ONLY LEFTISTS CAN BE IN THE INTELLECTUAL ELITE (!)

I have just come across a bit of "sophisticated" debate on the blog of a Leftist academic. Get this from Brian Leiter: "Yes, it's true that when you raise the intellectual bar high, as serious universities do, you get fewer right-wing kooks, but that simply doesn't mean there is political indoctrination going on at universities. The fact that the U.S. has moved farther to the right during the same time period when the universities have allegedly moved to the left ought to be taken as empirical confirmation of that point." I guess that as a dumb psychologist I may have missed the point of this clever bit of legal reasoning but he seems to be saying that if more people are conservative and the universities are more leftist, the universities can only have got that way by raising their academic standards. But does not that equate higher intellectual standards with greater Leftism? So is he not assuming what he has to prove?

And it is presumably true by definition that "kooks" will be excluded by a higher intellectual standards but why does a higher intellectual standard exclude right-wing kooks only? Are we again asserting that only rightists are kooks? It appears that we are. Otherwise, why put "right-wing" in front of kooks? In Leiter's case, it would appear that abuse and assertion has taken the place of evidence and reasoning. I feel sorry for the law students he is allegedly teaching at the University of Texas. Or maybe my studies in analytical philosophy have just not equipped me for Leiter's version of logic. Maybe I am just a "kook".

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WHEN BLACK IS BROWN

The Leftist racists are reeling at Berkeley: "This fall, being black at Berkeley is likely to become even more of an anomaly than it already is. As of late spring, 98 black students had registered for fall enrollment out of an expected freshman class of 3,821... "Virtually every part of the campus is extremely concerned about the low numbers of underrepresented minorities and, in particular, the appallingly low numbers of African-Americans," Strait said. The fall enrollment figures came about six months after John Moores, chairman of UC's governing Board of Regents, issued a report saying Berkeley turned away thousands of students who aced the SAT but accepted hundreds - many of whom were black or Hispanic - with low scores". But there are more Asians than whites in the student body, so not all "minorities" are "underrepresented". But Asians don't make a place "diverse" of course -- don't ask me why!

But most amusing of all, note this quote: ""Don't go there thinking, 'I'm going to be looking around for other black kids,'" says Ward Connerly, a part-black UC regent who led the fight to drop race-based admissions". Apparently, if you oppose racism, you can only be "PART-black"! Funny that I have never heard any of the many coffee-coloured Leftists described that way. What a weird world the Left live in! Ideology even affects their colour-vision.

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ELSEWHERE

Leftists just hate the entire field of IQ research. The very idea that some people are smarter than others offends their "all men are equal" religion and the repeated finding that IQ is mostly genetically inherited means that they cannot blame low IQ on "society". So Leftist psychologists are always ducking and weaving in an effort to find some way of devaluing IQ. They normally do that by inventing "other" intellectual abilities that are independent of IQ. I have mentioned the feeble attempt by Sternberg in that direction previously so I guess I should mention another theory that is very popular among Leftists -- the Howard Gardner theory of "multiple intelligences" -- eight of them, would you believe? There is a very clear and simple demolition of the whole Gardner theory here -- which points out that the Gardner theory not only ignores the data but that its criteria for calling something "an intelligence" are so loose that sense of humour, sense of smell, musical ability, athletic ability etc could all be called "intelligences". By adopting similar rules I could say that all cats, dogs and horses are birds -- but that would still not make them so.

Selwyn Duke, from Mens News Daily says the sexualised abuses at Abu Ghraib are serious, but were they 'torture'? And why have the media had a sudden attack of morals? "...if you were weaned on MTV and Loveline, received constant messages that sex is a game, homosexuality a legitimate lifestyle and that what used to be called behaving like a slut is not degrading but the fruits of liberation, how likely would you be to recognize the gravity of the incidents at Abu Graib? Heck, there are some people - and I suspect you can find an inordinate number of them in the media - to whom that kind of behavior is recreation."

An acerbic comment from Peggy Noonan: "Europe is a post-Christian society on a continent devoted to the material except when it is considering astrology, witchcraft and worshiping rocks."

Roger Sandall is an ex-anthropologist and author of The Culture Cult. Reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement as "brilliant, sardonic, and impassioned", his attack on romantic primitivism (best known from the writings of Rousseau) ranges from discussions of the horrible decline and fall of anthropology, to the intellectual follies of thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Polanyi, to the baleful triumph of the anthropological meaning of "culture" in the humanities. It is neither polite nor politically correct: but it's a sure antidote to multicultural delusions.

There is a thought-provoking post here that sees concern over animal rights as a capitalist luxury. Without capitalism we would have much more pressing problems than animal rights to deal with.

Dick McDonald has just put up a heap of hard-hitting posts about current American politics. I had missed the news about America's soaring factory output and the way former knockers of it have ignored the turnaround.

Wicked Thoughts now has nine pictures up of the strange things you can encounter if you go shopping overseas.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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