This article follows on from Peter’s musings about the Left and their culture of critique of Western civilisation, and their denial that political correctness rules the university and “thinking’ sectors of society. Yes, pigs really do fly.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/lathams-law-52/
“What was Paul Ramsay thinking? In dedicating part of his estate’s $3 billion endowment to course work at an Australian university, the healthcare mogul should have known the sort of academic disciplines certain to excite the higher education sector. The Ramsay Centre for the Enhancement of the LGBTIQWTF alphabet would have had staff at La Trobe University, home of the Safe Schools program, doing cartwheels. The Ramsay Centre for the Study of Colonial Genocide could have been built as an annex to the QUT’s notorious Indigenous safe space, helping to develop 364 alternative dates to Australia Day. Yet there was Ramsay, idealistic to the end, wanting to focus academic attention on an obscure concept known as ‘Western Civilisation’. Hadn’t he read Foucault and Derrida?
Didn’t he know enough about post-modernism to understand there’s really no such thing as democracy, individual rights, economic development or advanced healthcare and education? They are all social constructs, a capitalist conspiracy to make us think that reason and rationality, the values of the Enlightenment, are worthwhile. Poor Paul, he dedicated his money to the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. Last week the Australian National University said it didn’t want to proceed with negotiations to create a Ramsay-funded undergraduate degree. ANU already has a Centre for Islamic Studies and a Centre for Indigenous Studies, so why fluff around with the civilisation that introduced equal rights for women and invented useless, irrelevant stuff like the steam engine, electricity and the Internet? Better to stick with burqas and boomerangs.”
Denying that political correctness is not dominating the Arts/Humanities of the universities, as discussed in Peter’s article is simply nonsense. What else can be said about the claim that scientific objectivity itself is just a white racist myth:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/06/07/new-york-college-course-claims-objectivity-is-a-white-myth/
“A course at Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, New York, argues that the concept of “objectivity” is a myth created by white people. The course, which was first reported on by Toni Airaksinen of Campus Reform, is entitled “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions,” and taught by Kendralin Freeman and Jason Rodriguez of Hobart and William Smith College. The course’s description dives into the teaching pair’s perspective on various “white mythologies,” a phrase popularized by postmodern thinker Jacques Derrida that refers to the set of beliefs and cultural truths of white Westerners. This course explores the history and ongoing manifestations of “white mythologies” — long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which the peoples of the world are to be understood and judged. Students will explore how systematic logics that position “the West” and “whiteness” as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of women.”
Let the universities see how funding cuts right to the bone fit into their scheme of white mythology. It will be hard to preach when sleeping on the streets, becoming one of the “cool’ people themselves. This is the point that I have been making for years now, namely that the universities are irreparably corrupted by Leftoid ideology, and like some marriages, have now gone too far, and must be dissolved. It is amazing that conservatives just don’t see this, desperately clinging to the notion that the institutions which they wish to “conserve” still can be saved. This betrays a basic lack of a sociological imagination, no doubt because Sociology as a discipline is perhaps the most decadent of all disciplines, the mother of political correctness. Yet, social processes still exist, and need to be scientifically understood.
Once an institution gets as rotten as ours have, the battle to save and patch them up inevitably brings them down. It is like having that old cotton shirt with a horrible tear, but attempts to mend fail because the stitches just tear away the existing fabric. It is over. Not all houses can be patched up; not all shirts can be repaired; duct tape will not mend everything because at some point there will be more duct tape in the object than object. Likewise for the universities which have gone beyond critical mass. The failure of conservatives to recognise the level of decay of society, and to cling to things long dead, will mean that the chances of fighting back against the slave masters will be diminishing small. It is time to face painful realities. Just because things are calm down your green leafy street, does not mean that the chaos will not be knocking down your door tomorrow, literally:
https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/crime/violent-home-invasions-surge-in-victoria-in-january-and-february/news-story/3c4983a6208751eecd544c566c32a281
“VICTORIANS are terrified and rightfully so. Every morning they wake to news of another violent home invasion overnight. A knife held to a pensioner’s throat. Children screaming as masked men hover over their beds. Intruders using crowbars and baseball bats to terrorise homeowners. In January and February this year, homes were broken into by armed men in Cranbourne, St Albans, Albion, Brighton, Bayswater, Skye, Mentone, Taylor’s Hill, Hillside, Ascot Vale and Geelong."
This is just the beginning of the end.