Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

So Much For The Ivory Tower

Marxists, Seen On Campus

As universities all over the Western world start to sputter and fail because of funding shortages and bloated, costly bureaucracies, here’s an interesting take:

Universities’ response to the cash crisis reveals their deeper crisis of purpose. Up to 10,000 university jobs are reported to have been cut this year. Yet diversity, equity and inclusion teams seem to have been largely spared the axe. Instead, universities are cutting core academic disciplines. The University of Kent has closed its philosophy department, while Canterbury Christ Church University will no longer teach English literature – a university spokesperson described the course as ‘no longer viable in the current climate’.

Once, it would have been unthinkable for a university not to offer degrees in major branches of learning, such as literature or philosophy. These subjects were taught not because ‘the market’ made them ‘viable’, but because they contributed to our understanding of the word and what it means to be human. That they can now be so readily discarded speaks to an impoverished intellectual climate that universities themselves have helped to create.

Note the emphasized sentence.

What it shows to me is that the so-called intellectual rigor of the ivory tower has faded, if not disappeared altogether.  (I know, I know:  “Wake up, Kim, it’s been going on for decades!” )

As long as universities continue to be regarded as simply an adjunct to the marketplace — i.e. providing certification for careers — then of course the “thoughtful” classes such as philosophy or Shakespeare are going to suffer.  (Of course, certification is probably critical for careers such as engineering, medicine and the hard sciences, less so for law and suchlike.)

Why one would need a B.A. to be a personal assistant or office receptionist, of course, simply underlines the fact that the high school diploma has ceased to be any kind of qualification whatsoever.

And universities are becoming equally useless.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of Gramscian Marxists.

Overkill

Anti-Gun Nannies

And then there’s this:

To be brutally honest, a high-capacity magazine ban is kinda pointless when you consider that one only needs a single bullet to commit suicide.

But that only goes to show that apart from being a loathsome, shameless opportunist, this Marxist bitch also proves that there’s absolutely no depth that Gun Control Inc. will not stoop to in order to push their foul agenda.

Bastards.

It’s Worse Than That

Journalist Scum, Politics

In a good post about the latest filth to emanate from the Biden cabal (wholesale pardon of murderers from facing the federal chop), Hugh Hewitt writes:

We will remember “37 out of 40,” and biographers and presidential historians will long note and long record and elaborate on this abuse of power, along with the pardon of Hunter Biden, and all the other outrageous abuses of power. The people around our apparently incapacitated president don’t care at all what history will declare about Biden. Their indifference is purposeful. It’s a display of shamelessness.

They “don’t care at all what history will declare about Biden”  because in times to come, the Marxists and their lickspittle historians will just whitewash events or cause this entire shameful episode to disappear from our history.  Remember, Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia, the chocolate ration has always been 5 grams per person, and shame is an unknown emotion to the Left.

AWOL

Politics

It’s bad enough that FJB was a drooling idiot for what seems like his entire presidency, but when it’s one of our Texas gals… WTF is going on in Washington?

Rep. Kay Granger, the first Republican woman to represent a Texas district in the U.S. House of Representatives, has been found in a nursing home that specializes in memory care after having been missing from Congress for about six months.

Granger, 81, who was first elected to the House in 1996, and before that was the mayor of Fort Worth, has not cast a vote in Washington since July. Her absence had generated concern in her district, which is the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area, according to the New York Post.

She was found when a reporter at The Dallas Express got a tip that she had been staying at a memory care facility after being found wandering through her neighborhood while seemingly lost and confused.

FFS, and we could have elected someone errr fresher toot sweet if we’d learned about this back in July…

Somebody in the Republican party — Texas or Washington D.C. — needs to get their ass severely kicked, and it’s not Kay Granger.

Bad Dads, BAD Dads

Anti-Gun Nannies

Apparently, CNN (who?  I dunno, never heard of them either) seems to have a problem with Dads buying their kids guns for Christmas:

CNN began the article with a story of an Oregon dad, Paul Kemp, who bought a hunting rifle for his son, Nathan, when he turned 16 years old. Nathan had been hunting with his dad since he was 7 years old.

CNN then stated, “Parents looking to purchase a firearm for their child for the holidays have to balance their hopes for the gift with the risks that come with such a purchase, such as an accidental shooting, suicide or the gun being used in a crime.”

In an attempt to bolster their position, CNN said, “For example, the teenage school shooting suspects in Oxford, Michigan, and Winder, Georgia, allegedly used firearms they had received as Christmas gifts from their parents, and those parents have faced criminal charges.”

I don’t want to get into dueling statistics here, but I just wonder how many deaths have been caused by teenagers getting into road accidents with cars given them by their parents?

Never mind;  giving guns to our kids for Christmas is a tradition that goes back generations, as these few ads prove:

Of course, as the Left hates the very concepts of both tradition and the family with a passion, these would be seen as pure evil.

Me, I just wish we could see more of them, updated for today’s market.

And I absolutely love this one:

…because as any fule kno, every man should have owned at least one Mauser in his lifetime.

The Impossible Dream

Communication, Politics

Like many people, I’ve been amused by Leftists all over the U.S. squealing about how they need to combat “right-wing” podcasters like Joe Rogan by setting up competitive podcasts which express those views of the Left (as though the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune,CNN, CSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC weren’t sufficient outlets for Leftist agitprop  already).

Clifton Duncan has one such take on this silliness:

They can never build “their own Joe Rogan.” The notion is ridiculous–not just because it evinces their tendency toward top-down control, but because their cult renders intellectual, political and philosophical exploration outside of narrow ideological parameters impossible. These people have psychotic meltdowns, blacklist peers, and cut off relatives over politics. They’re incapable of empathizing with anyone outside their congregation. For all their fetishizing of credentials, their masturbatory exaltation of their educations, they’re violently allergic to intellectual curiosity–how on earth COULD they “build” their own Rogan, or a Lex Fridman, whose curiosity and openness are part of their brand?

Well, yes;  all that’s true, and more besides.

But beyond their genetic inability to create a competitive “voice” lies one inescapable truth:  they can create all the podcasts they want, but they’ll only ever generate an audience of a few hundred thousand people (roughly, the equivalent of the NYT subscription base and/or CNN’s viewership).

I remember when Rush Limbaugh died, the Left was ecstatic because, they thought, the field was now open for radio shows like the leftist Pacifica to capture the radio audience for the Left.

Never happened, did it?  Because most Americans don’t buy into their shit.  Want proof?  Of the top dozen or so talk radio shows in the U.S., Sean Hannity alone has just over 14 million weekly listeners, and a huge percentage of the talk show audience listens to the likes of Dan Bongino, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt, Dana Loesch, Mike Gallagher, Glen Beck, Brian Kilmeade and Mike Berry at their various time slots during the day and night.  (You can’t combine them because there is considerable overlap in the conservative audience, who might listen to four, five or more shows during any given week.

The sole Left-wing radio host in the top dozen is Tom Hartmann (of Pacifica) whose midday show attracts some 7 million listeners per week, compared to his midday conservative competitors Dana Loesch and Dan Bongino, whose combined audience is more than double that, at nearly 17 million.

And just to be clear on the numbers:  Nielsen/Arbitron admits candidly that their numbers severely understate rural listenership, and always have.

Somehow, I suspect that farmers and country folk (mostly conservative) greatly outnumber any hippie communes out in the sticks.

So yeah, while the Left may have a systemic problem in putting together a non-traditional media voice, the principal reason they’re always going to fail is that Leftism per se  is hugely disliked by and abhorrent to the vast majority of Americans, FJB’s 81 million “voters” notwithstanding.  And the social adjuncts to Leftism (high taxes, gun control, uncontrolled illegal immigration, LGBTOSTFU and Big Government, to name but some) are each individually just as unpopular as Socialist government in toto.

Long may it ever be so.