Hmm, a politics post - and it is not going to be about some people's simplistic and childish belief in a divine power known as "Global Warming," or actually, to be accurate, "man-made Global Climate Change." I mean, the globe has obviously warmed considerably. Scarily, today within the space of a few hours, Maryland has gone from a brisk 58 degrees to a tepid 72 degrees in the mere 3 hours since I woke up. Obviously, every one must stop driving their cars immediately. And preferably get off the beltway. well, except for me. I want to see how fast I can go on the beltway without any cars on it. And ominously, it seems that during the same time my local part of the globe has experienced a rapid rise in temperature, Perth Australia has experienced an almost equal and opposite cooling. I predict that half the globe will settle into a hyper warm atmosphere while the other half will turn into an ice ball.

But, anyway...

Some idiot professor of fruit and mammarian studies has encountered the harshest form of oppression known to the academy. Her students disagreed with her. I know, shocking.

Let's take a sample of her, shall we say, syllabus:

"scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

Yup, that old social construct: the scientific method. Now, this scientific method is not the community-based reality that is Global Warming where false climate data is fed into poorly thought out computer models to show looming catastrophe, but a process by which a hypothesis is tested and either confirmed or proven wrong.

What I love about academics is their ability to use a variation of language to both combat the communication of ideas and to stifle disagreement. I call it "nihilistic over-verbalization." And I actually do love it. It is like watching Maori tribesmen do some bizarre and obviously counter-societal tribal sacrifice (where the academics sacrifice truth, the savages only sacrifice a goat), if the destruction is done with the right amount of flair, it's fun to watch. I love the way it rolls off one's tongue with right amount of smugness and defensiveness. If the person sounds like she memorized it from someone else, that is a bonus. Anyway, I always smile and think to myself, "that is good nihilism, way to avoid the real world. "
To illustrate: at one point in the Sopranos, future nihilist academic Meadow responds to her BF's fear concerning the Mafia by pointing out that such social organizations were a natural consequence of the barriers to access that American society placed in the path of Italian Americans. "Great Meadow, but I am still going to be whacked without consequence because I saw a "made" guy go down on a dock worker."
Maybe the Hebrews were right, by naming something, you have power over it. I could go on, but the social construct thing always makes me smile. And maybe these people are trying to use that power to become gods. makes you think, eh?

Anyway, in this post, a lunatic professor is questioned by her students in response to her not-quite well thought out ideas. The left has told us that the highest form of patriotism is dissent (and flag burning and vandalizing recruiting offices). But, now we learn that to the academic left, the highest form of scholarship is blindly accepting vacuous identity agendas from whoever happens to be lecturing at that period of time.

Savor some crazy:

"After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded."

This is an important reminder, folks, that your PhD in Dutch Gargling and Basket-Weaving with a minor in Comparative Feminist-Scream Therapy is not only useless, but quite annoying.

Post Script, It is true that I called these advanced degrees useless (much like law degrees (not my law degree, mind you)), but I was reminded that Michelle Obama used her PhD in Dutch Gargling and Basket-weaving with a minor in comparative feminist-scream therapy with an emphasis on cracker hating into a $300K job. So, I mean, unless the messiah used his influence to peddle a job for his embarrassment of a wife, there are some perks to being able to a write a thesis so bad that Christopher Hitchens wrote, "To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language." Wow, I wish I could write like that guy. Then again, I wish I could sing like Dave Matthews or throw a football like Bret Favre, so that thought is trite and obvious.