Mar 15 2009
Nothing like encouraging free expression in class
Of Arms and the Law: Prof. calls police after student discusses guns in class
“Last October, John Wahlberg and two classmates at Central Connecticut State University gave an oral presentation for a communications class taught by Professor Paula Anderson. The assignment was to discuss a “relevant issue in the media,” and the students presented their view that the death toll in the April 2007 Virginia Tech shooting massacre would have been lower if professors and students had been carrying guns.
That night, police called Wahlberg, a 23-year-old senior, and asked him to come to the station. When he arrived, they they read off a list of firearms that were registered in his name and asked where he kept them. Guns are strictly prohibited on the CCSU campus and residence halls, but Wahlberg says he lives 20 miles off-campus and keeps his gun collection locked up in a safe. No further action was taken by police or administrators.
“I don’t think that Professor Anderson was justified in calling the CCSU police over a clearly non-threatening matter,” Wahlberg told The Recorder, the CCSU student newspaper that first reported the story. “Although the topic of discussion may have made a few individuals uncomfortable, there was no need to label me as a threat.””
This is pure harassment, of course. Nothing but.
But, to get into the spirit of things: if anyone in the good professor’s class had referred to the use of a controlled substance, would the police have been called? How about underage drinking? What if the class presentation had been in favor of legalizing currently illegal substances? Grounds for police intervention?
Somehow, in the professor’s mind, anyone who even speaks of firearms in any non-derogatory way is automatically suspect.
I bet the professor is on the Diversity Council, and preaches far and wide about tolerance and accepting people who have different perspectives than yours.
Any takers? It seems that more and more, the following equation is true:
professor = hypocrite
I wish it was true less often than it seems to be.
Mar 14 2009
Does Christian Love call for taxes to fund social programs?
John Mark Reynolds thinks not, in Love Your Neighbor and Don’t Tax Him.
Key graphs, more at the link.
Moral men have a duty to help their neighbors, but nobody has the right to force other people to help.
Jesus told a story of a Good Samaritan who crossed difficult social and cultural barriers to provide relief to an injured man. This is a good model for our own behavior. We should help the hurting neighbor even if he is a pariah in our community. The mortgage broker who has lost his job is also my neighbor and, when he is hurting and repentant, should receive pity, charity, and care—not just sermons about his errors.
Moral behavior is most valuable when it is not easy to do. The temptation is to avoid doing our moral duty by ignoring it or passing off the dirty work to somebody else.
The Scroogish Samaritan ignores his moral duty to help his neighbor. He assumes everybody should care only for self and destroys common culture by his selfishness. The Statist Samaritan forces everybody else to help the injured man and so gains a cheap feeling of virtue, but undermines any real virtue.
……..Sadly, it is so much more blessed to give than to receive that the Statist Samaritan tries to give all the blessings to the state. He loves the state and so wishes to turn everyone’s appreciation for charity to it.
Not surprisingly charity that is coerced does harm to everyone. The injured party may be helped at first, but only at the cost of doing injustice to others. Taxing Peter forces Peter to help Paul, often does little for Paul, and almost certainly will make Peter resent Paul. Peter should help Paul, but making him do it will teach both men bad lessons. The taxed feels resentment as the object of his charity lacks a human face—he gives his coerced taxes to faceless bureaucracy—and the recipient becomes the ward of government.
When we pass our moral duties over to the state, we lose the power to do charity ourselves, turn an act of charity into coercion, and give the state too much power. People are habituated to look to the state to meet their needs and not their communities, churches, and family. This weakens every non-state institution and risks tyranny.
Forced charity is inefficient because it rarely distinguishes between worthy and unworthy attempts at charity. ….
Forced charity is bad for us because in removing our liberty to choose between goods it makes us perpetual dependents. No good person wants to be perpetually dependent on his neighbor, because his neighbor has a face and knows him. It is much easier to become a perpetual dependent on the government, because the government is faceless.
Mar 13 2009
Chris Matthews vs Ari Fleischer
Chris Matthews features prominently in the new movie Media Malpractice as essentially a shill for Obama. (Full disclosure: I provided the music for the film.)
Now, Matthews displays again his uncanny knack for completely distorting facts and misrepresenting contexts. Watch, and judge for yourself:
Mar 13 2009
I told you so #2
‘I’m Maureen Dowd, and I’ve Been Had’ (Much more at the link)
They may need a support group before the month is out. They could gather in New York or Washington where many victims reside. The meetings would start: “I’m Maureen [or David]. I’m a duped Barack voter. And I’m mad.”
The ranks indeed are filling with the disaffected and the disappointed, Chris Buckley, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, David Gergen, and even that gynecological sleuth and blogger Andrew Sullivan. And then there is the very angry Marty Peretz. Their complaints are varied but expressed with equal amounts of remorse and bitterness. They all have been done wrong by Barack.
Was there EVER a chance that the most Left Senator wouldn’t be the most Left President?
They ain’t seen NUTHIN’ yet.
Suckas
Mar 11 2009
The Left At Christian Universities, part 8: Violently Non-Violent
This is a repost of an article done earlier in another context, but which seems to fit nicely into the series on The Left At Christian Universities. The previous post in the series is here.
A few months ago, at a local Christian university, as I was entering a building to attend a conference on science and theology, I happened to notice a sign advertising the campus ROTC program, free tuition for going into the Army as an officer for a period of time following graduation. (ROTC is Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.) The ROTC sign was obviously at the entrance of the building, a major classroom building, so it would catch the eye of students who might be interested.
I saw a young man whom I assumed to be a student, who picked up the sign and laid it down behind a trash can, out of view. I heard him say to a friend, as they entered, “That was non-violent, wasn’t it?” At the time, I was disinclined to say anything, thinking it was just a couple of students engaged in a prank, and because I was a bit late and in a hurry, I decided to restore the sign to its original location when I left the conference.
When I got to the conference room, I saw that things hadn’t gotten started yet, and people were just chatting and waiting. Then I saw the young man who had hidden the ROTC sign. I admit to being slightly taken aback: one presumes that people who attend conferences on theology are people who seek to behave morally, and I could see no moral justification for moving the ROTC sign.
So, before the conference got started, I walked up to him and said, “Are you the person who hid the ROTC sign?” He said he was, and repeated his “non-violent” line, and laughed, like he thought I would agree. I think he thought I was about to praise him.
Continue reading “The Left At Christian Universities, part 8: Violently Non-Violent”
Mar 11 2009
Che: Why not make a nice movie lionizing Lenin?
Most of what you’ve heard about Steven Soderbergh’s Che is true. At four and a half hours, the film, now playing in selected domestic markets and available on video on demand, is extremely long. And even at this length, the film skips over the least convenient, indeed morally repulsive, period of Ernesto Guevara’s life. It’s a testament to Soderbergh’s skill that the film still has some merit—above all, the director’s typically meticulous composition and audacious experiments with form—but it falls abjectly short of accuracy.
…….Soderbergh presents Che as an unabashedly ideological revolutionary who rejects any path for change aside from violent struggle. For the most part, the film focuses on his two periods of most intense guerrilla activity, in Cuba and then in Bolivia—revolutions to the death in each case. A fellow moviegoer observed afterward that she no longer thought of Guevara as “cuddly.” That’s a start.
Yet for Soderbergh, this violent Guevara remains a sympathetic figure. Such admiration may have motivated the director’s omission of the years that Guevara spent after the revolution in Castro’s Cuba, supervising executions, establishing the state police, and helping build an authoritarian state—unpleasant activities that the Che T-shirt crowd would rather not examine. It’s a politically convenient choice, to be sure, but given the film’s emphasis on Guevara’s guerrilla career, perhaps it makes some artistic sense. A few flashbacks intervene, but for the most part the film concerns itself with combat and survival in the Cuban and Bolivian countryside. This close attention to the practicalities of guerrilla warfare binds together what might have been two tonally incoherent episodes—in two different countries and separated by nine years. Showing Guevara’s comparatively humdrum years in Castro Cuba—where he killed from behind a desk instead of from behind a rifle—might have enervated the film’s narrative energy.
Hollywood continues the whitewash, with just enough truth to claim objectivity, but not enough to provide real understanding of the murderer.
No surprise there, of course, since few of us want to understand murderers, and since telling the truth tends to make for difficult to watch story lines.
I’m still waiting for Hollywood to make a nice movie to “humanize” Lenin, or Stalin, or maybe Hitler. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. Probably win some Oscars.
Mar 10 2009
Killing tiny humans for profit and career advancement
Amidst the fawning press coverage of President Obama’s overturning of the Bush stem cell funding policy, it is important to understand a few basic facts about what he has and has not done.
First, the stories about this decision suggest Obama has restored federal policy to what it was before George W. Bush’s 2001 stem cell policy announcement. This is simply not true. The federal government has in fact never before-even under President Clinton-used taxpayer dollars to encourage the destruction of human embryos, as it will now begin to do. Obama’s decision is an unprecedented break with the longstanding federal policy of neutrality toward embryo research. Before 2001, not one dollar had ever been spent to support embryonic stem cell research, and when George W. Bush provided funds for the first time, he did so in a way that made sure tax dollars did not create an incentive for the ongoing destruction of human embryos. President Obama’s new policy will do precisely that: it will tell researchers that if they destroy a human embryo, they will become eligible for federal dollars to use in studying its cells; establishing an obvious and unprecedented incentive. And the president has not established any moral constraints whatsoever on funding: he has instructed the NIH to create the rules, so it’s safe to expect that they will permit not only the use of embryos “left over” after IVF, but also those created solely to be destroyed for research, including those created by cloning. This is well beyond what even most advocates of overturning the Bush policy have tended to argue for in public.
Second, the coverage suggests the Bush policy was a ban on embryonic stem cell research. In fact, again, the Bush policy provided federal funds for the first time, and it placed no limits on the conduct of embryo research with private sector dollars, except in requiring that those funds not be mixed with federal money. President Bush made clear that he believed embryo research was unethical, but his powers to act to constrain it were limited, and the policy he pursued sought to establish clear bounds for the use of taxpayer funds while at the same time encouraging the development of alternatives to the destruction of embryos. He believed-rightly, as it turned out-that if policymakers carved out the proper channels for this research, it could be directed away from unethical practices
And this brings us to the third missing piece of the stem cell story: the emergence of alternatives to the destruction of human embryos. In the early days of the stem cell debate, the hope that such alternatives might be found had been expressed by people on both sides of the argument. In 1999, President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission issued a report supporting federal funding of embryo-destructive research on the grounds that, as they put it, “in our judgment, the derivation of stem cells from embryos remaining following infertility treatments is justifiable only if no less morally problematic alternatives are available for advancing the research.” At the time, no such alternatives seemed apparent, and even when Bush announced his policy in 2001 the possibility of such alternatives was largely speculative. But in the last few years, researchers have made groundbreaking advances in the development of pluripotent cells (that is, cells with the ability to be transformed into the various cell types of the body and to proliferate, like embryonic stem cells) without the need to use or destroy human embryos. Such techniques are beginning to dominate stem cell science, and they avoid entirely the moral, and therefore the political, controversy inherent in the taking of nascent human life for research. They offer a path to genetically matched embryonic-like cells without the shadow of ethical abuse. It seems increasingly clear, therefore, that embryo destruction is not the only, or best, path to exploring the promise of pluripotent stem cells.
Fourth, it’s crucial to understand that whatever their source, the promise of pluripotent stem cells remains quite speculative and uncertain. Indeed, it now increasingly seems like the real holy grail for the treatment of degenerative diseases may be the employment of small molecules to transform cells from one type to another within the body of a patient: a different model of treatment altogether from the cell therapies that stem cell science was once expected to produce, though one that has emerged from the study of embryonic stem cells. No one knows which, if any, of these avenues will provide treatments and cures. What we do know, however, is that cells derived through the destruction of embryos left over after fertility treatment-the cells that President Obama’s executive order addresses-are far less useful, far less necessary, and far less appealing to researchers than they seemed eight years ago when the controversy surrounding federal stem cell funding policy began in earnest.
The president’s decision to take the unprecedented step of encouraging the destruction of human embryos with taxpayer dollars every day seems more removed from the scientific and ethical realities of the debate, and from the aspiration that underlay the policy he has chosen to end: that science and ethics might both be championed together, rather than set against one another.
Mar 10 2009
Contradictions
Laughing at the Contradictions of Socialism in America
The six dialectical contradictions of socialism in the USSR:
* There is full employment, yet no one is working.
* No one is working, yet the factory quotas are fulfilled.
* The factory quotas are fulfilled, yet the stores have nothing to sell.
* The stores have nothing to sell, yet people got all the stuff at home.
* People got all the stuff at home, yet everyone is complaining.
* Everyone is complaining, yet the voting is always unanimous.It reads like a poem, only instead of the rhythm of syllables and rhyming sounds, it’s the rhythm of logic and rhyming meanings. If I could replicate it, I might start a whole new genre of “contradictory six-liners.” It would be extremely difficult to keep it real and funny at the same time, but I’ll try anyway.
Dialectical contradictions are one of the pillars in Marxist philosophy, which states that contradictions eventually lead to a unity of opposites as the result of a struggle. This gave a convenient “scientific” excuse for the existence of contradictions in a socialist society, where opposites were nice and agreeable, unlike the wild and crazy opposites of capitalism that could never be reconciled. Hence the joke.
Then I moved to America, where wild and crazy opposites of capitalism were supposedly at their worst. Until recently, however, the only contradictions that struck me as irreconcilable were these:
Economic justice:
* America is capitalist and greedy, yet half of the population is subsidized.
* Half of the population is subsidized, yet they think they are victims.
* They think they are victims, yet their representatives run the government.
* Their representatives run the government, yet the poor keep getting poorer.
* The poor keep getting poorer, yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
* They have things that people in other countries only dream about, yet they want America to be more like those other countries.Hollywood cliches:
* Without capitalism there’d be no Hollywood, yet filmmakers hate capitalism.
* Filmmakers hate capitalism, yet they sue for unauthorized copying of their movies.
* They sue for unauthorized copying, yet on screen they teach us to share.
* On screen they teach us to share, yet they keep their millions to themselves.
* They keep their millions to themselves, yet they revel in stories of American misery and depravity.
* They revel in stories of American misery and depravity, yet they blame the resulting anti-American sentiment on conservatism.
* They blame the anti-American sentiment on conservatism, yet conservatism ensures the continuation of a system that makes Hollywood possible.
More at the link. A useful intellectual exercise: see if you can come up with a similar list revealing inner contradictions in Capitalism. Or American Exceptionalism.
I think it will be difficult to do with the natural connection of those above, because there are simply fewer internal contradictions.
But I await any attempts with interest.
Mar 10 2009
I want one. Or two.
Having been a roadie in a former life, and occasionally still being forced to function in that capacity, this looks like just the thing to help me manage those heavy flight cases for mixers, full size keyboards, etc.
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