-
America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution
July 16, 2010 | 649 comments
-
Reflection on Brains and Barack
March 31, 2010 | 149 comments
-
CIA’s Vulnerability Is Congenital
January 11, 2010 | 54 comments
-
Obama’s Foreign Policy Problems, Personified
November 7, 2009 | 6 comments
-
From Citizens to “Stakeholders”: The New American Constitution
September 8, 2009 | 50 comments
The Slaughterhouse
How Our Best and Brightest Think
Could it be that our “best” universities’ humanities departments are filled with pretentious poseurs? From our July-August issue.
Ark of the Liberties: America and the
World
By Ted Widmer
(Hill & Wang, 384 pages, $25)
To what extent has a generation of monopoly over academic life corrupted the monopolists’ intellectual standards? Could it be that our “best” universities’ humanities departments are filled with pretentious poseurs? This book is evidence that the corruption is very deep, and that the products of our most highly rated institutions are often ignorant excuses for cheap partisanship.
Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown library at Brown University, is a former aide to President Bill Clinton—twin peaks of the academic and political Establishment. His Ark of the Liberties carries endorsements from Sean Wilentz, famous Princeton history professor, as well as from Clinton and Senator Ted Kennedy. It covers American history from the 16th century to our time, and argues that Americans, though mostly bad, have always been the “ark” of ideals that should make mankind good. Hence it is a valuable window into what our ruling class thinks of America and its basis for so thinking—into the caliber of our rulers’ minds, and their content.
First, the caliber: Only recklessness explains how anyone with access to a library could make so many ignorant misstatements of fact. Thus Widmer tells us (and Professor Wilentz endorses!) that “before Columbus” Europeans regarded “the face of God, the distance of the sun…beyond the ken of mortals.” But every geometry student used to know that Eratosthenes of Alexandria triangulated Earth’s distance to the sun as 804 million stadia, within 1 percent of modern measurement. For Widmer, the Monroe Doctrine “was a tissue of highly exaggerated claims about what the United States would do…” But in Monroe’s 1823 speech and in J. Q. Adams’s authoritative diary—available in any library—there is not even a solitary hint of U.S. action. John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech supposedly “denounced liberty.” Not in the text that exists in every library. Widmer describes the U.S. Marines as “a land-based service branch.” But they are ever part of the Navy. In 1794’s Whiskey Rebellion, George Washington “led his army into battle against his own people once more.” But there was no battle. In the Mexican War, Widmer tells us, the United States “was extending slavery.” But none of the territories added to the U.S. by the Mexican war ended up as slave states. Widmer calls Thomas Jefferson’s, J. Q. Adams’s, and countless others’ observation that Cuba helps form the mouth of the Mississippi River “a dubious argument.” But this is a geographic fact to anyone who looks at the map with malice aforethought, as did Nazi submariners and the U.S. Navy in World War II. Woodrow Wilson had a “mystical communion with the founders.” But Wilson’s main book, Congressional Government (1885), argued explicitly that the Constitution impeded good government. Wilson’s main literary legacy is the argument that Washington’s foreign policy was wrong. Widmer also makes up stuff out of thin air: “By 1938 Germany had two thousand planes with a range of thirty-three hundred miles.” That would be news to Germany’s aircraft industry. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 State of the Union address supposedly boldly blamed the growing possibility of war “on autocrats in Europe and Asia.” Read that address: it contains no proper names. The point of the above list of utterances divorced from reality, which could go on ad nauseam, is that Widmer’s America is an artifact of willfully ignorant minds in echo chambers.
For such minds, the truth about anything takes a back seat to advancing their own agenda. Simply, Widmer & Co. want to rule America to adapt it to their own standards, for which they believe the world yearns. Indeed, they imagine that, under their aegis, something like that is already happening. On the jacket flap, Widmer writes: “America’s ambition to be the world’s guarantor of liberty…is a success story…”
Most Americans would brand such thoughts as madness. Is it imaginable to guarantee liberty to all the world? What success has the U.S. had at this? Yet Widmer tells us that America’s leaders must realize this dream, and that to do so they must be wary of the American people, who are in the grip of the idea that they “possess the key to religious truths that are unavailable to others.” They are also typically confident “in the right to expand indefinitely.” Such megalomania seems more characteristic of Widmer than of people you know.
What liberties does the “ark” carry? What liberties do Widmer et al. want to bestow on America and the world? Though Widmer does not argue explicitly, the answer is clear enough. He tells us that the 1791 slave revolt that rid Haiti of whites really was about “an African people fighting for their liberties” although their notion of liberty “fit uncomfortably” next to Americans’. He regrets that Woodrow Wilson “degraded liberty” in Russia by interfering with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Having mentioned that early Americans believed liberty meant that they could live without interference from their rulers, he expresses no preference for that concept over that of the Haitian genocide and of Soviet Communism. Moreover, he writes, “there is always room for a new and better definition. That’s why pencils have erasers.”
So what views of liberty do Widmer & Co. want to erase and which to write in? He praises Franklin Roosevelt for redefining liberty in America in terms of “economic entitlement,” and tells us that Eleanor Roosevelt made this “comprehensible to the world” through the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He writes that we should “come to terms with the way the rest of the world feels about us—a constellation of fears and hopes roughly equal to our own.” By the words “our own” fears and hopes, Widmer means those of people just like himself. Thus do Widmer et al. use flexibility in defining liberty, as well as deference to such foreign standards as they prefer, to dress up their class’s claim to power over fellow Americans.
Hence much of the book is hagiography for the class’s icons, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, who redefined liberty. Wilson, he tells us, undid the “arrogant actions of his three predecessors.” Alas, he “encountered resistance to the perfect liberty he described with such power in his speeches.” So (Widmer shies from the word invaded) Wilson “more or less told Nicaraguans whom to elect, placed Haiti under a U.S. military government… occupied the city of Veracruz…sent a punitive expedition of nearly seven thousand men into Mexico.” He took the U.S. into World War I because America’s “rights as a neutral state were being trampled.” One wonders whether Widmer is simply ignorant that Wilson veiled co-belligerency with Britain with mere pretense of neutrality. Wilson “labored for peace” by fighting a war “for a universal dominion of right” and “against the past itself.” Neither Widmer nor anyone has ever explained what sense a war against the past can mean, or how such a war might ever bring peace. At Versailles, 1919, Widmer tells us, Wilson “invented [emphasis his] a new and improved version of civilization” in “an act of faith as much as an act of will.” Inventing civilization by dreaming? No wonder Versailles spawned troubles that have killed millions.
But Widmer tells us that this treaty was nothing new after all, but just “went back to 1776 and the Model Treaty.” How Versailles resembles the proposal by which the Continental Congress had sought to bring France into the Revolutionary War through free trade Widmer does not try to explain. He just tells us that Wilson was going to “lead us, and through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world has never dreamed of before.” The only sure thing is that Widmer drank Wilson’s Kool-Aid.
FDR signed the Atlantic Charter. It “embraced all of humanity.” By so doing, Widmer writes, he “not only upended Washington’s warning against foreign entanglements, but insisted that the freedom of any person ‘anywhere’ in the world was dependent upon the rights of liberty and justice ‘everywhere’ in the world.” (G. W. Bush?) Actually the charter’s prime objective, the cause for which Britain had declared war on Germany, was the independence of Poland. Widmer’s discussion of World War II never mentions Poland, passing over the fact that FDR abandoned Poland to pursue Stalin’s global cooperation. Nor does it mention that Stalin started the war, in tandem with Hitler. Rather, for Widmer, the war was “between those who were clearly fighting for freedom and those who were clearly fighting against it.” It was fulfillment of “the outrageous global ambitions that had been voiced by the windbags of the 1890s.” Never mind, he adds, that “liberation meant different things to different liberators.” What did it mean to FDR other than cooperation with Stalin? For Widmer & Co., the discrepancies between FDR’s words and reality amount to mere “disturbing details.” This is the history, reducta ad absurdum, by which our Liberal Internationalist rulers rule.
Widmer brands those who disagree with his tribe as religious bigots, noxious wreckers, even hypocritical defenders of slavery and of Hitler. He does not argue, just slurs. “The Christian Right…would have us believe that God authored the Constitution.” Franklin Roosevelt’s critics were like “weeds in a sidewalk….Just as the defenders of slavery had found liberty a most capacious word to defend their right to expand, so those who hated FDR’s economic policies and his hostility to Hitler found that same banner useful when organizing to oppose him.” Characterizing dishonestly those with whom one disagrees has become the normal way nowadays for liberals to avoid reason as they grab power. To gentry who feel entitled to rule, truth and reason are superfluous.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (51) | Leave a comment
More Articles by Angelo M. Codevilla
More Articles From The Slaughterhouse
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/07/22/how-our-best-and-brightest-thi
Follow us:
ADVERTISEMENT
Current Issue
- The (Real) Great Divide
- Screwtape Talks Turkey
- Ailes: A Voice for the Silent Majority
SPONSORED LINKS
FLASHBACK TO: 1995
-
Pope Culture
A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
-
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
-
Dames at Sea
-
In the Absence of Guns
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
-
The Metaphysical Martini
-
Counting the Costs of Clintonism
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
-
Chuck McHagel
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
-
The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
-
It’s the Best Time of the Year
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
-
The Bush Crack-Up
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
Clip of the Day
ADVERTISEMENT
frost| 7.22.09 @ 6:42AM
The "humanities" bunch? How'bout 90% of whatever topic?
Recalling my (middle) daughter in the late 70's talking about a communist history professor at ASU in Tempe, laughing about it. Or so it seemed.
Last I heard (sorry to say, there's no communication these days) from my open-minded sister, said daughter was a Howard Dean supporter a few years back - - so, don't make the mistake of thinking that these creepy-crawlers don't make a lasting impression...
PS/she got her Masters degree in "Oriental Religions," married a lawyer - who works for the feds in DC. 'Nuff said - - but sad, none the less.
Steve| 7.22.09 @ 8:00AM
One contemplates the racial/historical nonsense and absurd neo-paganism of the Nazis and asks: how could a civilized nation fall for such crap? Well.........America is learning first-hand how a nation can fall for such crap: said crap is given a veneer of respectability by the "educated" class.
P. Aaron| 7.22.09 @ 8:09AM
Didn't the big 'Zero' just scold us for our past impositions of America's 'morality' upon the rest of the world?
Old Soldier| 7.22.09 @ 8:28AM
The vast majority of college students recognize the nonsense being spewed at them by liberal professors - they access to the library as well. Some believe this kind of nonsense and go on to careers in academics, community-organization, and government.
Appleby| 7.22.09 @ 8:49AM
It's the same nonsense we heard in 1968, when those of us who were the first in our families to attend university were trying to get the education for which we were paying with blood, sweat and tears, not government dollars ... and it was nonsense then and it is nonsense now. Even my hippie sister is now admitting that what she thought was nirvana in 1968 is killing the country in 2009. We grow too soon old...
blackelkspeaks| 7.22.09 @ 8:59AM
The identification of the modern phenomenon we see as "liberalism", generally and specifically, is really quite simple. It is, at the root, the denial of God and of His Revelation. The entire sweep of modern philosophy is replete with this premise at its core.
As I witness the collapse of the modern world, in evidence to me every single day, and consider our head-long rush to destruction, the only solace I find amidst this descent to savagery is the realization that this was foretold long ago and is, indeed, necessary to prepare us all for Christ's return, as He promised. I can find no other explanation that makes sense of it all.
Jack Olson| 7.22.09 @ 10:02AM
Intellectual inquiry on American college campuses now coincides with the public relations industry. To the academics, there is no such thing as fact, only what point of view is "privileged." They can deny the reality of anything just by calling it a "social construct". To the PR hacks&flacks;, there is no such thing as fact, there is only perception, "what works." And if you try to tell them that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes, they feel no need to defend their point of view with facts. Remember, they don't think facts exist. They simply dismiss you as something which ends in the suffix "ist."
Aaron| 7.22.09 @ 10:15AM
No doubt the majority of conservative leaning college students would easily pick up on the left bias of this book. My biggest problem with this rag of a book is the out and out lies. Its down right destructive to our history and completely unnecessary. Its funny how people would rather read this than something full of plain old facts as if the truth weren't dramatic enough.
frost| 7.22.09 @ 10:31AM
Mr. Olson's comments remind me of "Atlas Shrugged" and these comments therein:
"Genius is a superstition… There’s no such thing as the intellect. A man’s brain is a social product. A sum of influences he’s picked up from those around him. Nobody invents anything, he merely reflects what’s floating in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual scavenger and greedy hoarder of the ideas which rightfully belong to society, from which he stole them. All thought is theft. If we do away with private fortunes, we’ll have a fairer distribution of wealth. If we do away with genius, we’ll have a fairer distribution of ideas." (from page 507)
(a couple pages earlier) "Point Four. No new inventions, devices, products or goods of any nature whatsoever, not now on the market, shall be produced, invented, manufactured or sold after the date of this directive. The Office of Patents and Copyrights is hereby suspended. (pg. 509) We’ll have to close all research departments, experimental laboratories, scientific foundations and all the rest of the institutions of that kind. They’ll have to be forbidden… It will end wasteful competition… we won’t have to worry about new inventions upsetting the market. We won’t have to pour money down the drain in useless experiments just to keep up with overambitious competitors… Nobody should be allowed to waste money on the new until everybody has plenty of the old." (and 510) "Nobody will push us out of business or steal our markets or undersell us or make us obsolete… Nobody will be permitted to decide anything. It will be decided once and for all…. Why should they be allowed to go on inventing… why should we be kept on the go in eternal uncertainty… Heroes? They’ve done nothing but harm, all through history. They’ve kept mankind running a wild race, with no breathing spell, with no rest, no ease, no security… They’ve never left us a chance… "
Same kind of mindset, 'ay?
Richard Baker| 7.22.09 @ 10:35AM
William F. Buckley, Jr. spoke of academia thusly:
"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University". Considering what passes these days for intellectual output from the Universities, this says it all. Too many tenured communists and grant whores living in Fantasyland. And we pay for this foolishness.
Todd| 7.22.09 @ 10:57AM
Excellent quotes Frost, Atlas Shrugged brilliantly exemplifies the mindsets of these frauds who pretend to care about the common man by tearing down those who actually produce something of worth which they are incapable of. Every conservative should make a point of reading Atlas Shrugged so we can better understand the mindset of the Statist mentality that seek to destroy our liberties and economic progress. If Ayn Rand was still alive and could debate this fraud, it would be one hell of an intellectual ass kicking.
Marc Jeric| 7.22.09 @ 11:12AM
Those cowardly protesters of the 1960's - so idealistic, full of marxists truths, drunk on free love and drugs, drawing checks from their loving fathers, and mortally afraid of draft - ended up tenured professors of sociology, psychology, and other empty endeavors. Now they are doing two things: 1) falsifying history where they are heroes, and 2) filling the empty heads of youngsters with more marxism. Some of them have PhD's in "African-American studies" - you know, where the Egyptian blacks invented astronomy and mathematics; like that nincompoop from Harvard who attacked the white policeman who tried to defend his house from thieves. Do these non-entities have big chips on their shoulders! Instead of putting that creep in jail for 30 days with a big fine, the city elders excused themselves as true cowards and are ready to plead guilty and pay a 2 million dollar fine for "racial profiling". What is wrong with racial profiling when 5% of the population commits 80% of murders and 90% of house breakings? What was that non-entity doing in China - studying appropriate Gulag methods for white racists? Did Harvard pay for that?
Liberal Reader| 7.22.09 @ 11:32AM
Here's the thing, Codevilla:
If someone writes a book on, say, American history in the academy, there is -- it is true -- no real guarantee that its premises are faulty, and no real guarantee, in fact, that its entire argument is not ridiculous -- although the rigorous peer review it will have underwent does cut down on the chances that it is.
The right wing opinion network undergoes very little fact-checking, let alone peer review, and if you want to challenge an argument in a history book, you need only gather your evidence, and write up your argument.
The academy is based upon rules that attempt to create the most possible space for reasonable debate. It's definitely not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what passes for civil discourse in the Fox Newsopia in which so many readers of American Spectator dwell.
Your piece may very well be a fair bit of criticism. But look at the posts in response. How many of them are fair?
Jorge Fernandez| 8.4.10 @ 4:27PM
While Liberal Reader may be right about the fairness of the comments and his criticism of FOX - he leaves out the fact that liberals do not argue a point fairly they just assault the author of any thought that contradicts theirs. This book appears to be just another liberal rewrite of history and a badly done one at that. The sad part is that there are enough idiots out there that will believe it without fact checking it. That was Widmer's goal.
frost| 7.22.09 @ 12:11PM
TYPICAL. "L-R" (immediately above) is mighty strong on the innuendo, woefully light on the specifics. In fact, there were none.
Normally, when caught, they either change the subject or call you names.
Yet, on that topic, recalling the quotation (paraphrased), "it's the winners who write the history."
Michael Tomlinson| 7.22.09 @ 12:48PM
When did George Washington make war on his own people? Washington's war was to liberate his people from British rule. No doubt confusing for a Democrat who favors and supports depsots. Do you suppose he was thinking about Barack Obama's economic war on Americans? It's so easy to get one's "facts" confused when you're making them up.
Liberal Reader I'll be fair Widmer is as knowledgable about history as Barack Obama is about economics, Bill Clinton is about monogamy, Ted Kennedy is on lifesaving and John Murtha is about ethics.
Jack Olson| 7.22.09 @ 1:42PM
Rigorous review, Liberal Reader? Consider this example, cited by Reason Magazine's Glenn Garvin: "In 1983, the Indiana University historian Robert Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union--the cream of American academia--in a book titled 'After Brezhnev'. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold war was a pipe dream. 'The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable conservative, immobile government.' Byrnes summed up the book in an interview with 'We don't see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet System.' Barely six years later the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled 'Gosh, We Didn't Know Our Ass From Our Elbow'? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you're sorry."
Michael Bellesiles's "Arming America" had been reviewed by his academic peers, indeed had been honored with the Bancroft Prize by a committee of Columbia University historians, before it was exposed as a fraud by amateur historians such as the Contra Costa Historical Society. Such cases as these two imply that what you call "rigorous peer review" boils down to politically correct groupthink.
Liberal Reader| 7.22.09 @ 2:38PM
Jack Olson --
So what's your point?
Historians are sometimes wrong.
O.K.
The CIA didn't anticipate the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan or it's eventual dissolution. The CIA -- despite a huge, secret budget -- got weapons of mass destruction wrong in Iraq and failed to alert the FBI about crucial information that might have prevented 9.11.
People get things wrong. Thousands of historical studies are published each year. You've named two that were flawed. It sounds like both were discovered.
Again -- if you aren't interested in what scholars have to say, it's fine. This is a free country. Watch 24. Listen to Rush Limbaugh. I'm sure you'll like what you hear more than you would like what you read.
As for peer review being "politically correct groupthink".... I just had to laugh when I read that. It's ridiculous, and clearly you don't know what you're talking about.
But the good news is, you don't have to. No one is forcing you to read scholarly articles, and there's plenty of entertainment out there for you to take its place. Good luck, and enjoy your fast food!
frost| 7.22.09 @ 2:47PM
Thanks, you've proven my earlier point, "LR" -- your last sentence/innuendo says volumes.
Elle| 7.22.09 @ 2:51PM
How could a civilized nation fall for this crap? A civilized nation just elected this crap to the White House.
Amateur Historian| 7.22.09 @ 3:06PM
At least one of Wilson's "arrogant predecessors" did far more to propagate liberty than all of Wilson's writing and bloviating over a lifetime. (Good reference; "Leonard Wood and Cuban Independence, 1898-1902" by James Hitchman. )Wilson didn't have the credentials to polish McKinley's army boots, as a man or as a president.
Tony in Central PA| 7.22.09 @ 3:22PM
This reminds me of an episode back in the 90's when a liberal academic journal was punked by a famous physics professor. In the almost - incomprehensible prose of pomobabble ( the official language of liberal academic journals ) he proceeded to explain that gravity itself was merely a social construct. The editors didn't figure it out until after it was published and somebody told them.
Tim| 7.22.09 @ 3:36PM
"The academy is based upon rules that attempt to create the most possible space for reasonable debate. It's definitely not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what passes for civil discourse in the Fox Newsopia in which so many readers of American Spectator dwell. "
Bah! What academy are you talking about LIb? The one that lies in the gutter moaning for government grants like an addicted whore on the street of a majority Democrat district? That academy?
No, no my friend. You red scoundrels would sooner trade your Mao jackets for hair coats than tolerate any dissent in the vapid echo chamber of marxist infested academe.
Now I suggest you run along and deprive some orphan of his lunch money before you get the sound thrashing that you deserve.
frost| 7.22.09 @ 4:00PM
Most all Princeton faculty members who had given to 2008 presidential candidates had donated to Democrats, according to federal records of donations to presidential campaigns from Princeton University employees. The Daily Princtonian (1/21/08) reported that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) was the runaway favorite candidate among those donors, having received $12,050 from Princeton employees. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) drew the second-highest total contributions from Princeton faculty and staff with $5,600. A graduate student and member of Security gave $200 to Rep Ron Paul…
That, too, says volumes.
jerryofva| 7.22.09 @ 4:06PM
Liberal Reader:
Professor Codeville isn't citing areas where Widmer made inaccurate predictions. He was pointing inaccurate statements in the face of the actual historical record. Only a liberal reader would fail to understand that
Richard Baker| 7.22.09 @ 4:19PM
Sometimes, reading liberal academics has the ring of Bizarro, the alternate universe villain that caused Superman so much trouble. Waaay out there, man! This article sounds like a synopsis of the thoughts of the Bizarro character.
frost| 7.22.09 @ 4:34PM
Couldn't resist offering a few more exerpts from "Atlas Shrugged" -- (page 848) " What were they thinking now, the champions of need… what were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: 'I don’t want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they’ll never miss it' - - then later had snapped: 'The tycoons can stand being squeezed, they’ve amassed enough to last them for…………'"
(Dagney on pg.850) "There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all the loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat’s directive… There was the goal of all those con men… who sold their revelations as reason, their “instincts” as science, their cravings as knowledge…"
(and her supercilious brother on the next page)"Why shouldn’t I be given the fulfillment of my desires… Why should you be happy while I suffer? Oh, yes, the world if yours, you’re the one who has the brains to run it. Then why do you permit suffering in your world? You proclaim the pursuit of happiness, but you doom me to frustration. Don’t I have the right to demand any form of happiness I choose? Isn’t that what you owe me…? It’s your sin if I suffer! It’s your moral failure… therefore I’m your responsibility, but you’ve failed to supply my wants, therefore you’re guilty! All of mankind’s moral leaders have said so… who are you to say otherwise… you can’t be good, so long as I’m wretched. My misery is the measure of your sin. My contentment is the measure of your virtue.
I want this kind of world, today’s world, it gives me my share of authority, it allows me to feel important – make it work for me… You have the privilege of strength, but I – I have the right of weakness! That’s a moral absolute!”
- - - published 52 years ago; sounds like the present. Now, if you'll excuse me, gotta re-read "1984" again.
JimE| 7.22.09 @ 10:31PM
LR, while there is no doubt that you are a liberal, your posts indicate that you are not a reader and if you are you lack the ability to comprehend what you do read. You are little more than a useful idiot who grovels at the lefist anus awaiting your next meal.
RichardNous| 7.23.09 @ 8:30PM
It's really this simple. Just as a five year old believes "I said it therefore it is true" so do these people.
RichardNous| 7.23.09 @ 8:30PM
It's really this simple. Just as a five year old believes "I said it therefore it is true" so do these people.
CaptDMO| 7.23.09 @ 9:29PM
LR-As for peer review being "politically correct groupthink".... I just had to laugh when I read that. It's ridiculous, and clearly you don't know what you're talking about. Hmmm. I say hogwash, however, there's "Groupthink in Academia: Majoritan Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid", Danial B. Klien and Charlotta Stern.
As seen in The Independent Review, Vol.13, no.4, Spring 2009, pp-585-600.
That MAY expose it in simple enough terms (warning: Polysylabia!) Then again, there's this guy named Horowitz. (sp?)
Ed H| 8.2.09 @ 9:25AM
"Historians make mistakes."
You'll not get away with that one. When historians make mistakes, it is because they listed the wrong citation for a stated fact. Or their whole citation list is out of order. Or they draw the wrong conclusion from the facts presented. Those are "mistakes".
Presenting something which never happened is not a "mistake", it is a lie.
Alan Brooks| 8.17.09 @ 10:08PM
I met Ward Churchill. Very sad that a brilliant prof could be so self-deceived.
Brian| 3.5.12 @ 9:47PM
I hear about Prof. Angelo M. Codevilla from Rush Limbaugh and read him all the time, I was even on a dating site the other day and somebody mentioned him, does he ever give interviews, I have no idea what he looks like.
Mark| 3.5.12 @ 9:50PM
I hear about Prof. Angelo M. Codevilla from Rush Limbaugh and read him all the time, I was even on a singles site the other day and somebody mentioned him, does he ever give interviews, I have no idea what he looks like.