May 11, 2008 01:47 PM
More lunacy from theTimes, or why an Islamic supremacist is not like Bill Cosby
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Earlier today, I reported on The New York Times’s cheerful story about “mad pride,” the effort by various lunatics (I use the term in the way Mr. Blotton used “humbug,” in its Pickwickian sense) to reverse the unfair stigmatizing insanity by embracing their madness, so to speak. Just as certain homosexuals now proudly employ the [...]
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May 10, 2008 12:54 PM
Some disadvantages of sainthood
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Yesterday, Victor Davis Hanson, reflecting on Obama’s “new messianic rules of engagement,” posted a brief observation on “the advantages of Sainthood.”
he talks about supposedly illiberal Pennsylvanians as a racial group or quips “typical white person”, associates with the racist Wright, and counts on a solid base that votes 90 percent along racial lines, [...]
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May 09, 2008 11:16 AM
Hillary channels Glenn Close
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
From Madatoms (via Instapundit). A story whose title says it all: “Hillary Clinton: The Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of the Democratic Party.”
It’s 2:31 AM. The Democratic Party is sleeping peacefully when it hears its phone buzz on the night stand. It rolls over and sees “Hillary” on the caller ID. It pauses briefly, considering pushing [...]
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May 08, 2008 06:51 PM
Mac like me
by Stefan Beck
Heather Mac Donald’s new essay “Is the Criminal Justice System Racist?” is finally available online at City Journal, and is a must-read. Another must-read: this instructive peek at the psychology of a cops-are-racist true believer, courtesy of good ol’ Mother Jones.
If you believe that the criminal justice system is racially biased, you need to know Heather Mac Donald.
She’ll mess with your mind and make you either up your politico-cultural game or admit you were wrong. . . .
And how will she “mess with your mind,” exactly?
Just about every one of her pieces is a statistical and analytical tour-de-force, while we liberals tend too often to mouth liberal pieties like inside jokes. Just yesterday, I was listening to Angela Davis . . . on my car radio. I agreed with nearly everything she said, but they were dissatisfying lefty bromides, one and all. Racist criminal justice system. Slavery was bad. War in Iraq. The crowd whooped and hollered, but where was the beef, the analysis, the facts? Forgive me Angela, patron saint of the streets, but Mac Donald would have had you for lunch. . . .
[Mac Donald is] among America’s harshest critic of blacks. Harshest and most devastating; unlike most of the right-wing blovio-sphere, home girl does her homework. . . . I read her religiously—even have a Google alert set up in her honor—much the same way one looks for dismembered limbs and blood stains at an accident scene while knowing one shouldn’t. One will only get upset if successful and MacDonald upsets me every time because with every piece, she sets out to prove that the only problems blacks face are of their own making.
She doesn’t mess around. Her City Journal latest is a devastating response to the liberal shibboleth that the criminal justice system is racist and designed to criminalize and incarcerate blacks en masse.
The author, Debra Dickerson, goes on to praise Mac Donald for her “thoroughly documented” claims (what a novelty!) and for “the attention she pays to internal dissent from the conventional wisdom within the black community itself, a voice which liberals tend to muffle so as to continue the war against the criminal justice system.” You could be forgiven for thinking this was a piece in favor of Heather Mac Donald. It’s really a call to ignore or trivialize evidence that contradicts your prejudices:
However much crime blacks commit, Mac Donald refuses to consider for even a moment that racism itself is the (yeah, I’ll go there) root cause of black crime. Either blacks commit more crimes because they’re inherently violent and criminal or there’s another reason—a bedrock racism that segregates, undereducates, and marginalizes them in every way come to mind. Is it so hard to imagine that a hated group responds with disfunction [sic]? For Mac Donald—yes, it is.
Yet this question has nothing to do with Mac Donald’s thesis, which is simply that “the continuing search for the chimera of criminal-justice bigotry is a useless distraction that diverts energy and attention from the crucial imperative of helping more inner-city boys stay in school—and out of trouble.” Nevertheless, Dickerson doesn’t think twice about a smear: If Mac Donald illuminates “the complexities of life in the inner city,” she does so “for all the wrong reasons.” The title of this post is “Know Your Enemy”—the enemy, one supposes, being the unpleasant truth.
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May 08, 2008 12:35 PM
In praise of prejudice or, Scientific American gets softening of the brain
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Once upon a time, Scientific American was a great way for humanists–a fancy name for the scientifically illiterate–to keep up with what was happening in the world of science. The magazine was wide-ranging, deep enough to be respectable but written for the interested layman. Above all it everywhere displayed a contagious curiosity about the [...]
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May 07, 2008 11:08 AM
2008 Bradley symposium: Encounter at 10
by James Panero
One of the new widgets on our new website--which I hope you are enjoying, it's great to see two years of work coming together--is our event calendar. I just posted a new event there that anyone in the Washington area should check out. On June 4, 9:00-12:30, at the St. Regis Hotel, the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal will host a symposium on ten years of Encounter Books, a sister organization (if I may be so gender specific) to The New Criterion. Panelists will include Roger Kimball, Encounter's publisher, along with Encounter authors Robert Bork, Andrew McCarthy, John O'Sullivan, John Fonte, James Piereson, and Victor Davis Hanson. And the best thing is, it's open to the public with registration. So check it out, and click here for more information.
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May 07, 2008 10:54 AM
From our Spanish desk
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
An interview on BBC Mundo about the 1960s with a “conocido comentarista conservador.”
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May 06, 2008 12:07 PM
Visit "Azores"
by David Yezzi
Thin volumes of poetry do not generally constitute a publishing event. They arrive like faint ripples on the still pond of contemplation, just as the latest tell-all memoir or beltway thriller roars by on a PWC, throwing off sheets of oily water. Still, I'm delighted to announce the publication of my second book of poems, Azores, just out from Swallow Press. The book recently receiced a wonderful review in The New York Sun by Adam Kirsch. And Bernard Chapin has recorded a spirited video review, which you can see on the Azores page on Amazon (where you can purchase a copy as well). Just today, an interview with Bernard about the book has started to make its way in the bloggosphere. Here's a bit of it (responding to Bernard's question about which poem in the book is my favorite):
A kind of healthy loathing sets in for me as soon as the poems are published. They’re basically done; they’re as good (more or less) as they’re going to be. I consider each of them as works of the highest genius the day that I finish it, and possibly for a few days afterward. Then more and more I tend to see the flaws. Whatever it was that got my blood going enough to think I was on the right track fades a bit. I still feel okay about it but not as thrilled. That’s good, I think. It keeps me moving ahead, taking whatever works and building on it if possible. It’s like Wallace Stevens wrote to Donald Hall, when Hall asked if he could collect Stevens's undergraduate poems: “Some of one’s early things give one the creeps.” Even a poem written five years ago can seem like a voice form the distant past. I’m not sure that speaks very well for their longevity, though.
Or you can read the whole thing here.
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May 06, 2008 12:44 PM
“Libertarian paternalism,” or Socialism by any other name smells as bad
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
How do you spell “oxymoron”? My current favorite candidate is “libertarian paternalism.” That’s the phrase that Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein promulgate as an alternative to socialism in their new book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Of course, they don’t say their form of paternalism is a synonym for “socialism.” [...]
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May 05, 2008 01:30 PM
Pimp my curriculum
by Stefan Beck
In today’s Wall Street Journal, editorial page writer and former Dartmouth Review editor Joseph Rago has the last word about Dartmouth’s most litigious professor, the one and only Priya Ventakesan, and it’s an optimistic one. He acknowledges that “even at—or especially at—putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan’s.” He shares his own shocking “Mad Libs moment,” too:
I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I “deconstructed” the MTV program “Pimp My Ride.” A typical passage: “Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined.” It received an A.
Xzibit must have been so proud. But take heart:
The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor’s best efforts, there’s life in American colleges yet.
I’m inclined to agree. All the same, as I noted here, the responsibility can’t rest entirely with the students. If they’re smart enough to spot an incompetent—or all-out demented—professor, what is Dartmouth College’s excuse for letting her slip through the interview process? In any case, the counterrevolution will be a long one, affording us many, many opportunities to be outraged while laughing up our sleeves at the spectacle. The latest from Dartmouth? A panel discussion about the writings of Maurice Sendak. A fitting reminder that we can count on the wild things peeping out from the Ivy for some time to come.
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