PDA

View Full Version : A Professor Who Attended Charles Murray’s Middlebury Talk Is Now Wearing a Neck Brace



Chris
03-04-2017, 11:24 AM
PC turns violent again.

A Professor Who Attended Charles Murray’s Middlebury Talk Is Now Wearing a Neck Brace. Protesters Attacked Her. (http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/03/a-professor-who-attended-charles-murrays)


The principle of free speech was not the only thing to suffer injury at Middlebury College on Thursday: a professor was physically assaulted by members of the mob that shut down Charles Murray's talk.

That professor, Allison Stanger, had to go to the emergency room and is now wearing a neck brace.

"One of the demonstrators pulled Prof. Stanger's hair and twisted her neck," Bill Burger, a college administrator, told The Addison County Independent. "She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and (on Friday) is wearing a neck brace."

...Attacking a professor because she had the audacity to assist Murray during his harrowing escape from campus is very, very, very wrong.

...So much for safe spaces.


Some, even professors, accuse the speaker Charles Murray of being a white nationalist. He's not. But it's their interpretation that counts when it comes to PC.

Chris
03-11-2017, 01:37 PM
George Will comments, The liberals who loved eugenics (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-liberals-who-loved-eugenics/2017/03/08/0cc5e9a0-0362-11e7-b9fa-ed727b644a0b_story.html?utm_term=.eb4e96359e03)


The progressive mob that disrupted Charles Murray’s appearance last week at Middlebury College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any of the protesters. Some of them denounced “eugenics,” thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics — controlled breeding to improve the heritable traits of human beings — was a progressive cause.

In “The Bell Curve,” Murray, a social scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Harvard University psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, found worrisome evidence that American society was becoming cognitively stratified, with an increasingly affluent cognitive elite and “a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution.” They examined the consensus that, controlling for socioeconomic status and possible IQ test bias, cognitive ability is somewhat heritable, the black/white differential had narrowed and millions of blacks have higher IQs than millions of whites. The authors were “resolutely agnostic” concerning the roles of genes and the social environment. They said that even if there developed unequivocal evidence that genetics are “part of the story,” there would be “no reason to treat individuals differently” or to permit government regulation of procreation.

Middlebury’s mob was probably as ignorant of this as of the following: Between 1875 and 1925, when eugenics had many advocates, not all advocates were progressives but advocates were disproportionately progressives because eugenics coincided with progressivism’s premises and agenda.

Progressives rejected the Founders’ natural-rights doctrine and conception of freedom. Progressives said freedom is not the natural capacity of individuals whose rights preexist government. Rather, freedom is something achieved, at different rates and to different degrees, by different races. Racialism was then seeking scientific validation, and Darwinian science had given rise to “social Darwinism” — belief in the ascendance of the fittest in the ranking of races. The progressive theologian Walter Rauschenbusch argued that with modern science “we can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part.”

<continue at link>

Progressives derided the Founders as unscientific for deriving natural rights from what progressives considered the fiction of a fixed human nature. But they asserted that races had fixed and importantly different natures calling for different social policies. Progressives resolved this contradiction when, like most Americans, they eschewed racialism — the belief that the races are tidily distinct, each created independent of all others, each with fixed traits and capacities. Middlebury’s turbulent progressives should read Leonard’s book. After they have read Murray’s.

Chris
03-11-2017, 02:07 PM
George Leef was there, describes it in The Middlebury Mob Shows How Thin the Veneer of Our Civilization Is (https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/03/middlebury-mob-shows-thin-veneer-civilization/), then comments:


he reason why, I think, is explained by the intellectual tribalism that grips much of America.

I mean that many people label others as either being in their tribe (consisting of people who are righteous and always correct) and the opposing tribe (consisting of people who are evil, stupid, and wrong on everything). Real scholars never impart such ideas because they know that reasonable and moral people can disagree on almost everything. They also know that the only way for civilized people to counter error is through debate; they know that people cannot be persuaded with violence.

Unfortunately, intellectual tribalism is spreading like the Black Death among so-called progressives. Anyone who disagrees with progressive policies is likely to be labeled an enemy, much as Karl Marx labeled everyone who rejected his beliefs a “class enemy.” The more influential such a person is, the more vehement the attacks and hatred against him. Murray, for example, is called a “racist” and “white supremacist” even though he is neither.

...And turning to the toxic effects of this indoctrination, one is the growing idea that the enemy tribe must be fought by any means necessary. Not only do evil people like Murray not deserve to be heard, they deserve to be punched....

Chris
03-11-2017, 02:12 PM
Leef mentions Michael Munger who writes in Freedom is Hard (http://www.nsjonline.com/article/2017/02/munger-freedom-is-hard):


...At UNC Chapel Hill last week a “flier” was discovered, hundreds of copies of which had been distributed around the campus. It encouraged students to “bash the fash!”, meaning physically assault fascists. The definition of “fascist,” conveniently, appears to be anyone who disagrees with the smothering leftist orthodoxy that the flier-istas embrace.

One sign of fascism, according to the flier, is the wearing of a “Make America Great Again!” ball cap. Since that is the symbol of our current president, a substantial part of the population is “fascist.” Earlier in the week, a set of “instructions”— of unknown origin — circulated nationwide. This “meme” claimed that “It’s okay to punch Nazis, and of course white male libertarians who advocate free speech.” If you disagree with me, I get to punch you, provided I’m one of the anointed who has politically correct views.

There are two difficulties here. First, these advocates are confused about the role of violence as being effective for their side. The state specializes in violence....

Second, and more fundamentally, the right that is being invoked and relied on by the left is precisely “freedom of speech.”...

Chris
03-18-2017, 04:18 PM
Students at Elite Colleges are the Most Hysterically Opposed to Offensive Speech, Data Shows (http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/15/students-at-elite-colleges-are-the-most)


It seems the most privileged students in the country are also the most fragile. Highly expensive, elite college campuses are more likely to play host to the kind of censorious madness on display at Middlebury College two weeks ago.

That's according to data compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and crunched into chart form by the Brookings Institution's Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias. Reeves and Halikias put it all together in a format that makes the trend obvious:

...

https://i.snag.gy/bsLAfF.jpg

...It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the students shrieking Marginalization! Oppression! Microaggression! at Charles Murray are some of the least marginalized or oppressed people in all of human history, given their substantial financial resources. The average yearly household income of a Middlebury student is nearly a quarter million dollars.

...