Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Tom Watson Jr, longtime head of IBM, writes (in his autobioraphy) about his personal encounter with McCarthyism in the 1950s:
There was a moment when I truly thought IBM was going to lose its shot at defense work because of the kind of window blinds I had in my office.
Via Ed Driscoll comes a link to an op-ed about the relationship between Darwin and racism in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Dr. Tony Campolo, a minister and professor of sociology at Eastern University. I find the op-ed interesting because virtually every statement about Darwin in the piece is dead wrong.
Lately I’ve been struggling with the concept of “educated beyond one’s intelligence”. Testing and education is supposed to separate the meritorious from the masses. Unfortunately, education serves only to cut off the very bottom, obviously inept cohort, but seems to have less ability to separate truly good people from mediocre intellects and fakers. This has direct implications beyond Academia, as David Foster pointed out when he noted the reliance of businesses on paper trail rather than accomplishments as a means of filtering potential new hires.
I’m now starting to construct a mental model for why education seems to be failing at this central task, and a few terms spring immediately to mind.
As a defendant before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, that is.
Clive Davis links to an opinion piece by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald writes that hate speech laws are ‘oppressive and dangerous’ and quotes, among other sources, an article by David Bernstein at NRO:
…University of British Columbia Prof. Sunera Thobani, a native of Tanzania, faced a hate-crimes investigation after she launched into a vicious diatribe against American foreign policy. Thobani, a Marxist feminist and multiculturalism activist, had remarked that Americans are “bloodthirsty, vengeful and calling for blood.” The Canadian hate-crimes law was created to protect minority groups from hate speech. But in this case, it was invoked to protect Americans.
Now see what you did? You just had to keep calling for blood and get the nice professor lady into trouble. Tsk, tsk.
By the way, Mark Steyn himself reports that some of the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s investigators are acting as agents provocateur, at websites such as Stormfront, among some others.
Pinker concludes his lengthy discussion of “The Moral Instinct” in the NYTimes:
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
He treads some ground we’ve seen in his earlier work but as usual his discussion excites – contrasting what appears universal and what doesn’t, optimistic in his belief that the more we know about being human the better humans we can be.
(Thanks, as about always with Pinker, to A&L.)