Posted on 05/30/2008 11:32:47 AM PDT by William Tell 2
Michael Bellesiles was a history professor at Emory University and the director of Emory's Center for the Study of Violence. He was also a senior fellow at the Stanford Humanities Institute and visiting fellow at Chicago's Newberry Library. Several years ago, he published a book called Arming America, which claimed Americans did not own many guns in the early years of the republic and, therefore, the Second Amendment is bogus. The book was well received by gun control zealots. He received Columbia University's distinguished Bancroft Prize for history books. He was the darling of the media.
However, there was one problem: Mr. Bellesiles' claims were fraudulent. Eventually, his prize was rescinded and he resigned from Emory.
Why would a fraudulent book promoting abolition of gun ownership be lauded, while scientific studies and books such as John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime are immediately demeaned?
For about 20 years, left-wing academicians ...(the rest is at this link):
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=19733176&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8
Ding Ding Ding!
We have a winner!!!!
Best answer of the day.
AND the MSM
Thatz eezy. Its cuza skulez.
It’s all the fault of those Christian zealots, don’t cha know.
Selective Service gave teachers an exemption from the draft, so the draft dodgers became teachers - So we have, and have had, large numbers of left wing teachers; old story, you subsidize something and you get more of it.
Schools across the spectrum I am afraid...preschool through postsecondary.
I read the article. It doesn’t say “Why” leftist thought is predominant in America. It just says that it is.
Good article though.
Welcome to the forum.
You have that right. Public schools and universities when they are not acting as the mouth piece of the left are dumbing down education to the lowest common denominator.
It actually meant “Central” America.
“Leftist thought” is an oxymoron.
Actually it’s not ‘public schools’
The correct term is
GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
The problem goes much deeper than the simplistic answer.
How did the media, entertainment, public school education, universities, etc. all acquire a leftward bent.
Liberals work a lot harder than conservatives at integrating their thought into these social institutions.
We will never have much effect on government until we gain more control in these issues.
We need to stop investing in the Republican party and start working on grass roots organizations.
“There is a saying that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. If conservatives do not respond, it could soon be the false, left-wing idea now taking root in our culture.”
This statement pretty much sums it up.
Trying to change that as best I can...:-) It is daunting being a Conservative teacher amidst all these liberal teachers. Just recently found out that a teacher in my building is teaching an entire unit on Al Bore's "An Inconvenient Lie". Made my blood boil. In response, I handed out researched articles from official, scientifically-sound sources that offered evidence to the contrary and simply tasked the students to do the research themselves and make their own informed decisions. I actually allowed the students to do an extra-credit assignment which included researching pro/con views on globull warming, then formulating a position statement based on their newly acquired information. Nice to see that a few saw the issue for what it really is...false.
Haven't heard a word yet from the teacher who was teaching Al Bore's movie...
The constant AARP ad which says we need LIFETIME Financial security
Hooray for that truth. Of course, the Media , the female vote which depends on cradle to the grave govt. care, Democrats in general, and the universtities which know how to save the snail darters, wear condoms, but can’t find Kansas on a map, all contribute.
Where can I find parts I II and III?
The media, entertainment industry etc. have been trained in John Dewey's incubator of socialism. It's not just the content either, it is also the method, the objectives, the unions and the fact of government schools existence. It may not be the only problem, and undoubtedly there are other contributers, but government schools account for around 85%-95% of the problem. It is simple to acknowledge the education establishment for liberalizing of America, but hardly simplistic.
“For about 20 years, left-wing academicians”
You must be relatively young. I can guarantee to you that it started WAY before 20 years ago.
In the mid-50s when Khrushchev was in power, in the then U.S.S.R., he said, paraphrasing, “Your children will be taught and you and they won’t know they are being taught.”
Because the men with balls are dying off and wussies are replacing them.
Unless more conservatives become members of what Robert Bork calls the "chattering classes," America will become a totalitarian society.
These are people who want power and go after it.
Or people who go into fields that they don't think are well paid and start looking for power or revenge as a compensation.
They aren't going to go away, but they probably won't make the country totalitarian any time soon either, because most Americans have a natural reaction against the excesses of such people.
“In the mid-50s when Khrushchev was in power, in the then U.S.S.R., he said, paraphrasing, ‘Your children will be taught and you and they won’t know they are being taught.’”
____________________________________________________________
Had a bat$h*t second-grade teacher in the 1950s who made no effort to hide her contempt for me because I was what we now call “gifted.” She forced me to walk solo around the room and instructed the other children to laugh at me.
It was her way of forcing me into the “box” to make me a good little worker bee. I remember it was all about sharing and the group — individualism got my result.
Yep, socialism’s been marching through the institutions for a hundred years at least. We need to do the same thing if we want the pendulum to swing back.
Because the men with balls are dying off and wussies are replacing them.
Last time I checked boomer's were still running the show. Take from that what you will.
“Last time I checked boomer’s were still running the show. Take from that what you will.”
_____________________________________________________________________
Bill Clinton and George W Bush are our only two Boomer presidents. Pelosi and Reid are of the “Korean war” generation — between the Greatest generation and the Boomers.
Boomer Derangement Syndrome can distort the facts somewhat, no offense...
NEA, MSM, LGBT.
No argument, we all know that. However, the education system in America is not the cause of leftward thinking, but the result. How do we change that dynamic? Certainly not by voting for politicians.
It was a supposedly conservative Republican which gave us the Dept. of Education.
I would love to read the other three parts of this series, do you have a URL to those?
Excellent piece. Thanks.
I believe it was Jimmy Carter who did that, as a campaign promise to the teachers union. It effectively gave them a cabinet post.
He signed the Public Education Organization Act creating the DOE in October 79, and it went into operation in May 80.
I'm not sure it is the result as much as it is the vehicle for propagation. One can't prevent dangerous ideas, but you can control the contagious spread of ideas. Some bad ideas will simply die out in the market place of ideas, unless they are foisted upon a population with force. When the government taxes a population in order to force those bad ideas on that population you have a tyranny called government schools.
That is great, keep up the good work.
The real test is to see how much money Mr. Gore will make if the carbon credit tax is implemented...billions.
People also don’t know that he and his Dad were underwritten by Occidental Oil for years.
Teddy Kennedy, Environmental Icon, actually is also in the oil business, go figure.
Thank you!!!! It is so easy to adopt the habits and thoughts of the left once you get into a teaching position in higher ed. I applaud your efforts.
“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.” -‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.
Hooray Mike! Great article! How about links to parts I II & III.
Thanks for your work, EnigmaticAnomaly!
GRRRRREAT thread! Thanks to all contributors.
I believe that it is the combination of two things. One, that leftists are patient. Not saying that they are more patient than rational people, but their patience is key. Two, leftists have very skillfully made their agenda into a ratchet. That is, they understand that is self defeating to try to get every leftist policy/program they want implemented all at once. Instead they focus on securing small victories, “ratcheting” them in place as the widely accepted societal standard, then working towards their next small victory. If they fail it’s no big deal because their ratchet has guaranteed that even when they lose, they win.
This is something that conservatives can learn from. Leftist’s ideals and visions may be driven by emotions and feelings, but the manner in how they work to achieve their goals is very rational. Conservatives on the other hand have ideals and visions driven by rational thought, but the manner in how we work to achieve our goals is very irrational and emotion driven.
The conservative, for the most part, is very absolutist and will disregard out of hand any policy or politician who does not fit the mold of conservative one hundred percent (I am only speaking generally). The leftist will champion any person or policy that will in some way advance his agenda even if it does not fit the leftist mold one hundred percent. As a result, leftists are constantly making gains, or at the very least in a position to fight for gains, while conservatives are almost always playing defense. A perfect example of this is the gay marriage issue. Ten years ago would it have been considered a conservative ‘victory’ that a judge stated that a ban voted on by the citizens of a state didn’t violate the state constitution? Even when they lose, they win.
Women's Suffrage!
I prefer to call them what they really are, "Government Churches".
Richard Rorty was a Prof. of Philosophy at Princeton, U of VA, and then Stanford. He died in 2007. Our taxpayer-funded universities have many of these types of people. Most are not so blatant about it. They just think that they are good enlightened people who need to enlighten their students. They really think that they are doing good by overthrowing the students’ religious beliefs.
Recommended reading:
That Every Man Be Armed:
The Evolution of a Constitutional Right
by Stephen P. Halbrook
None taken, I’m not a boomer.
Go the Bulletin website www.thebulletin.us. Go to the left column find Columnists and Commentary and then go to Michael P. Tremogie Talks ( this was not a name I made up you have to believe me about that one).
The series starts with the title Appeasement Nation
Thanks for the kind words:
Go to the www.thebulletin.us Click on ‘Columnists and Commentary’ in the lefthand column. Scroll to Michael P. Tremoglie Talks and click. The series begins with the piece titled “Appeasement Nation.”
Thanks.
Here are the links to the first three:
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=19721853&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=19725643&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8
http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=19729480&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8
I believe that your post must be the post of the month, if not the day. It is very astute and well said. If you don't object, I will put it on my profile page (with credit to you). It bears repeating. Your three paragraphs bear more wisdom and profundity than anything I've read on here in some time. Thank you.
No problem. Be my guest!
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