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The disease that has rotted the academic mind is post-modernism, hereafter called pomo. Pomo is neo-solipsism, the belief that there is no objective reality, that everything is subjective (a narrative), and that we can learn nothing about anything. Pomo requires no math skills (here, I believe, is one of the major reasons it has become so popular, so math idiots who should never have been able to graduate high school and now hold PhDs can pretend to do research and justify their careers). Pomo requires no research skills, other than the ability to play therapist and ask Cindy Lou Student, “So how do you FEEL about that?”

However, pomo is far more than simply silly. It is politically charged, viciously anti-western and anti-American, and to say the least, ignorant. The National Council of Teachers of English, perhaps the largest cesspool of pomo garbage, has published a paper by one of its members about the importance of discussing democracy in the classroom. It should be no surprise that to the author, “democracy” means the European flavor, neo-feudalism, where the government is all-powerful and exists to parent its subjects, and the principles upon which this nation was founded are ignored or contradicted. Whether this is because the paper was written by yet another brain-dead academic Marxist, or because the author is unfamiliar with Federalism, the Founding Fathers, the Constitution or the Federalist Papaers is irrelevant. You can count on nearly any academic these days, no matter what his agenda, having no knowledge about his own nation’s history, and being unable to tell the difference between Jefferson and Hamilton.

That should be Jefferson, Hamilton and Marx.

Pomo began, of course, in the humanities, the fields which have become the sewer of non-intellectualism in academia as the hippies who had no marketable job skills went to grad school and got PhDs. It has spread like Ebola to the social sciences, and remains immensely popular in education.

My own field had already begun to slide into academic stupidity when pomo arrived to finish the job. Noam Chomsky, hailed as the savior of linguistics, actually stole linguistics away from any semblance of science or scientific thought with his particularly squishy–and untestable–mentalism. Chomsky trashed research in the field with his concept of the Ideal Speaker/Hearer. No longer did the researcher have to collect data, because he reflected the Ideal Spekaer/Hearer. No longer did anyone need to have any kind of methodology, apply any rigor, or control any experimentm, because there were no experiments, only introspective essays, supported by citations of other introspective essays, that ludicrously claimed to reveal psychological realities.

Enter Robin Lakoff, and her tome of untested unproven assertions that every feminist scholar revers, Language and Womens Place. No statement she made is in any way supported. She makes gross and ridiculous generalization after generalization. Yet this trash masquerading as linguistic research became the seminal work for so-called feminist theory.

The difference between Lakoff and Chomsky, believe it or not, is that Lakoff is politically charged. (I suspect it would be hard for non-linguists to believe that Chomsky’s linguistic work is not politically charged or even politically relevant, but believe it). The Marxist ideology of feminist studies intermingled with the same in pomo, and fed it. Thus, the current communist academic hydra was born.

It should be said that mentalism also put the brakes on pomo in the field. Where the two contradict, Chomsky’s mentalism prevails. The result is if you compare the quality of research between linguistics and, say, education, the former is far superior. It’s nearly all garbage, but it doesn’t stink nearly as much.

Researchers in the field are trying to be more rigorous, but they forget GIGO. The core of their research is still mentalist trash, nothing more than ideas cooked up in the imagination of Chomsky et al, none of which can be tested or disproved as science requires. Their attempts may be laudable, but they are empty. And until researchers drop the garbage that rots at the center of their own research, they are cheating the United States out of tax dollars.

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This is what happened with Pinochet, the Shah, in Afghanistan, in fact, this is what happened in all those examples of “evil American imperialism” the liberaltarians and leftists love to howl about.

I think we could look to our parent nation, the UK, and their history and learn something. Look at all the ex-colonies, and you see British institutions everywhere. Adapted British governments. British educational systems. And even in ex-colonies that were intensely, even violently, anti-British. (Granted, there are a few exceptions, but not so many that there isn’t something to be learned here.)

Of course, the Bush Doctrine isn’t imperialism, unless you abuse the meaning of the word. Imperialism requires that a nation incorporate colonies into itself by imposing foreign rule. That is not what we are doing, or are interested in doing.

What our non-American allies and enemies do not understand about the United States is our intense isolationist streak that has been with us since the beginning of our nation. Call it arrogance if you like, but we just don’t give much of a fuck what the latest fashion in Milan is or even where it is in Italy. Why should we? You folks in Milan live your lives and we’ll live ours. Where we perceived a threat (this is where the Cold War comes in) we acted; otherwise, we went about our business.

This was the attitude of Bush.43, until 9/11. That changed the above attitude to we don’t give much of a fuck what you do as long as you don’t threaten or attack us.

When our national security was threatened by the election of an openly Marxist government, we acted covertly and helped Pinochet into power. But then, our isolationism came into play. We had nothing to do with his rule. We had no interest in influencing his rule.

The same is true of Shah Pahlavi. We were not there to help him build his nation or government. We were protecting our national security. In Afghanistan, we aided the rebels against the USSR in their last gasp to expand their crumbling empire. But as soon as the rebels won, we left.

We have always assumed that since we figured it out, everybody else could as well (hat tip to Mark Steyn). I think the fundamental reason this has been a faulty assumption is another one of those cultural differences, one that most of the world doesn’t get about the United States.

We don’t look backward, we look ahead. For the most part, the rest of the world looks backward and runs into the wall again and again.

You can see evidence of this everywhere. Back in the 90s when Eastern Europe was plagued by so-called ethnic cleansing, the excuse given time and time again was what the Turks did in the thirteenth century.

Newsflash. This makes no sense to Americans. None. Get over it. Move on. Take responsibility. Try to behave like civilized adults. And take your “You Americans do not understand because you have no heeee-story!” horseshit and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

This backwards looking phenomenon is even more obvious in the Middle East than Europe (though no more valid). As soon as we left Afghanistan the warlords begin fighting among each other. There was no interest in living in a civilized relatively free nation, there was only a group of tribes fighting for the power to behead members of other tribes.

The Cold War was not a mistake. We fought the good fight and, thanks to Reagan, who was every bit as hated by the Eurotrash as Bush.43, we won. I will not say that we should not have intervened. However, we should have been a bit more imperialistic.

The Bush Doctrine is a radical departure from American foreign policy, in that it is not isolationist. The Bush Doctrine is not imperialism, but it is extracting the primary benefit of imperialism: nation building.

I don’t object to this. But what I do not understand is why we are using a European-style democracy as the model–particularly in countries that are really collections of different ethnic and/or religious zones. Wouldn’t a collection of states only loosely connected by a relatively weak federal government be ideal in these areas, so rife with tension? Wouldn’t allowing these groups to govern themselves rather than impose the rule of another group on them be less likely to lead to yet another nation fractured by internal warfare?

It seems to me ideal, yet we are exporting a system with a large and all powerful central government run by coalitions between parties (and presumably, the ethnic/religious states). I don’t need to point out the problems with this sort of government–look to Europe, more specifically Italy, a nation not torn apart by historical strife among different ethnic groups.

I suppose it depends on what one means by “work,” at least in a sense. Yes, it could work, though I doubt efficiently or without creating yet more problems in an already tense country. The argument is that without a strong central government you cannot force these tribes/groups to work with one another, but at the end of the day, you cannot force cooperation. Instead, we should demonstrate to these areas that it is to their best interest to cooperate, and allow each to set up its own local (state) government, bound with the others in a Federalist pact driven by a Constitution (but without the equivalent of the Fourteenth Amendment). If the Sunnis and Kurds are allowed to govern themselves in their own states, there will be far less resentment resulting from the control of the Shia majority–and the Shiites can likewise govern themselves.

Call it imperialism if you like, but it would be the best thing we could do, for them, for Europe, and for ourselves.

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Despite their howling about human dignity and rights, only Communists have more blood on their hands than liberals. 89.5 million deaths is nothing to sneeze at (and that’s a conservative estimate). And liberals have no shame or guilt about those deaths, either; no, they insist on the myth that hippies were cultural heroes, and their political stances were justified and righteous.

Liberals were wrong about the New Deal. Liberals were wrong about terrorism, wrong about Hussein, wrong about Afghanistan, wrong about Iraq. Liberals were wrong about US intelligence, wrong about Iran, wrong about Cuba, wrong about the UN—the list goes on and on.

In fact, I’m having a very hard time coming up with anything liberals were right about, and I really am trying. Liberals were right at least in spirit about civil rights in the 60s, though wrong in their implementation (although it cost him the election, Goldwater was right to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an unconstitutional law—though at least is was democratic and not legislated by the courts). That’s as close as I can come.

The thing is, getting liberals to admit they were (or are) wrong is nearly impossible. In nearly any instance, the closest liberals get to admitting error is to twist the truth and claim, suddenly, that they were right.

So we have Kennedy and Kerry claiming that liberals deserve credit for the fall of the USSR (this after both howled through Reagan’s presidency about how his policies, which resulted in the fall of the USSR, were going to bring us to nuclear war). Or we have liberals claiming Clinton was responsible for welfare reform (yes, he campaigned on welfare reform, but had to be forced to sign the welfare reform bill over his veto; welfare reform was thanks only to Gingrich and the Republican Congress).

Liberals who admit they were wrong do so when they become conservatives.

So liberals still uphold the mythology of the 60s and claim to be cultural heroes, and still scream about American war crimes in Vietnam as if every soldier there raped babies on a daily basis, even though My Lai was the only example of any such war crimes, and even though the VVAW’s “Winter Soldier” hearings were found after investigation to be pure bunk. You will never, however, hear a liberal admit that the conservatives were right about the domino effect, even though Cambodia and Laos fell like dominoes as soon as we pulled out, nor will you hear a liberal admit that pulling out resulted in millions of deaths.

Take the Killing Fields, which graphically deals with the bloodbath of the Khmer Rouge. The first half of the movie squarely lays the blame not on the murderers, but on the United States—when what blame does belong to the United States falls squarely and solely on the shoulders of the anti-war liberal Democrats.

What’s going on? How can so many people be so utterly oblivious to reality that they cannot even see how much death and destruction their socialist, pro-leftist dicatator policies have caused?

If I were Ann Coulter, I’d say they were lying. Some are. But it’s not that simple, I’m sorry to say. And to answer the question, we have to delve into the culture of fear known as liberalism.

Liberals are afraid of many things—firearms, flags, imaginary “hate crimes” that haven’t happened yet but might someday if their agenda isn’t implemented—but foremost among them is conservatives. Liberals isolate themselves in ghettos of liberals. Those who do, in fact, know a conservative or two don’t discuss anything with them.

At our goodbye party, a group of liberals was talking to me. One said (incorrectly, by the way, but that’s another issue) that Penn State was not as “diverse” as IU. My response was, more or less, who cares? and it—rather, I—was outed. One of those liberals, when she found out that the Explorer with the GOP stickers was mine, said that she was scared—and she was only half kidding.

Liberals are frightened of conservatives for two basic reasons. First, liberals will not tolerate dissent in any form, and (correctly) perceive conservatives as a challenge to their delusions. Second, liberals have whipped themselves into a frenzy of fear about conservatives and Republicans—all you hear from liberals about either is how stupid or evil (or both) they are.

And this frenzy isn’t just rhetoric. It’s real.

These two reasons motivate liberals to only associate with other liberals. Liberals make the assumption that anytime they are talking to someone, the other person is also a liberal. Because liberals never interact with anyone but other liberals, they can weave a fantasy world where reality has no impact. Kennedy and the liberals were the reason the Soviet Union fell. Clinton gave us welfare reform. Hippies were cultural heroes, and nobody died as a result of our pulling out of Vietnam. Burning flags is patriotic. Bush is a Nazi. No liberal would ever think to question these precepts, or test them against facts. They are part of the liberal fantasy world, the Alice Through the Looking Glass land in which they live, upon which reality and facts have no effect. Point out that after four decades of affirmative action and handouts, the black community has more crime and poverty than any time since the end of the Civil War or that black males are more likely to end up dead or in prison—all incontrovertible facts—and they will tell you it’s because of “racism” if you’re lucky, though they’re more likely to tell you that you’re a racist. Try to point out how utterly devoid of any morals, ethics or principles Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or Julian Bond is, and watch the fireworks. You cannot get liberals to discuss issues and deal with reality; they will only deal with their fantasies.

In order to do this, liberals have had to reduce every possible counter example or argument to hate, racism, sexism, homophobia, or whatever strawman they have come up with—and they have done this by disavowing the existence of personal responsibility and reducing all human beings to mindless puppets manipulated by external forces. So liberals avoid the “illegal” in illegal immigrant by charging racism. Liberals avoid Roe v. Wade by screaming sexism. Liberals avoid Vietnam by screaming My Lai. And so it goes.

Again, though I love Ann Coulter’s poison pen, I don’t think liberals are necessarily lying (and I don’t think that if she were sitting here, Ms. Coulter would disagree with me in a serious conversation). Some undoubtedly are, at least some of the time. And I don’t believe that liberals are inherently evil.

But as long as liberals live in their irreal world, as long as they only associate with or talk to other liberals and reinforce their delusions, and as long as they demonize conservatives, they will never admit their errors, or wash the blood from their hands.

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Apparently, they thought he just said those things to get elected—which would have been true, had he been Clinton. But he’s not Clinton. And as for all this nonsense about WMDs, there is absolutely no evidence that Bush intentionally misled anyone. None.

Also—and these are related, though you’ll have to indulge me for a moment until I get to that—have you noticed that all that (highly appropriate) liberal screaming about female circumcision and the treatment of women in Muslim nations has vanished? Poof, just like that, as soon as we invaded Afghanistan, transformed into all this gushy Islam-is-a-religion-of-peace, multiculturlist nonsense. Or how Gloria Steinam defended Clinton against that awful woman Paula Jones, and said even if he had done what she claimed, it wasn’t sexual harassment. Or how liberals are always screaming about the First Amendment, unless it comes to “speech codes” at univerisities, which they claim aren’t First Amendment violations. Or how liberals howled about not being able to protest at the Republican convention except in zones, yet said nothing at all about the cages Democrats set up for protestors at their convention. Or there’s Harry Reid, who when Clinton was campaigning for Social Security reform was loudly supporting privatization, but now that Bush is campaigning for the same thing, he not only opposes privatization but insists that there is no problem, nothing to fix—and wholly without shame. Again, the list goes on and on.

Both of these stem from the same cause: liberals have no principles. Liberals do not understand the concept. Liberals do not believe anyone could have principles. Liberals have only a goal, and how they reach it is irrelevant to them.

This is why they so readily accuse Bush of lying, even though they have no evidence to back up their charges. This is why they will subvert their own “principles” in a heartbeat if it suits their political agenda. This is why Gore and his team tried every underhanded trick they could think of to “win” the election in 2000 then turned around and accused Bush of “stealing” it—and to this day, see nothing inappropriate whatsoever.

It’s not that liberal principles have no consistency, as it at first appears. Their principles exist merely to further their goals, and are dispensible at any time, should that seem the best way to accomplish those goals.

Nor is it that liberals cannot have principles. If that were true, liberals would never become conservatives. I don’t think most liberals realize this about themselves, and indeed, if you have no principles and don’t understand the concept, why would you be able to realize that you had none? So it’s understandable—but it’s not acceptable.

It’s dangerous.

Let me finish by returning to my original statement: sometimes people give themselves away unintentionally. I’d like to quote Jane Smiley, from her article on Slate the day after the 2004 election (though only what I need, and I’ll spare you as much of the dripping hatred and invective as possible). Here it is:

“The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do–they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable.”

Here, Smiley has openly stated in the heat of her anger the goal of liberalism. Not rights, not concern for the poor, not freedom, but control. Don’t like to be told what to do. Virtually unteachable. These two sentences are liberalism, crystallized into its most fundamental form. And that is why I fear them.

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These are, no doubt, the same city-raised idiots that pay 4 bucks for a dozen brown eggs because they think they’re organic, or not “dyed”, or some such leftist enviromoron nonsense.

I swear one of these days I’m going to start selling free-range water. I’d make a killing.

To be fair, about a fourth of the farmers there are real farmers (there is a conspicuous absence of “organic” and “free-range” on their signs, and they look like farmers, not hippies). About half of them are Amish.

I’m picky about where my money goes. I figure conservative money should stay in conservative pockets. I don’t buy from hippies; I only buy from conservatives. So today I bought an elk roast from Duane. And since he gave me a discount, I’ll give him a free plug.

Duane owns Long Elk Farm in Bloomfield. Duane is a conservative Republican, and a nice guy. I talk to him every time I go to that den of America-hating Bush-bashing liberals. (How Duane and every other conservative who sells there can stand being there all day, I do not know.)

I’ve bought from him several times. Farm-raised elk. Like farm-raised venison, it bears little resemblance to wild elk–no gaminess, very lean and rich-flavorted, truly wonderful stuff. Here’s the info:

Duane & Becky Long
Long Elk Farm
RR 3 Box 406
Bloomfield, IN 47424
(812) 863-7167
Cell: (812) 361-8735
longelkfarm@bluemarble.net
www.IndianaElkMeat.com

Buy from Duane. He’s a patriot. No praise higher than that.

Then there’s the quaint local talent (the secret is to go early so they haven’t dragged their hungover leftwing butts out of bed yet to go to the market and “share” their talent). Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger wannabes who always manage to hit on how wonderful and left-wing and back to nature they are and bash conservatives in the process.

(You know, if liberal myths about gun-owners were true, I would have taken my 45ACP out long ago–cause I’m always armed, even at the farmers’ market–and blown away the quaint local talent. So much for gun-grabbing liberal mythology.)

Just down the row from Duane the commies had their tables. There was the “save our social security” table, and the “green” table. And funny how these people just can’t read, or don’t look at T-shirts. They always try to get me to sign some left-wing petition.

Hey bozo, see the Bush-Cheney T-shirt? What are the odds that I’ll sign your idiotic “impeach Bush” petition?

The other problem is that this is a small town–not small compared to where I grew up, but I haven’t lived there in many years–small enough that you always run into those people you never want to see, ever, when you go there. Or almost always. Today, I didn’t. But I got there before they dragged their worthless hungover liberal butts out of bed (again, that’s the secret).

So tonight we’re having certified conservative Republican elk roast, with a chilled tomato cream soup (certified Amish tomatoes), god knows what else, and certified conservative Republican blackberry sorbet.

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Recently I saw a first-grade teacher hold up a construction paper cutout of the letter M. “Look, boys and girls,” the teacher gushed. “Madison cut straight on the lines and then she glued on glitter to make her letter shiny. Madison wins a place on our star board.” The principal smiled and saw nothing wrong.

This is not a parody.

Even students see what jokes these idiots are.

I would find this merely stupid, or even laughable, if I didn’t have to deal with the students who come out of these idiots’ classrooms. But I do. And it is neither funny nor excusable.

You might wonder what message these morons with education degrees think they’re sending to their students. But they’re hardly concerned with that, since school systems are cheating every way they can–doing everything but actually teaching in the classroom–to comply with No Child Left Behind.

So class, let’s review the messages these idiots are sending:

• What I do isn’t important; how I feel is important.
• Working to succeed is a waste of time as long as we all love each other.
• There’s nothing wrong with cheating, as long as it gets you a handout from the government.

What’s the solution, you ask? Abolish any and all requirements for teachers to have education degrees–better yet, don’t allow anyone with an education degree to teach–and require instead that they have degrees from the content subject. So math teachers have math degrees, and history teachers have history degrees. You wouldn’t have to abolish those massive wastes of tax money known as education schools because there would suddenly be no reason to get an education degree. They’d dry up and blow away all by themselves.

All I can say is thank god I’m going to be dead before these kids are old enough to be elected.

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Utter lack of accountability

Only university staff and non-tenured (adjunct) faculty are accountable. Tenured faculty are in no way accountable, no matter how much of a mess they create. Not accountable to their peers, not accountable to the university administration, not accountable to the university trustees, not accountable to the state legislatures who give them more and more money, not accountable to the voting taxpayers who pay their salaries.

Here’s a scenario, one I’ve seen many times.

Professor Howling is selected by his peers as the new departmental chairman (or program director, or whatever). He is not selected because they feel he is capable of doing the job–his peers don’t care about that, because nobody is accountable. No, he’s selected because it’s “his turn.”

Professor Howling’s salary triples, because he is now the chairman. Being the ivory tower idiot that he is, he pays little attention to the department, particularly little attention to important things like how many grad students there are, whether they are graduating with PhDs, how many applicants, and what the department might do to attract more students (not to mention grants). As a result of his lofty inattention, the department goes to hell.

At the end of his term, he keeps his inflated salary–because he used to be the chairman! Never mind that he singlehandedly ruined the department–that’s one of those real world concerns, and here in the ivory tower, we pride ourselves on our utter lack of knowledge about and regard for real world concerns!

Had he been in the private sector, Howling would have been living in a cardboard box on the street–and should have been. But no, Howling keeps making $120K, despite the fact that he’s incompetent, despite the fact that he didn’t care enough about the trust he was given to take his mind off that pointless research he does long enough to do his job.

(The irony is that academics are forever whining about how universities are being run like businesses. No. The difference is accountability.)

Worthless research

Here’s another common one, particularly in the humanities, social sciences and education, where post-modernism rules. Taxpayers give thousands of dollars to Professor Squealing to find out how Georgina, her student, “feels” about herself in the classroom.

This, btw, is known as “qualitative research.” It is neither.

After giving Georgina numerous surveys to find out how she feels, and what would make her feel better, Professor Squealing concludes that competition, patriarchy, sexism, racism, speciesism, whateverism keeps Georgina from feeling as good about herself as she might and she is therefore the victim of an oppressive, disempowering, disenfranchising corporate capitalist system (oops, sorry, forgot “marginalizing” there).

Of course you’re wondering why anyone should care how Georgina feels about herself in the classroom–any rational human being would wonder the same thing. And as Professor Squealing has not yet figured out, when Georgina gets out into the real world and gets a job, her employer won’t give two shits about how she feels. But that’s how low our universities have descended–the classroom as a group therapy session.

Useless bureaucracy

It should come as no surprise that universities are continually creating more and more wasteful middle management, given that universities are government institutions (and this even applies to private universities, who play follow the leader).

Let’s take Professor Howling (see above), our new departmental chairman. The largest source of revenue for his department is a mandatory undergraduate course which has been administered and taught–quite successfully–for well over a decade by non-tenured (adjunct) faculty.

Our idiot chairman decides that this is unacceptable, because peons can’t be trusted with course content or administration! His solution is to reorganize the adjuncts under a tenured “coordinator” so the course will have more prestige (only to tenured faculty).

The new coordinator is wholly, utterly unconcerned with the course or administering it, other than using his textbook (royalties) and the additional 60K he gets to “coordinate” it.

Guess how much the adjuncts who successfully administered the course got for the same thing. Go on, guess. That’s right. Zip.

Being uninterested in anything other than his pet research projects, he foists all the responsibilities he is being paid for off on the adjuncts, who out of resentment, stand back for the first time in the history of the course. The course goes to hell–but of course, the adjuncts are blamed.

Ivory tower attitude

You may think this has tenuous relevance to money, but you’d be wrong. Academics are like babies sucking at mommy’s tit. They do nothing but demand, demand, demand, more, more, more money from the legislatures. They never have enough money.

Business schools are the exception. Why? Well, they don’t depend on taxes. They solicit private funding.

Bingo! you say. Of course, because as we pointed out a few moments ago, you’re a rational human being.

Mention this suggestion to an academic and it’s like throwing holy water on a vampire. Evil! Awful! Polluting the purity of the ivory tower! Dreadful!

Idiots.

But this attitude affects costs and revenues in other ways. Professor Howling sees no reason to pay attention to such mundane things because of this attitude. Professor Squealing never wonders if her research could in any way be meaningful or productive because of this attitude.

These people need to be slapped and forced to deal with the real world. The best thing that could happen to American universities would be for legislatures to cut off every penny of funding, so they have to deal with reality and find ways to fund themeselves.

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