Tag: education

Milo brings the chaos to Berkeley

Milo ends his campus tour with a bang:

Protesters armed with bricks and fireworks mounted an assault on the building hosting a speech by polarizing Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos Wednesday night, forcing the event’s cancellation.

Several injuries have been reported and at least four banks have been vandalized after demonstrators marched away from the scene of a violent protest at the canceled speaking event by controversial far-right writer and speaker Yiannopoulos on the University of California at Berkeley campus.

UC Berkeley officials said the protest was infiltrated by vandals.

Yiannopoulos was making the last stop of a tour aimed at defying what he calls an epidemic of political correctness on college campuses.

With masked activists joining the already large group of protesters gathered in the area between Sather Gate and the north end of Telegraph Avenue as night fell, campus police were holding their positions near the entrance of the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building hosting the event.

As the gathered crowd got more agitated, masked “black bloc” activists began hurling projectiles including bricks, lit fireworks and rocks at the building and police.

Some used police barriers as battering rams to attack the doors of the venue, breaching at least one of the doors and entering the venue on the first floor.

In addition to fireworks being thrown up onto the second-floor balcony, fires were lit outside the venue, including one that engulfed a gas-powered portable floodlight.

The area on Upper Sproul Plaza grew thick with smoke, and later tear gas, as the protest intensified.

At about 6:20 p.m., UC campus police announced that the event had been cancelled. Officers ordered the crowd to disperse, calling it an unlawful assembly.

Shut down the universities

Being fully converged, they are no longer fit for their original purpose of educating the sons of the elite.

The prestigious University of Oxford wants students to replace “she” and “he” with the more gender-neutral pronoun “ze.”

The university’s behavior code states that using the wrong pronoun for a transgender person is considered an offense, and a new leaflet distributed by the student union supposedly aims to cut down on hurt feelings and discrimination by encouraging students to use “ze” instead, the Independent reports.oxford

British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell applauded the move.

“It is a positive thing to not always emphasize gender divisions and barriers,” he told the Daily Mail.

“It is good to have gender-neutral pronouns for those who want them but it shouldn’t be compulsory,” Tatchell said. “This issue isn’t about being politically correct or censoring anyone. It’s about acknowledging the fact of changing gender identities and respecting people’s right to not define themselves as male or female.”

“Giving people the ‘ze’ option is a thoughtful, considerate move,” he said.

The change suggested by the Oxford’s student union follows a trend of schools moving toward more “gender inclusive” language to describe students who don’t want to be labeled male or female.

The University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion issued a list of suggested gender-neutral pronouns for students that included “ze,” as well as other terms like “xe,” “hir,” “zir,” “xem,” and “wyr” to identify transgender students that created a public firestorm, The Tennessean reports.

Officials later removed the guidance from the university’s website amid the backlash, according to EAGnews.

In England, Cambridge University is also moving toward more “inclusive” language, and student welfare officer Sophie Buck told The Sunday Times student union events there “start with a speaker introducing themselves using a gender neutral pronoun.

“It’s part of a drive to make the union intersectional,” she said.

Remember, this is all entirely predictable. It is the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence on display: No institution can effectively serve two different functions. The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.

From SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police:


The public schools can no longer educate, so people are turning to homeschooling. The universities can no longer provide liberal arts educations, so people are becoming technology-assisted autodidacts. The banks no longer loan, the state and local governments no longer provide basic public services, the military does not defend the borders, the newspapers no longer provide news, the television networks no longer entertain, and the corporations are increasingly unable to provide employment.


Even as the institutions have been invaded and coopted in the interests of social justice, they have been rendered unable to fulfill their primary functions. This is the great internal contradiction that the SJWs will never be able to positively resolve, just as the Soviet communists were never able to resolve the contradiction of socialist calculation that brought down their economy and their empire 69 years after Ludwig von Mises first pointed it out. One might call it the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence; no man can serve two masters and no institution can effectively serve two different functions. The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.


There is no point trying to debate about what the purpose of a university is any longer. The public should stop funding them, their assets should be seized and distributed to the public, and new institutions will rise up to take their place. Nothing of value will be lost in the process, because they’re already not educating anyone anyhow.

It’s fascinating to see how quickly allowing women to attend the elite universities destroyed an institution that was centuries old. One would think someone, somewhere, would eventually notice that the same pattern is playing out again, and again, and again in a wide variety of institutions, from the men’s clubs to the churches.

CORRECTION: Apparently the situation at Oxford is not QUITE as bad as the article makes it look. It’s only the Oxford Student Union that has adopted this policy, not the entire university. So, it’s about 3-5 years less converged than the article describes it.

Predators go where the prey is

You may recall last night’s discussion of Chanhassan, and what a nice, low-crime area it is. But it’s not necessarily safe, because predators always go where the prey is. As I said yesterday, there isn’t a public or private school in America where there isn’t at least a would-be child molester:

The principal of Chanhassen High School was arrested Tuesday morning on suspicion of possessing child pornography. Timothy Dorway, 44, was booked Tuesday after Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agents with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force arrested him.

The arrest followed a search of his home in Victoria and at the high school where he was named principal in 2010.

Charges have not been filed in the case. No Eastern Carver County School students are involved in the investigation, according to the school district. Dorway was placed on leave Tuesday.

“This is a difficult day for our students, parents and community,” Superintendent Jim Bauck said in a statement. “There are questions that we want answers to and we’re working with the BCA as they conduct an investigation to find those answers.

Looking at the guy, they’d better dig up the floor of his basement and the beds of his flower gardens. Homeschool or else!

Why I don’t give to my alma mater

In a single picture. This was not my elementary school, but the university from which I graduated. Bucknell University, to be specific. What a pathetic laughingstock it has turned out to be since it started embracing “diversity” in my sophomore year, which at the time confused everyone there, especially the nominally diverse. I wonder, do they offer degrees in collages, coloring books, and eating paste yet?

Homeschool or else

When they ask children who are abused why they didn’t tell anyone, this sort of thing is probably why. Who are they supposed to trust?

When a school police officer learned that a teacher was raping a 14-year-old sophomore, he did it too, the girl says in a civil lawsuit, and now the teacher is in prison and the cop is awaiting trial. In a federal lawsuit against the Edgewood Independent School District and Memorial High School, Jane Doe says both district employees used “hall passes” to pull her from class to sexually assault and sodomize her on school grounds.

Her chemistry teacher, Marcus Revilla, who impregnated her, pleaded guilty to sex crimes in state and federal courts, including sexual assault of a child and production of child pornography. He was sentenced to 13 years in state prison and a 17-year federal prison term.

Revilla filmed his sexual exploitation of the girl, and sexually assaulted and/or sodomized her “on at least 100 separate and distinct occasions,” according to her Dec. 5 lawsuit.

Former Edgewood ISD police Officer Manuel Hernandez is awaiting trial in Bexar County Court on charges of aggravated sexual assault.

She sued him too, and the school district’s police department.

Now, Mr. Hernandez deserves his fair trial, but the fact that the teacher she accused has already been convicted tends to lend credence to her account of events. Also, there is the fact that Hispanics are disproportionately inclined towards committing sex crimes to bolster her story.

You can talk the “my kids go to a great school” talk all you like, but the fact is that predators always go where the prey is, and the statistics clearly indicate that every school, public or private, is concealing one or more sexual predators among its employees.

Truth or social justice?

Jonathan Haidt argues that universities face a choice:

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a kife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?
The harvardmost obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.  Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.

But they don’t, really. The universities are, by and large, going to have to choose social justice. Truth will never serve any institution that depends upon a partnership with government and the banks to prey upon unsuspecting young people in order to mortgage their futures.

The One True Ring of Evil

The Bucknell Bubble has inadvertently produced a series of right-wing dissidents:

Frequent Fox News guest Michael Malice stopped by The Milo Show this week where he discussed his experience at Bucknell University, an institution which he claimed was ripe with anti-intellectualism and elitist snobbery.

Malice lambasted Bucknell’s culture of anti-intellectualism, claiming that students and faculty rarely engaged with ideas that conflicted with their worldview during his time at the university. I highlighted this in February when I compared the warm embrace the university gave a guest speaker from the Black Panther Party who had a history of violent rhetoric with the reception received by the relatively harmless provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, whose visit inspired hostility from both faculty and students.

Malice partially attributed the culture of anti-intellectualism to the radicalism that dominated many of the university’s departments.  “The head of the economics department when I was there was a feminist Marxist, and one of her themes was ‘since the laws of economics were discovered by men, they are inherently sexist and need to be rediscovered by women.’”

Like many students, Malice expected his university experience to be intellectually stimulating. Always a skeptic, Malice hope to challenge his own views, as well as the views of others. Instead, Malice claims that his peers rarely ventured outside of their intellectual bubbles. “No critical thought. These are the same people who 30 years ago said ‘you’re eating raw fish, what is wrong with you?’ And now, ‘I’m a foodie, you gotta go to this place, they have the freshest stuff.”

Yiannopoulos and Malice discussed the series of dissidents that have passed through the gates of Bucknell University over the past 20 years. “What’s weird is that it seems there is a one true ring that gets passed down. Vox Day was there eight years before me. And then right between Vox Day and me was Evan Coyne Maloney, who was called the right-wing Michael Moore, he did a film called IndoctrinateU.”

“And now they’ve got Tom Ciccotta,” Milo added.

Yiannopoulos and Malice suggested that the university’s continued failure to provide a complete education will only give rise to more conservative and libertarian Bucknell dissidents. “I love the idea that the President of Bucknell is always between right-wing shitlords, is sitting there just wondering which of their fresh-faced intake is going to rear his head as the new evil monster,” Yiannopoulos said.

One of my professors informed me about fifteen years ago that BU’s crackdown on the Greek system, which began my sophomore year and picked up significantly the year after I graduated, had an unexpectedly negative consequence of reducing the average SAT scores among incoming freshmen. Apparently, all the “brilliant fuck-ups”, to use his description, who had once preferred what was then a party school like Bucknell to the uptight atmosphere of the Ivies, no longer saw any reason to attend what had been transformed into just another Ivy League wannabe with a pretty campus in the middle of nowhere.

It used to be a place for Ivy League rejects, rich and pretty Greek legacies, and smart kids who liked to party, but now only the rejects remain.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I took one look at Princeton and was ready to leave after five minutes, even before our pompous tour guide waxed eloquent about all-male eating clubs. MIT was, of course, a complete non-starter; we made a perfunctory visit so my father could see his old stomping grounds. At Bucknell, a pretty sorority girl was my tour guide, and she invited me to come to a Kappa Kappa Gamma party. Easy choice. But if I was choosing a college these days, I doubt I’d even bother visiting Lewisburg. What would be the point? If you’re going to subject yourself to four joyless years of grim SJW indoctrination, you should at least be rewarded with a name-brand diploma with which you can torment SJWs saddled with lesser degrees.

There were some early signs of convergence taking place while I was there. I remember how weird I thought it was when the administration began pushing “diversity” in my junior year. Diversity? At Bucknell? What diversity? The only diversity to be found was in my sprinter-jumper-hurdler group and on the football team. We were innocents back then, and we had no idea what that signified at the time.

Anyhow, it amuses me that of my entire class, Doug Lebda and I are the two alumni deemed notable by Wikipedia. What a horrible embarrassment that must be for the university. Needless to say, I’ve never been invited back there to speak.

Homeschool or die, homogamy edition

And this is why every sensible parent is rightfully wary of those super-caring male teachers:

Police continue to investigate sexual abuse allegations by three teenage victims assaulted by a South St. Paul teacher and his “husband”[sic] found dead in Washington last week.

Aric Babbitt, 40, and Matthew Deyo, 36, knew they were being investigated by police when they left town in mid August, according to court documents recently made public. Their bodies were found on a beach on Lopez Island by a kayaker Aug. 25. Police later discovered a suicide note.

One of the victims came forward to the police Aug. 14. Like the others, Babbitt and Deyo were friends with the teen’s parents and acted as mentors to them, the documents said. They would take them on trips, sometimes getting them drunk or high and then have sex with them, the documents said.

Never forget that gay men are 14 times more likely to sexually abuse children than straight men. That doesn’t mean all of them are chickenhawks, but it is something you should probably keep in mind when that super-dedicated drama teacher with the mustache is really, really insistent about how your 13-year-old son would absolutely benefit from taking part in the big weekend trip to the state convention.

And, according to my gay acquaintances, more than a few gay “marriages” would be better described as “conspiracies to commit statutory rape”.

As for male teachers, think about what kind of man is capable of surviving, let alone thriving, in the SJW-converged environment of public school teaching.

“Babbitt’s Youtube channel depicts a highly-involved teacher who cared about his students.”

Highly-involved. You don’t say.

“According to the report, Babbitt became the boy’s mentor after he came out of the closet to his family.”

Mentor. Right.

Mailvox: teaching 4GW

William S. Lind and LtCol Thiele are improving the state of American university education:

I teach undergraduate courses in Political Science and after reading Lind’s Four Generations of Modern War on your recommendation, I had to throw out two whole lectures on war and terrorism.  I’ve gone two semesters with new lectures and I’m looking to expand on this theme in my Intro course through some form of non-lecture activity.  After reading an article from Jeffro on wargaming in the classroom, I’m considering introducing a game which would demonstrate thematic concepts on 4GW, but I have little experience in wargaming beyond Risk and PC gaming. 

Could you recommend an appropriate game?  My classroom size is approximately 10-12, making 2 or 3 person teams possible, and I can probably devote two 1.5 hour sessions to this activity.  Andean Abyss and Cuba Libre have come up but I can’t afford to buy multiple games in a trial-and-error fashion.  Thank you.

Interesting question. Let’s throw this out to everyone and discuss the matter. My first thought was Junta, but that’s probably too focused on the traditional civil unrest. And it has made me think that perhaps it would be worthwhile to design a game around the core 4GW concepts. It wouldn’t be too hard, the first question would be deciding whether to make it totally theoretical or utilizing real and/or historical settings.

Another possibility would be Fallujah 2004: City Fighting in Iraq. This wouldn’t teach 4GW concepts per se, but would help illustrate some of the challenges involved. However, it’s a solitaire game, which could be seen as a positive or a negative, depending upon the professor’s perspective. Decision Iraq is a two-player game that deals directly with the insurgency, so I’d probably take a close look at that one. The rules can be found on the Decision Games site here in RTF format.

Affirmative action in action

This sort of affirmative-action-related meltdown happens far more often at the better schools than anyone would credit:

Throughout elementary, middle and high school, Kidd’s talent for science showed. She was accepted into the highly competitive Thacher School, a private boarding high school in California where she promptly earned the nickname “The Science Girl.”

The teachers loved her and lavished her with praise, Kidd wrote, using her homework as an example for other students. When she was a sophomore, her chemistry teachers announced before 240 classmates that Kidd had garnered the highest score in a national chemistry competition.

These accolades only fueled Kidd’s drive to succeed, and it culminated in her acceptance to an Ivy League university.

“The ultimate climax was when I got into Columbia,” Kidd wrote. “Because it’s such a prestigious school, it made me feel like I had proven to myself, and everyone around me, that I made it.”

When she got on campus, she decided, naturally, that she would study science. But things didn’t go smoothly.

The day she moved in was her birthday. “I felt really alienated and alone and didn’t find the Columbia students very welcoming,” Kidd wrote. “During my freshman year, I quickly went from star student to slacker.”

In contrast to the tight-knit community at Thacher, Kidd said, “at Columbia I was lucky if a teacher talked to me.” The lack of close connections with her teachers discouraged her from engaging with her schoolwork.

“Even though I was wired to be a good student,” Kidd said, “I didn’t feel inspired. I got through the year, getting B’s and C’s, but I didn’t care. I was just happy the summer arrived.”

Upon her return to classes in September, Kidd signed up for computer-science classes and “hated every minute of it.”

One morning in April, she woke up and realized she needed to make a change and “started plotting [her] escape.”

She probably would have been a star at a second-tier school. But it’s not only unreasonable, it is cruel to be throwing kids like this into situations where mediocrity is the best possible outcome and failure is the most probable one.

Anyhow, she’s better off doing what she actually wants to do than what everyone else expects of her. It’s neither right nor fair to put the weight of a race on one young kid who happens to be an outlier.