bq. The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore
bq. The Department of Educational Studies offers students several alternative programs of study. Although the Department does not offer a major, it does provide students with the opportunity to develop a Special Major in conjunction with another department. Students may also minor in Education. In the Honors Program, students may do a Special Major in Education and another field or may do an Honors minor in Education. Students may choose to do secondary or elementary Teacher Certification in addition to or independently of these other options.
So, you can minor in Ed, and you can study it in conjunction with something else. But you cannot in fact have “an education degree from Swarthmore” in the same way that you can have an Economics or Physics or History degree from Swarthmore.
Via Fascist Sadly, No!, a fascist look inside fascist Jonah Goldberg’s fascist forthcoming fascist book. Fascist.
The fascist jacket copy suggests that “The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.” I, for one, welcome our Fascist Swarthmore Obergruppenführer.
Not one but _two_ former office mates of mine are quoted on the front page of the Times today in a story about Facebook. Jason Kaufman talks about his work with Nicholas Christakis on patterns of affiliation amongst Facebook users. Our own Eszter Hargittai talks about her research on comparative adoption of Facebook and MySpace. And my brilliant colleague Ron Breiger will doubtless be pleased to see that Georg Simmel gets a shoutout too, for the idea of triadic social closure.
bq. Whenever I teach an undergraduate class, I ask the students what’s the earliest major news event they can remember. When I started teaching at Arizona, most students could remember the Challenger disaster. Then it was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then the first Gulf War. Then Bill Clinton’s first-term election. At the moment it is the Oklahoma City bombing. Soon it will be the death of Princess Diana.
But this isn’t just a kids-these-days complaint. Today’s college freshmen probably don’t remember much about politics before President Bush, and the war as been going on for most of their teenage years. Combine that with the administration’s fine line in disinformational BS and, as Rob remarks in a comment elsewhere, this is what you get:
bq. I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11. The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.
bq. How can an interpretive theory gain legitimacy in two cultural markets as different as France and the United States? This study examines the intellectual, cultural, institutional and social conditions of legitimation of Jacques Derrida’s work in the two countries and develops hypotheses about the legitimation of interpretive theories. The legitimation of Derrida’s work resulted from a fit between it and highly structured cultural and institutional systems. In France, Derrida capitalized on the structure of the intellectual market by targeting his work to a large cultural public rather than to a shrinking group of academic philosophers. His work appealed to the intellectual public as a status symbol and as a novel and sophisticated way to deal with late 1960s politics. In the United States, Derrida and a group of prestigious literary critics reframed his theory and disseminated it in university departments of literature. His work was imported concurrently with the work of other French scholars with whom he shared a market. Derrida’s support is more concentrated and stronger in one discipline than the support for other French intellectuals. In America, professional institutions and journals played a central role in the diffusion of his work, while cultural media were more central in France.
bq. I spent a lot of those years exhausted and angry. We continued to have only part-time child care. Some nights I put the children to bed crying because I knew they were better off crying alone in bed than interacting with an angry sleep-deprived mother. I was furious that I had to make constrained choices and could not have the life I wanted. When he was home, my spouse was “superdad,” who did a lot of the work and played a lot with the children, so there was a big hole when he was gone. He was aware of how much he did when he was around, but not of what it was like when he was not around. I wanted him to confront the consequences of the work-home choice he was making and feel just as bad as I did. In retrospect, I probably should have used more paid child care and household help, as the children would probably have been better off with a saner mother, but I did not want to concede defeat to the constraints in my life. I preferred feeling angry to adjusting.
I haven’t said “Read the whole thing” in a while. This one’s worth it.
For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves. “When we had finished the repairs, we had a big debate on whether we should let the Panthéon’s officials know or not,” said Lazar Klausmann, a spokesperson for the Untergunther. “We decided to tell them in the end so that they would know to wind the clock up so it would still work.
“The Panthéon’s administrator thought it was a hoax at first, but when we showed him the clock, and then took him up to our workshop, he had to take a deep breath and sit down.”
Daniel Koffler on Saletan and all that. Also, Eric Turkheimer on Race & IQ in general. I was going to write that it is astonishing how persistent this rubbish is. (Philippe Rushton has been on the scene for ages. And, if I remember right, a few years ago he sent out one of his little pamphlets to all the members of the American Sociological Association.) But really, it’s not astonishing at all. While racist cranks will likely always be with us, their persistent ability to get the attention of the likes of Saletan is a predictable consequence of the interaction between a part of American intellectual and political life with some key facts about American history and social structure. I haven’t seen such exquisite handwringing about the hard facts of life since the schmibertarians started justifying torture.
_Update_: As emerges in the discussion below, this Top 10 is a little too good to be true, and probably reflects efforts to game the system either by critics or other participants in the Conservapedia world rather than the true degree of readership for these particular pages on the site.
