Freezing sacred cows: stark bullock naked

… or the rationalist has no clothes.

Reason, according to Enlightenment thinking, was supposed to be a panacea for Mankind’s ills and as such was and remains the proclaimed foundation stone of liberalism ancient and modern, washing away millennia of superstition, ignorance, obscurantism, illegitimate power and the privilege of elites to be above criticism, questioning, mockery or other challenge.

Reason was imagined to be something like aSwiss Army knife for politics, philosophy, economics and morality: the duct tape of Liberal Man; The Force.

Nothing could not be faced, identified, defined, explained and dealt with by the fearless wielders of the sword of reason, who would go anywhere, pay any price, to seek any knowledge without fear or favour.

Perhaps in the new religion of the mighty mortal mind, Reason was to be the illuminated ones’ equivalent of Charity for the Christians as described in 1 Corinthians 13.

It turns out - quite unexpectedly I’m sure - that in fact all the patience, persistence, humility, intellectual courage, openness and tolerance of the unorthodox in word, belief and thought and that all the hope and endurance intended in seeking the truth wherever liberals’ inquiries led them has been reduced to an economy-sized bottle of Pig-Be-Kleen, at least as far as onemouthpiece of the American educational establishment is concerned.

You can transpose this to its UK equivalents without too much effort.

Someone has suggested - in a place created by and for the supposed leaders and instructors of a nation’s educators as a subscription-only content site no less - the notion that a particular new ‘academic discipline’ might in fact be ill-suited to solving certain kinds of problems in the same way we might question dowsing, phlogiston theory or phrenology.

The questioner was removed; banned from making her case ever again; exiled untested and unanswered.

Why? Because her methodology is wrong? Because her statistics are too narrowly selected or fragmentary or because her evidence was unattributed or her experiments proved unrepeatable and thus difficult to recognize as science?

Nope; it was because her critics are upset at being having their beliefs questioned and their opinions challenged.

Since Brainstorm was created five years ago, we have sought out bloggers representing a range of intellectual and political views, and we have allowed them broad freedom in topics and approach.  As part of that freedom, Brainstorm writers were able to post independently; Ms. Riley’s post was not reviewed until after it was posted.

I sincerely apologize for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us.

One theme many of you have sounded is that you felt betrayed by what we published; that you welcome healthy informed debate, but that in this case, we did not live up to the expectations of the community of readers we serve.

You told us we can do better, and we agree.

Freedom of speech but only when pre-approved by authority….Public distress as a justified reason (that word again) to exclude distasteful dissent.

So it’s back to tradition, deference, customary good manners, respect for authority and the established ways of thought for the people who lead the people who teach the children of the only nation on earth to put men onto the surface of another world.

I second that emotion.

If it’s good enough for educated modern liberals, it’s good enough for me.

And good luck figuring out that tricky old foreign policy, guys!

Originally discovered here.

Picture from here.

Here’s the objectionable blog post.

I’ve posted a small print version below the in case of erasure, or censorship as it used to be called back before liberalism ate everything.

The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.

NB: To see Chronicle editors’ final response to the below post, please read “A Note to Readers.”

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recentpiece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!) She explains that “The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.” The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.

But topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?

Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

Cognitive dissonance 101

When I first read this article, having Googled for the text of President Obama’s Berlin Wall speech, I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t a wicked (and wickedly funny), all-time best Right wing spoof of some Left Liberal’s obsequious paean to The One. For me this was like a dream come true: except, obviously, without all the lesbians..

It turned out not to be so. Someone’s actually getting paid by the shareholders of The Boston Globe to write this reality-free garbage.

But I have promised not to fisk at least once a week, (which I’ll fulfil today), and I’m sworn to saying something positive about a Right wing point of view each week (which in this case means it’s enough to say that no-one on the Right wrote unqualified tosh like this about Ronald Reagan during the first year of his presidency or for much later as far as I know,) and… besides, some of you have been very creative and responsive lately.

So let’s not fisk it at all.

Let’s instead accentuate the positive, shall we, and show up something that isn’t a non-sequitur; or isn’t flatly gainsaid by some other part of the piece; or an outright lie or - better yet - that doesn’t match this particular gem’s combination of mendacity, hypocrisy, more mendacity or the dramatic irony of what a crock each part of it is compared with the rest of the article or to the little circle of firelight that we call reality…

“At critical points in the 2008 campaign, Obama boldly defied conventional wisdom about fund-raising, organizing, message strategy, and crisis management.”

The candidate who had “The Audacity to Win’’ - as chronicled in the new book by his campaign manager David Plouffe - is a president with the audacity to wage war with a pre-announced date for winding it down.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, never lived down the “Mission accomplished’’ banner that hung across the aircraft carrier he landed on in May 2003. At the time of Bush’s now infamous photo-op, the conventional phase of war was over in Iraq. But the insurgency that developed afterward took thousands of American lives. The banner and the president in a flight suit declaring an end to major combat operations turned into a morbid national joke.

Last week, Obama used a West Point setting to essentially declare his mission accomplished before it even begins. He is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, with a vow to start pulling them out in 2011.

Now, that’s true audacity, and totally in keeping with candidate Obama’s willingness to continually roll the dice.

Plouffe’s book chronicles many examples of dice-rolling, from minor to grandiose.

When Obama decided to run for president, he gambled that the country was somehow ready to elect “an African-American man, born to a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, just four years out of the Illinois state senator,’’ as Plouffe writes. To get to the point of convincing voters that he was the right man for the times, Obama first had to gamble that he could derail Hillary Rodham Clinton, the all-but inevitable Democratic nominee.

At critical points in the 2008 campaign, Obama boldly defied conventional wisdom about fund-raising, organizing, message strategy, and crisis management.

He tackled the race issue head-on with a ground-breaking speech. He took an overseas trip that could have backfired in any number of ways; Plouffe calls the speech that candidate Obama delivered in Berlin “truly audacious.’’

“One of the fundamental truths of the campaign’s story, one that will always stick with those of us who went through it, is that we threw long,’’ writes Plouffe. “We refused to be defined by past electoral and American history, by what we were told we couldn’t do. We tried to see things simply as they existed. We refused to accept the story that many thought would be written for us and instead wrote our own chapter of history.’’

The gambles paid off. Obama won.

Now, after what we are told was long, thoughtful, gut-checking analysis, he is embarking on another kind of gamble. He is marching more American troops into Afghanistan and betting that he can order them to start coming home in time for his reelection campaign.

If Obama has any second thoughts in the months ahead, he can turn to Karl Rove’s laudatory opinion piece, published in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “Obama can win in Afghanistan.’’

Now, Rove represents an administration that really knew how to start and end a war, doesn’t he?

Obama’s problem is that starting war, or escalating it, is relatively easy. Ending war is hard.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel, Vietnam War veteran, and Boston University professor of history, said on the radio show “Democracy Now’’: “He seems to assume that war is a predictable and controllable instrument that can be directed with precision by people sitting in offices back in Washington, D.C. I think the history of Vietnam and the history of war more broadly teaches us something different. And that is, when statesmen choose war, they really are simply rolling the dice.’’

There it is again, the phrase that allowed a first-term senator from Illinois to shock the political establishment and win the war.

Rolling the dice.

If he loses this gamble, Obama could lose the presidency. Then again, Bush was reelected even after the “Mission accomplished’’ debacle.

But with this gamble, there is much more at stake than reelection: the country’s trust and the lives of its precious sons and daughters.

So its good, truthful, consistent, or hopeful points about the Obama Presidency are…?