Did Political Correctness Kill Antonio Calvo?

It didn’t happen in some despotic third world country. It happened at Princeton University, a pre-eminent educational institution. There a cabal of graduate student night riders forced a Spanish professor out of his job. Link here.

Antonio Calvo was a lecturer at Princeton. Apparently, he had once raised his voice to a female graduate student and had once made a vulgar and insulting remark to a male graduate student.

To the best of our knowledge, those were his crimes.

In the politically correct academy, Calvo’s statements were hanging offenses. A group of graduate students banded together to destroy his reputation and to make him a pariah on a campus where he had taught for ten years.

Not only was Calvo’s contract not renewed, but Princeton University subjected him to the humiliation of being escorted off the campus in mid-semester, like a common criminal.

A Spanish immigrant, Calvo’s green card had been sponsored by Princeton. In the ultimate indignity he was going to be expelled from the United States.

It was more than Calvo could bear. He went home and stabbed himself to death. Score one for the thought police.

Funny thing, if Calvo were an illegal immigrant who had snuck across the border, these same graduate students would surely have defended his right to stay in the country.

Now, Princeton has forbid all members of the Spanish department to talk to the press. Concerned with its own reputation, and unwilling to explain why a respected teacher was forcibly expelled from its campus, Princeton is enforcing a code of omerta.

As for those graduate students who destroyed Antonio Calvo, they have become mysteriously silent. If they believe in what they did and are proud of their actions, they should face the world and take responsibility for what they have done.

We can only hope that, before long, we will see their grimaced faces in the press.

Why Johnny Can't Write or Think

We know it so well that we believe that we are beyond being shocked. We know that political correctness has infected American universities to the point of turning education into ideological indoctrination. And we ought to know that this  process has dumbed down the experience to a point where it amounts to professional malpractice.

However well we know this, nothing really prepares us for for Mary Grabar’s account of a convention of university writing teachers. Link here.

Grabar explains: “After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested  in teaching students to write and communicate clearly.  The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against ‘marginalized‘ groups and restrict self-expression.”

This band of imbeciles has gone completely over to the dark side. They do not even pretend to be teaching writing; they could care less about whether or not their students can formulate a clear sentence that expresses a concept.

They want to use their professional expertise to indoctrinate their students into their ideology. They are almost surely grading their students based on their adherence to politically correct thought.

The examples are so egregious and so mindless that I could not have made them up if I had really tried. Grabar is especially taken by the trio of native American drummers whose “music” is supposed to be akin to expository prose. Naturally, that part of the program is capped off by a plea for everyone to learn to speak Cherokee.

It would take a very talented group of joke writers to invent that kinds of discussion topics that absorbed the interest of these English instructors.

Even then, if you are an outsider to the field, you would not laugh because you would never believe that any college instructor could be that stupid.

Surely, this malfeasance rises to the level of malpractice. It is grossly unethical for people who are being paid to teach English composition to refuse to teach English composition.

When you are hired to do one thing but do another, you are severely lacking in integrity. You are exploiting and abusing your professorial privilege.

These teachers are so thoroughly arrogant about abusing the system, and so thoroughly unaware of how unethical they are, that they do not even try to hide it.

Why should anyone care? Don‘t these academics have a right to their kumbaya moments? Doesn’t everyone?

Unfortunately for all of us, the people who are the core editors and writers in the mainstream media have probably had their skills honed in English composition classes where good prose style was ignored in favor of rants against white privilege.

If you wonder why so many journalists do not bother to offer an objective view of the facts, but are hell bent in forcing us to think the way they want us to think, the reason might be that they received indoctrination in place of education, that they were rewarded for political correct opinions and not prose style, and that they were taught by teachers who were  unethical and unprofessional.

They must have learned it somewhere.

Where the Jobs Are

In America we like to say that the states are the laboratories of democracy. We are a pragmatic people; we believe in trial and error; we want to see what does and does not work.

By now most of us have figured out that California does not work. And that Texas does. The exodus of jobs and citizens out of California is becoming so pronounced that even the politicians can see what is happening. John Fund reports here.

Fueled by liberal utopianism, California is becoming a great American dystopia. Unemployment in California is 12%; in Texas it’s 8%.  Seventy businesses have left California this year; fourteen of them have moved to Texas. With businesses leaving California at a rate of 4.7 a week, the exodus is accelerating. Last year businesses left at the rate of 3.9 a week.

A week ago a group of California legislators traveled to Texas to try to figure out why Chief Executive magazine rates Texas the best state to do business and California the worst. Given the advantages that California enjoys, it takes real effort to come in last in anything.

The largely Republican legislators were accompanied by Democratic Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom.

Where were the Democratic state legislators? You guessed it: the public employee unions prevailed on them not to go. As though anyone needed more evidence of labor union hostility to any policies that might lead to job creation.

As John Fund explains in the article linked above, there is nothing mysterious here. It’s not about what’s in the Texas water.

California is failing because of higher taxes and more regulations, accompanied by an obsession to impose a certain kind of liberated lifestyle.

Tax and regulate, empower labor unions, let tort lawyers go wild… you cannot have a better formula for creating a modern dystopia.

Oh, and by the way, while California has produced the worst business environment, it is doing its darndest to lead the nation in political correctness.

Fund points out: “And just as Texas business leaders were testifying about how the state's tort reforms had improved job creation, word came of California's latest priority: On April 14, the state senate passed a bill mandating that all public school children learn the history of disabled and gay Americans.

“One speaker from California shook his head in wonder: ‘You can have the most liberated lifestyle on the planet, but if you can't afford to put gas in your car or a roof over your head it's somewhat limited‘."

Why can’t California create jobs? Because they just do not care. They are otherwise preoccupied.

Political correctness is not just an absurdity; it is not just a dangerous absurdity that seeks to control people’s minds and circumscribe their freedoms. It distracts from the task at hand. If you do not work on the task at hand, it will not just get up and fix itself.

What's Your Anxiety Quotient?

Nearly everyone agrees that totalitarian cultures do not produce great art. An artist working for a communist or fascist dictatorship will invariably produce propaganda that looks like, but does not attain to the stature of, art.

The same is not true of artists who have worked under the patronage of the Catholic Church or Italian princes. Since these institutions are responsible for many of the greatest works of art in the Western world, they are, on this score, anything but repressive.

If totalitarian government makes bad art, does it also make people stupid? If you are being forced to toe the party line, if you are too afraid to question party orthodoxy, does that diminish your mental capacities?

Here, the question seems less clear. In the twentieth century many great thinkers have been lured by despots. Think of Martin Heidegger’s love affair with Naziism or the many European philosophers who plighted their mental troth to Marx, Stalin, and Mao.

Did their adherence to an ideology compromise their work? It may be true that a philosopher who admires Hitler might still say something interesting about Heraclitus, but once he gets involved in politically charged issues, one suspects that his mind will buckle under the weight to conform.

Again, the same does not seem to apply to theologians working under the auspices of the Catholic Church. Medieval Catholic theology is one of the greatest intellectual productions in the Western world. And it does involve considerable and substantive differences of opinion.

All that to introduce an article by one Taylor Clark. Without any doubt, Clark is not a great thinker. Even as a journalist who writes about matters psychological, he is simply mediocre. He is not nearly as good as Jonah Lehrer or Benedict Carey.

As opposed to those writers, Clark maintains a distinct bias toward feminist ideology. But, has his embrace of the feminist party line compromised his mental capacities? For today, that is the question. Link here.

You know the feminist party line: gender differences are not innate, but are socially constructed. Given what happened to the unfortunate Larry Summers when he dared opine that gender was not a social construct, we all understand why Clark would not want to run afoul of the feminist matriarchy.

As it happens, good feminists do not really believe in objective facts. This has help them to distort scientific research, the better to fulfill their ideological expectations.

As a good feminist, Clark is worried about the anxiety gap. By all rational measures, women have a higher anxiety quotient than men. Clark does not use the term anxiety quotient-- I bear the responsibility for that-- but he is at the ready to attack any measure that suggests that men and women are not identical.

One suspects that Clark is trotting out his own anxiety in a vague attempt to close the anxiety gap. After all, the gap can be closed by women becoming less anxious or by men becoming more anxious.

In his words: “Women, according to countless studies, are twice as prone to anxiety as men. When pollsters call women up, they always confess to far higher levels of worry than men about everything from crime to the economy. Psychologists diagnose women with anxiety disorders two times as often as men, and research confirms—perhaps unsurprisingly—that women are significantly more inclined toward negative emotion, self-criticism, and endless rumination about problems. From statistics like these, some have even leapt to the Larry Summers-esque claim that women are simply built to be much more nervous than men—an idea that has outraged many women inside (and outside) the psychology community.”

Actually, it’s feminists, not scientists, who have been the most outraged. That might lead us to ask how much scientific research has been skewed in order to placate chronically outraged feminists?

Mustering a level of confidence and arrogance that we often find among the brainwashed, Clark asserts what his feminist minders want him to assert. Gender, vis-à-vis the anxiety gap, is a social construct.

In his words: “While women are indeed more fretful than men on average right now, this difference is mostly the result of a cultural setup—one in which major social and parenting biases lead to girls becoming needlessly nervous adults. In reality, the idea that women are ‘naturally’ twice as anxious as men is nothing more than a pernicious illusion.”

Pernicious to whom, exactly?

Clark does not answer this question, even though it is, as we shall see, salient.

Apparently, researchers have observed that little boys are, if anything, slightly more anxious than little girls. They have also seen that the situation changes markedly after the children reach puberty.

Does this suggest that the anxiety gap has something to do with biological, not social, realities?

Yes, and no. Clark and his team of crack researchers conclude that it’s not about puberty per se, but about the way parents react to puberty. In case you didn‘t know, it’s all in the discourse.

In Clark’s words: “Well, one answer is that as a flood of adolescent hormones sends these boys' and girls' emotions into overdrive, the difference in their upbringings finally catches up with them. After all, whether parents intend to or not, they usually treat the emotional outbursts of girls far differently than those of boys.”

Now the fault lies in the fact that parents treat male and female children differently. One has a right to be somewhat surprised. After all, haven’t all of these parents received a full dose of feminist indoctrination? Don’t they know that it is heresy to treat boys and girls differently.

This line of argument also suggests that we should not trust parents to bring  up their children, but rather, that we should put all of our trust in ideological zealots who pretend to be scientists.

As Clark sees it, parents tend to tell anxious boys to suck it up; then, they try to shelter their pubescent daughters from life’s challenges. This apparently explains why girls have a higher AQ than boys, and why women have a higher AQ than men.

Let’s all take a deep breath and do a little reality check. When boys and girls reach adolescence, their bodies change in very different ways. Where boys and girls were roughly equal in size and strength before puberty, after it, for reasons that have nothing to do with the patriarchy or  parental bias, boys become bigger, stronger, and more aggressive.

This is the natural consequence of ginned-up testosterone production.

Some of that new aggression is directed toward other boys, through team sports, video games, and even gang activity. But some of it will be directed toward girls. Even when it is not directed toward girls, girls tend to feel threatened in its presence. Because they are not as strong....

Is it crazy to teach girls that, by virtue of puberty, they have become more vulnerable to male aggression and male predatory tendencies?

Why ignore the fact that a heightened AQ is adaptive? It allows girls to avoid potentially dangerous encounters with boys and men.

Girls have more anxiety because they have more to be anxious about. Being more vulnerable, and recognizing that they are more vulnerable, they are more anxious. It's not that complicated.

A woman walking home late at night is likely to be more anxious, thus, more on her guard, than a man. Is there anything strange about that? Would you prefer that she be less anxious and more reckless in her behavior?

If she is your daughter, I would wager that you would have a strong opinion on the matter, and not because you are a dupe of the patriarchy.

We should note that if you think that girls’ high AQ has nothing to do with anything real, then you are saying that all girls and women have been subjected to mind control.

Clark’s argument is profoundly disrespectful to women and to their feelings.

In short, there is no real mystery. If you are smart enough to reject feminist dogma, you will have no problem  understanding why girls might be more anxious than boys and why it is not necessarily such a bad thing.

It is not a difficult point; it is almost too obvious to mention. Yet, Taylor Clark, good feminist that he is, misses it completely. You've heard it before, perhaps not often enough, but: Beware male feminists!

Feminism claims that women are as strong, as tough, and as aggressive as men. For this reason they do not need anyone‘s protection. The old ethic that makes men protectors of women is outmoded and detrimental. It‘s sole purpose is to make women feel weak.

Once girls discover that they are fated to be smaller, weaker, and less aggressive, they will also discover that men are not allowed to claim to protect them. This gives them even more reason to be anxious.

You might believe that no one is really dumb enough to believe that, from adolescence forward, the biological differences between men and women should not have emotional consequences.

You would be wrong.

While it is implicit in Clark’s feminist analysis, it is explicit in television crime dramas.

The next time you are watching an episode from one of the Law and Order shows, or any other television crime drama, you will notice that whenever there is a violent altercation, even an actual fight, between a female police officer and a larger male criminal, the female police officer almost always wins.

I often wonder how stupid the shows’ producers think we are. If you are not smart enough to recognize propaganda when you see it, the shows leave you with the impression that women need not be more anxious than men because they are just as strong as men. If that is true, then it is fine and good for a woman to act as a man would act in any and all circumstances.

A woman would therefore have a choice. She can either listen to her anxiety and heed its message, or she can take unnecessary risks because feminism has told her that she is just as strong as a man. If she then gets hurt, she can feel that she has martyred herself for the cause.

The Blogosphere versus the Punditocracy

This month the New York Times put up a pay wall. I was not even tempted to subscribe.

I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and happily pay for the Economist.

When purchasing anything, we look at the value of the product. Is it worth the price? With the New York Times, it clearly isn’t.

Occasionally, the Times prints something compelling. But since political correctness has so thoroughly infiltrated its journalistic marrow that it can’t be trusted to report the news objectively, that seems to me to undermine its claim to my or anyone else’s money.

Of course I still have access to some Times material through Twitter, and I do comment on its material… mostly because it influences the way New Yorkers think and the way the news is covered in the media.

When it comes to the ramblings of its columnists I am amazed at how bad most of it is.

You wouldn’t want to be shipwrecked on the intellectual version of a desert island and have only Tom Friedman, Nick Kristof, Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman and their ilk to provide you with mental sustenance.

Pretty soon, you would become a living echo of vapid party line thinking. And you would think that you were saying something interesting and intelligent.

Such is the price of believing the hype that surrounds the New York Times.

According to Rob Long at the Ricochet blog and John Hinderaker at Powerline, it makes sense that the mainstream media hates the blogosphere. It turns out that bloggers are more competent and more expert on various subjects than are the supposedly deep thinkers at places like the New York Times.

Some bloggers have ripped away the veil of illusion that is covers the general ineptitude of Tom Friedman.

Hinderaker succinctly states: “Still, Friedman must be one of the most overrated people in the world.”

What occasioned this critique? Over at the Ricochet blog Rob Long unearthed a Friedman prediction from 1999. He discovered that Friedman had predicted that online bookseller and retailer Amazon was doomed to fail.

As is his general wont, Friedman larded up his prediction with some pseudo-cleverness about how someone working out of his living room in Iowa could easily crush Amazon.

As Long analyzed it, the problem was not that Friedman was wrong. The problem lay elsewhere.

In Long’s words: “Look the point isn't that Friedman made a stupid prediction.  We all make stupid predictions.  The point is that we have a pundit class that's uniquely unqualified to pronounce on business, and business opportunities, and yet arrogantly and pompously does so anyway.  There's something monumentally irritating about Friedman's flatulently confident assertions, backed up as they are without a shred of experience, knowledge, or skin in the game.  It's worth remembering -- especially these days, when business and economic predictions keep erupting from the noisy, nasty, uninformed bowels of the pundit class.”

Reading this, John Hinderaker was inspired to check out how Amazon stock had performed since the moment that Friedman dissed it. Then he took a look at the performance of New York Times stock.

You know where this is going. While Amazon has grown and expanded and enriched its stockholders-- even counting the tech wreck of 2000-- the New York Times stock has collapsed.

In Hinderaker’s words: “… there is a delicious irony in the fact that there is indeed one industry with respect to which Friedman's dire prediction came true: Friedman's own industry, journalism. It turns out that amateurs, many of whom have far more expertise with respect to business, politics, the arts--you name it--than Tom Friedman and other pundits with newspaper columns can, almost for free, turn out exactly the same product that Friedman does. Only better.”

When you get right down to it, Hinderaker adds, the reason why people no longer rely on the mainstream media for information and opinion, is that the quality is lacking. If the barons who control these media outlets whined less and stopped blaming technology, then perhaps they would see that their own editorial practices have contributed significantly to their downfall.

If all you’re reading is Tom Friedman you might imagine that he has something interesting to say. I hope you don’t, but you might. If you have access to a variety of opinions offered by people who are not members of the pundit class, then you will discover that membership in the pundit class is anything but merit-based.

In Hinderaker‘s words: “The Times has declined for a number of reasons, but one of the important ones is that citizen journalism turned out to be not just a viable alternative, but a superior alternative, to the myopia that Friedman and his colleagues represent. Friedman was perceptive enough to diagnose the problem that micro-competition could cause for Amazon (albeit incorrectly) but not perceptive enough to apply the same reasoning to his own industry. That fact speaks volumes about how much trust we should put in the pundit class, especially when it opines about business matters.”

"Academic Grade Redistribution-- or-- Liberal Tax Policy"

You've heard the arguments for income redistribution through tax policy. What if someone took those arguments and applied them to college grades? In fact, our friends at XtraNormal have done it, in a great video. My thanks to commenter Phocion for having brought this to our attention. 

Altruism and the Darwinians

In the world of  Darwinian science, altruism has always posed a problem. If our true purpose is to transmit our genes to the next and generations to come, how does it happen that people perform altruistic and self-sacrificing actions that will diminish their chance of passing on their genes in favor of someone else’s.

At least, that’s the way I understand this complicated question.

Darwinian theory explains selfishness very well. And it assumes that our selfish behaviors are dictated and directed by genetic necessity. We act selfishly in order to transmit our genetic makeup, because our genes desire to sustain themselves, to live on throughout the generations.

But, does altruistic behavior disprove Darwin?

Today, most evolutionary biologists have explained altruism by noting that we share our genes with our close relatives. One person can sacrifice himself for the good of his family and his relations.

In that way, his genes, in part, though not as a whole, will live on, and will have a better opportunity to continue to live on.

This is called kin selection theory.

Now, what would it mean, from a Darwinian perspective, to say that someone has given his life for his country? This level of selflessness does not make a lot of sense.

Kin selection theory would claim that the soldier lays down his life for his cousins, not his country. If that is true, then we are simply deluding ourselves when we say that we are loyal and honor-bound to defend our country?

Let's imagine people who become true believers in Darwin. Do they believe that their purpose in life is to pass on their genes? Do they believe that patriotism is outmoded and useless, that they owe nothing to their community or nation, and that it suffices that they fulfill their biological destiny by reproducing. Perhaps they believe that they owe a few altruistic gestures to those who are connected by blood, but, beyond that, they are not ethically bound.

It would appear, to this novice in the field, that there is no real place for nobility or loyalty or for feelings of belonging to a community. It’s all about a bunch of selfish genes that are making you do what they need you to do in order to survive.

So, now, along comes the eminent Darwinian entomologist Edward O. Wilson declaring that the theory of kin selection is wrong, because human beings are motivated by an independent wish to promote the success and survival of their social group.

Wilson just wrote a paper raising this issue in the journal Nature. It provoked a torrent of criticism, something that often happens when someone, even an eminent authority, attacks received dogmas.

The dispute became loud enough to have reached the mainstream press. The Boston Globe reported: “The alternative theory holds that the origins of altruism and teamwork have nothing to do with kinship or the degree of relatedness between individuals. The key, Wilson said, is the group: Under certain circumstances, groups of cooperators can out-compete groups of non-cooperators, thereby ensuring that their genes — including the ones that predispose them to cooperation — are handed down to future generations. This so-called group selection, Wilson insists, is what forms the evolutionary basis for a variety of advanced social behaviors linked to altruism, teamwork, and tribalism — a position that other scientists have taken over the years, but which historically has been considered, in Wilson’s own word, ‘heresy.’”  Link here.

The article then quotes Wilson: “Human beings have an intense desire to form groups, and they always have….This powerful tendency we have to form groups and then have the groups compete, which is in every aspect of our social behavior...is basically the driving force that caused the origin of human behavior.”

I would question the use of the notion of desire here. All humans live in groups. This is a natural condition. I see no reason to imply that human beings start out as random individuals and then come together into a group.

I am not, as I say, an expert in this field. So I looked up an article on natural selection in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Link here. There I discovered that the theory of group selection has a distinguished progenitor.

It was first proposed by Darwin himself.

Here is the SEP analysis: If selection acts exclusively at the individual level, favouring some individual organisms over others, then it seems that altruism cannot evolve, for behaving altruistically is disadvantageous for the individual organism itself, by definition. However, it is possible that altruism may be advantageous at the group level. A group containing lots of altruists, each ready to subordinate their own selfish interests for the greater good of the group, may well have a survival advantage over a group composed mainly or exclusively of selfish organisms. A process of between-group selection may thus allow the altruistic behaviour to evolve. Within each group, altruists will be at a selective disadvantage relative to their selfish colleagues, but the fitness of the group as a whole will be enhanced by the presence of altruists. Groups composed only or mainly of selfish organisms go extinct, leaving behind groups containing altruists.”

Also, “Darwin then argued that self-sarcrificial behaviour, though disadvantageous for the individual ‘savage’, might be beneficial at the group level: “a tribe including many members who...were always ready to give aid to each other and sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection” (p.166). Darwin's suggestion is that the altruistic behaviour in question may have evolved by a process of between-group selection.”

Is good character being caused by genetic necessities or is it something that correlates with a desired biological outcome?

As the Boston Globe writer explained: “Wilson is not arguing that members of certain species don’t sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their relatives. They do. But it’s his position that kinship and relatedness aren’t essential in causing the development of advanced social behaviors like altruism — that the reason such behaviors catch on is that they’re evolutionarily advantageous on a group level.”

Why are the Darwinians so upset about what Wilson has suggested? Perhaps they see a danger to their theory of basic human selfishness. Perhaps they have trouble accepting that a group has an existence and that it too defines certain moral imperatives. After all, a group, as opposed to a kinship cluster, is not a biological entity. It is a sociocultural entity.

The interest of the group may well coincide with the interest of genes, but this does not necessarily have to be biologically determined. What if, for example, the virtues of loyalty, patriotism, and nobility are meaningful outside of biological imperatives?