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Political Correctness "Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."

I admit to facetiousness. I also allow that facetiousness is the rhetoric of despair - in this case, despair over the dreadful pickle into which the academic community in the US - and I suppose elsewhere - has gotten itself over the last two decades or so. STS - at least in the most flamboyant and - to use a dreadful phrase - pathbreaking versions - is to me both example and symbol of the university’s growing inability to carry through one of its major intellectual functions, to wit, the filtering of new ideas and the winnowing out of those...

WATERBURY, Conn. — A criminal defense attorney has been arrested on a disorderly conduct charge involving kissing as a crime. Ralph Crozier, 55, of Southbury was arrested Thursday for kissing a female judicial marshal at Waterbury Superior Court on Dec. 22. Crozier said state police investigators told him the marshal did not invite him to kiss her, which was why criminal charges were filed. "This is the biggest baloney I've ever seen in my life," Crozier said Thursday. "How many tens of thousands of people in Connecticut wished their co-workers and friends 'Merry Christmas' the day before Christmas?" The incident...

A district judge has granted a preliminary injunction to stop the NCAA from banning the University of North Dakota from hosting a postseason game because of its "Fighting Sioux" nickname, state Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said. Stenehjem said judge Lawrence Jahnke alerted him to the decision Saturday night. Stenehjem did not know the details. UND is among a handful of schools with American Indian nicknames and logos that the NCAA considers hostile and abusive. Those schools are barred from holding postseason tournaments, or from using their nicknames during road playoff games. Stenehjem, in asking for the injunction, said the ban...

Where’s Newt When You Need Him Another interesting poll was released today and as expected is not getting much play in the mainstream media. According to a CNN poll released this weekend 54% of Americans believe that the government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and private sector enterprises. This comes on the heels of another poll, also buried from the general public, that was indicative of the majority of Americans believing that if Democrats regain power they will raise our taxes. This puts the Republican leadership in quite a quandary, for these two polls...

Multiculturalism hasn't worked: let's rediscover Britishness By Patience Wheatcroft (Filed: 08/10/2006) The tyranny of political correctness has for years suppressed the qualms that many Britons have had about what was happening to their country. Radical imams were allowed to preach hatred while being funded with state benefits, but few dared to question such madness, let alone act against it. The doctrine of multiculturalism dictated that all beliefs should be allowed to flourish, and to challenge that view was as politically incorrect as pinning up a Pirelli calendar in Islington Town Hall or suggesting that two married parents usually provide the...

After the Chicago White Sox were eliminated from participating in post season play, many fans were asking "why?" Why did the team with the most talent in the game play mediocre baseball for the second half of the season? How did a team that was 27 games over the .500 mark in July reverse course so quickly and end up being one of the greatest disappointments in baseball history? Who was responsible for this monumental collapse of a team that was supposed to repeat as World Series Champions? I think I have the answer to these questions, but it has...

In my column on the foiled UK terror plot, I ended by asking whether political correctness is really worth dying for? Indeed, the entire discussion of profiling Muslim airline passengers in an age of Islamic terrorism rests on this question. And if the reaction of mostly British passengers aboard a recent flight from Malaga, Spain to Manchester, England is any indication, the answer would be “no.” In what’s been dubbed a case of “mutiny” by the British media, fearful passengers demanded that two young Muslim men they felt were acting suspiciously be taken off the flight.

I don't know how many of you are fans of archeology, let alone that of Meso-America, but there are certainly those of you interested in the politically-correct whitewashing of terrorism. How are the two subjects related? Let me explain. The whitewashing of current-day terrorism is advocated by the same ilk, those who would rewrite the modern-day cause of terrorist atrocities, as well as those who would rewrite, for example, the pre-Columbian history of Mexico. I recently watched a History Channel "documentary" which either 1) rationalized the Aztec tribe's insatiable appetite for human sacrifice on the grounds that they were "deeply...

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna. From Citizen to Subject — The Rule of Experts and the Rise of Transnational Anti-DemocratsBy Baron Bodissey At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama pronounced that we had arrived at “The End of History”, and that capitalism and liberal democracy would now be the only global system left. But when I look at Europe today, I see democracies under threat because of an elaborate Eurabian bureaucracy and Islamic fanaticism. I see countries unwilling or unable to defend themselves against massive immigration/colonization. Has democracy become too soft...

TORONTO - Seventeen alleged Islamic terrorists were arrested in Canada recently, leaving approximately 50 more terrorist cells to go, according to federal spy agency sources. But even with authorities acknowledging that more arrests are inevitable, there’s one thing that could hinder further takedowns: political correctness. Since the terror busts, some Canadian journalists have been busy spitballing accusations of ethnic insensitivity at each other from the nation’s editorial pages. Obviously, they’d rather be picking the lint out of each other’s navels than worrying about the folks who want to kill us. Meanwhile, the political climate here is so charged that politicians,...

The New Yorker magazine has, for many years, catered to the anxieties and strivings of wordsmith intellectuals and those aspiring to that status. Is there a psychiatrist’s office in Manhattan that doesn’t display the magazine in its waiting room? It is a part of the supportive therapy worried wordsmith intellectuals require. It reassures them that, just as in 6th grade, they are still the cleverest ones in the class, whatever the adult world may think. It assures them their sexual confusion is evidence of an elevated metrosexual status. It tells them that their physical timidity is in reality, evidence of...

LOWER BURRELL, Pa. -- A Lower Burrell school student is facing a three-day suspension for sharing gum with a classmate. Jolt chewing gum has caffeine and ginseng. The Lower Burrell school superintendent said consuming and passing out the gum violates the school's drug awareness policy. That's because caffeine is considered a stimulant. Parents told Channel 11 they did not understand the suspension. Resident Elizabeth Grombacher said, "I think it's stupid. Everything's getting too politically correct it's so wrong." "It's probably just like Mountain Dew or something like that. If it's got a lot of caffeine in it and they probably...

I looked forward to returning to Iceland. It had been seven years since I last lectured there, and I remembered it as a beautiful, rugged country, great for hiking and swimming. I was scheduled to deliver four lectures on Iran, Iraq, and transformative diplomacy at the Universities of Iceland and Reykjavik, and at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Keflavik. This trip would not be so smooth. Word of trouble began to percolate in the morning of the first lecture. A local antiwar activist was demanding my arrest as a war criminal. My crimes were multifold: Writing an article blaming...

"....“Manliness,” by Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield, has succeeded in ruffling the feathers of feminists and liberals alike. The New York Times felt that professor Mansfield needed more than one intellectual assassin—like Rasputin—and sent two (at least so far) to lay him to rest. The Times published a fresh-mouthed, snarky interview with the affable professor a couple of weeks ago (click HERE), and last week it published a review of his book in the Book Review by Walter Kirns (click HERE). The latter, with the soul of a girly-man, wrote a dismissive review dripping with sarcasm and bitchiness which only...

Whether it’s running a war or running a school system, look out for leaders who don’t know what they’re doing. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg was voted into office promising to make a success of the city’s wildly unworkable schools. He knew nothing about education, shopped around for advice, and made an unfortunate choice in his schools chancellor. Joel Klein, a successful attorney for government and big business, knew nothing about education either. Both men know about management, and in their naivete about teaching and learning, fell prey to the proponents of the very ideology that has corrupted the system they...

Years ago, it used to take the Gestapo, the NKVD or the Kempitei and a lot of coercion, force and propaganda to insure that everybody expressed himself in the politically correct fashion. Midnight raids, informers, hero children and show trials were all trotted out to illustrate the proper path. Dissenters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, deviationists, the work-shy, wreckers, cosmopolitans, defeatists, and anybody else who failed to toe the line were rounded up, leaned on and dispatched to corrective labor camps or shot out of hand for their failure to get with the program--Hitler’s, Stalin’s or Tojo’s politically correct policy of communication. Somewhere...

We live in a world today where our every day lives are dictated by political correctness. People-on the job, at school, on the streets, and sometimes even in their own home-have to be concerned with every word they say; it could be misconstrued by someone as being offensive or discriminatory. When typing an email at work, it is necessary to meticulously review it for its content. If this isn't done, one risks the chance of corrective action by their employers, termination or possibly a lawsuit for discrimination. In fact, I am certain that some of you reading this will find...

Political Correctness Trumping History at the US Holocaust Museum? By Shelomo Alfassa January 13, 2006 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America's national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. Yet, this premiere public-private organization is deficient in their scholarship, leaving out of the historic record, reference to the 1930's and 1940's Nazi-Arab conspiracy, probably because of political correctness once again surpassing truth. With its origins within the Carter administration, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) was officially chartered by a unanimous Act of Congress in 1980 and was inaugurated in 1993 in Washington, DC....

The DNC Presents "A Winter Gala in Washington" A press release from the Democratic National Committee: