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Journal smittyoneeach's Journal: VDH: "Our Three Blind Mice" 55

Journal by smittyoneeach
Our Three Blind Mice

"Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they runâ¦"

The recent testimonies of the three university presidents (Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and [soon to be departed?] University of Pennsylvania's Liz McGill) concerning their inaction about endemic anti-Semitism on their campuses have probably done more damage to higher education than any recent event in memory. (And note there was not a white, male, heterosexual supposed oppressor to be found among the enlightened).

We know they know they failed because two at least clumsily tried damage repair over the next few days that only confirmed their initial stupidity. And a herd of other scared university presidents suddenly have now issued their own memoranda professing their supposed zero tolerance politics for anti-Semitism on campus.

Still, do not believe that any are too sincere given they remain for now still more afraid of their DEI/woke/hard left faculty and students than they are of alumni, donors, or us the taxpayers.

But note the following:

1) The three blind mice could not even lie well. Like nearly all contemporary university presidents, they have long revoked admissions, suspended students, or relieved faculty from teaching for any language, expression, or advocacy they considered incorrect, which translates as anything not compatible with wokism or DEI.

Invoking 'freedom of speech' to disguise their moral cowardice is pathetic when they have never on their campuses believed in freedom of speech. One incorrect word about someone trans, a misplaced pronoun, or a clumsy reference to a non-white student, and the offender would be punished immediately--followed by the usual performance-art, virtue-signaling, "this is not who we are"/"there is no place for such hatred on this campus" memo from a careerist dean or bully provost.

Instead, they have excused their censorship by arguing that in their campus enclaves, as in a corporation, they have the right to set their own codes of behavior--without taxpayers subsidies.

But the issue is not so much "free speech", but the equal application of rules and laws. These presidents adhere to systemic prejudice, in which free speech and rules of behavior are predicated on ideology as well as race and ethnicity. Worse still, they cloak such neanderthal reactionaryism in gobbledygook progressive platitudes.

In their ridiculous white-oppressor/non-, white-oppressed reductionist world, advocating the destruction of Israel, and the Jewish people with it, is no big deal. Indeed, it pays dividends among their DEI and foreign student constituencies.

So they are upset not that they have de facto institutionalized anti-Semitism to such a degree that it is now inviting physical assaults on their own students, but that they have been caught and called out on it.

Bottom line: the nation learned that these people don't care about their own campuses cheering on mass rape, mutilation, and beheading or calling for the extinction of Israel and all the Jews in it, because Jews as whites are on the wrong side of their victim/victimizer DEI binary, and suffer the additional wage of anti-Semitism.

There is no career upside in their twisted worlds in defending Jews in Israel--or anywhere--from precivilizational barbarism.

2) All of these elite university presidents supposedly were once top scholars, seasoned faculty, and experienced deans and provosts. In other words, they are the purported best and brightest of what academia now has to offer us.

And it turns out to be not much at all.

Note in minutes they were utterly eviscerated by Republican congressional representatives with no such academic credentials, but with plenty of intelligence, logic, street smarts and common sense acquired from politics or business or non-academic experience.

When the president of Harvard or MIT is rendered a moral pygmy and intellectual lightweight by our local congressional representatives, it warns us of what higher education has become and perhaps reminds why academics should be kept as far away from governance as possible. (Professors--e.g., a Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama--usually have proved poor if not dangerous presidents).

After such skilled grilling, we owe a great deal of respect for the abilities and moral sense of these Republican House members.

3) The only reason the three showed any remorse or the next day tried to reset, was transitory fear of financial consequences, as in being blamed for a temporary drop-off in donations.

But that reality underscores that we the people do have power over even our elite and private universities and can rescue them from themselves, if we understand that those who feign a supposed disdain for money are the most eager to acquire it, as we saw with the Bankman-Fried trio.

In other words, the taxpayer can reign in a Harvard or MIT--should the U.S. government condition billions of dollars in annual subsidies to campuses on non-discriminatory policies, reconsider tax-exemptions for university giving, tax their endowment income until higher education is truly disinterested and non-partisan, and remove the government from the $2 trillion student loan racket that ensures tuition inflation, administrative bloat, and generations of youth suffering from arrested development.

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VDH: "Our Three Blind Mice" More

VDH: "Our Three Blind Mice"

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  • Yes we do... comes with the wealth in numbers, still inseparable :-)

    • My argument is that, for a glance at history, you seem to discount leadership.

      • This father figure, was it absent, or overbearing?

        • Non-sequitur wants to ride bicycles?

          • :-) that's rich coming from you.. Not at all, your obsession with "leadership" is obviously driven by the male authority figure. I just asked if you experienced too much or too little

            So, how will your desired "leaders" be chosen?

            • No obsession; merely the observation that organizational behavior argues for leaders/followers, surely as militaries throughout human history have had officers/enlisted.

              You may resume pretending otherwise.

              • A total non-sequitur in regards to how leaders are chosen. The powers is ours, or no?

                • If the power is purely ours, then why even have elections? I reject your "total non-sequitur".

                  • Elections are where our power to select a leader is voiced.

                    And "reject" all you want, the non-sequitur was total. If the power to pick leaders is not ours, then whose is it?

                    • There will be no improvement until we realize the substantial degree to which our system has drifted toward aristocracy with a two-party facade.

                      The need for reform is substantial, but all we get from you is a Polyanna complacency. And no, Trump does not look like a reformer. His term wasn't as bad as I figured it would be, or it was worse in different ways. And the hormonal release of a second term could be entertaining, albeit briefly. But if we don't attack the root/rot causes, then it's moot.

                    • You still haven't specified these "reforms", nor who will decide what... The only workable reform can only come from the voters themselves, unless you have something better than majority rule to do it

                    • You still haven't specified these "reforms", nor who will decide what...

                      I pointed you to https://conventionofstates.com/ [conventionofstates.com] and Levin's "Liberty Amendments" which form the general outline.

  • These are private universities you are talking about, not public or state universities. I looked and could not find any evidence of Harvard (to pick just one) receiving any taxpayer subsidies. They do of course bring in research grants, but those are competitive grants that are for research, not for undergraduate scholarship or infrastructure (which is where taxpayer subsidies at public universities most often go). Can you find anything showing the contrary? I found several write-ups that - intentionall
  • As I mentioned in the front page discussion: [slashdot.org]

    If someone calls for "Death to Israel", are they automatically saying they want everyone in Israel dead? I would argue they are not. To me that phrase is a call for the end of the current political state of Israel. That doesn't mean the killing of everyone there, or the eviction of everyone there who is currently a citizen of it. Even calls of "the river to the sea" do not inherently mean that everyone between the two is to be killed.

    This is similar to ho

    • And the people parasailing over the Gaza border on October 7 were just a peace envoy, right?

      • I'm not excusing the Hamas attack. I'm merely stating
        • "Death to XYZ country" is not always the same as calling for killing everyone in XYZ country
        • The citizens of Gaza have been oppressed by the state of Israel for some time now and had no options for recourse

        • had no options for recourse

          07Oct was certainly an option; Hamas jacked around: now Hamas and everyone in the blast radius are finding out.

          Responsibility: Hamas.

          • So when your new hero Netanyahu then "accepts surrender" from Hamas, and then again denies them the right to hold an election - which puts us right back to where they were before - what should the Gaza citizens do instead? They can't leave, they can't protest, they can't vote, and their government - which they didn't elect - isn't recognized as legitimate. Or do they not have a right to exist? At that point it sounds a lot like you're calling for "death to Palestine".

            • What if Hamas surrenders and disbands instead?

              Yep, death to Philistine, to use the Arabic name for the region. Despite being propped up by Rome in 70 A.D., they've been losing the war against the Israelis since the time of King David- usually very badly, though in recent years they've improved to only trading 25 Philistine lives for every Jew killed (back in King David's day, it was more like 100:1).

              Maybe it is time to try a new strategy- say a one-state solution where they accept Israeli citizenship in re

            • You put so vastly many words in my mouth in a desperate effort to shift attention from the atrocities of 07Oct.
              • What causes you to think that? I never excused or condoned the Oct7 attack. What they did was awful. The response is also awful. What came before both was awful as well. However with the way you paint the two sides in such stark binary nature of "good" and "evil" does not help to recognize the underlying issues and grievances at all.
                • Uh-huh. This JE is about Your Team equivocating for the unspeakable in ways that bespeak vast moral dry rot. Which is why I don't take you seriously.

                  • :-) Always funny to see a Trump supporter (or any other democrat/republican for that matter) critique someone's morality

                    • Unless and until there is reform, it's all shot.

                    • Reform comes from within

                    • Sure, at the individual level. This is called "the Gospel". But there is quite literally NO "within" in politics. Politics is "between". This is one of those substantive, initial understandings that must be gotten right, as any amount of lousy results can stem from this misunderstanding.

                    • All choices are made by the individual. You're still just trying to blame the "crowd"

                    • And the "crowd" is made up of so many individuals interacting with their environment, no? You're not seriously arguing a Solipsism, are you?
                  • As I already stated:

                    I never excused or condoned the Oct7 attack.

                    I'm not sure why you're trying to claim to the contrary.

                    • I never excused or condoned the Oct7 attack

                      . I'm not sure why you're trying to claim to the contrary.

                      At least not explicitly. But the equivocation sure seems noticeable. I don't mean to turn you into a Hunter Biden-style victim, by any means.

                    • You found the equivocation that you wanted to see. I have stated many times that plenty of blame belongs to both sides, and that the Oct 7 attack was terrible.

                      I have also more than once asked what you would do if you were in the situation the Palestinians have found themselves in, and you have never offered a different path for them. They can't vote, they can't leave, they can't pursue education, all they can do is try to exist in the forced poverty that they are born into.

                    • You found the equivocation that you wanted to see. I have stated many times that plenty of blame belongs to both sides, and that the Oct 7 attack was terrible.

                      This is the equivocation. Oct07 is purely, 100% owned by Hamas. They voided the sympathy warranty there.

                    • You found the equivocation that you wanted to see. I have stated many times that plenty of blame belongs to both sides, and that the Oct 7 attack was terrible.

                      This is the equivocation. Oct07 is purely, 100% owned by Hamas. They voided the sympathy warranty there.

                      Hamas attacked Israel on Oct07. I have never refuted that.

                      The important point here though is that Israel has oppressed Gaza in many ways for many years. Palestinians in Gaza had no way to negotiate with Israel as Israel declared the Gaza government illegitimate and prevented Gaza from electing a new one. Similarly Gaza could not get international recognition of their existing government. They were suffering under the conditions imposed on them, and had few - if any - other ways to bring attention t

        • There's an obvious option for recourse, it's just one that the citizens of Gaza have rejected for 4000 years and find inconceivable: surrender.

          • 4000 years? The modern state of Israel is barely 75 years old. You should check your math. Palestinians were living peacefully with Jewish neighbors in Palestine before we established the modern state of Israel; they are not terribly fond of having been forced to give up their land in retribution for a war they were not a part of.

            • The modern state of Israel is only the latest iteration of Israel in this battle. To understand the full cultural importance, you need to go back to what the original Philistines thought about these slaves from Egypt moving in and taking over the land on their eastern border.

              • To understand the full cultural importance, you need to go back to what the original Philistines thought about these slaves from Egypt moving in and taking over the land on their eastern border.

                This Land is Mine [vimeo.com]

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