An Evening with Dinesh D'Souza

First of all, major kudos to Danny, Alex, Chris and the other CRs for a dynamite event. It was standing room only in CUE 203 to hear Dinesh D'Souza discuss "Racism is Not the Problem.". I estimate that [edit]200-225 were in attendance tonight. It was nice to see a good community representation, including some of our local elected officials and Republican Party leadership. Paul Zimmerman was there along with some other regular Palousitics readers.

My evening got off to an interesting start. I was waiting in the parking garage for the elevator with my 15-year old daughter. The elevator doors opened, and the only person I could see was.......Dinesh D'Souza!!! Funny!! We got in the car and CR Chris Del Beccaro was nice enough to introduce me to Dinesh.

I'll get into much more detail about what was said later (with pictures,) but I'll conclude the way Dinesh concluded tonight: Universities need intellectual diversity the way they need racial, gender, cultural, and language diversity. It was obvious by the reactions and questions from some in the the crowd tonight that there is not very much of that at WSU. Dinesh challenged those liberals in attendance to open their minds to viewpoints that they don't hear very often, like his. If that was his goal, he was quite successful.

Danny, Alex, WSUCollegeRepublican, Paul: Please feel free to chime with your own posts and pictures if ya got 'em.

The Party of Victims Indeed

Michael nailed it.

According to the (Everett) Daily Herald:

Prepare to provide your name, address, phone number and e-mail when you sign in at Democratic caucuses Saturday.

And, if you don't mind, please list your race and sexual orientation, too.

The form set for use in Snohomish and 37 other counties contains boxes asking for ethnicity, and if a participant is disabled or lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered.

[...]

The inquiries are intended to help Washington's Democratic Party balance its selection of delegates.

Twenty-nine of the party's 97 delegates will be chosen in June based on the plan's numeric goals for diversity.

[...]

Those attending Republican caucuses won't find any optional questions. They'll simply sign their name and give their address, phone number and an e-mail address.

"We're not as obsessed with categorizing Americans as our Democratic friends," state Republican Party Chairman Luke Esser said.

Apparently Democrats are more concerned with the privacy rights of terrorists than members of their own party.

Nick Fury, Agent of Intolerance

"The College Republicans appear surprised about why we find their outrageous film so objectionable, but by the end of the week they will have felt the full fury of progressive voices for tolerance on the Palouse."

- UI Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Palouse Moonbat-in-Chief Nick Gier on Vision 2020 today.

Boy, nothing says "tolerance" like "full fury."

And in the UI Argonaut today, Rula Awwad-Rafferty, UI faculty member and JUNTURA committee chair (JUNTURA "enhances student academic success and promotes the values of respect, understanding, and equality within a diverse university experience") stated, “I don’t think hatred ought to be tolerated anywhere. But you don’t fight hatred with hatred.”

Really? So if you can't hate Mohamed Atta and Osama bin Laden, is it okay then to hate George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld? How about Wal-Mart? How about conservatives and evangelical Christians? Because you sure see a lot of campus-sponsored and -approved hatred directed at all of them, especially from Gier, who has compared fundamentalist Christians to Jihadists, (from the below picture on his UI-based web site, we can tell which Gier thinks is worse.) This is Gier's "full fury of tolerance?"


By the way Nick, here's a hint for you. If you were to post a sacrilegeous picture of Mohammed like that in Iran, it wouldn't be Jesus knocking at the door packing heat, it would be the Revolutionary Guard.

If I were the CRs, I wouldn't worry. That gasbag Gier doesn't have enough fury to get out of a wet paper bag.

Where There's Smoke, There's FIRE

College Republicans at San Francisco State University faced disbandment of their club after burning flags last October.......the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah. It seems the flags of the two terrorist organizations have the word "Allah" written on them, unbeknownst to the CRs (a Ku Klux Klan flag, which contains a cross, was also burned, but thus far no outrage over that). I wonder how the WSU PC/Diversity Mafia would have reacted to an incident like this? The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) spang into action. Even the ACLU defended the CRs. The club has been spared.

See story here and here.

HT: Bruce Heimbigner

New Study Reveals Minimum Wage Hikes Lead to Job Loss for Minorities and High School Drop-Outs

Speaking of room for improvement in the state of Washington, how about our nation-high minimum wage. Take a look at this new minimum wage study by the Employment Policies Institute.

The author of the study, David Neumark (a former Wal-Mart Watch "Person of the Week" so let's dispense with the "conservative hack" labels in advance), concludes that :

For every 10% increase in the minimum wage:
• Minority unemployment increased by 3.9%
• Hispanic unemployment increased by 4.9%
• Minority teen unemployment increased 6.6%
• African American teen unemployment increased by 8.4%
• Low-skilled unemployment (i.e., those lacking a high school diploma) increased by 8%

An EPI press release states:

Minimum wage hikes jeopardize entry-level jobs: Separate studies from economists at Duke, Michigan State, and Boston University all conclude that minimum wage hikes attract teenagers from wealthy families into the workforce, displacing low-skilled adults in the process.

Economists at Cornell University and the University of Connecticut found that a 10% increase in the minimum wage results in an 8.5% increase in unemployment for young African Americans and adults lacking a high school diploma.

That's bad news for a college town like Pullman, especially if we hope to increase the diversity at WSU. That's the irony of liberalism and statism. It always hurts the ones it supposedly means to protect the most.

HT: Dale Courtney

Merry Individuality!

[Cross posted from Versus The Mob]

Yesterday, I received an email from one of my now former students about some personal business, and the student signed off with "happy holidays!" I responded with my customary "Merry Christmas!" I then had a mental twitch and wondered if I would next receive some sort of admonition for "assuming" that the holiday I celebrate - that a majority of Americans do - is one shared by the student I was exchanging emails with.

Much is made of sanitizing the cultural expressions tied to this time of the year, with places such as Washington State University, officially or otherwise, adopting the neutral "happy holidays" expression for fear of offending some particular ethnic or religious group. This has come to be seen as the "tolerant" thing to do, with culturally specific instances of seasonal well-wishing being seen as somehow rude, oppressive, etc.

It is true that not everyone celebrates Christmas. Some celebrate Hanukkah, some Kwanzaa, and some do not celebrate anything at this time of the year. It is thus held by some that to express a wish for a person's well being to them in any of these particular ways, which may not be their own, is somehow offensive and wrong.

But would this not also mean that one can only wish for the well being of his or her own ethnic, cultural, or religious group? It is implied in this erroneous belief that one's wish for the well being of another is meaningless, even an affront, if the person it is expressed to does not share the exact same practices. Of course, this makes no sense - if I wish someone a Merry Christmas, and they turn out to be a Hindu, for example, it does not change two things:

1. In my cultural observances, and in that of millions of others, it is Christmastime, and the other person can recognize that for me it is that time;
2. Even if the other person does not celebrate Christmas, during this period of time in which others are, things can still go well or things could go badly for this person. My expression of well wishing toward him or her is still expressed in the hope that things will go well for that person during this time.

Thus, there should be no dilemma created, real or imagined, if I say "Merry Christmas" to a Muslim, who may in return wish me a happy Ramadan, or the same to a Jew who may in turn wish the Muslim a happy Hanukkah (when each person's respective holy time is occurring, of course).

This should seem obvious, but somehow, our universities, governments, even our society at large, have adopted the idea that cultural-specific holiday well wishing is offensive. Instead, we have the bland "happy holidays!" held up as the ideal replacement.

But who does "happy holidays" belong to? That is, whose identity is tied to it? Of course, the intention - and the effect - is that no one should have their identity tied to it. Instead of making expressions reflecting who we are, we are told that we should blurt a meaningless abstraction instead. While some take this to be the mark of sensitivity and tolerance, I maintain that it is anything but. This is nothing more than another way in which collectivists attempt to destroy our individuality, to mold us into the amorphous "society" devoid of individuality that they take to be the ideal. The non-distinct phrase, "happy holidays" is not meant to spare the fragile psyches of "oppressed" individuals, but to deny individuality to everyone; it is the very definition of intolerance, masquerading as tolerance.

So to all, I wish you a Merry Christmas, and I will happily accept your individual expressions of well wishing toward me in return, without offense, no matter what form they come in!

"Diversity" Training

Some white students at Whitman College in Walla Walla wore blackface a la "Survivor" to an off-campus party. The outcry caused classes to be canceled yesterday so students and faculty could attend a daylong "diversity" symposium. Complete story here.

Diversity Mania

This article came from the internet. It is written by Dr. Walter Williams. He is a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

There are some ideas so ludicrous and mischievous that only an academic would take them seriously. One of them is diversity. Think about it. Are you for or against diversity? When's the last time you said to yourself, "I'd better have a little more diversity in my life"? What would you think if you heard a Microsoft director tell his fellow board members that the company should have more diversity and manufacture kitchenware, children's clothing and shoes? You'd probably think the director was smoking something illegal.

Our institutions of higher learning take diversity seriously and make it a multimillion-dollar operation. The Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; the universities of Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice-presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity.

George Leef, director of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C., writes about this in an article titled "Some Questions about Diversity" in the Oct. 5 issue of Clarion Call. Mr. Leef suggests that only in academia is diversity pursued for its own sake, but there's a problem: Everyone, even if they are the same ethnicity, nationality or religion, is different. Suppose two people are from the same town in Italy. They might differ in many important respects: views on morality, religious and political beliefs, recreation preferences and other characteristics.

Mr. Leef says that some academics see diversity as a requirement for social justice - to right historical wrongs. The problem here is that if you go back far enough, all groups have suffered some kind of historical wrong. The Irish can point to injustices at the hands of the British, Jews at the hands of Nazis, Chinese at the hands of Indonesians, and Armenians at the hands of the Turks.

Of course, black Americans were enslaved, but slavery is a condition that has been with mankind throughout most of history. In fact, long before blacks were enslaved, Europeans were enslaved. The word slavery comes from Slavs, referring to the Slavic people, who were early slaves. White Americans, captured by the Barbary pirates, were enslaved at one time or another. Whites were indentured servants in colonial America. So what should the diversity managers do about these injustices?

When academics call for diversity, they're really talking about racial preferences for particular groups of people, mainly blacks. The last thing they're talking about is intellectual diversity. According to a recent national survey, reported by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in "Intellectual Diversity," 72 percent of college professors describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent conservative. Liberal professors think their classrooms should be used to promote a political agenda. The University of California recently abandoned a provision on academic freedom that cautioned against using the classroom for propaganda. The president said the regulation was "outdated."

Americans, as taxpayers and benefactors, have been exceedingly generous to our institutions of higher learning. That generosity has been betrayed. Rich Americans, who acquired their wealth through our capitalist system, give billions to universities. Unbeknownst to them, much of that money often goes to faculty members and programs that are openly hostile to donor values. Universities have also failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.

What's part of Williams' solution? Benefactors should stop giving money to universities that engage in racist diversity policy. Simply go to the university's website, and if you find offices of diversity, close your pocketbook. There's nothing like the sound of pocketbooks snapping shut to open the closed minds of administrators.

Dr. Williams makes several good points. This is an issue we are faced with time and again and as the College Republican's at WSU can attest to, they are dealing with it now. Similarly, a friend of mine was in a class recently where the discussion dealt with what happens when the majority becomes the minority. Well, according to one person in the class when the majority (white people) become the minority nothing needs to be done. That is just how it should be. White people have been the majority so long there doesn't need to be any equalizing done. This seems to go against everything that we've been taught about trying to make minorities stronger. She believes there is no cause or reason to change this plus as she says this is what she is being taught in colleges and universities today. I have to agree with closing of pocketbooks