Posts Tagged → intellectual
Harvard U is fake, no longer “Harvard”
The plagiarism scandal around Harvard University’s low quality, diversity-hire president Claudine Gay has now destroyed not just Gay’s personal and academic reputation, but Harvard’s as well. Harvard is no longer an academic institution based on rigorous intellectual debate and merit, it is a nakedly and proudly political activism site motivated by far left wing ideas and values.
In her PhD dissertation (the subject is useless nonsense and subjective fluff), Claudine Gay plagiarized material from a number of authors and academics, not the least of which was her own PhD dissertation advisor at Harvard. Her plagiarization has led to a lot of discussion across the Harvard University campus, some academic advisory boards, the Harvard University board of trustees, academics, racially-based groups, and American society. Understandably so, because Harvard University has been the flagship educational institution in America since its founding nearly four centuries ago.
Harvard’s reputation has always rested upon two simple things: 1) The highest intellectual rigor for its students and its educators, 2) the most exclusive and competitive screening of its students and its educators. For hundreds of years, to either teach or be taught at Harvard has been the gold standard for academic achievement in America and worldwide. The cold and uncaring application of logic, reason, proofs, and meritorious capability have winnowed the desirous from the truly stellar there for centuries. Well, no longer and not any more, as Inspector Clouseau said as he smashed the priceless Steinway piano into splinters.
The debate about whether or not Claudine Gay has the academic merit and the necessary high character to remain as the university’s president has torpedoed Harvard’s reputation. Simply because the widespread formal response by Harvard University to Gay’s failures of judgment and moral character, and to her academic cheating, has been to not only allow her to stay on as now a really, really blatantly incompetent diversity hire (no white man or white woman in that position would have ever made it beyond the first few minutes of this multifaceted crisis), but to also literally allow Gay to cheat even more, only this time in public.
Claudine Gay is now being allowed to retroactively amend her PhD dissertation with the necessary citations and quotation marks that were missing when her doctoral thesis was approved. This is like the judge allowing the robber to go back to the bank and put the money back in the vault, in order to avoid being charged and held accountable for the original crime of robbing the bank, now that the robber has been caught.
Gay is being allowed to do this re-crime so that her detractors are no longer empowered with the truth, so that they can no longer accurately accuse her of academic cheating. And for those who don’t know it, academic cheating is an automatic FAIL on every real academic report card, and it is usually the means for ejection from whatever school the cheater is enrolled at.
Harvard University’s board of trustees and the academics behind this brazen sleight of hand have basically told everyone in academia, in research and development, in the business of important ideas, and in the competitive world of merit that some animals are more equal than other animals, and that there are harsh rules for everyone, except for those few special people who some remote, self-anointed elite group has artificially determined should not be judged by the same standards as everyone else.
No society can sustain itself with this kind of fake justice system, or this kind of fake educational system. With this decision to both allow Claudine Gay to retroactively amend her already finalized dissertation, and to retain her as president, every single internal brake and decision-making system designed to ensure that all of Harvard University’s outputs are the best possible on Planet Earth have failed.
It has been determined by the powers that be at Harvard that the institution is now a (leftist) political activism center with no intellectual rudder, no universal standards for behavior or achievement, no universal code of conduct. Only subjective political decisions will be used henceforth to run the school, and we now see that certain skin colors and certain Marxist outlooks will be the preferred choices.
There are a lot of things I did not expect to see in my lifetime. I did not expect to see a presidential election fraught with so many wild irregularities across so many states and jurisdictions. I did not expect to see the entire media establishment and the entire political establishment not only fail to address those electoral irregularities, but to jointly sweep everything under the rug, declare a winner who had not even campaigned in public, and to accuse those who questioned the election results as “election deniers.” I did not expect to see the force of law be used against the “election deniers” for questioning the outcome and legitimacy of the questionable election, and who have since become persecuted political dissidents and outright political prisoners in their own “democratic” country. I did not expect to see the rule of law fail as widely and as quickly as it has, and I did not expect to see the rise of a totalitarian federal bureaucracy as fast as it has happened.
I also did not expect to see America’s flagship academic institution (the school now formerly known as Harvard University) gleefully burn down its own reputation in a public bonfire of vanities.
With all of these spectacular and unbelievable failures, Harvard’s just being the latest, we are seeing the severe cultural rot America has been experiencing since the 1960s finally come to fruition. All of the cultural safeguards, institutions, and legal infrastructure designed to keep America functioning as a constitutional republic are failing and being failed on purpose and in front of our faces. We are told by the agents of these failures that we must accept these outcomes not as failures, but as inevitable changes necessary to re-make America into the socialist utopia it was always meant to be.
It now seems possible not just that the Hamas loving racist academic fraudster Claudine Gay will be retained by Harvard as its president, but that she could be forcefully installed by the federal bureaucracy and its media wing (not elected by the people) as the next president of the United States “for our own good.”
Symbols have now officially become more important than facts in America. We all see that Harvard is fake, and we are told that it is still Harvard.
American Liberals: From Thoughtful Intellectuals to Parrot Puppets
Recent conversations with a number of liberals have me writing this essay. Because “shocking” is the only word capturing the breadth and depth of loss liberals have plunged since my youth.
In my youth, which is like a thousand years ago, liberals were the free thinkers, the unconventional open -minded intellectuals. Their willingness to think outside of the box on some issues helped America improve in a variety of ways on some key public policy areas.
For example, liberals led the way on environmental quality, understanding mental health and disability, and understanding and tolerating homosexuals. These subjects may have been taken to crazy lengths since their inception (e.g. demanding that everyone not just tolerate homosexuals and treat them with dignity, but be forced to accept homosexual behavior in place of religious belief or personal discomfort; or to force environmental quality to literally the trillionth part to the point where America has no economy).
Liberals were thoughtful intellectuals on a bunch of public policy issues, and they helped America become a more tolerant, comfortable place to live as a result.
What has happened since then, let’s say then being 1976, liberalism’s high water mark, is an increasingly faster rush to the bottom of intellectual rigor, honesty, consistency, and meaningfulness. Today’s liberals are by and large politically correct to the point where they adhere to the latest and strangest notion, no matter how out of bounds, dishonest, double standard-ed, inconsistent, or how high the price they and America must pay. The list of their self-destructive PC issues is a thousand miles long, but let’s just say that supporting BlacKKK Lives Matter violent cultural destruction, using official government offices to promote and implement unofficial policies that voters have not approved, etc.
Today, liberals are parrot puppets. Many are like the walking dead zombies in horror movies. They simply parrot platitudes and certifiably false claims they are fed by the politically partisan mainstream media, turning them into puppets.
A long time dear friend living in the heart of New York City made it clear to me the other day that she hates President Trump so much that she will endure having her businesses looted and destroyed, her neighborhood gutted, her livelihood set back twenty years. Donald Trump never did anything to her. He has done none of the things she says that she hates about him. She actually supports some of his domestic policies. When I pointed out that her visceral hatred for him is the result of her constantly imbibing mainstream media fake news that is designed to fill its readers and watchers with hate, and that she might consider reading or watching some different information sources, she responded that she only watches and reads those outlets “that are in line with my values.”
In other words, my dear liberal friend will only encounter information outlets that reinforce what she already thinks. So her mind is a closed loop. She is now a parrot puppet. And she is not alone.
The exact same formula is at work on a host of other liberals I encountered and spoke with over the past week. Information outlets that do not directly and strongly reinforce what they already believe, or what they want to believe, are forbidden. Because their minds are so tightly closed, they cannot think of anything but hate and disrespect for people who disagree with them.
Talking with liberals is like watching crack addicts shoot up, snort, and smoke a toxic drug all at once. They start out knowing it is bad for them, but they willfully engage in self-destructive behavior because their high is so good. The high being that false sense of floating enlightenment and perfection of being totally correct about all things, always. And this hard drug analogy would seem to explain why liberals are now going so far as to embrace self-destructive policies that are so clearly going to damage their own personal lives, and their children. Like accepting the false outrage of BLM and begging forgiveness for crimes committed by different people hundreds of years ago.
If I were confronted by a BLM loon and told to get on my knees, I would turn the table and demand the same of him, maybe even have him get on all fours and give me twenty five push-ups, because his cannibal ancestors enslaved and ate a bunch of white AND black people just a couple hundred years ago. Oh, the racism! Oh the injustice! Oh the horror! The shame that BLM jerk should feel for his cannibal, slave-owning ancestors should just crush him flat, and shut him up. It really is his fault. All of it. Including the indigestion that followed his ancestors’ unholy meals.
I digress.
It is sad to see so many people with native critical thinking capability toss it overboard. America is losing some of our best and brightest to liberal political correctness. An entire generation or two of Americans cannot think their way out of a wet paper bag because of PC and being parrot puppets.
In case you have any inkling of open mindedness left, you are encouraged to take a walk on the wild side, to cross the DMZ, to go to no-man’s land, to put your very life in jeopardy and read through some of the articles posted at www.thegatewaypundit.com, or www.breitbart.com. Just try it. It might be like trying mint chip ice cream for the first time, when all your life you thought you just always wanted plain vanilla. Maybe you will discover something new and rewarding.
Maybe you will become an intellectual once again.