Sunday, February 11, 2007

[faust takeover] latest manifestation of the same old thing

Reader, you may see this post as not directly concerning you and yet it really does concern you. It really does.

When I ran this post on Faust, I felt something was wrong with her but couldn’t quite pinpoint it and so wrote nothing more. That this lady should have been rushed into the job, after the vilification of Lawrence Summers, seemed to smack of “Them”.

“Them” is different things to different people – PC mafia, moral relativists, feminists, Marxists et al – but the agenda’s the same and I kept returning, over and over, to Woodrow Wilson [1913]:

"Some of the biggest men … are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

and Churchill [1920]:

"[T]his world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing … It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century, and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads."

It is the greatest foolhardiness and misreading of history to suggest that because Churchill was speaking then of communism, the threat exists no more. It very much does, only in its latest manifestations. So it was no surprise to read Sissy Willis’ own post on the Harvard takeover and if someone were to subsequently bring out that Faust is a dignitary in some group like Eastern Star or whatever, it would equally not surprise:

"The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent," writes Heather MacDonald at City Journal. "Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. … [This] confirmation, could not have more clearly repudiated Lawrence Summers's all-too-brief reign of meritocracy and academic honesty Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology."

Nonsensical academic theory - I wrote on this here and here, the latter with, admittedly, only 70 linked references but how many do you need?

Christina Hoff Sommers’ equity feminism is one thing and as a male, I can hardly blame the women for sticking up for their sisters but Feminism was given a capital F and hijacked along the way by those very forces just alluded to:

"The women at the Heilbrun conference are the New Feminists: articulate, prone to self-dramatization, and chronically offended. Many of the women on the "Anger" panel were tenured professors at prestigious universities. All had fine and expensive educations."

Behind Faust’s seemingly mild views lie assumptions which are terrifying in their full implications for policy and for academic programming:

# I guess I've been studying unpleasant people or politically incorrect people for my whole academic career.
# it's very important to understand how individuals in the past rationalized lives that we might find unthinkable …
# My daughter, a committed vegetarian, now tells me that in a hundred years none of us will ever believe that we were eating meat.
# It is important to celebrate people but not to do so uncritically. By celebrating people in an uncritical way we only make them removed from ourselves . . .

As Sissy says: “Who but politically correct Marxist "thinkers" would ever dream of "celebrating" people uncritically?” And I add that Faust’s stated and implied feminist agenda for Radcliffe may well be arguable to a $300 million point but her takeover of all of Harvard, male and female alike, is nothing short of execrable.

Finally:
"Whether it's back in the gulags of the old USSR, in the inimically orchestrated "street" of today's Arab tyrannies or in the politically correct, ivy-covered towers in our own backyard at Harvard, intimidation is the blogtheme that keeps on giving."

And intimidation is what we’re all facing now, from the evil of ID cards through to enforced views in the halls of learning.

Earlier post here.

4 comments:

  1. It seems the threat of losing one's liberty isn't seen as such when it is your own culture and government that is doing the threatening.

    You reference the "hijacking" of feminism...how true. Basically every movement has been hijacked along the way by those in power to maintain that power - a sort of sustainable "status quo."

    For example - if you can paint the feminists as dangerous, extreme, overbearing, aggressive, etc., then you have effectively isolated the movement and eliminated any public persuasion they might have had.

    The same has been done for the environmentalists...paint them as tree-hugging, extreme people who would save a cockroach over their mothers and you can limit any power they might obtain.

    At some point, the public needs to take back their power...but the key, I believe, is the media. It is the corporate media that promotes such hijackings, repeating the mantra of their corporate sponsors and going with the stories that propagate such illusions. The world citizenry can only take what is rightfully theirs when they choose to fully understand the biases that are inherent in the information sources...

    ...Which is where bloggers come in, eh? A true "freedom of information..."

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  2. James: Totally awesome post, and not only because I love to see my own name in print.

    The Importance of Being Noticed.

    It's stimulating my own febrile blogging brain towards birthing a new post, possibly implicating Stanley Fish in the recent faux bomb scare in Boston.

    Wil robinson: Excellent comments . . . I share your hope in the blogosphere's potential to wake up a sleeping populace who are letting their freedoms drip, drip, drip away.

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  3. Don't know what good our posting will do though. We can only hope.

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  4. *
    Lubos weighs in... I find this happiness about the femaleness of a president insane.

    It works very differently in the commercial world.


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