HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED: A look at the 1957 Far Rockaway High School Rifle Team. It’s certainly a sign of how New York has changed, and not for the better.

Meanwhile, in 2007 Yale is banning fake weapons on stage. And to think that universities hold themselves out as bastions of critical thinking where people can make fine distinctions . . . .

As Sigmund Freud said: “A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”

Or intellectual maturity, anyway. It’s certainly evidence for Robert Epstein’s thesis.

UPDATE: Perhaps the Yale cast should show up in this apparel.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh: “Do Yale students have a hard time telling theater from reality? Are they so emotionally fragile that they would be traumatized by seeing a realistic sword on stage?”

I think that’s the Yale administrators. It’s all about the unwillingness to face reality and its consequences.

MORE: Reader Ryan Robinson notes something fishy at Wikiquote:

Just wanted to point this out…

At some point since you posted the Sigmund Freud quote “A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity”, somebody went on to wikiquote.org and edited the page. They have that quote now marked as O“Misattributed”. Whoever edited the page says that they searched Google Print, but apparently they neglected to note that the version they searched is NOT the complete text of Freud’s work. Perhaps someone with access to a library can confirm or deny that quote.

Interesting how quickly the wikiquote page was modified… Also interesting that they *speculatively* attribute the quote to an opponent of gun control.

This is why wikis suck. That quote has been there for years — then I link it and it vanishes. I think the quote’s real — at least I’ve seen it elsewhere before. But either the quote was bogus when I linked it — which means that wikiquote sucks — or the quote was real and has been deleted/marked as misattributed for political reasons — which means that wikiquote sucks. And there’s no obvious indication that it’s changed since I cited it. Which means that wikiquote sucks.

STILL MORE: The Freud quote reappeared, but is now back to “misattributed” on Wiikiquote. Here’s a suggestion that it isn’t accurate from another source. What I hate is that it’s very hard for readers to tell when I’ve linked to Wikiquote what it looked like when I established the link.

MORE STILL: I went to the library to look the Freud reference up myself. The quote above doesn’t appear on p. 33 as cited. Instead, there is what’s seen below, which appears right after an account of a dream in which a woman tries to unsheathe a dagger to kill herself, only to awaken and find she’s tugging on her husband’s penis:

This is consistent with the (currrent) WikiQuote version, saying that the Freud quote is actually quoting Kates’ commentary on what Freud might think, rather than what Freud actually said.

Which doesn’t make Yale look any less dumb. Any speculation on the sexual underpinnings of Yale’s policy regarding swords on stage will be left as an exercise for the reader. . . .