Category Archives: Intellectualism

The Stepford Students

Britain, Education, Intellectualism

I’ve written about the deadened Millennial Mind. Comedian Chris Rock has stated that he avoids doing his stand-up before Millennials. Brendan O’Neill of The Spectator calls them “The Stepford Students,” and details how he was swarmed by these idiotic automatons for violating their right … to feel comfortable. The youth is definitely not the future:

Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.

I was attacked by a swarm of Stepford students this week. …

… Barely a week goes by without reports of something ‘offensive’ being banned by students. Robin Thicke’s rude pop ditty ‘Blurred Lines’ has been banned in more than 20 universities. Student officials at Balliol College, Oxford, justified their ban as a means of ‘prioritising the wellbeing of our students’. Apparently a three-minute pop song can harm students’ health. More than 30 student unions have banned the Sun, on the basis that Page Three could turn all those pre-rapists into actual rapists. Radical feminist students once burned their bras — now they insist that models put bras on. The union at UCL banned the Nietzsche Society on the grounds that its existence threatened ‘the safety of the UCL student body’.

Stepford concerns are over-amplified on social media. No sooner is a contentious subject raised than a university ‘campaign’ group appears on Facebook, or a hashtag on Twitter, demanding that the debate is shut down. Technology means that it has never been easier to whip up a false sense of mass outrage — and target that synthetic anger at those in charge. The authorities on the receiving end feel so besieged that they succumb to the demands and threats.

Heaven help any student who doesn’t bow before the Stepford mentality. The students’ union at Edinburgh recently passed a motion to ‘End lad banter’ on campus. Laddish students are being forced to recant their bantering ways. Last month, the rugby club at the London School of Economics was disbanded for a year after its members handed out leaflets advising rugby lads to avoid ‘mingers’ (ugly girls) and ‘homosexual debauchery’. Under pressure from LSE bigwigs, the club publicly recanted its ‘inexcusably offensive’ behaviour and declared that its members have ‘a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter’. They’re being made to take part in equality and diversity training. At British unis in 2014, you don’t just get education — you also get re-education, Soviet style. …

MORE.

Rest In Peace, Dennis O’Keeffe

Family, Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, Liberty

I met Dennis O’Keeffe, of blessed memory, at a Liberty Fund colloquium entitled “History, Citizenship and Patriotism in Liberal Democracy,” where Dennis—a professor of sociology at the University of Buckingham and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs—was in his element.

David Conway, a mutual friend and a stellar scholar too, had invited me to partake in an exchange of ideas with some of the finest minds in Britain. With his twinkling blue eyes, sonorous voice, and beautiful mind, Dennis was the star. Not only was he a beautiful mind; Dennis was a beautiful person to know and be around. A patrician, the dashing Dennis was also kind, sweet, humble; with an uncanny ability to engage intellectually and personally with interlocutors.

Needless to say, that the idyllic and breathtaking setting of the Ockenden Manor in Cuckfield, West Sussex, England, and the intimate quorum—only fifteen people partook—was conducive not only to the exploration of ideas, but to the forging of an enduring friendship.

Dennis and I were in epistolary contact until That Fateful Day, also the beginning of the end. From May 2006, until Dennis’ last missive to me, on November 11, 2010—we exchanged close to 100 emails. In his last letter, Dennis wrote:

Dear Ilana

I will happily write a foreword to your book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” You can send me the text electronically I guess. … I suspect you are up against a mix of fear and sentimentality. This is much the same in the British case. The issues are of vast importance, both philosophically and practically. If South Africa goes down the toilet, down the Zimbabwe road, the outlook for Africa will be even grimmer than it is already.

Love
Dennis

Upon the publication of his last book, “Edmund Burke,” also in 2010, I introduced Dennis to my readers, via a two-part conversation. The titles should give you an idea of what fun Dennis and I had:

* “Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara” (10/22/2010)

* “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture” (10/29/2010)

I love you, Dennis O’Keeffe.
Preach It in Heaven.

The Grubby Jonathan Gruber: Typical Social Sciences Ph.D. from MIT

Education, Healthcare, Intellectualism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudo-intellectualism

A Ph.D. from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Jonathan Gruber is an unscholarly political hack, burdened by political ambition and unburdened by a scholarly mind. Gruber embodies what the American academy tends to produce in the social sciences these days: pure dreck. The guys is a crass opportunist; a charlatan, nothing more.

Here, Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, blurts out how and why you were deceived about the law (as the likes of myself warned those who would not listen).

… this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay, so it was written to do that. …. if you had a law that made explicit that healthy people would pay in and sick people would get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever but basically that was really really critical to get this thing to pass… I wish we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this [Obamacare] law than not.

Liberal Vs. Libertarian Response To Ferguson (Rand’s Just An Opportunist)

Britain, Intellectualism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Racism

“Liberal outrage over what some see as racial injustice” vs. libertarian anger “that connects the perceived overreaction by a militarised local law enforcement to [a libertarian] critique of the heavy-handed power of government”: As expected, BBC News adopts a more analytical angle on the “unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer.”

Expected too is BBC’s take on the libertarian scene. As its libertarian stand-bearers, BBC News has chosen from the ranks of Beltway libertarians, conservatives and Republican congressmen and senators.

“The state is big and powerful and violent and can hurt you, whether it’s the FDA, the state prosecutor or the local police force,” writes Hot Air blog’s Mary Katharine Ham, concisely summarising the gist of this libertarian argument.
Breitbart’s John Nolte puts it a bit more sharply: “The media hate police but without them, who will ultimately force us to buy ObamaCare and confiscate our guns?”
On Wednesday night Congressman Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning Republican embraced by the grass-roots Tea Party movement, tweeted that the news from Ferguson was “frightening”, asking: “Is this a war zone or a US city? Gov’t escalates tensions w/military equipment & tactics.”
One of the leading figures in today’s libertarian movement, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul

In his response to Ferguson, as is his wont, Sen. Rand Paul managed to straddle liberal and libertarian narratives, vaporizing idiotically as follows:

“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention.”

Rand is the very embodiment of political opportunism.