Saturday, February 22, 2014

It was a nice country while it lasted

The Soul of a Curmudgeon by Fred Reed:

Ah, the guttering candle of civilization! How I love it. The dwindling flames warm the cockles of a curmudgeon’s heart (whatever precisely a cockle may be): the galloping rot, the stampede to enstupidation, the gathering night of the Fifth Century.
...
The signs are as clear as pigeon droppings on a martial statue. This, from UCLA, a daycare center in California which was formerly a university

     Racial tensions are inflamed at the University of California at Los Angeles following several incidents — most notably, one where a professor corrected the grammar, punctuation and capitalization in minority students’ assignments.
  
    The act of correcting a black student was “micro-aggression,” according to the members of the student group “Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color,” which launched a sit-in during a subsequent meeting of the class.


Wonderful! This is heady stuff. Graduate students “of color” (which never seems to include Chinese or Koreans, who can spell) can’t be expected to distinguish “its” from “it’s.” Fourth-grade English is just too hard for them, and they must be sheltered from the burden. Apparently they attend university to avoid being expected to learn anything.

...

Protecting minorities (which category never seems to include Jews, men, Mensans, or Anglo-Saxons) from the travails of learning would seem more racist than requiring it of them, but never mind. Keep ’em dumb, keep ’em mad. Especially, keep their tuition. Onward into the gloaming. Let the show go on.

The inevitable inevitably happens, and it is. (You saw it here first.) Someone famously said that democracy lasts until the unworthy learn that they can vote themselves the treasury. Yes. More generally, until they learn that they can vote themselves everything. Here is the backbone of American domestic policy, if that is the right word for floundering narcissism. The inadequate and barely lettered, by weight of numbers, can simply declare themselves the equals of their betters (or should I say “there betters”?). They don’t have to accomplish anything. They simply assert that they have done it, or that doing it is elitist and therefore reprehensible. 

There's much more by following the link, but I also suggest the link to the UCLA article to appreciate the full measure of the foolishness complete with the professor's nauseous self-criticism.

Found at American Digest.