Men en pointe: please do not try this at home

The New Neo Posted on by

I remain fascinated with the dancing of Georgian men. That’s “Georgia” as in here:

Georgia

In Georgian folk dance tradition it’s the men rather than the women who sometimes dance on their toes, or en pointe as we like to say in the Frenchified ballet world. But it’s a a very different pointe technique then the one used by the female ballet dancer (always female, except for parody). The ballet dancer balances on the very tips of her toes, and the strength of the foot is developed in its arch, which forms a lovely curve that should have no breaks in it:

pointeballet

pointeballetxray

Male feet tend to be less flexible, even in dancers, although there are certainly exceptions to the rule. The Georgian dancers aren’t trying for that elegant ballet line. They are into a different effect—one of stabbing the ground, almost clawing at it with the forefoot bent and the weight on the knuckle of the toe, a broken and harsh line instead of a seamless elegant one:

georgiamanpointe

The point of Georgian men’s pointe work (sorry; couldn’t resist) is to convey daring as well as skill; to show that the man is afraid of nothing. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this, and pay special attention when you get to minute 2:17:

Speaking of dance as a show of daring-do, this next clip is so scary I’m not sure I’d even want to be in the audience for it. Here’s a description of the type of dance it is:

Khevsuruli (ხევსურული) ”“ This mountain dance is probably the best representative of the Georgian spirit. It unites love, courage, and respect for women, toughness, competition, skill, beauty, and colorfulness into one amazing performance. The dance starts out with a flirting couple. Unexpectedly, another young men appears, also seeking the hand of the woman. A conflict breaks out and soon turns into a vigorous fighting between the two men and their supporters. The quarrel is stopped temporarily by the woman’s veil. Traditionally, when a woman throws her head veil between two men, all disagreements and fighting halts. However, as soon as the woman leaves the scene, the fighting continues even more vigorously…At the end, a woman (or women) comes in and stops the fighting with her veil once again…As a characteristic of Georgian dances, Khevsuruli is also very technical and requires intense practice and utmost skill in order to perform the dance without hurting anyone.

Indeed (the real action begins at around minute 4:50 so you can skip ahead to that, but I left the whole video as is in case you want to see the entire dance intact):

Jenner and Penner

The New Neo Posted on by

Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner refers to his/her state as “the new normal,” but transgenderism is actually quite unusual in the statistical sense, and it’s a poorly understood phenomenon as well. Some people think transgendered people are mentally disturbed, and some think they are just people trapped in the wrong body who need a body correction. But either way, it’s a phenomenon that’s neither average nor unremarkable.

I’ve written before about my view on the phenomenon of transgendered people, but I’ll recap here:

You know, I’ve got nothing against transgendered people. Based on the fairly extensive research I’ve read, both pro and con, I think the evidence indicates that transgenderism is a real issue that causes real suffering for a relatively small percentage of the population, and that for many of those it is probably something they were born with, perhaps having to do with hormonal glitches affecting fetal brain development in utero.

But I don’t think that’s always the case. I don’t think transgendered people represent a unitary phenomenon at all. Some seem to make an excellent adjustment, with or without surgery, but some are acting out rather serious problems, and the problems are hardly limited to gender dysphoria. But what percentage of the whole each group represents I don’t know; I don’t think experts know, either.

Sexual reassignment surgery is a big, big step, one that Jenner hasn’t taken yet and one that many transgendered people never take—some because of lack of money, but some because they don’t want it.

A number of people writing about Jenner have brought up the story of Mike Penner. Not only did Penner’s last name rhyme with Jenner’s, but there were certain other parallels: a life in sports (although Penner was a sports writer for the LA Times rather than a star athlete), a marriage that ended in divorce, a great deal of publicity, and even a Vanity Fair photo shoot as part of the process of coming out. But Penner’s tale, although happy at the beginning of his coming-out, went sour pretty quickly, and he ended up changing his mind about sex assignment surgery and ultimately going into a deep depression and committing suicide.

Note that I use the pronoun “he” for Penner. That’s because, some time after deciding against the surgery, he also stopped taking female hormones and asked friends to call him “Mike” again.

Penner’s end was tragic but I’m not sure how much it tells as about any other transgendered people but him, although it is certainly a warning that some transgendered people may have very serious problems that are not being properly addressed, and that all is not necessarily sweetness and light once they achieve what they believe to be their dream. One of the many catalysts for Penner’s suicide was apparently the loss of his wife, whom he had somehow believed would consent to remain in a relationship with him, and about whom a friend heard him say with deep regret, “I had the perfect life with Lisa, and I threw it all away.”

One thing that seems undeniable is that transgendered people are at very high risk for suicide attempts and for completed suicides, and this appears to be true whether they have sexual assignment surgery or not:

A whopping 41% of people who are transgender or gender-nonconforming have attempted suicide sometime in their lives, nearly nine times the national average, according to a sweeping survey released three years ago…

Nearly two-thirds of respondents who were the victims of domestic violence at the hands of a family member had attempted suicide, the study also showed. Suicide attempts were less common among transgender and gender-nonconforming people who said their family ties had remained strong after they came out…

Being “out” as transgender was also tied to steeper risk, the study showed: People who tell everyone that they are transgender or gender-nonconforming, or who said that other people could always or usually tell that they were transgender, were more likely to have attempted suicide.

The study didn’t say whether these rates decreased after sex-reassignment surgery. That’s because such statistics are hard to come by. But they are not necessarily encouraging:

[A] review warns that the results of many gender reassignment studies are unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants. For example, in a five-year study of 727 post-operative transsexuals published last year, 495 people dropped out for unknown reasons. Dr Hyde said the high drop out rate could reflect high levels of dissatisfaction or even suicide among post-operative transsexuals. He called for the causes of their deaths to be tracked to provide more evidence.

Dr Hyde said: “The bottom line is that although it’s clear that some people do well with gender reassignment surgery, the available research does little to reassure about how many patients do badly and, if so, how badly.”…

Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex. A 1998 review by the Research and Development Directorate of the NHS Executive found attempted suicide rates of up to 18% noted in some medical studies of gender reassignment.

It is a sobering development in the transgender world, too, that Johns Hopkins—the hospital that pioneered sex reassignment surgery in the US—has ceased doing the surgery because doctors there found the results to be unrewarding on average:

We at Johns Hopkins University””which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”””launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study””up to 30 years””followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population.

The question, however, is whether it rose about the comparable transgender population that didn’t have surgery.

I do know that some transgendered people are extremely happy with their surgery and remain so. The problem is that medical science can’t seem to differentiate all that well, ahead of time, between those whom the surgery helps, those it does not, and those it ultimately harms. Another problem is that the intense politicization of the entire issue has made it hard for scientists to study it and publish findings with anything like the objectivity it deserves.

[NOTE: And this is just a horrendous, tragic story. It also indicates that Belgium has embarked on a very bad path.]

Hillary Clinton has great name recognition, but…

The New Neo Posted on by

…what is she being recognized for?

I think Megan McArdle may be onto something when she writes:

By allowing Clinton to take the lion’s share of the fundraising dollars and the media attention, the party has left itself without a plausible alternative candidate. That seemed dandy as long as she was easily trouncing Republicans in polls. But those polls were always going to narrow, because the early polls were basically measuring whether people recognized the candidate’s name, not whether they were going to vote for her more than a year hence. As the GOP race sorts out, and the front-runners achieve more public awareness, you’re going to see our highly partisan electorate lock into much narrower margins.

Moreover, Clinton will have less room to improve her margins than whoever the Republican is.

I think it matters a great deal which candidate the Republicans nominate, and how effectively the MSM and Democrats can cast that person as a villain. It that person is successfully demonized, many people would then go with the villain they know, Hillary.

D-Day: 71 years

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a repeat of a post from the 65th anniversary of D-day. I have added a small amount of new commentary to update.]

Today is the 71th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII. Here’s a video with a few grainy clips of the Allies wading ashore:

I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on, and all that.

The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And I have little doubt that our armed forces would be up to the task; the question is whether our government would. In the years that have passed since I first wrote this post, I have gotten to the point where I have little doubt that our government would not be up to the task, and I’m beginning to doubt whether our armed forces would, either, because of the way it’s been hamstrung under Obama.

But back to the D-day landings. About thirty-five years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.

omahacemetery.jpg

But the scene was quite different back in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.

The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.

This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:

…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.

The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:

Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.

In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:

Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion.

.

This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:

[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.

The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:

Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.

As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.

These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (particularly if while under the aegis of the Bush W. Bush administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.

In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred—fortunately for all of us.

Krauthammer…

The New Neo Posted on by

…on how the requirement for keeping electronic health records is driving doctors away from the practice of medicine.

I’ve heard this complaint myself from doctors I know. Ah, but bureaucrats know best in our brave new world.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Heartless bot from the comments section of an article entitled “More boomers are committing suicide”:

Everyone loves what you guys tend to be up to.

Of course, since bots aren’t people, I guess they’re all heartless.

Make a muscle

The New Neo Posted on by

Old people—especially really old people in their upper 90s—who seem otherwise healthy, can become highly debilitated due to a mysterious wasting that happens to a great many of them as they approach advanced old age. It’s called sarcopenia, and although resistance training helps improve the situation, even active people experience it.

We all lose muscle as we get on in years. Many of us, after so many years of trying to lose weight and become trimmer, find that we suddenly start to waste away for no good reason, and gaining weight becomes the goal, especially muscle mass.

It happened to my mother when she hit 95 or so. Suddenly, after having maintained a healthy robust weight for most of her life, and seeming fairly strong, she lost ten pounds in a month or two. She wasn’t eating less, it was just that her body couldn’t use her food in the same way as before, and she suddenly became a bit thin. Then her weight stabilized for about six months, and then there was another sudden ten-pound drop.

It happened in increments like that. She didn’t seem to have any diseases, and she continued to eat, but in the last few months of her life—at 98—she lost her appetite, too. And that was that. Basically, she wasted away, and there was nothing to be done to reverse it, although many things were tried. It was as though her body didn’t want to take in sustenance any longer; it had had enough.

Note that I say it was her body that decided. What about her? What about her mind, her will? Many people suggested to me that she had made a conscious decision and that she didn’t want to live anymore. But knowing my mother as well as I did, and talking to her and observing her, it didn’t seem that way at all to me. Her body seemed to give up, not her.

I’ve seen it happen to other very old people I know, some of them relatives (although not related to my mother). For example, the first sign of it in my mother-in-law was when she had trouble getting out of a chair; her quadriceps just weren’t strong enough any more. She was only in her early 80s, and this was a woman who until just a few years earlier had either played tennis or jogged almost every day.

What happened? Her husband (my father-in-law) became ill with cancer, and during the two years between his diagnosis and his death she gave up all her exercise in order to keep him company and take care of him. Their main activity during that time was to watch TV together and talk, he in a recliner and she lying on a sofa near him.

It was very loving of her. But it contributed to a precipitous decline of her body, one that continued slowly but surely until her own death about eight years later, bedridden.

And so I read with interest the news that researchers may be on the way to discovering the key to keeping our muscles from wasting as we age:

We found that the body’s fuel gauge, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), is vital to slow muscle wasting with aging,” said Gregory Steinberg, the study’s senior author and professor of medicine at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine…

“Mice lacking AMPK in their muscle developed much greater muscle weakness than we would have expected to see in a middle-aged mouse,” said Steinberg. “Instead these mice, which were the equivalent of being just 50 years old, had muscles like that of an inactive 100-year-old.”…

Despite the importance of maintaining muscle function and strength as we age, there is currently no treatment besides exercise. With an aging population, age-related muscle wasting and loss of muscle strength is a growing issue that shortens lives and creates a significant financial burden on the Canadian health care system.

And then there’s people like Jim Arrington. I’m not keen on bodybuilding as a sport, but this guy is extremely impressive, although he’s really a mere child at 82 in terms of the sort of extreme old age I’ve been talking about:

[NOTE: Arrington seems to have a bit of trouble walking. Maybe some sort of joint problem, perhaps arthritis, or a back problem? He also has something I’ve noticed in a lot of bodybuilders: disproportionately small calves. I don’t know if that’s because the calves are very hard to build up, or because the other muscles are so enormously developed that their calves look smaller in comparison.

As an ex-ballet-dancer, I have to say that disproportionately small calves are not my problem. That’s true for most dancers; ballet is one thing that really really builds strong calf muscles, and they tend to last a while after the dancer has hung up her pointe shoes.]

On Hillary: Katha Pollitt thinks that women…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are too hard on Hillary Clinton because women are hard on other women.

Just when you think you’ve heard all the excuses possible for why Clinton isn’t receiving the approval she was expected to get, you see something creative like this:

My women college classmates (Radcliffe ”˜71) aren’t so excited about Hillary Clinton. An e-mail to our New York City potluck group elicited distinctly modified rapture. They’re bothered by her high-priced speeches and the aura of favor-trading and favor-banking around the Clinton Foundation. They don’t like her Wall Street connections, and they don’t like Bill (a”‰k”‰a the “ick” factor). Plus, she’s not progressive enough…

But this is where women differ from the other American groups underrepresented in politics. Racial and ethnic minorities can be extremely loyal to their own, but women are hard on other women””and feminists are no exception. Even the idea of electing a Democratic, pro-choice woman president doesn’t necessarily get a rousing cheer.

Actually, feminists are usually hard only on conservative women like Sarah Palin. When Palin was running for VP in 2008 I wrote a piece entitled “Palin unhinges feminists on the left,” and “unhinged” is really the correct word. For example, this quote was, unfortunately, fairly typical of the sort of invective that was routinely spewed towards Palin:

I confess, it was pretty riveting when John McCain trotted out Sarah Palin for the first time. Like many people, I thought, “Damn, a hyperconservative, fuckable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a ”˜sexy librarian’ costume ”” as a vice president? That’s a brilliant stroke of horrifyingly cynical pandering to the Christian right.

And then there was Professor Wendy Doniger:

I submit a piece that appeared at the website “On Faith,” under the aegis of Newsweek and the Washington Post. It was written by Professor of the History of Religions Wendy Doniger, who teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and it contains the following astounding line referring to Palin [emphasis mine]: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

Yes, women can be hard on women.

But back to Hillary. Pollitt tells us what she likes about Clinton, and why she’s very excited by her candidacy:

First, I’m excited about beating the Republicans, and she’s the best candidate for that job.

Translation: however bad Hillary may be, Republicans are by definition always worse. And besides, we haven’t got anybody else.

Second, Hillary will be the first woman president””and that is important. At this point in world history, it is embarrassing how backward the United States is. More than 70 women have been chosen to lead their nations, including in gender-conservative countries like Pakistan, Ireland, and the Philippines””and 22 nations have female leaders right now. What is the matter with us?

Translation: if Hillary is elected, I can finally feel proud of my country, which will then have attained a status right up there with forward-looking Pakistan.

By the way–although Pollitt ignores this fact—the late Benazir Bhutto, who remains to this day Pakistan’s only female prime minister, came to politics and the job in the same way Hillary Clinton has: by being related to a man who was the head of the country.

Pollitt goes on:

Third, Hillary is a feminist and is running as one””as she made clear in an April speech…[O]n a range of issues that matter to women””reproductive rights, healthcare, childcare, pay equity””she will move the ball forward. She will nominate liberal women and people of color to important posts.

Translation: she mouths the right feminist slogans, and she will appoint people from the favored special-interest groups.

But the most interesting thing about Pollitt’s article is that she had to write such a pep talk at all, in an effort to rally the faded, weary troops. What Pollitt’s message really boils down to is that Clinton is a woman and a Democrat; it’s the equivalent of the old “hold your nose and vote” that conservatives are so familiar with on the Republican side.

This isn’t the way it was supposed to be for Hillary. It may be enough to allow her to win, though.

[NOTE: I look at the Republican field, on the other hand, and I feel actual enthusiasm. A lot of these candidates seem decent, intelligent, and capable. My favorites so far are Walker, Rubio, Cruz, and Fiorina. Perry’s now in, too—not quite up there with the others for me, but with an excellent track record in Texas.

It’s an embarrassment of riches. Jindal’s good, too, although (as I’ve written before) I think he lacks that indefinable something to appeal to a broad swatch of voters, some sort of energy and magnetism that’s needed. But still, it’s by far the best Republican slate I can ever remember seeing. In a meritocracy, any of these people would beat Hillary, hands down. But the world is not a meritocracy.]

Our Orwellian immigration agencies

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s rename a couple of government agencies.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement department (ICE) will henceforth be known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Non-Enforcement (ICN). The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will now be known as the Department of Homeland Insecurity (DHI).

Why? I think it’s self-evident, with this news only the latest chapter in a long, long line:

Most of the illegal immigrant criminals Homeland Security officials released from custody last year were discretionary, meaning the department could have kept them in detention but chose instead to let them onto the streets as their deportation cases moved through the system, according to new numbers from Congress.

Some of those released were the worst of the worst ”” more than 3,700 “Threat Level 1” criminals, who are deemed the top priority for deportation, were still released out into the community even as they waited for their immigration cases to be heard.

Homeland Security officials have implied their hands are tied by court rulings in many cases, but the numbers, obtained by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, showed 57 percent of the criminals released were by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s own choice, and they could have been kept instead…

ICE officials insist that those who are released are still monitored, often by electronic ankle bracelets but also through a system of phone checks or by paying a bond.

However, nearly all of those released under electronic monitoring broke the terms of their release, according to ICE numbers.

In fiscal year 2014, ICE put about 41,000 immigrants through electronic monitoring, and more than 30,000 of them broke the terms of their release ”” many of them racking up multiple violations. All told, they notched nearly 300,000 violations in one year alone, or an average of 10 instances per violator…

In 2013, the agency released 36,007 convicted criminals who were awaiting the outcome of their deportation cases. Those released had amassed 116 homicide convictions, 15,635 drunken driving convictions and 9,187 convictions stemming from what ICE labeled involvement with “dangerous drugs.”

The total dropped to about 30,000 in 2014 ”” but the seriousness of the offenses increased, with 193 homicide convictions among the detainees and 16,070 drunken driving convictions. There were also 426 sexual assaults and 303 kidnapping convictions, ICE said.

I doubt that even 20% of American would be okay with this. Why are we so powerless to do anything about it? Our president is perfectly fine with it, as well as many of our legislators, and most people don’t even know it’s happening.

Obama vs. Bush, the latest round

The New Neo Posted on by

George W. Bush in April 2013:

“History will ultimately judge the decisions that were made for Iraq and I’m just not going to be around to see the final verdict,” the two-term president told CNN in a wide-ranging interview.

“In other words, I’ll be dead.”…

“You learn that life doesn’t end after you’re president,” Bush said…

“I know this, that Laura and I gave the presidency eight years of our life. We gave it our all. Made the best judgment calls I could. I didn’t compromise my principles. And I’m a content man.”

Bush is still very much alive, and the judgment of history is still out. But at the moment, the judgment of Americans is going rather well for him:

According to the poll, 52% of adults had a favorable impression of George W. Bush, 43% unfavorable. When Bush left office in 2009, only about one-third of Americans said they had a positive opinion of him. This new poll presents a notable shift as Bush’s overall favorability has remained well below 50% for much of his time as a presidential alum…

Obama’s approval rating has…dropped since April, going from a near-even 48% approve to 47% disapprove split to a negative-tilting 52% disapprove to 45% approve…across party lines, from both men and women, from whites and non-whites.

Tipping point? Not that it matters; Obama isn’t going anywhere, unless a lot more people start clamoring for impeachment. A lot more.

missme

Student power and its origins

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought I’d highlight this observation by commenter “Caedmon” in the “Free speech on campus” thread:

I wonder how much influence high tuition fees have on this?…

When the high costs of tuition fees in the US are discussed the college students are usually seen as unfortunate victims. Might it not also be the case that paying thousands of dollars to sit in a lecture hall gives one a sense of entitlement?

In such a situation I might well feel that it was up to me to decide whether Lena Dunham was better than Shakespeare.

This is not to dismiss the influence of political correctness etc. just to suggest that high fees change the relationship between student and professor. The kid who has spent all summer baling hay to go to college might look on his Latin professor with veneration. The kid who has borrowed against his future earnings as a top Hollywood script writer does not hold his film studies professor in such high esteem.

This might not be so much the revolution devouring its own as America’s professors slowly waking up to the fact that they are now the servants of the little monsters they have created.

My response is that it’s an interesting notion, and I think it enters into the mix, but I’m not at all sure how much. Things were already changing back in the 60s, when tuition was not that high—not just in absolute terms, but in relative ones. Yet, in the words of the brilliant Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind:

”¦[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

Bloom’s book came out in 1989, but in that passage he was describing certain matters that took place at Cornell, where he’d been a professor, in the year 1969. This was long before the marked tuition hikes we’ve seen in recent decades. I’ve written at length about what happened that year at Cornell and its significance, so I won’t recap it all in this post, but suffice to say that professors and administrators there proved that they were pushovers more interested in PC thought and placating student pressure (including, in the case of Cornell, the threat of violence by armed students) than in defending any principle they had supposedly held dear.

The issues were somewhat different back then. In Cornell it was race, and the establishment of a Black Studies department, as well as threatening a black student (Alan Keyes, as it turns out) who had disagreed with the protesters. In 1969 at Cornell the protagonists consisted primarily (although not solely) of young black men. Today they are more likely to be women, and many—although by no means all—are white women. What these groups of protestors have in common is that they are students who have realized they can all-too-often bully and threaten professors into doing pretty much whatever they say.

[NOTE: I’ve said I wouldn’t go into the whole Cornell 1969 story here, but I keep learning new and fascinating things about it. For example, in doing research for this post I found this article—generally quite sympathetic to the protestors—from which I learned the following:

Only days before the Straight takeover, on April 10, 1969, the Cornell administration had approved $240,000 to create an Afro-American Studies Center and a director, James Turner, had been identified months earlier. “The students wanted an autonomous program; they wanted the center to have control of its own destiny,” said Eric Acree, librarian at the Africana Studies and Research Center.

So Cornell was already slated to get an Afro-American Studies Center, but that wasn’t good enough for the demonstrators, who said they wanted it to be autonomous.

I had always figured that the black students at Cornell in 1969 had come there as part of some sort of affirmative action or outreach program to get more black students at Cornell in an era when they were ordinarily few and far between. Sure enough, that turns out to have been true, and President Perkins of Cornell was a pioneer in that respect:

In 1963, his first year in office, Cornell President James Perkins had launched the Committee on Special Educational Projects (COSEP) to increase enrollment of African-American students at Cornell and provide them with support services — the first program of its kind at a major American university.

Perkins, who had chaired the board of trustees of the United Negro College Fund, said Cornell wanted to “make a larger contribution to the education of qualified students who have been disadvantaged by their cultural, economic and educational environments.”

Perkins resigned the semester after the student takeover, saying: “it seemed to me quite clear that one way ”” a strange way ”” to contribute to healing the community was to resign.” So the demonstrators managed to force him out, too, despite how far he had gone to further the presence of black students at Cornell.

One other thing I noticed when reading this piece:

Early in the morning of Parents’ Weekend, 40 years ago this Saturday, 11 fire alarms rang out across the Cornell campus. At 3 a.m., a burning cross was discovered outside Wari House, a cooperative for black women students. The following morning, members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) occupied Willard Straight Hall to protest Cornell’s perceived racism, its judicial system and its slow progress in establishing a black studies program.

I would now bet a fair amount of money that the protestors who ended up occupying Willard Straight Hall were the same people who had set fire to the cross. Their motive would have been to establish a pretext for the entire episode, and to pretend it was white racists on campus who did it. I doubt we’ll ever know whether that’s the case or not. But that would be my guess, although it’s something I would not have thought of until recent years in which we’ve learned of the recent spate of fake racist and/or hate crimes on campus and elsewhere (see this).]

Free [sic] speech on campus

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace notes that even some liberal professors on campus are becoming alarmed (although for the wrong reasons) about the closed, doctrinaire, power-driven, anti-free-speech tactics of the social justice [sic] warriors on campus. He quotes a liberal professor named Edward Schlosser who writes at Vox:

This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics….

Personal experience and feelings aren’t just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it’s no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses.

The press for actionability, or even for comprehensive analyses that go beyond personal testimony, is hereby considered redundant, since all we need to do to fix the world’s problems is adjust the feelings attached to them and open up the floor for various identity groups to have their say. All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis –from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away.

While I read that, I was thinking “Schlosser’s afraid to say it, but he’s mainly talking about the influence of female students on the type of allowable discourse on campus these days.” Lo and behold, when I got to Ace’s commentary right afterward, he had written much the same thought: “This emotion-based style of ‘argumentation’ is, it is forbidden to say, chiefly a female one (a dopey, girlish female one, not a womanly one), and one that has been lately adopted by the more female-skewing girlboys who are easily dominated by group will.”

Yes.

And let me add that I experienced this personally (as an observer, not a target) in the early 90s when I returned to school for a Master’s degree. The trend was already quite highly developed and deeply entrenched at the time, much to my surprise, even though it had escaped my notice till I returned to campus life.

But I discovered it when the young women in an undergraduate class I was required to take for my Master’s—a class which, being in the social sciences, consisted almost entirely of women—were virtually all in favor of a definition of actionably offensive speech that went something like this: “speech that offends any person in the subjective sense, rather than speech that is in fact objectively offensive.” In vain I stood up in front of the 100-or-so students, most of them around twenty years younger than I, to ask what the limits of this might be, to suggest that it was wrong to allow the most sensitive among us to dictate what was unacceptable, and to speak up for free speech in general. I was met with uncomprehending stares and impatient dismissal, a fossil in my own time.

I realized that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Not one person appeared to agree with me, or if they did they weren’t saying so publicly or privately. And the professor, a woman just a couple of years younger than I, was clearly on their side. I have never forgotten it, and although at the time I didn’t put it in a political left/right context (that came later), I realized it was a frightening development and it made me feel very, very uneasy and quite alone.

Things have only got worse, with the advent of the internet, social media, and twenty-five more years of student marination in leftist memes. Campus liberals are now starting to feel its hot breath on their necks.

[NOTE: Two excellent and somewhat-related pieces: this and this. The latter is the chilling story of the Kafkaesque nightmare that liberal professor Laura Kipnis faced when was so bold as to criticize the “creeping bureaucratization and fear that surrounds sexual activity on campus.”]