Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Thank you for the invitation to join this group. Can someone tell me more about the membership? How many folks from SCSU are members of this "blog"?

Pardon the simple question, but what the heck is a "blog."

Random thoughts:
--Thor Halvorsen (sp?) from FIRE was on Hardball with Chris Mathews this evening.
--It seems that FIRE is getting noticed by the national press

Question: How can can an ex-professor, who resigned from SCSU in protest due to the rampant neo-McCarthyism, contribute to this blog and the battle for the integrity of academic freedom, scholarship, and standards at SCSU.

Although I'm no longer on campus, my heart and mind have never left the struggle in the trenches at SCSU. You folks are fighting a noble cause. As someone who now is affiliated with a major university and who has a private office in the heart of the St. Cloud business community, you would NOT believe how the radical liberal behavior on the SCSU campus is viewed. Actually....you would believe it. These "real world" folks laugh at the absurdity of much of what happens on the SCSU campus. Unfortunately, they tend to lump all professors into the same camp and think you are all out of touch. The real world folks outside of SCSU could be a real allies in the war against the radical left on SCSU....

Kevin


Monday, September 23, 2002

Tonight's the night a class on campus has a discussion on Iraq where nobody in favor of war against Iraq will speak. David Brooks suggests that these people operate under The Fog of Peace. Brooks describes most of the left commentary on the war as one flavor or another of parochialism, "the inability to consider the larger global threats because one is consumed by one's immediate domestic hatreds." Here on this campus, it's very much a "we're not worthy" mentality.

For a third branch of the parochialists, Iraq is not the issue, America is the issue. The historian Gabriel Kolko recently declared, "Everyone--Americans and those people who are the objects of their efforts--would be far better off if the United States did nothing, closed its bases overseas, withdrew its fleets everywhere and allowed the rest of the world to find its own way without American weapons and troops." For peaceniks in this school, the conditions of the world don't matter. Whether it is Korea, Germany, the Balkans, or the Middle East, America shouldn't be there because America is the problem. This is reverse isolationism: Whereas the earlier isolationists thought America should withdraw because the rest of the world was too corrupt, these isolationists believe that America should withdraw because the United States is too corrupt.

...Writers in this school derive an almost sensuous pleasure from recounting how much people in the rest of the world dislike America; whether those anti-Americans also, by the way, kill homosexuals, oppress women, and crush pluralism is relegated to the background. For these parochials, the immediate priority is hating America.



So well done! (Courtesy of Instapundit.)

Friday, September 20, 2002

I'm posting this largely out of fear that we're going to have an incident like this at SCSU someday. If you got here by a link from the discuss list, I get one gold star for forecasting. Here's a first-hand account of the Concordia University halt to a speech by Benjamin Netanyahu (9/7/02), an account with pictures of Hanan Aswari's speech at Colorado College (I miss your impersonation of her, Orn!) and the riots at San Francisco State. These got nicely tied together by Daniel Pipes.

Tuesday, September 17, 2002


King is being gentle. Those "acting unilaterally" are "Masterbators for Peace," a site worth visiting. A hoax, surely, but more bizarre than all that Iraqi blood soaking American hands? (Don't those in the bizarre Left ever change their metaphors? Blood-soaked hands worked pretty well in about 1967, but it's worn badly since then.) Or consider this, which was on the Best of the Web from OpinionJournal.com (an arm of the Wall Street Journal) on tuesday, Aug. 13:


"Political Juggling Act"

Boy, you knew eventually it had to happen, didn't you. Someone had to take a perfectly nice pastime like juggling and turn it into an occasion for politically correct idiocy. Check out the Web site for--we're not making this up--"Jugglers Against Oppression: The Mission of Jugglers Against Oppression is to educate St.Cloud State University students and community members about different forms of oppression that exist in our community. Members incorporate into juggling performances their experiences and view on homophobia, racism, sexism, ableism, classism, ageism, gender oppression, biphobia and other forms of discrimination and oppression. Anyone and everyone with an open mind is welcome to juggle and share experiences. Non-Jugglers are welcome."
We've never heard of "biphobia." What is it, fear of the number two?

Note that Opinionjournal is a Top-100 visited sites on the web.

So...:blood-soaked hands," ..."Jugglers Against Oppression"...Masterbators for Peace" Which is more bizarre than the other?





Some antiwar types are in favor of, um, acting unilaterally? I'm assuming this is farce, but the problem is, you can't be entirely sure.

Monday, September 16, 2002

Iraqi blood on our hands? It'd be laughable if it wasn't so monstrous. (Both this and the previous entry courtesy of OpinionJournal's Best of the Web.

And next time you see these no invasion types, tell them this report from Human Rights Watch should be viewed.

Addendum to the rally story: The campus newspaper provides additional coverage. (University Chronicle needs a proofreader badly.) One of the speakers, running as a Green for the state legislature, throws out this:


"If we end poverty in the world, if we give everybody a fair shake on equal opportunities (there will be less terrorism). We simply take from them (other countries) and bring it all here and then we end up destroying their environment."

Give them your stuff or they'll become terrorists. Sounds like the short road to surrender there, pal. We don't take from them, we trade with them. See a difference? In one case, we try to persuade them by offering them something of value. In the other case, 2800 innocent people die and we get a 16 acre hole in the ground. To the Greens, the first thing justifies the second.

"I think we need to cut $60 billion out of the military budget to use to end poverty. Starting with clean water in Iraq. We could end poverty in five years." Well, that was tried -- it's called the World Bank. If this guy would read William Easterly's new book, you'd find out it doesn't work. Giving Saddam $60 super-size is going to make him love the Kurds? And not take money from bin Laden? Does Green describe what this guy eats or smokes?


Sunday, September 15, 2002

Just when you think it's safe to think again, we had a little protest about how the big bad US is going to blow up poor little Iraq. Many of the protestors are either SCSU students or faculty. Some people apparently think we need every last person's permission to go to war.

--One student of our social responsibility program says "I don't believe in war." Belief trumps fact. Swell, and when the bombs fall I'm sure your beliefs will protect you.

--"Not in my name" -- but when I ask that my tax dollars not fund the NEA and the teachers' unions, where are you? With a gun, taking my money away.

--And of course the usual "No more blood for oil", as if the price falls every time we pursue foreign policy there.

Behold, the vanguard of the idiotarians. Over in the campus paper one writer wants us to commemorate 9/11 by cutting our dependency on foreign oil. Common Dreams goes further, wanting the WTC site to be a monument to "a future free of this literal and figurative fuel" (whatever THAT means). I cannot wait to watch these people stroke their scrabbly beards wondering why they can't heat their cappucinos by holding magnifying glasses towards the sun.

I suppose it could be worse, as Joseph Sabia reports at Frontpage. At least we're not being silenced.

Thursday, September 12, 2002

There's a showing on campus today a documentary about Ramsey Clark (last seen trying to free the blind mullah Sheikh Omar Abd El-Rahman from his prison for his role in the 1993 attack on the WTC) going to Iraq to observe the death of Iraqi children. Wonder if Clark visited the Kurds?

As someone noted, Clark is a pure negative indicator: If you're on the exact opposite side of him, you can be pretty sure you're on the right side.

But more to the point, supposed their advertisment for this film "Let Iraq Live" were true? (And it isn't like we want Iraq to die; we only want one guy to go away.) They claim "More than 1.5 million civilians, mostly children, have died from disease and malnutrition in the last eight years, according to UNICEF." I have no idea how they know how many children are in the 1.5 million. But my point would be that the crude death rate in Iraq (at 9%, according to the World Bank's World Development Indicators) (you'll need Adobe for this one) and a population of 23 million people, would imply that less than 9% of the deaths in the country are due to disease and malnutrition. How many deaths do you think countries not facing sanctions would have?

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

This Dave Barry column from Saturday shook me out of some inexplicable torpor today. Had to run to a dean's council meeting scheduled for the same time as my Econ 350 course, so I had the class watch Stossel's Is America #1? video. At no point does Stossel ask "Why do they hate us?"

Teaching democratic citizenship today? You might wish to share this. (Courtesy of Instapundit)

Tuesday, September 10, 2002

So what are we going to do on 9/11? The university website has an article today about the difficulties international students will face. No doubt that's true. Yet we'll ring the chimes and observe a moment of silence, and the human resources office put out a PowerPoint slide show of the last moments of the WTC. It surprised and pleased me. I'll be surprised if this goes on undiscussed on the faculty listserv tomorrow.

This is an opening post for a group weblog for SCSU members of the NAS to discuss events at SCSU and elsewhere that would be of interest to us and to the SCSU faculty and staff. It's a team list; if you're a member and want to join in the fun, let me know.

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