* I get the impression Mr. Sailer was making that point obliquely. He also said some sweet and flattering things about how campus Jews made life better for us all. Lots of spoonfuls of sugar to help the medicine go down this time.
* How to win an argument in the 21st Century: Be so annoying and unpleasant that whomever you’re trying to argue with wants to stop interacting with you immediately and get as far away from you as possible
* I am a strong disbeliever in the Flynn effect. People are getting dumber. Whatever cultural genre you choose, no matter who it’s aimed get, it gets cleverer and cleverer as you go back in time.
Literature, magazine, news, tv, everything. Read a mass-market pulp fiction magazine from the 30s or watch one of the many 1950s tv shows on Youtube like What’s My Line if you don’t believe me. Not even talking about Victorian era mass market literature.
It’s not that they’re more correct, it’s that the ideas expressed are more complicated than what we’re used to. The audience was expected to follow along with longer trains of thought and keep more ideas in their minds simultaneously.
What happened? Steve is right, diversity makes everything suck.
Personally, I always know whether a piece was written by a white, black or jewish author without looking at the name.
For blacks, language is a struggle. The obvious panicky effort and the clumsiness of the result makes you tired. They just can’t do it.
For jews, language is like breathing. The effortlessness of the expert.
Whites are in between.
So maybe we’re not getting dumber but communicating on the level of the least literate is taking away our ability to talk about complicated ideas. And you know what messrs Sapir and Whorf say about that.
* In their defense, those who are not the uber-triggered 10% are really just terrified that what they might laugh at today might become grounds for banishment and public shaming tomorrow, so they hold back on the laughter until absolutely sure it is ok—and they aren’t the first ones laughing either. And I do mean that literally—look how quickly men in dresses went from laughable to being the Greatest Civil Rights Moment of our Time. It’s quite frightening to be out on that wire.
This is also why Leftists flock so hard toward the approved Leftist comedy vendors—Leftists are dying to laugh, but are restricted from doing it, so the approved comedy vendors promise to deliver jokes that will not get the audience banished and beaten. The Leftists are so laugh deprived that the 10,000th stale joke about R’s being dumb/white people being evil or dorky will make them laugh because they need to laugh, for crying out loud!
* I used to enjoy the verbal sparring and Socratic give-and-take with witty lefties. But I haven’t experienced any of that since graduate school in the 1990s.
There are many reasons for the dumbing-down of campuses. A major factor is money: colleges want every single live body with a pulse they can get, paying obscene tuition and fees, so that administrators can enrich themselves. It’s become a racket, plain and simple. I’ve actually had students who were borderline retarded… and numerous others with a fifth-grade reading and writing ability.
The other major reason for the enstupidation of the academy is not so much blacks and minorities, but females. Women have overtaken the campus, and they are, in my experience, quite unwilling to engage in real intellectual debate (where one party may be proven wrong) without taking it personally. Women in higher ed intellectualize and rationalize their emotions; they tend not to think objectively. Consequently, higher ed has institutionalized the herd mentality of the female (in contrast to the pack mentality of the male) in which the worst possible thing to be is a black sheep. It’s become a coffee klatch and a knitting circle. I once worked at a junior college in which neither my department chair nor my academic vice-president had academic doctorates. They were the first females to hold their positions, though, and they practically made a fetish out of that fact. (They threw me out. I’m not a genius, but I did write and defend an actual academic dissertation for my degree).
The feminization of higher ed has turned it into post-adolescent day care. At the community college where I work part time, some of the female faculty are having students make f-cking cut-and-paste collages as if it were fourth grade. I kid you not.
It’s depressing, really. I actually feel sorry for the handful of students who are actually bright and eager to learn. But they seem to be a very, very small minority.
