger PC-certified authors. A look at the political views of prestige authors-both the old guard and the newer generation-is very revealing: Norman Mailer : after a period of near invisibility, Americas most celebrated living novelist has remerged as a critic post 9-11 US policy. Mailer claims that anxieties among white American males are the real motives behind military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nothing like a war, so goes Mailers thinking, to boost sagging white male egos . Mailers charge is especially comic, coming as it does from a man whose peculiar insecurities drove him to appear on the Dick Cavet show wearing boxing gloves and trunks-and to threaten the host, as well as another guest: Gore Vidal. Gore Vidal : Vidal enjoys striking populist poses in order to condemn Americas supposed ruling elite. Yet Vidal has spent several decades expressing haughty contempt for the United States and its benighted bumpkins. For instance, Vidal suspects a conspiracy behind the 9-11 attacks, and naturally the White House is behind those conspiracies. You see, by not acting against the attacks, the White House can now suspend civil liberties and to control Middle Eastern oil and gas. Kingsolver best represents the younger generation of PC moralists. In an especially hilarious outburst, she likens the US to a familys greedy Fat Brother who refuses to share : In the autumn of 2001 we faced the crisis of taking a very hard knock from the outside, and in its aftermath, as our nation grieved, every time I saw that wastefulness rear its head I felt even more ashamed. This quote perfectly captures the PC blend of self-righteousness and stupidity. The US is wasteful beyond reason-a Fat Brother who therefore earns the enmity of the global family. Kingsolver assumes that global wealth is rigidly finite, and therefore, the more the Fat Brother takes, the less is left for others. It does not occur to her, apparently, that wealth is not finite as ten seconds of thought would reveal and that financial capital is intimately tied to cultural capital. Therefore, nations that respect the rule of law, that respect property rights, and that encourage freedom of thought produce far more wealth than nations that dont. Alphabet Challenge vividly renders a PC world gone mad, and in doing so, it does more than offer an alternative world view in fiction. It places the race/class/gender triumvirate in its crosshairs and pulls the trigger. Perhaps Gardners own background-growing up in the final years of the Soviet Union-keeps her alert to the dangerous irrationalities of GroupThink and the reduction of literature to propaganda. Certainly, her honed intelligence and satiric sensibility are long overdue. One hopes Gardner and other tough-minded authors are the leaders of a nascent battle against the PC chokehold upon literature. As David Horowitz has observed of higher education, It should not be a fight for young students to get a complete education, to learn more than half the story. For far too long, half the story has been the only story in the arts and letters. |