WORST COLLEGE MAJOR EVER?: Beloit College, “Critical Identity Studies.”

Combining a variety of academic disciplines (gender and women’s studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies), Critical Identity Studies (CRIS) investigates the ways identities are shaped within structures of inequality and through systems and practices of power and resistance.

From the introductory course, “Sex and Power,” to the advanced theoretical courses which include “Whiteness,” “Masculinities,” “Gender Bending,” “Race and Culture,” “Feminism and Politics,” “‘Black Lives Matter,” and “Thinking Queerly,” CRIS courses are always interdisciplinary, intersectional, and oriented toward social justice.

Annual “direct cost” of attending Beloit College: $58,870

THERE ARE MANY, MANY JEWISH LAWS AND TRADITIONS THAT THIS RABBI VIOLATED: Stephen Miller’s childhood rabbi bashes the Trump adviser in his New Year’s sermon. 

But if your real religion is liberal politics, I guess it doesn’t matter.

WHITEWASHING PROGRESSIVE HISTORY: Euphemizing Eugenics. In some circles, Progressives’ support for forcibly sterilizing those deemed “unfit” becomes mere “collective action to control the birthrate.”

MAX BOOT: VICTIM OF IDENTITY THEFT?

IT’S 2018, AND HISTORIANS AREN’T EMBARRASSED TO WRITE ARTICLES LIKE THIS: An Exceptional Case? Problematizing Soviet Anti-Racism.

Apparently, all too many folks on the Left still believe that the USSR’s purported anti-racism was totally sincere. So this “revisionist” piece basically amounts to, “Maybe the Soviet propaganda that naive American Communists and fellow travelers ingenuously accepted wasn’t fully reflective of actual Soviet practice.”

As a Facebook friend, herself a refugee from the USSR, writes in response:

The Soviets were anti-racists only in the sense that they shouted about American racism whenever anyone mentioned mass murders conducted by the Lenin-Stalin regimes. Short of that hypocrisy, the Soviet government had no interest in anti-racism, mostly because it wanted to keep open the option of ethnically-based mass deportations and murders on its own soil. Stalin, after all, presided over the genocide of millions of Ukrainians, followed by genocide, forced deportations, and mass incarcerations of numerous ethnic and religious groups, from the Crimean Tatars to the Volga Germans to the Chechens to the Latvians, to the famed plot to deport all Jews to Siberia which was only thwarted by Stalin’s death.

One problem seems to be understanding racism from an American perspective. Having virtually no African-descended population, the Soviets could feign tolerance toward minorities while systematically oppressing domestic ethnic minorities. It’s the same sort of constricted perspective that leads woke millennials to dismiss the Holocaust as “white on white violence.”

IN TODAY’S EDITION OF “NOT THE ONION”: Vox.com: The new Nabisco animal crackers art doesn’t address any of the underlying issues about ethics, exploitation, and corporate greed.

“Yet the symbolic significance of changing the animal cracker box design does little to dismantle the elements of capitalism that exploit animals, people, and the environment.” You don’t say! I had thought this was magical animal cracker box design that would make every progressive fantasy come true…

WHEN A WATERGATE FELON FALSELY ACCUSES YOU OF DISHONESTY: I’ve been one of the louder critics of a terrible, inaccurate polemic posing as a work of history. The author’s defenders have resorted almost entirely to ad hominem, but none with as much irony as this:

WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES STARTS TO SOUND LIKE THAT WOMEN’S STUDIES COURSE IN COLLEGE THAT TWO-THIRDS OF ENROLLED STUDENTS DROP THE FIRST DAY: The Dark Side of the Male Fitness Internet: One of the internet’s most popular fitness personalities is a dead bodybuilder named Zyzz. Is he the key to unlocking the links between toxic masculinity, objectification and fringe politics?

THIS SHOULD BE MAJOR NATIONAL NEWS: U.S. charges two men with serving as agents of Iran, monitoring Americans and a Jewish center. It’s currently buried in the Local section of the Washington Post under “Public Safety,” and not in the New York Times at all. Is it really not especially newsworthy that a hostile foreign power is scoping out terrorist targets in the U.S.?

POWER GAMES: The Compulsory Society. Kevin Williamson: “Why compel Jack Phillips to knuckle under? Because you can, and because you hate him. Hate is an inescapable part of tribalism, and hate is now the single most important organizing principle of the American Left.”

NOT AMERICA’S FINEST MOMENT: The Deportation of Mexican-Americans in the 1930s: Putting aside the merits of deporting legal immigrants during the Great Depression, the failure to give American citizens a reasonable opportunity to prove their citizenship was criminal. What’s odd about this otherwise informative article, however, is that while it’s about deportations that continued through the late 1930s, somehow Donald Trump is mentioned three times but Franklin Roosevelt not at all.

At almost the same time the deportations began, Congress passed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, meant to prop up union wages, in part by preventing itinerant African-American workers from getting jobs on federal construction projects. When a southern Congressman noted with amusement that his northern colleagues were enthusiastically discriminating against blacks, a supporter of the bill from the north responded that it wasn’t about blacks, he’d also support the bill if it were “Mexicans” taking the jobs!

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS THEY WOULDN’T HAVE STANDARDS AT ALL: This is Louis Farrakhan’s pinned tweet. He has over 300K followers. Why did Twitter ban, say, Tommy Robinson, but Farrakhan is left alone?

MSM NARRATIVE FAIL:  ‘Unite the Right’ Rally: White Nationalists March in D.C.

It’s not until the fifteenth paragraph that the New York Times bothers informing its readers of a crucial detail: “The Unite the Right group planned to have up to 400 people at the rally … though the group was considerably smaller.” So all this media hoopla for a few dozen losers, because it feeds into the media’s preferred narrative that Trump has brought us to the verge of racist-fascist takeover of the U.S.?

UPDATE: Even then, the Times isn’t being completely forthright. “Considerably smaller” apparently means around thirty people. My friend has more people than that playing role-playing games in his basement this weekend, but the MSM doesn’t seem interested in that.

MORE: The Times has now completely rewritten the story, now emphasizing the “low attendance” of around “two dozen.” Some of my local friends were literally scared for their safety because of the way the media all last week suggested that thousands of violent neo-Nazis were about to descend on D.C. Someone should be held accountable, but won’t.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN TWENTY YEARS? Corbyn’s wreath at Munich terrorists’ graves: Photos show Labour leader at tribute event for Palestine ‘martyrs’… including plotters behind 1972 slaughter of Israeli Olympic athletes

KEEPING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE: Washington, D.C., Braces for ‘Unite the Right 2’ White Nationalist Rally.

The media is treating this event as if hundreds of thousands of goosestepping Nazis are descending on D.C. In fact, “Permits for Sunday’s ‘Unite the Right 2’ rally indicated that about 400 demonstrators are expected in Lafayette Square, a park adjacent to the White House.” Four hundred is likely optimistic.

Treating these pathetic morons who can’t fill a small high school’s auditorium as if they represent some major national movement is only giving them millions of dollars in undeserved free publicity, albeit in the service of a contrived narrative that the Trump administration has enabled a major neo-Nazi revival. Ignoring them won’t necessarily make them go away, but it will deprive them of the media oxygen that’s making them seem much more significant than they are.

PROPAGANDA IN SUBURBAN BOSTON HIGH SCHOOL: Emails Reveal High School Teachers Plotting to Hide Their Political Bias From Parents. One teacher wrote, “Personally, I’m finding it really difficult in the current climate to teach kids to appreciate other perspectives. . . I don’t feel good about protecting [a nativist] student’s right to a so‐called ‘political’ view.”

OUR MORONIC MEDIA–MSN PUBLISHES ANTI-SEMITIC NONSENSE: MSN has an article on the world’s richest families. It concludes with the Rothschild family which, the article informs us, has wealth estimated at up to $700 trillion (which is almost triple the world’s total wealth).

Apparently, no one at MSN understands that (1) the Rothschilds have been the subject of absurd anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for generations; and (2) the only place you would find such a ridiculous estimate of the family’s wealth would be at websites pushing said conspiracy theories. We all laughed at the DC councilman who thought the Rothschilds controlled the weather. What do we do about MSN? And before we attribute this to some naive intern or such, note that the story has been up for six days, and apparently no one at MSN has noticed it is propounding garbage.

SOMETHING IS AMISS IN THE HISTORY PROFESSION: Over at Volokh, I recount some troubling recent interactions with historians. Can one be shocked, yet not surprised? When I’ve done my own historical research, as with my books Rehablitating Lochner and Only One Place of Redress, I’ve found that conventional historical wisdom often ranges from “inaccurate” to “just made up.” So while I’m not surprised to find low intellectual standards among some historians, I still find it shocking that they openly defend these standards.

SOME DARE CALL IT CONSPIRACY (BUT THEY ARE OUT TO LUNCH): Duke Historian Nancy Maclean’s Wacky Conspiracy Theory. It’s not that the pro-immigration, free-trading libertarian Koch Brothers have real differences with the nationalist, protectionist Trump; it’s all just a smokescreen to distract you while your rights are eviscerated, claims MacLean.

THE AWARD FOR WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE I’VE HAD IN RECENT MEMORY GOES TO: TaskRabbit. I hired a Tasker to move a heavy treadmill from my basement up two flights of stairs. He tried to disassemble it, couldn’t get if fully disassembled, then couldn’t get it back together. Easy-peasy, you’d think, given TR’s “happiness pledge:” either send someone to fix and move the treadmill, or give me credit to buy a new one. Nope. They offered to give me credit to hire another Tasker to move it, with no guarantee it will be fixed or is fixable. And that resolution took weeks and weeks of emails back and forth, and despite the fact that Taskers pay a hefty insurance fee for just such eventualities. And then when the resolution agreement arrived, it had a “non-disparagement” clause and a confidentiality clause, meaning I’d be legally bound to not complain about how awful TR customer service is, nor to explain how they make folks seeking a resolution sign various rights away. To heck with that. I’m not going to sign, I’m going to disparage away, and I’ll find another way of resolving my treadmill problem. Stay away from Task Rabbit, if a Tasker breaks something there is no guarantee it will be fixed, it will take weeks and weeks to reach an unsatisfactory resolution, and then they will want you to sign away various legal and other rights before they will do anything.

By contrast, kudos to Amazon, which eventually offered a generous resolution to a previous problem with Amazon Services.

AND MEDIA PEOPLE WONDER WHY PEOPLE DON’T TRUST THEM: ABC News’ Molly Hunter apparently believes that in democracies, privately-owned newspapers don’t fire cartoonists.

ECONOMIC ILLITERACY FROM FEDERAL JUDGES: Eleventh Circuit invalidates state law preempting Birmingham’s minimum wage increase. The whole opinion is a mess, but I was struck by this:

As an initial matter, we have little trouble concluding that the plaintiffs have suffered concrete injuries as a result of the Minimum Wage Act. According to the amended complaint, Lewis and Adams work in Birmingham and earn less than $10.10 per hour. Birmingham Ordinance No. 16-28 guaranteed them $10.10 per hour, adjusted annually to a cost of living index.

In fact, the Birmingham ordinance didn’t guarantee Lewis and Adams anything, as it didn’t guarantee that their employers would be willing to pay them more than the market wage they had been earning. The rest of the opinion proceeds as if minimum wage laws are an unmitigated good for low-wage workers. The implicit reasoning, in part, is that if low-wage workers, particularly African American low-wage workers, approve of being promised something (a higher wage) for nothing (no negative consequences on the low-wage labor market), they must in fact be getting something for nothing. It’s as if neither public choice nor mainstream labor economics is at all familiar to the judges. More incentive for McDonald’s to speed up its installation of unmanned kiosks, I suppose.

ACLU: WE NEED TO BURN DOWN THE CIVIL LIBERTIES TO SAVE THE CIVIL LIBERTIES: A Pro-Liberty Case for Gun Restrictions

Unless my reading comprehension skills have really deteriorated, the ACLU is arguing that because government tends to react to mass shootings by restricting civil liberties, Americans will ultimately enjoy more liberty if we restrict gun rights to prevent mass shootings. That is, shall we say, a rather odd argument for the ACLU of all organizations to make.

Let’s try out this logic in another context: “Because the government tends to react to terrorism by restricting civil liberties, Americans will ultimately enjoy more liberty if we deny terrorism suspects due process rights, drone suspected terrorists abroad, and ban Muslims from coming to the United States.”

It’s not that the ACLU’s argument is inherently illogical (assuming one believes that gun restrictions will indeed inhibit mass shootings), it’s just that it’s not the sort of utilitarian argument the ACLU would ever make in any other civil liberties context other than with regard to Second Amendment rights.

OUR GOVERNMENT IS IN THE BEST OF HANDS: Plutonium Stolen From the Parking Lot of the Marriott San Antonio Northwest

They left the materials in the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition and went to bed. The plutonium and cesium were stolen out of the Marriott parking lot…. The group that lost the nuclear material is the Off-Site Radioactive Source Recovery Program which is based at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory — is the team charged with recovering plutonium and enriched uranium that has been loaned out by the military. Let that sink in for a moment.

I THOUGHT THE (SOCIAL) SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: How Social Science Might Be Misunderstanding Conservatives