Maggie's Farm

The War Against Academic Freedom

It seems crazy nowadays that you can get in trouble without aligning with Marxist theories. How many times have I posted about this? 

SAT exams are a good measure of preparedness for higher education. 

(They also seem to be a pretty good proxy for IQ, but of course not always. If raised illiterate in the Guatemala jungle, speaking only Mam, probably not.) 

I do not know to what extent various talents of interest correlate with IQ.  I'd be interested, because some people have areas of extraordinary talent, and areas with none so an LA higher ed might not be right for them.

Still, in an America in which some are obsessed with racial measures, the SATs, statistically, seem to favor Asians first, Ashkenazi Jews second, non-Jewish Europeans third, and American Blacks and Hispanics last.

Regardless of that, I feel it makes sense to try to discern what kids are prepared for a rigorous plan for advanced education. Admittedly, much of higher ed these days is an industry seeking customers, but that is another topic.

Via Bari Weiss' selections,  You Aren't Actually Mad at the SATs - you're mad at what they reveal.

I want to add that many of the best people I have known would have been terrible with SATs, and could never have done college physics or ever aspired to read the Iliad in Greek. 

Book: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature Hardcover

Also, A Conversation with E O Wilson (text) 

This is the best week of the year to phone the IRS and the DMV to deal with nagging issues. Also, best week of the year to sort out insurance issues.

Why? Nobody else is. 

Are CDs obsolete? Are books obsolete?

I use both. I also have a turntable for old vinyl records.  

And what are "natural rights"?

From The fallacies of the common good by Kim R. Holmes:

 Put simply, the more successful the current common-good movement is, the more it will erode one of the key pillars of American conservative thought: the idea of liberty. The biggest danger is not that America will evolve into national or imperial socialism, but that statist arguments from conservatives will end up reinforcing similar arguments made by progressives. Politics would devolve into a bidding war on which side, the Right or the Left, can buy the most votes with government handouts, win the most battles in the courts over defending “their” version of free speech, control the courts and administrative elites, or get to define what industrial and administrative policies mean. In that battle, I would put my money on the political masters of collectivism, the progressives, because that is their raison d’être.

Former Staffer Jodi Shaw Sues Smith College Alleging Anti-White Racially Hostile Workplace

 A professor at Loyola University New Orleans has been accused of spouting racist, sexist comments in the classroom.

University Of Illinois-Chicago Law School Reassigns Jason Kilborn's Spring Classes While He Undergoes Mandatory Diversity Training

From Academic Ideologues Are Corrupting STEM. The Silent Liberal Majority Must Fight Back

 I expected to be viciously mobbed, and possibly cancelled, like others before me. Yet the result surprised me. Although some did try to cancel me, I received a flood of encouraging emails from others who share my concern with the process by which radical political doctrines are being injected into STEM pedagogy, and by which objective science is being subjugated to regressive moralization and censorship. The high ratio of positive-to-negative comments (even on Twitter!) gave me hope that the silent liberal majority within STEM may (eventually) prevail over the forces of illiberalism.

A Field and Stream Classic short story: The Road to Tinkhamtown by Corey Ford.

A tearjerker: A man and a dog. 

The testimony of Steven Ijames, who is an impressive police officer, at  Legal Insurrection from the Daunte Wright trial.

Fascinating. 

A quote from an academic via American Thinker:

 My research sits between classics and modernist studies, but does not take the canonical form of that interdisciplinary research, i.e. tracking the genetic inheritances of an ancient canon of texts in modernist aesthetics. Instead I invert this impulse: I am interested in pursuing, on the one hand, the role of modernism and the canonization of modernist aesthetics in mediating the narrative category of the classical and the canon of ancient texts. On the other, I focus on the generative crisis that the classical, as a category whose signature gesture is a periodizing narrative of historical rupture, poses to the utopian aesthetics of modernist rupture as formalized in the shock of the new. My dissertation takes up these problems by targeting the longstanding interpretive structure in the reception of Euripides that has taken the ancient Greek tragedian to be preëmptively modern. It proceeds as a series of case studies in the 20th-century interpretation and adaptation of Euripides, looking to moments when the assertion of Euripides' modernity has proved generative for modernist, post-modernist and avant-garde aesthetics.

Who decides?

At City Journal

Via American Digest, Long Read of the Week: The Turn by Liel Leibovitz. It begins:

You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.

The Turn hit me just a beat before it did you, so I know just how awful it feels...

At Quillette, Work or Welfare?

 As early as 1995, author Jeremy Rifkin suggested that automation would eliminate work for most and create the basis for a society where “large numbers of people could be liberated from long hours in the formal marketplace.” This would allow them to focus on “leisure activities,” a kind of technological utopia for the masses.

..It’s a compelling vision in some ways, but right now it looks dystopic...

Egypt opens Luxor's ancient 'Avenue of Sphinxes' to great fanfare

A video here 

Standards-Based Grading Will Ruin Education

Nobody imagined that anything remotely resembling The Red Guards of China in the 60s, but the mobbing of people today in the US brings The Red Guard to mind, especially on campuses. In fact, I feel that the Red Guards are a role model for some. 

It feels as if there is the fad of a soft Cultural Revolution going on here. Down with The Five Olds, etc. 

There are many new topics about which one can engage in Wrongthink these days. Justice, free speech, and tolerance are bourgeois concepts designed to oppress somebody.

Excellent memoir: Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng.  It takes a strong stomach to read it.

 The Malicious Dead End Of "Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion"

From Jeffrey Polet's Negotiating “The Captive Mind” on American campuses:

 Intellectual terror, Milosz avers, is a principle central to the ideological project.

I was not familiar with Milosz' 1953 The Captive Mind, but should have been.

How Plague Reshaped Colonial New England

Very doubtful that it was bubonic plague. It is more likely to have been a combination of European diseases like influenza, smallpox, common cold (a corona virus), etc first brought to the New World by Portuguese fishermen.  The natives had no immunity to those things.