Liberal Trinity

The Cultural Marxist Brainwash Exemplified ~ Dennis Prager (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

An instructive call into the Dennis Prager show from a larger interview (below) exemplifies how well the university brainwashes young people. Amazingly sad.

Here is the fuller interview:

Dennis Prager interviews Olivia Legaspi of Haverford College about her recent column, “What Working At McDonald’s Taught Me About Privilege.” Some interesting calls into the show cause great insights by Dennis Prager.

This is some excellence in air time explaining what the colleges are doing to young people.

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/ ~ see also: http://www.prageruniversity.com/

Political Correctness Devastates UCLA ~ Who Killed the Liberal Arts?

Published by Papa Giorgio

What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to transmit the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, writers, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. But today, that same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that reinforce a sense of victimhood and narcissism. So, what happened? Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains.

UCLA now is about as worthwhile as a local community college. You no longer go to these institutions to learn about great ideas, but now must listen to the static of EVERYTHING being made equally great by the magic wand of the left. Dennis Prager read from — and commented on — Heather Mac Donald’s Wall Street Journal article about UCLA nixing classical studies as mandatory for English lit majors. Here is some of that article as read above:

The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity
When Shakespeare lost out to ‘rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class’ at UCLA, something vital was harmed.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.

In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

Such defenestrations have happened elsewhere, and long before 2011. But the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the school’s English department was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature, uncorrupted by an ideological overlay. Precisely for that reason, it was the most popular English major in the country, enrolling a whopping 1,400 undergraduates.

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.

Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.

[….]

Compare the humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate, who had been required by the school’s core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race and class.”

“Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in “Great Books,” his 1997 account of re-enrolling in Columbia’s core curriculum. “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today.

W.E.B. Du Bois would have been stunned to learn how narrow is the contemporary multiculturalist’s self-definition and sphere of interest. Du Bois, living during America’s darkest period of hate, nevertheless heartbreakingly affirmed in 1903 his intellectual and spiritual affinity with all of Western civilization: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

It is no wonder, then, that we have been hearing of late that the humanities are in crisis. A recent Harvard report from a committee co-chaired by the school’s premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57% of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: “If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . .” How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley?

No, the only true justification for the humanities is that they provide the thing that Faust sold his soul for: knowledge. It is knowledge of a particular kind, concerning what men have done and created over the ages.

…read more…

News Media vs. Video Games (#GamerGate)

Published by Papa Giorgio

ABC joins Fox News, MSNBC and the rest of the news media who have been attacking the games industry for decades. Their bias knows no bounds, their research knows no objectivity, and their reporters know not a damn thing. Welcome to Gaming.

Gay Patriot adds to the real narrative well:

It would be nice to live in a society where we could play our video games, go to our sporting events, watch our entertainment programs and not be assaulted by the dogma of Social Justice Warriors. It would be just as nice to live in a society where journalists reported facts accurately, instead of molding them to fit a narrative.

Liberalism Devours Itself ~ Gay Patriot and Steven Crowder Comment

Published by Papa Giorgio

…As I read it, I could not help but wonder whether there is race fluidity in addition to gender fluidity? If a person can be whatever gender they want to be despite the biological reality of their genetic and physical make-up, then why can’t they be whatever race they feel they are? Why should those same rules not apply to race?

It used to be thought that a man claiming to be a woman had no more grip on reality than a man claiming to be Napoleon or a bunny rabbit. But the culture has evolved, and society has decided that for a man to be woman requires nothing more than hormone treatments, surgery, and make-up. (Which, as an aside, seems rather insulting to real biological women.) If race is an identity, than why should people have any less right to determine what their race in addition to their gender?…

(Gay Patriot!)

This is what I posted in the comment section of Gay Patriot:

As I see it… the Left is devouring itself… they are taking away their tools to separate and conquer. Undermining their won arguments of race-class-gender, and wanting to throw things like the 14th Amendment away. Each layer of their thinking is built on a false perception… soon they have so many layers in this house of cards that it will topple. I hope sooner than later.

I have been pointing this out for years, with the thanks to an author who wrote well on this topic of illiberal liberalism. Here is the idea in a nut shell that is expressed in his books:

“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it.  Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?”

Dale A. Berryhill, The Liberal Contradiction: How Contemporary Liberalism Violates Its Own Principles and Endangers Its Own Goals (1994), 172.

In other words… there are all these new “rights,” special rights — if you will — making “equal under the law” a thing of the past… thus, you have all these interest groups and new protections clashing. And they will eat each-other. But like I have said for years as well, this frustration of “Utopia Lost” makes the Left violent. Get ready, it will be a bumpy ride.

See my larger post on Rachel Dolezal:

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio vs. Reality!

Published by Papa Giorgio

My Take Eric Garner

What you don’t see in the Eric Garner video of his arrest:

Black female Sgt. was in charge of the arrest. She could have told the men taking him down to taze him (which still could have given him a heart-attack, BTW ~ that’s what killed him, a heart-attack).

They originally asked him to move down the street — away from the business that sells cigarettes lawfully. (And yes, I think the exorbitant taxes on cigarettes in NY is ridiculous… if you think it is too — QUIT VOTING DEMOCRAT!).

[In other words, Mr. Garner wouldn’t have been there in the first place if fiscal conservatives were voted into office there. He might have been in jail — and not home for Christmas — for a 32nd criminal code violation on his already 31 priors and resisting arrest, record.]

The video we are all familiar with is the very end of the incident… it doesn’t show the previous 13-M i N u T e S.

Do you see why the grand-jury maybe decided not to indite? They have 25 (I think) grand jury members on a grand jury in NY and need only 12 of them to say “yes” to indictment. They couldn’t get even twelve. This will all be public soon, but I wonder if ANY wanted to indite?

(Out of all Mr. Garner’s bad choices, one can see that his worst choice has most likely put him in a place worse than that choke hold. Sad. #UnrepentantLife)

Via Jason Riley (Wall Street Journal):

Beauty

We now know that Michael Brown was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor in the name of helping them.

The black teen in Ferguson, Mo., robbed a store, attacked a white police officer and was shot dead while resisting arrest. That was the conclusion of a St. Louis County grand jury that brought no charges against the officer after considering all the physical evidence, along with eyewitness accounts from blacks in the vicinity of the confrontation.

Not that any amount of evidence would have stopped the hooligans in Ferguson Monday night who were determined use Brown’s death as a pretext for more bad behavior. Nor will evidence thwart liberals who are bent on making excuses for black criminality and pretending that police shootings are responsible for America’s high black body count.

According to the FBI, homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Liberals like to point out that most whites are killed by other whites, too. That’s true but beside the point given that the white crime rate is so much lower than the black rate.

Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of “over-policing” certain neighborhoods to juice black arrest rates. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the emergency calls originate, and they spend much of their time trying to stop residents of the same race from harming one another.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani pointed this out recently on “Meet the Press” in a debate with sociologist Michael Eric Dyson. “What about the poor black child that is killed by another black child? Why aren’t you protesting that?” Mr. Giuliani asked.

“Those people go to jail,” Mr. Dyson responded. “I do protest it. I’m a minister. They go to jail.”

Mr. Dyson might want to try protesting a little harder. Chicago had 507 murders in 2012, only 26% of which were solved. “To put it another way: About three-quarters of the people who killed someone in Chicago in 2012 have gotten away with murder—so far, at least,” Chicago Magazine noted. Mr. Dyson and others on the left are not oblivious to this black pathology, but they are at pains even to acknowledge it, let alone make it a focus. Instead, liberals spend their time spotlighting white racism, real or imagined, and touting it as an all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes.

Ferguson helps further that agenda in ways that Chicago does not. Hence, the left posits that the Michael Brown shooting is the norm, even though the data show that it’s the exception. And if black criminal behavior is a response to white racism, how is it that black crime rates were lower in the 1940s and 1950s, when black poverty was higher, racial discrimination was rampant and legal, and the country was more than a half-century away from twice electing a black president?

Racial profiling and tensions between the police and poor black communities are real problems, but these are effects rather than causes, and they can’t be addressed without also addressing the extraordinarily high rates of black criminal behavior—yet such discussion remains taboo. Blacks who bring it up are sell-outs. Whites who mention it are racists. (Mr. Dyson accused Mr. Giuliani of “white supremacy.”) But so long as young black men are responsible for an outsize portion of violent crime, they will be viewed suspiciously by law enforcement and fellow citizens of all races….

…read it all…

Concepts: `The Old But Better GOP` (Glass Ceilings)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Besides John van Huizum undermining his entire case to show that any of the supposed (granting him the idea that his positions are true) disparities he lists have any value in being “unfair,” or “wrongs” — see the last post on John’s thoughts — let us cherry pick just one example from his many above “bumper sticker” platitudes and dissect is a bit. (You may mouse over the pic to see the section.) In picking one seemingly true position and shedding some factual challenge to it should call into question John’s understanding of the rest.

“Assure equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex.”

Okay, I have written on this topic quite extensively, and this is just a portion from this larger writing:

(Alex Castellanos ended up writing a response to his above “tiff” with Maddow) This is partly an import from a previous post dealing with this topic via my old blog, and partly an update. In my original post entitle, Glass Ceilings, Veteran benefits, and Other Liberal Mantras, I chronicled the following:

The Glass Ceiling

President Clinton said that women make .73 cents on every man’s dollar. He used this as a campaign issue to try and smear Republicans. Kerry said that women make .76 cents on every man’s dollar, and likewise used this stat as a political smear. The question then is this, are these two persons correct?

YES! If you compare all men to all women, then yes, there is a disparage. This stat doesn’t take into account a few things. It doesn’t consider the fact that women tend to choose the humanities when entering college and men seem to choose the hard sciences. So by choice women tend to choose professions that pay less. Not only that, when you compare Oranges to Oranges, you get something much different than expected, or that we would expect from the liberal side of things. If a woman and a man have had the same level of education and have been on the same job for an equal amount of time, the woman makes $1,005 while a man makes $1,000, a difference of $5 dollars every thousand dollars a man earns.

So, the bottom line is that this platitude that John listed is a stat misused by the Left to portray [incorrectly] some disparaged class of people to rally around for political gain, not for gain of presenting truth. Sad.