Incomprehensible Witch

Over at Taki’s place, Ted Dalrymple takes aim (metaphorically speaking;  he’s a Brit) at some total loony university professor:

Professor MacCormack’s book defeated me, not only sapping my will to read further but inducing a state almost of catatonia.  It certainly cured me, at least temporarily, of my obsessional desire to finish any book that I have started.  Her style made  The Critique of Pure Reason  seem as light and witty as  The Importance of Being Earnest.  She appears to think that the English plural of manifesto is manifesti rather than manifestos;  I admit that it conjured up in my mind a new Italian dish, gnocchi manifesti.
Open the book at any page and you will find passages that startle by their polysyllabic meaninglessness combined with the utmost crudity.  By chance, I opened the book to page 144 and my eye fell on the following:

The multiplicity of becoming-cunt as an assemblage reassembles the tensors upon which it expresses force and by which force is expressed upon its various planes and dimensions.

And Dalrymple notes:

I have known deteriorated schizophrenic patients to speak more sensibly and coherently than this.

No kidding.  Let’s take a look at this paragon of literacy, shall we?

…and not in drag:  

This Oz bint is, and I quote:  “a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England” (whatever “continental philosophy” may be).  Also, Anglia Ruskin University is not part of Cambridge University, but a separate school with campuses scattered across several towns, Cambridge being but one of them.

One wonders what John Ruskin (after whom it’s named) would think of this example of its academic excellence.

 

Unhinged

As Longtime (and, probably, Recent) Readers know full well, intemperate speech is not exactly an unknown event on this here back porch, and I often “permit” (okay, encourage) the same in Comments.  But I’m just a guy with a digital megaphone, little different from the loons one would find at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, London or the average screamer on a city street.

I am not, however, a college “professor” who does the same in a classroom:

The investigation found that Castro would belittle students who disagreed with his religious beliefs or lack thereof. Students alleged that Castro made his political beliefs known in the classroom by saying things such as he “would cut off [former U.S. Attorney General] Jeff Sessions’ head and play soccer with it,” and that he would “hang [President Donald] Trump by [President-elect Joe] Biden’s entrails” for example.

Note that I’m not interested in his Twatter account where he said this:

Castro celebrated the news of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) contracting COVID-19 and hoped that President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence would contract the virus too, in addition to calling Trump a “fat klansman.”

That’s his right to say that — Glenn Reynolds once suggested on his private Twatter account that we should run over violent protestors who attacked our cars, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either.  (Actually, there’s a great deal correct about it, but we can discuss that another time.)

The minute, however, you subject your students –essentially, a captive audience — to your unhinged ravings and penalize them for disagreement, you should be shown the door, the window, the wall and finally the street as you are tossed out on your tenured ass.  (Which, amazingly, Texas A&M are doing to him subject to his appeal, which is also his right.)

There is a clear distinction here between freedom of speech and professorial misconduct.  For far too long, students have had to toe the line and simply acquiesce with the antics of such professors even (or especially) when they disagreed with these Marxist loons.  My own kids used to tell me about this when they were still at college.  (I did no such thing, and for some reason none of my professors ever confronted me when I called attention to their silliness.)  So it’s long past time that this conduct was censured — and by the way, as a side issue, tenure should not be treated as a barrier to censure either.

Ditto this asshole (same link):

Alvard was reportedly notified of disciplinary sanctions following the results of the investigation into his classroom conduct and behavior. In the memo, Alvard was charged with “creat[ing] a negative learning environment for some students that materially affected their ability to participate and learn” and that Alvard “failed to deliver instruction and class materials in an unbiased and respectful manner.”

What the hell has happened to Texas A&M?

Then we have another academic fuckwit getting his two cents in:

“Republicans, you should not be allowed to speak about being shocked by President Donald Trump or the recent right-wing raid in Washington, D.C., for your words ring hollow,” wrote Jones, who is the chair of the Pan-African Studies department. “You all should be forced to shut the hell up unless whatever you have to say begins with, ‘I’m sorry.’ You should not be allowed to condemn Trump or attempt to distance yourselves from him unless you begin with, ‘I have helped him, and I’m sorry,’” he wrote.

Ummm who exactly is going to force us to shut up, asshole?  You?  The federal government?

Actually, I know who he wants to shut us up:  Big Tech — Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. — and they’re getting down to that with gusto, the Leftist cocksuckers.

Here’s one little statement for our worthy head of the “Pan-African [whatever that is] Studies” department:  We’re not going to distance ourselves from Donald Trump — and by “we”, I mean the 75 million people who voted for him over your senile, fraudulent candidate and his cocksucking accomplice — and we sure as hell aren’t going to apologize to you or anyone else for our support of him.

 

Hitting Back

Here’s a little something to make your day:

A linguistics and education professor from Michigan State University claims that telling somebody that you can’t understand him is an example of “linguistic racism.”
More specifically, it’s “racist” to ask a person to repeat what he said because you “don’t understand [his] thick accent.”
Another example is someone “openly say[ing] only English is to be spoken in the workplace” despite the presence of multilingual employees.

This is one time where I wish I was still back in college, and specifically, at Michigan State in this little turd’s class.

Because from then on, I would only speak to him in Afrikaans, and submit all my papers in Afrikaans.  Then, if he attempted to change or penalize that, I would label him a linguistic racist and file disciplinary charges against him, using his own precept as the basis.

Another Chink In Our Security

Here we go again:

A University of California-Los Angeles researcher has been arrested for allegedly throwing away a damaged hard drive while the FBI was investigating him for transferring sensitive U.S. data to China’s National University of Defense Technology.

As I noted in my post on a previous such incident, it would be a terrible thing if the spying motherfucker’s name was something like Professor Laydback Surferdude — but no, he’s an omelet-complexioned virus-spreader:

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday that 29-year-old Guan Lei “falsely den[ied] his association with the Chinese military” during interviews with federal law enforcement officials. Lei has since admitted that he participated in Chinese military training.
According to authorities, one of Lei’s faculty advisors in China also served in the Chinese military.
The Justice Department further alleged that Lei hid digital files from federal law enforcement and lied about having contact with the Chinese consulate during his time in the U.S.

I’m generally not a huge fan of piling on offenses just to add to the sentence, but I’m going to make an exception in this case because the little prick is so young.  So:  destruction of evidence (20 years), lying to a federal agent (5 years) and espionage (25 years), all sentences to run consecutively.

Or we could just shoot him in the back of the head, and make his family pay for the bullet — it’s what the ChiComs do to spies, after all.

I’m getting heartily sick of both this spying nonsense, and the aiding and abetting being given by academia.

We need to clean house, thoroughly, by expelling all Chinese nationals from faculty positions in academia.  And before the profs start squealing about “loss of intellectual capital” or some such bullshit, I would suggest that the only loss of intellectual capital is being caused by having these spies sending our work back to their Commie bosses.  Should our academic wailers wish to continue to work with these assholes, they should be quite free to do so:  in China.

Pushing Back

Here’s a happy ending:

A Los Angeles English teacher was forced to flee her home after receiving numerous death threats for wearing an ‘I Can’t Breathe’ T-shirt during one of her virtual class sessions.
The teacher at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California wore the shirt in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and included instruction about racial injustice in her teaching, which the school allowed.
But a parent upset with her class allegedly shared a photo of the teacher on social media along with her e-mail address and invitations to harass her.
The photo was later shared by Elijah Schaffer, the podcast host of YouTube’s ‘Slightly Offens*ve’, on his Twitter account, which led the teacher to receive hundreds of emails and threats.

Meanwhile, oh boo-hoo-hoo:

‘I can’t afford to go to a hotel and I can’t go home. My daughter’s a ninth-grader starting at this school. We can’t stay in our home,’ the teacher said to CBS Los Angeles.

Not so much fun when the Alinsky Rules are used against you, huh?

The last word comes from one of the good guys:

Scott Blodgett is one of the parents upset with the teacher’s curriculum that covers the civil unrest unfolding across the country.
‘I just want my daughter to go to English class and learn about English,’ Blodgett said.

Yup.  Stick it to them, good and hard.  And this happened in Califuckingfornia.

Unnecessary Deadlines

I have never understood why people give themselves deadlines on activities which require no deadlines:  “I have to get my hair cut this week” or “I need to do the laundry today” and “I must finish my book before Saturday” and so on.  Other than an attempt to impose some kind of self-discipline over chronic procrastination, all this does is add a layer of stress into one’s life — all the more so because it’s both needless and self-imposed.  An ex-boss of mine put it in perspective, speaking purely of business matters and not of obvious crisis situations:  “There is no decision can’t be improved by waiting till the next day.”

Over at Insty’s place, Mark Tapscott posted a long letter from a friend who is grappling with the fact that his kids — and the kids of many of his upper-middle-class neighbors — will not be attending public school anytime soon, thanks to the teachers unions’ unnecessary obsession with the health risks of their members being exposed to the germ-laden petri dish that is the average school.  (It’s definitely worth going over there and reading it.)  Leaving aside the obvious retort that other workers (in supermarkets etc.) seem to have had few problems in this regard, I want to focus instead on one aspect of this hapless parent’s dilemma.  Here’s the part that got me thinking:

“And, for the families who either cannot leave a job or are not interested in what has been proposed by the public school systems, they are either spending tens of thousands of dollars per year on private education or are now for the first time acquainting themselves with homeschooling options. I will also add that in many cases, private schools are full and homeschooling curriculum options are sold out leaving families with no idea what they will do in a few weeks.”

Somebody needs to sit this harried man down and explain one of the most beneficial aspects of homeschooling:  there are no deadlines.  The “few weeks” he’s talking about is an artificial construct:  schools say that the new semester must begin on September 7, therefore that’s when education should begin.  Of course, that’s utter nonsense if you’re not chained to the public (or any) school system:  your kid can take up classes on September 7, or October 15 (or tomorrow, for that matter) — because given the glacial speed of public education, the kid will catch up with, and overtake, his former classmates in a matter of weeks.  (Remember that the entire middle- and high school mathematics curriculum — all five years of classroom instruction — can be learned by an average student in just over six months, when delivered at their own pace at home.)

I remember the mother of my son fretting about his slowness in getting toilet-trained, and telling her:  “I promise you that by the time he’s fifteen he’ll be using the toilet just like everybody else.”  And from an educational perspective, whether a kid starts learning in August or September is irrelevant to their future progress.

Everyone seems to want to set deadlines on education:  must complete high school by age 18, then go straight to college and finish the undergrad degree in four years, or else “they’ll be left behind” — as though that matters, when of course it doesn’t.

Unsaid in all this, of course, is that if education is truly unshackled from the education establishment, there’s nothing to stop a kid from finishing their undergrad degree by age 18, either, if the kid is smart enough and motivated enough — because just as homeschooled kids of high-school age typically finish twelfth grade earlier than their classroom-educated contemporaries, the appearance of online university-level classes (delivered either by streaming or by DVD) means that the homeschooled college student could finish their degree in two years and not the more common four.

The only thing that holds parents back from homeschooling is their own sense of inferiority — that somehow, even college-trained adults can’t teach their kids mathematics (the discipline which frightens parents the most).  Let me assure you all right now:  with the proper course materials, anyone can teach their kids anything.

And best of all, there’s no need to feel pressure to do it by any specified date — hell, you can even learn the stuff with your kids as you go along, and how bad can that be?