You asked how college was when I was a kid, in the late Epicene, and what I thought of schools today. Herewith an answer which I will probably post on my website as I think the matter important:
Much has changed.
Long ago, before 1965 say, college was understood to be for the intelligent and academically prepared among the young, who would one day both provide leadership for the country and set the tone of society. Perhaps ten percent, but no more than twenty percent, of high-school graduates were thought to have any business on a campus.
Why do so many of our young people instantly break down in tears the moment anything seriously offends them?
Have we raised an entire generation that has been so coddled and that is so spineless that it is completely incapable of dealing with the harsh realities of the modern world? At colleges and universities all over America, students are now demanding “safe spaces” where anything and everything that could possibly make them feel “uncomfortable” is banned. And “trigger warnings” are being placed on some of our great literary classics because they might cause some students to feel “unsafe” because they may be reminded of a past trauma. In this day and age, our overly coddled young people have come to expect that they should be automatically shielded from anything that could remotely be considered harmful or offensive, and as a result we now have an entire generation that is completely lacking in toughness. That may be fine as long as you can depend on Mom and Dad, but how in the world are these young men and women going to handle the difficult challenges that come with living in the real world?
Author Claire Fox has a great deal of experience dealing with these overly sensitive young people, and she has dubbed them “Generation Snowflake”…
Why do so many of our young people instantly break down in tears the moment anything seriously offends them? Have we raised an entire generation that has been so coddled and that is so spineless that it is completely incapable of dealing with the harsh realities of the modern world?
At colleges and universities all over America, students are now demanding “safe spaces” where anything and everything that could possibly make them feel “uncomfortable” is banned. And “trigger warnings” are being placed on some of our great literary classics because they might cause some students to feel “unsafe” because they may be reminded of a past trauma. In this day and age, our overly coddled young people have come to expect that they should be automatically shielded from anything that could remotely be considered harmful or offensive, and as a result we now have an entire generation that is completely lacking in toughness. That may be fine as long as you can depend on Mom and Dad, but how in the world are these young men and women going to handle the difficult challenges that come with living in the real world?
Author Claire Fox has a great deal of experience dealing with these overly sensitive young people, and she has dubbed them “Generation Snowflake”…
Bill Bonner, whose Diaries we republish here, is well-known for being an equal opportunity offender – meaning that political affiliation, gender, age, or any other defining characteristics won’t save worthy targets from getting offended. As far as we are concerned, we generally try not to be unnecessarily rude to people, but occasionally giving offense is not exactly beneath us either.
The motto of the equal opportunity offender….
Some people really deserve it after all…which is why we often refer to modern-day central bankers as lunatics, politicians as psychopaths, governments as gangs of highway robbers waving a flag, and so forth. On one occasion we even provided a translation of Mr. Böhmermann’s “abusive criticism” of Mr. Erdogan, which fell afoul of a 19th century lèse majesté law on Germany’s statute books.
That poem really was rude and insulting, no doubt about it. However, locking up journalists and opposition politicians under the pretext that they “threaten national security”, or bombing and suppressing ethnic minorities (for narrow and selfish political goals to boot) seems a lot worse to us.
The person responsible actually deserves to be insulted day and night, and given how thin-skinned Mr. Erdogan is, insulting him is great fun to boot. Admittedly, only as long as one is not within grabbing distance of his enforcers.
I stumbled across Bearing a few days ago and his videos crack me up (especially the ones where he rips morons doing Tedx talks).
The reality is summed up well in his description, they want to act like toddlers and have tantrums but be considered adults and equals; well fuck that noise.
The description of the video:
Feminists have become so accustom to getting their own way that it has become absolutely unacceptable to have an opinion that differs from the feminist consensus. They will literally kick, scream and throw about anything within arms length if you do not conform.
It’s like dealing with a cranky toddler throwing a tantrum .. but with one key difference – we’re supposed to treat these fucking babies like adults – we’re supposed to see them as our equals – we’re even supposed go out of our way to strive for their un obtainable Marxist equality of outcome.
And all the while, these cancerous feminists are under no obligation to act in kind to everyone else – they’re not even under any obligation to act like civilized people.
“There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.” —Edmund Burke
A tolerant culture has long been acclaimed as a righteous society. While most social indoctrination is designed to foster this fanciful theme, few are willing to ask or examine if this is a desirable goal. A valid conclusion rests upon a correct definition of the nature of tolerance and how it applies to natural arrangements and relationships among different groups. Here are four options to consider:
1) the power or capacity of an organism to tolerate unfavorable environmental conditions
2) willingness to recognize and respect the beliefs or practices of othe
3) a disposition to allow freedom of choice and behavior
4) a permissible difference; allowing freedom to move within limits
Which do you accept as the logical and judicious meaning for tolerance?
Video From UCLA Shows How Vulnerable Students Are In A Gun Free Zone Lockdown
A campus shooting on Wednesday at the University of California left two men dead in a murder-suicided that sent thousands of students looking for safety and locking themselves down in classrooms.
UCLA is a gun free zone that prohibits students from carrying a gun within 1,000 feet of school grounds under Penal Code 626.9 PC, also known as California’s Gun-Free School Zone Act.
UCLA’s campus policyalso, “Prohibits the transportation and possession of firearms and other dangerous weapons on the grounds of UCLA campus, off-campus buildings owned or operated by the University, areas adjacent to University Property or to activities of or programs conducted by the University, whether on or off University Property.”
What this means is that students have little way of defending themselves from a gunman who is seeking to do harm.
In this footage obtained by RT, you can see how students have nothing else to do for their safety but to lock themselves into a classroom and wait for the situation to be defused.
If a determined gunman wanted to barge into the classroom where the students in the video above were hiding, it’s very possible that he could have done so if he had enough time.
As you can see, all the students can do is to sit still and wait, in hopes they do not become targets.
UCLA’s gun policy and the state of California’s penal code establishing gun free zones did absolutely nothing to prevent the man who committed the horrific act on Wednesday from bringing his gun on campus.
Last October the state of California passed a bill that bans concealed handguns on campus.
What this video shows is that the states regulations are putting students in a terribly vulnerable position that could allow a determined gunman to do more damage then he otherwise would be able to do if students and faculty had sufficient means of self-defense.
In the same vein of socially engineered stupidity as “safe spaces” and “microaggressions,” seniors graduating at Plano High School in Texas have been told they are not allowed to wear their hard-earned National Honor Society stole during graduation… basically because some of the other kids who didn’t earn the honors might get their feelings hurt because they don’t have a stole.
According to school practices, students are not allowed to wear NHS regalia.
Garrett Frederick has been a National Honor Society member since his sophomore year, dedicating himself to maintaining a high GPA and performing community service hours.
“I’m not just an honor student — I’m an NHS student. I worked hard. I put in the hours,” Frederick said, explaining that he committed to 20 hours of community service every semester.
Note that students don’t just have to maintain a 3.6 GPA to be inducted into National Honor Society, they also have to complete 20 hours of community service each semester.
The impact of US-style "safe space" politics, in which causing offense is held to be a grave sin, is also limiting freedom of speech abroad. As Oxford Professor of European Studies Timothy Garton Ash exclaimed, figures like Jesus, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx would all be banned from British universities today due to the rise of social justice warrior pressure groups and correspondingly populist counter-extremism legislation.
This is "a double-pronged attack on free speech," Ash told an audience at the Hay literary festival on Monday.
As RT reports, as well as Marx, Darwin and Jesus, he warned that philosophers like Rousseau and Hegel would today be banned from campuses.
When I was a young man, my grandfather would tease us boys by telling us “In my day it was wooden ships and iron men. You boys will be lucky if you are wooden men in iron ships.” I’m not so old that my grandfather lived in the age of sail, so it was just a way for an old man to have some fun teasing his grandkids.
That said, he had a point. A boy coming of age a century ago was facing a much tougher world and would have to be tougher to live in it. There’s little doubt in my mind that men of my generation are softer than the men of father’s or grandfather’s generation. It’s not just the material excess we have today. When I was a little kid, I had it much easier than the prior generations. My grandfather, for example, quit school at 13 and went to work in a coal mine.
Steve Pinker has made a strong case that men have grown decreasingly violent over each generation. His data corresponds with the historical record, which is what makes it such a strong argument. We know, for example, that banditry was a serious issue in the Middle Ages. Traveling from one town to the next was dangerous. Today, we travel from town to town without thinking about bandits, other than cops running speed traps. The only danger there is to your wallet.
Students at Oberlin College are asking the school to put academics on the back burner so they can better turn their attention to activism. More than 1,300 students at the Midwestern liberal arts college have now signed a petitionasking that the college get rid of any grade below a C for the semester, and some students are requesting alternatives to the standard written midterm examination, such as a conversation with a professor in lieu of an essay.
The students say that between their activism work and their heavy course load, finding success within the usual grading parameters is increasingly difficult. "A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting," Megan Bautista, a co-liaison in Oberlin's student government, said, referring to the protests surrounding the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a police officer in 2014. "But we needed to organize on campus as well — it wasn't sustainable to keep driving 40 minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically."
The student activists' request doesn't come without precedence: In the 1970s, Oberlin adjusted its grading to accommodate student activists protesting the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings, The New Yorkerreports. But current students contend that same luxury was not granted to them even though the recent Rice protests were over a police shooting that took place just 30 miles east of campus.
"You know, we're paying for a service. We're paying for our attendance here. We need to be able to get what we need in a way that we can actually consume it," student Zakiya Acey told The New Yorker. "Because I'm dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems — having to deal with all of that, I can't produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways."
What in the Hell is going on in this benighted country? Of course a great amount of the stupidity is due to an election year where political madness rules – especially this year when neither “presumptive” candidate is worth one vote – much less the corruptive content of hundreds of thousands of “free speech” pieces, i.e. dollar bills – which our Supreme Court ( in the Citizens United case) in its’ infinite wisdom, defined money as “speech”and therefore to be freely applied by anyone, including corporations and their PACS and Super-PACS) in any manner they wished to spread it around in negative advertising or buying votes or influencing anyone of their choice to vote as the the corporatocracy desires. About as bright a decision as declaring that corporations are people and are afforded equal protection under the law. Garbage!
Now, being an election year, we must have even more fluff and bull shit tossed into the fan to distance and distract the voters (as if their votes counted for anything anyway) and again, our Supreme Court came to the rescue, ruling that lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender human beings are all perfectly normal and deserve “protection” under the “equal rights” clause of the Constitution (rest it’s soul)..
Well, let me get the facts off the table first so we know how many people need to be “protected” from nothing at all.
Within the general population of what used to be America, lurks 1.6% of the population who “identify” as lesbian or gay, 1.8% as bisexual (AC/DC I assume) and .3% as transgender. (Wikipedia – look it up)
Now, for the love of common sense, what do these people need protection from?
You know those clear plastic toy bubble “guns” that do not in any way whatsoever resemble a real gun and can only “shoot” someone with harmless bubbles?
Well, now a five-year-old in Colorado has been suspended for bringing one to school because the school considers it to be a “fake weapon”.
A spokesman for School District 27J in Brighton declined requests for interviews, but in an email defended the suspension, stating it “is consistent with our district policy.”
A policy that doesn’t include the actual definition of weapon, being “a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage” which is not something a bubble gun can really do unless they are trying really really hard?
The policy includes fake firearms that could reasonably be mistaken for an actual firearm, but many question if that actually applies to the princess bubble gun.
The operative phrase being “fake firearms that could be reasonably mistaken for an actual firearm,” which is the opposite of the princess bubble gun which can only unreasonably be mistaken for an actual firearm by people without functioning common sense.
Speaking of that:
“They said it was a fake weapon, and that I needed to come get her,” said the girl’s mother, who didn’t want to be identified. “I appreciate that they’re trying to keep our kids safe, I really do. But there needs to be some common sense.”
While the girl’s mother says there needs to be some common sense, and there does, what she doesn’t understand is that common sense long ago went extinct in America’s public schools. There’s hardly any left. No one’s really sure if it still exists there or not. It’s like a rare endangered bird that one must stake out to find and have a camera ready to take a picture of it if you do so you can prove you actually really saw it and aren’t just making stuff up.
We have schools that are suspending kids for Nerf guns, Lego guns, bubble guns, putting a picture of gun wallpaper on their computer, for “finger guns” on the playground, and even for biting a breakfast pastry into an “L” shape so that it kinda sorta resembles a gun (even though it is just a Pop Tart and for crying out loud, what violent damage is a little kid going to do with a freaking Pop Tart?).
Next thing you know, the “news” will be inundated with stories of schools going on paranoia lockdown because a kid got caught thinking about a gun.
These incidents have nothing to do with student safety and everything to do with traumatizing children into never exercising their Second Amendment rights. It’s about engineering a nation of obedient and totally defenseless sheep.
Michael Bloomberg gave a not so popular commencement address at the University of Michigan over the weekend. The former champion of banning large sugary drinks was surprisingly critical of college "safe spaces", the new trend that's sweeping the nation.
When the topic of critical lessons learned throughout college came up, the former mayor didn't hold back on his feelings about the subject. As he spoke, he was originally met with a mixed reaction from the students, with some clapping and some booing.
"The most important knowledge that you will leave here today with, like the importance of team work, has nothing to do with your major. It is about how to study, how to cooperate, how to listen carefully, how to think critically, and how to resolve conflicts through reason. In other words, it is working with others. Those are the most important skills in the working world, and it's why colleges have always exposed students to challenging and uncomfortable ideas. The fact that some university boards and administrations now bow to pressure groups, and shield students from these ideas through safe spaces, code words, and trigger warnings, is in my view a terrible mistake."
He didn't let up there, and as he went on the crowd grew seemingly more irritated with the lecture and the booing took over.
"The whole purpose of college is to learn how to deal with difficult situations, not to run away from them. A micro aggression is exactly that, micro. But in a macro sense, one of the most dangerous places on a college campus is the so-called safe space because it creates a false impression that we can isolate ourselves from those who hold different views. We can't, and we shouldn't try. Not in politics, or in the workplace."
In the new era of super political correctness, we're actually quite surprised that Mr. Bloomberg was critical of safe spaces and their usage,and it wouldn't hurt to have a bit more truthiness from those within the political arena.
No matter where you go in life, someone will be there to offend you. Maybe it’s a joke you overheard on vacation, a spat at the office, or a difference of opinion with someone in line at the grocery store. Inevitably, someone will offend you and your values. If you cannot handle that without losing control of your emotions and reverting back to your “safe space” away from the harmful words of others, then you’re best to just stay put at home. Remember, though: if people in the outside world scare you, people on the internet will downright terrify you. It’s probably best to just accept these harsh realities of life and go out into the world prepared to confront them wherever they may be waiting.
