Leftism

Madison Too Reaps What They Sow

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Since Dan took a (well deserved) pot shot at my town of Chicago recently I couldn’t help but notice this article in today’s Chicago Tribune titled “Public casts colder eye at homeless” subtitled “In Madison, rising suspicions in wake of unsolved slayings fuel backlash”.

The article states that there are 224,000 people in Madison and 3,400 homeless. By some simple math that means that 1.5% of Madison’s total population is homeless, if these statistics are correct. Per the article:

“A backlash against street people is under way in this renowned liberal college town after an uncharacteristically violent turn of events. Two unsolved murders in the span of a little more than two months have shaken Madison’s secure sense of small-city living and, even though no suspect has been named, the eye of suspicion has been fixed on panhandlers who work the streets.”

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Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride

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Megan McArdle is upset by something that Roy Edroso, a writer for The Village Voice, has said about her. He called her a “libstick libertarian”, which she feels is a misogynistic statement.

Well, it is a sexist comment! Considering that Mr. Edroso let it slip in an article where he rates ten Conservative blogs as to their Stupid to Evil ratio, Megan seems to be most incensed that he would be considering her femininity as a factor. What would being female have to do with being either stupid or evil?

She has a point, but that isn’t what I want to discuss. What puzzles me is how Mr. Edroso could have missed including The Chicago Boyz in his list!

Aren’t we Evil enough? We certainly try! I’m a gun-toting self defense instructor, and I even teach violent crime survivors how to shoot their disadvantaged attackers without charging them anything. To a New York liberal writing for a Leftist propaganda rag, that should put me somewhere above Joe McCarthy and just a little lower than Pol Pot. I mean, c’mon!

And stupid? I have bathtubs full of stupid at home, just in case a Village Voice columnist comes on by and wants to borrow a gallon or two. There are a few thousand rounds of ammunition in my living room alone, and I keep the guns used in the self defense class in my basement. According to those discredited studies the anti-gun lobby keeps quoting, I should have accidentally shot myself and every member of my family a few dozen times over by now. The fact that I haven’t shot anyone yet can probably be taken by a Liberal as proof that I am so stupid that I can’t even screw up right! If, that is, they can get over the fact that I am so stupid that I own guns in the first place.

And let us not forget my fellow Chicago Boyz! I doubt that any of them will be able to rise to the lofty heights of both Stupidity and Evility that I have achieved, but they all have their own geniuses in these areas. I figure that our combined talents creates a giant black hole that sucks all Goodness and Smartiness out of just about anyone unfortunate enough to glance at the title bar.

So the next time Mr. Edroso is compiling his little list, he should first stop on by and see what’s cookin’ with The Boyz.

Dancing Fast and Squinting Hard

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I don’t read Industrial Equipment News on a regular basis (who does?), but they printed a fascinating article by Mark Devlin that is worth checking out.

Mr. Devlin took umbrage at a recent paper written by two sociologist PhD’s in association with the University of Oxford. In the paper, the argument is made that there is something about engineers that causes them to become murderous, right wing radicals in greater numbers than other professions. This is due to the fact that most of the movers and shakers of international Islamic terrorist organizations were trained as engineers.

The 800 pound gorilla that the two sociologists are trying oh-so-hard to ignore is that an engineering degree might just be something sought after by people who are desperate to build bombs and place them where they will do the most damage. Terrorist wannabes will take classes that reveal the weak points in infrastructure and how to use explosives, as opposed to Texas Instruments turning normal college students into monsters with their mind-warping engineering calculators.

Or, as Mr. Devlin so pithily states, “Tough to overthrow much with an English degree.”

But I actually think there are two factors that both Mr. Devlin and the authors of the paper missed.

More than a few terrorist organizations of the Left in the 1960’s and 1970’s were started by, and heavily recruited, disgruntled college students and university professors. It worked back then, why wouldn’t it work now?

(As an aside, I would like to point out that the majority of those Leftist college students who turned to terrorism were enrolled in the soft sciences, mostly philosophy. I think the authors of the Oxford study would get bent out of shape if someone would suggest that the humanities warps the mind and turns people into violent terrorists. I would never do that myself for fear that Ginny, our resident expert on the humanities and former college student in the 1970’s, would decide to retire to her kitchen and assemble something volatile from common household cleaning products.)

It is also no secret that the Arab world is hardly a hotbed of growth and innovation. Seems to me that most of the families which can afford to pay for a modern Western style education would be pushing their spawn to get a degree in the hard sciences, if for no other reason than there is a real need for development through most of the Islamic world.

I corresponded very briefly with our fellow Chicago Boyz and resident engineer Steven den Beste about this article, and he had this to say about well educated terrorists….

“As to them being disproportionately engineers, I would suggest that observation of any large university will show that the vast majority of exchange students are to be found in departments who teach utilitarian subjects. Not too many Arabs are to be found studying postmodern literary theory or art history. And I don’t think you’ll find too many of them in the Women’s Studies department, let alone Queer Studies. Or any other “studies”, for that matter.”

That appears to be sound wisdom to me.

(Hat tip to Ace.)