Daily Archives: 26 February 2014

Are We Retreating from Engagement?

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William Kristol in The Weekly Standard:

Kiev is ablaze.  Syria is a killing field.  The Iranian mullahs aren’t giving up their nuclear weapons capability, and other regimes in the Middle East are preparing to acquire their own.  Al Qaeda is making gains and is probably stronger than ever.  China and Russia throw their weight around, while our allies shudder and squabble.
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Having withdrawn from Iraq, and seeing it now fall apart, the administration is nonetheless determined to get out of Afghanistan.  Its Russia “reset” is a joke, and its “pivot to Asia” an empty slogan.  Secretary of State John Kerry huffed and puffed when Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons last year, and asserted it was a Munich moment.  How right he was! Kerry came back brandishing a piece of paper, and Assad remains in power.

Indeed.  But it’s OK, because—look! Shiny!

Kerry now says that global climate change may be the weapon of mass destruction we should most fear.

It’s going to be a hard two years.  And it’s going to be harder, for many more than just two, repairing the damage.

Random Pseudo-Thoughts on Free Speech

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Erin Ching ’16, of Swarthmore College, without a trace of irony:

What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.  I don’t think we should be tolerating [Christian thinker Robert George’s] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society.

Sandra Korn, ’14, of Harvard:

[T]the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me.  After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication.  Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities.

And

…why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

This is what we’re teaching at our colleges and universities?  Maybe there’s too much “academic” freedom for the students, and not enough teaching of rigorous thinking.  Which flows from too much “academic” freedom of a different sort for the professors and their failure to teach the techniques of rigorous thinking.

h/t Robby Soave of The Daily Caller