Censorship at Central High School In Philadelphia

This is actually an older story by a couple of months… however, this is the first time I have heard of it and was more-than-happy to share with people Michael Moroz’s story and his intelligence and clarity on issues. I have to agree with Prager, young men like Michael do give me hope for our country. The abatement of free speech or counter-points is something akin to totalitarian governments AND I guess, schools. I just posted before this post on similar issues, see “…But Then I Started College.”

…But Then I Started College

This comes via the Harvard Crimson… which will surely be shut down do to it violating the feelings of a minority of students (h/t to Twitchy & Truth Revolt):

I used to believe that open discourse was a value all Americans hold dear. I presumed that when asked about what makes America so unique, many Americans would respond that our pluralistic society is the foundation of so much of our success. That it was understood that without a marketplace of ideas, our society simply could not flourish.

But then I started college.

Since the beginning of my freshman year, I have come to believe that a more fitting way to describe the current culture on college campuses is a culture defined not by open expression—but by sensitivity. This undue focus on feelings has caused the college campus to often feel like a place where one has to monitor every syllable that is uttered to ensure that it could not under any circumstance offend anyone to the slightest degree. It sometimes feels as though pluralism has become an antiquated concept. Facts and history have been discarded, and instead feelings have been deemed to be the criteria that determine whether words and actions are acceptable.

It is important to have organizations and movements on college campuses that work toward protecting individuals’ identities. The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of new identities, and students should become aware of and respect the plethora of new identities that have recently emerged. But many of these movements have gone too far.

Take the University of New Hampshire’s “Bias-Free Language Guide.” The list was compiled to inform students of words that are considered offensive in conversation. According to the guide, which was removed from the school’s website a few months ago after it incited controversy, the word “American” is unacceptable, for it fails to recognize people of South American origin. “American,” it argues, should be replaced with “resident of the U.S.” The words “senior citizens,” “older people,” and “elders” should also be eliminated, and instead replaced with “people of advanced age” and “old people.” If we’re at a point where it is offensive to say that your 90-year-old grandparent is a senior citizen, it seems that pretty soon, there may not be any neutral words left.

[….]

In a class I attended earlier this semester, a large portion of the first meeting was devoted to compiling a list of rules for class discussion. A student contended that as a woman, she would be unable to sit across from a student who declared that he was strongly against abortion, and the other students in the seminar vigorously defended this declaration. The professor remained silent. In a recent conversation with peers, I posed a question about a verse from the Bible. A Harvard employee in the room immediately interjected, informing me that we were in a safe space and I was thus not permitted to discuss the controversial biblical passage. And these are just stories from the past three months.

The assaults on free expression have dire consequences. The rise of the microagression movement has been reported to be detrimental to mental health on campus. Students’ emotional distress is increasing as educators presume that fragile undergraduates need to be protected from any form of dissent. Administrators must recognize that the current restrictions are incompatible with the very premise and goal of an education.

It is time to stop focusing on feelings as the criteria for speech and actions on the college campus.

(More by Rachel E. Huebner)

While we are on the topic of censorship… Dennis Prager gives us an update to Marquette University’s Censorship of Professor John McAdams and other students:

This next video brings a damning aspect to university campuses in that it speaks to the worst countries for freedom of speech:

Lewandowski Case Weak ~ Greta Van Susteren

Greta and her guests all agreed there is no way they can win this case in court and the only reason Corey was charged was because he is associated with Donald Trump. Greta said,

  • “In my wildest dreams I don’t see how a jury ever convicts on this with all the ambiguity. In fact, it looks like two Secret Service who were protecting Donald Trump are reaching for her. I don’t know whether or not that is what is provoking the bruises or not. That’s the problem. Here’s your reasonable doubt right there.”

Here is the actual statement by Miss Fields:

  • Trump acknowledged the question, but before he could answer I was jolted backwards. Someone had grabbed me tightly by the arm and yanked me down. I almost fell to the ground, but was able to maintain my balance. Nonetheless, I was shaken.

Cultural Appropriation Alert: Honkeys Cannot Have Dreadlocks

To me, this is an example of the left eating itself. This hippie-dippie kid is probably left-wing, and this BLM styled activist is a leftist… and one is telling the other to groom themselves a certain way. I guess she is an employee of the university, but we will soon (like Iran) have a dress code police. Something Walter Williams coined as “lifestyle Nazis” (one and two). The positive thing that may come out of these types of experiences is that we will get more Republican voters as they leave the crazy left.

People were in a tizzy over Mitt Romney’s forced haircut on a fellow student. The Left said this prank was enough to disqualify him from the Presidency. Yet, here, we see the Left wanting to forcefully cut hair due to “cultural appropriation.” Breitbart notes:

The video begins with the woman threatening the man by asking her friend whether he has a pair of scissors.

An argument ensues as the student insists on his right to have dreadlocks regardless of the style’s cultural origins.

“You’re saying I can’t have this hairstyle because of your culture? Why?” asks the student.

“Because it’s my culture,” responds the student.

The woman proceeds to grab him as he begins to walk away from the situation. When the white student pushes back, she accuses the man of putting his hands on her….

The Argument from Reason ~ David Wood

(H/T ~ Debunking Atheists)

….Darwin thought that, had the circumstances for reproductive fitness been different, then the deliverances of conscience might have been radically different. “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill  their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering” (Darwin, Descent, 82). As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring.

But this strongly suggests that we would have had whatever beliefs were ultimately fitness producing given the circumstances of survival. Given the background belief of naturalism, there appears to be no plausible Darwinian reason for thinking that the fitness-producing predispositions that set the parameters for moral reflection have anything whatsoever to do with the truth of the resulting moral beliefs. One might be able to make a case for thinking that having true beliefs about, say, the predatory behaviors of tigers would, when combined with the understandable desire not to be eaten, be fitness producing. But the account would be far from straightforward in the case of moral beliefs.” And so the Darwinian explanation undercuts whatever reason the naturalist might have had for thinking that any of our moral beliefs is true. The result is moral skepticism.

If our pretheoretical moral convictions are largely the product of natural selection, as Darwin’s theory implies, then the moral theories we find plausible are an indirect result of that same evolutionary process. How, after all, do we come to settle upon a proposed moral theory and its principles as being true? What methodology is available to us?

  • Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, eds., Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists & Other Objections (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2009), 70.

See more at my post: Evolution Cannot Account for: Logic, Reasoning, Love, Truth, or Justice

Caution – Babies on Campus (Updated w/Heather Mac Donald)

Via The College Fix

Heather Mac Donald has an excellent article in the City Journal:

The president of Emory University is the latest campus leader to grovel before narcissistic, delusional students, raising the question yet again: What do seemingly adult administrators so fear in their uneducated young charges?

Earlier this week, several dozen Emory students barged into the school’s administration building to demand protection from “Trump 2016” slogans that had been written in chalk on campus walkways. Acting out a by-now standardized psychodrama of oppression and vulnerability, the students claimed that seeing Trump’s name on the sidewalk confirmed that they were “unsafe” at Emory. College sophomore Jonathan Peraza led the allegedly traumatized students in a chant: “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” (This accusation of “not listening” was a thankfully toned-down version of the shriek “Be quiet!,” screamed by a Yale student last fall at her college master during an expletive-filled tirade.) As the Emory protesters entered the administration building, they drew on the Communist Manifesto(probably the only political theory they have even heard of) to express their pitiable plight: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

The order of the day was feelings. “What are we feeling?” protest leader Peraza asked his fellow sufferers, consistent with the neo-Victorian sentimentalism currently dominant on campuses. “Frustration” and “fear” were the answers. “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” a student told an Emory Wheel reporter. “I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”

Showing the viral nature of student self-pity, the Emory protesters leveraged their Trump-induced “pain” and “unsafety” into the same demand for more diversity hires made last fall by Black Lives Matter student protesters on campuses across the country. The Emory students also picked up on an exculpatory meme most recently on display at Brown University: the claim that affirmative-action admits are not competitive scholastically because they are so burdened by the need to create safe spaces for themselves. An Emory student told President James Wagner that “people of color are struggling academically because they are so focused on trying to have a safe community.”

Put aside for a moment the students’ ignorant demand for protection from political speech. Their self-image as immiserated proletarians, huddled together for safety and support, is pure fantasy. In fact, they are the most privileged group of human beings in history, enjoying unfettered access to intellectual, scientific, and social resources that would have been the envy of every monarch in the age of absolutism. And any college adult who has any sense of his responsibility to fit his charges for an objective relationship to reality would seek to convey that truth. By contrast, rewarding students’ delusional self-pity only increases the likelihood that they will fail to take advantage of the enormous intellectual riches at their fingertips and go through life with self-defeating chips on their shoulders. But President Wagner followed slavishly in the footsteps of virtually every other college president confronted by student claims of “unsafety”—he rolled over completely.

[….]

Any college president who adopts the rhetoric of “safe spaces” is already lost….

Leftist Ideals Exemplified ~ Cuba vs. North Carolina

Listen to “Ep. 96 – Worst. President. Ever.” on Spreaker.

Description of the above audio: Worst President Ever

Andrew dissects Obama’s insane interaction with Raoul Castro;

and discusses how a culture of narcissism weakens capitalism

  • New York’s Democratic governor banned state travel to North Carolina this week, citing its residents’ supposed lack of equal protection under the law, weeks after he announced efforts to facilitate travel from New York to Cuba, which is ruled by a repressive communist dictatorship that routinely imprisons political dissenters. (Washington Free Beacon)

GAY PATRIOT opines well:

The left-wing Governor of New York is banning state employees from traveling to North Carolina, on the basis that barring biological males from using the women’s bathroom is the worst violation of Human Rights in the History of Everything.

On the other hand, traveling to the Communist Island Gulag of Cuba is something he supports and encourages.

[….]

I guess the difference is that northeastern leftists prefer Communists to Southern Christians; [you see,] they understand Communists.

ALLEN WEST links to this article at MENTAL RECESSION:

Symbolism aside, this is the same Democrat Governor who recently traveled to Cuba to establish trade relations with a country notorious for their poor civil and human rights record.

Cuba has no anti-discrimination laws currently regarding the provisions of goods and services. None. They have no anti-discrimination laws regarding hate speech against particular groups. But they do have a constitutional ban against same-sex marriage.

Yet Cuomo seems perfectly fine with that.

North Carolina’s alleged intolerance – Bad. Cuba’s proven intolerance – *shrug*