Category Archives: culture

Exposing Truth in Belgian Universities is a Punishable Offense

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Nathan Cofnas, a post-doc at Ghent University in Ghent Belgium, has been suspended by the school’s Rector, Petra De Sutter. Cofnas expects to be fired, and he may well be by the time you read this. He was, you may recall, the man who exposed (former, now deceased) Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’s fraudulent activities, activities that were primarily broad based plagiarism.

Calling out an academician’s dishonesty, though, is strickly verboten in Belgium.

University Rector Petra De Sutter:

[T]he University takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher [Cofnas] at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.

Never call out an academic. That’s the Ghent message to academia.

“Healthcare is a right”

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That’s the mantra of the Left and of their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, most recently articulated by Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon in her successful campaign for the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination for Senator from Florida.

She, and they, are wrong on this, though.

What is the actual right intrinsic in all of us as human beings and in particular via our Declaration of Independence, us Americans, is our right to Life. Full stop.

Health care is merely a tool in protecting that right and preserving the object of that right, our Lives. If this tool is a right in itself in the meaning of the Nixons of our nation, then so are other tools critical—even merely useful—to our ability to protect our right to Life.

These other tools include seemingly peripheral things like our right to vote to choose who we will have represent us in our government, a right currently threatened by the Left’s moves to allow illegal aliens to vote and resistance by the Left to purge voter rolls even of those accidentally registered, all of which dilute the value and effectiveness of legitimate votes. That dilution diminishes our ability to choose our own representatives in government, and that puts the quality of our lives in jeopardy, and that degradation risks our Lives.

Other tools include more directly impacting matters like barring abortion, which denies a baby’s right to its Life.

That last raises another failure in the Left’s healthcare is a right mantra. Rights are universal; we don’t get to pick and choose who has the right, and who does not. The right to Life includes the right of all babies to their Lives, whether they’ve been born or they’re still gestating. Health care is an important tool for preserving the object of that right to Life, the Lives of those babies. Healthcare is only that, though, only a tool for effecting the babies’ rights, it is not a right in itself.

Chilling Effects

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Who’s doing the chilling, though?

The FCC has opened an early review of the broadcast licenses of eight of ABC‘s broadcast stations, and ABC has sued to put a stop to it. The FCC says the review is over ABC‘s—in particular, Disney’s—use of DEI initiatives to determine whether they violated the agency’s prohibition on unlawful discrimination. ABC‘s executives claim the review is based on President Donald Trump’s (R) dislike of two program’s anti-Trump coverage.

There’s this, though, that exposes the underlying problem regardless of those competing motives.

In its filing, ABC said the FCC’s actions are already influencing editorial decisions and having a chilling effect on its news operations.

If the executives think the government’s move really is about suppressing ABC speech, any supposed speech chilling is not from anything the government is doing. These executives are preemptively chilling their own speech. If they had the courage of their convictions, they would press ahead with their editorial decisions unchanged. By chilling—altering—their decision making, they could be seen to be tacitly admitting that the FCC’s review is justified—especially since the review is only just getting started and no evidence has yet been collected.

Hate Speech According to Leftists

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The latest example is provided by the Portland, Oregon, Portland Public Schools school district. The district has banned a mother

from her children’s school for a year because she engaged in sidewalk advocacy against its secret gender curriculum and social transitions of gender-confused students, claiming her “hate speech” violated its harassment policy….

That ban included preventing her from witnessing her son’s graduation from Meriwether Lewis Elementary School. Her daughter remains at risk of the school’s indoctrination program, a program of which the school district is so embarrassed, I surmise, that it felt constrained to keep it hidden away from concerned parents.

Regardless of the district’s apparent embarrassment over its program, or its dishonest desire to keep its treatment of the parents’ children from them, it has made its attitude toward speech very clear with the ban and its claimed reason for it.

Hate speech, according to the district, is any speech that disagrees with its Leftist ideology. Contra the Just the News characterization of the school district’s position, though, this attitude—toward free speech and toward transgender abuse of children—isn’t far-left; it’s increasingly becoming mainstream Left.

My Personal Experience Says Otherwise

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Matthew Hennesey, writing in the WSJ‘s Free Expression columns, was concerned about the heavy exposure to the unbridled freedom of everything being abundant and—from the student’s perspective—free and how this gives those still impressionable minds a false sense of the effectiveness of socialism to the point that it seems like to each according to his wants and from each according to what he feels like giving. And then the child faces the world as it is after “graduation” [my euphemism quotes].

College is where young people get a first taste of living on their own. But it’s a false freedom. The cost of things most adults must budget and pay for—food, transportation, housing, entertainment, even laundry—is bundled on campus. There are no price signals. Everything comes out of the big payment made before the semester starts. And who picks that up? Mom, Dad, and maybe Sallie Mae.
…As a result, “they experience consumption without consequence or even comparison.” Everything feels free. When, after graduation, these kids hit the real world, the shock is too much to bear. They have no sense of opportunity costs and trade-offs. They revert to a defense of the all-inclusive economic program they know and love.

The ill discipline, though, is a mark of the degradation of parenting as well as of the schools themselves. My first two years in college, I lived within the allowance my parents gave me. That upfront cost? One semester of each of those two years came from the fruits of my summer jobs. My second two years, I had no parental allowance, I had USAF Sgt’s pay courtesy of an ROTC scholarship. The upfront cost, though, was entirely picked up by the USAF, via my ROTC scholarship.

Nothing in the book store, from books to froo-froo to junk food was free the entire time. Nothing in the student union was free, also. The school’s cafeteria only served lunch and supper, no snacks or anything of the like. Nothing between meals. Snacks could be purchased in the student union or in the book store. The cafeteria might have served breakfast, too, but I wasn’t eating breakfast so I never noticed.

Now helicopter parents or lazily uninvolved parents—no middle ground constituting a measure of parental responsibility—ruin their kids before they get to college, and colleges now coddle those children while burying all of the costs in those upfront payments that the students never experience and indoctrinating them rather than teaching them.