Category Archives: culture

Frightening the Snowflakes

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It seems a Cambridge University professor had the effrontery to warn new students of a class of his—Physical Sciences—that life is hard and that it’s harder when you’re stupid.  For instance, this in an email that he sent to his incoming students:

Remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’—and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable.

Oh, the wailing and bodice rending that resulted.

Student Minds Cambridge, a “mental health” activist group:

We are very concerned that this could be extremely damaging to the mental well-being of the students concerned, and potentially others as well.

And a Vice-Chancellor of nearby Buckingham University, Anthony Seldon (late of Cambridge):

Frightening impressionable undergraduates into believing that work alone is all-important is irresponsible, unkind and wrong-headed[.]

Wow.

On the contrary, what’s damaging to incoming university students, what stunts their mental development, what’s frightening regarding “impressionable undergraduates” is coddling them, rewarding them for their precious snowflake-ness, and thereby trapping them in a sense of victimhood, instead of confronting them with the difficulties of serious learning, the sterner difficulties of life in the real world, and teaching them how to cope—and especially that they can actually cope.

Free Speech, Left-Style. Again

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The UC Berkeley student newspaper, The Daily Californian, accused Alan Dershowitz, in black and white, of having “blood on his hands” and of being “culpable for…Israeli atrocities”—of blood libel.  The Harvard law professor emeritus wanted to respond, but

The Daily Californian “absolutely, categorically” refused to print his reply to the op-ed.

As Dershowitz put it in a Fox & Friends segment,

The Daily Cal, as many college newspapers today, are totally one-sided.  You can say whatever you want about people like me if I’m pro-Israel. I don’t get to respond.

Free speech, indeed.

A Slip of the Mask

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When President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was deleted for a few minutes last week, it looked like an isolated mistake by a customer service employee “on his last day at work,” as Twitter, Inc, representatives had it.

Maybe not.  Now, more information is coming to light about that incident.  Seconds thoughts are occurring about the likelihood of a single employee in such a position having the authority to delete an entire account.  There’s more, too.

Inside Twitter, the brief deactivation elicited celebration or amusement even in the upper ranks. Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey Liked a tweet with an image of his face superimposed on celebrity painter Bob Ross standing before a canvas depicting Mr Trump’s deactivated account. “There are no mistakes, only happy little accidents!” the caption said.

And

One former employee said that deleting Mr Trump’s account was a “running joke” among employees about things they wanted to do on their last day.

And

Lara Cohen, Twitter’s former head of entertainment and talent partnerships, retweeted a post about the rogue employee that said, “Not all heroes wear capes.”

“Doing good on the way out the door,” is how another former employee described the episode.

And

A former employee involved with Twitter Moments, a product that highlights tweets curated by the platform or users, said on a number of occasions during the campaign that senior executives expressed displeasure with Moments that portrayed Mr Trump in a good light.

It’s also instructive that so many of these Twitter, Inc, responses are exposed by ex-Twitter employees, and not by current ones.

The mask has slid away momentarily, quickly reset, and the slip has exposed what free speech would be under a Left-leaning government.  And it looks a lot like the “free” speech of our colleges and universities.

Assimilation

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…of one culture into another.  This is the problem being experienced by eastern Germany since reunification.

Twenty-seven years after Germany’s reunification, the country’s political institutions are still struggling to break down what Germans sometimes call “the Wall in the head,” according to the leader of Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb).

“The domination of West Germans in the elites is still felt as cultural colonialism,” Thomas Krüger, the only former East German to head a government department not directly associated with East German affairs[.]

So much is true, but more importantly, it’s indicative of the long-term damage done by authoritarian governments.  The dominated culture develops an ingrained disdain for authority in general, which isn’t all bad for any people, but the individuals of that culture also have lost their initiative—their willingness, even their ability, to act on their distrust and to make their own decisions and then act on those decisions.  They’re still too used to being dominated.

It’s a generational damage, and it’ll take generations to overcome.  Eastern Germany has been free for only a bit over one generation after three or more generations of domination, first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets.

The Democratic National Committee

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On a different matter, this time, from information in Donna Brazile’s piece in Politico.  Brazile’s article is centered on the control Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign organization exercised over the DNC and how they got that control, and the article is worth reading in that light.

But there’s another matter that Brazile only mentions in support of her description of Clinton’s seizure but that wants a bit more emphasis.  First, the allegation:

Debbie [Wasserman Schultz] was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was.

Then an event, typical of the DNC’s financial machinations and illustrative of DNC leadership:

On the phone Gary [Gensler, Chief Financial Officer of Hillary’s campaign] told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

“No! That can’t be true!” I [Brazile] said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”

“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked.

And

She [Wasserman Schultz] seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided….

And

I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

The outcome:

…in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

This arrangement was agreed a year before Clinton had “won” the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination.  In other words, the DNC remade itself into a satrap of the Clinton machine, and done so well in advance of serious campaigning.

The Party chair not being overly involved?  The management team quietly letting the chair make decisions in a vacuum, including those that required team input?  Her replacement being stonewalled by the Party’s—her—management team?  It boggles the credulity to think these grown, highly experienced and talented men and women atop the Party didn’t understand what they were doing, or were in any way forced into doing it.  No, they all knew what they were doing.  All along, the Party’s leadership was in the tank for Clinton and did not want an honest, balanced primary contest.

It’s rich, too, that all of this is decried by the woman who herself was so far into the tank for Clinton that she fed Clinton debate questions before primary debates.

This is the level of integrity we can expect out of the Progressive-Democratic Party and so of any of its nominees unless and until there is a complete turnover of all of the Party’s leadership on down into the middle management ranks.  Every single one of them.