The pretensions of academic publication  and the allegedly rigorous peer-reviewed procedure were exposed in this deliberate “intellectual sting operation”:

“The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.

With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&

Thomas H. Benton, as Associate Professor of English at Hope College, writes:

“Graduate school may be about the “disinterested pursuit of learning” for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.

If you are in one of the lucky categories that benefit from the Big Lie, you will probably continue to offer the attractions of that life to vulnerable students who are trained from birth to trust you, their teacher.

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.”

That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.”

And so, another group of disempowered, dependent people come into being and another set of potential clients of the government is born from the middle-class welfare system called “higher ed.”

A blog explains why incurring debt to go to graduate school is a terrible idea, so terrible that he’s come up with 100 reasons to avoid graduate school altogether.

He’s talking about the liberal arts and the so-called social sciences, but his arguments (and evidence) can be applied to the sciences, to some extent.

Even if the tuition and your living expenses are paid for you, the experience is not “free” in any real sense.

You have to count the time spent as an opportunity cost and a waste of years you could have spent working, building a family,  starting a business, investing, or even just traveling and doing things you really love or care about, whether that’s volunteering for some cause or painting or woodworking or looking after your parents or siblings.

It’s simply not true that more formal education makes you healthier, wealthier, or wiser, which is, after all, what most people want out of life.

Of course, there are exceptions for everything, and in a handful of cases, for “born  teachers,” the supremely motivated and talented,  the very well-to-do, the extraordinarily self-sacrificing and dedicated….or  the terminally scheming…. the effort might still be worth it…..in the sciences.

The rest should probably take a pass. Unless, of course, they can do it free and do it fast:

“1. The smart people are somewhere else.

 If you think that going to graduate school will allow you to spend your days in a community of the enlightened, consider the axiom that it is unwise to borrow money that is difficult to repay.

To go into debt for a graduate degree in the humanities is to go into debt for a credential that, at best, will qualify you for a job with a relatively low starting salary in an extremely competitive job market.

Meanwhile, you will have removed yourself from the job market to pursue this degree, so don’t forget to add up the years that you will have incurred debt when you could have been earning money. But surely people in graduate school would be too smart to finance their educations with debt…

According to FinAid.org: “The median additional debt [the debt that graduate students pile onto the debt that they acquired as undergraduates] is $25,000 for a Master’s degree, $52,000 for a doctoral degree and $79,836 for a professional degree.

A quarter of graduate and professional students borrow more than $42,898 for a Master’s degree, more than $75,712 for a doctoral degree and more than $118,500 for a professional degree.”

This is not intelligent behavior. The smart people are somewhere else.”

In light of all the “shocked, shocked, I tell you” reactions to the video 0f an Oklahoma frat house’s racist chant, I pulled up some other instances of “hate speech” at American universities that somehow passed muster.

None of the people in these cases was in their teens, none was  drunk, none was speaking to a private group of like-minded associates, as the Oklahoma boys were.

1. A black activist and visiting professor at North Carolina State University addressed a Howard University Law school panel in 2005 and advocated exterminating all white people on the planet as the only solution to black problems.

2. After the Washington Navy Yard shootings, a tenured professor at the University of Kansas tweeted that he hoped that the next shooting victims would be the sons and daughters of the NRA (National Rifle Association) since, in his view, they were responsible for the Navy Yard massacre.

He was put on indefinite leave, the only one on this list who was punished.

3. In 2012, Dr. Richard Parncutt advocated the death penalty for influential deniers of global warming.

4.  In 2001, Mary Daly, a feminist professor at Boston College, advocated an evolutionary process that would result in a drastic reduction in the male population, as the only way to “decontaminate” the world.

5.  Pete Singer, renowned bioethicist,  argued in a published book that “Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person,”  and “Sometimes it is not wrong at all.” Princeton gave him tenure in 1998.

6.  The chairwoman of the University of Michigan’s Communications department wrote an oped whose first line was “I hate Republicans.” Further on in the piece, she referred to what she felt as “loathing.”

7.  University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis said this about the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre: “I want Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.”

8.  Rutgers University professor and poet Amiri Baraka has written, “”I got the extermination blues, jew-boys….”  and “We want dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-Jews.”

None of the views expressed above (even number 7, which was surely an actionable threat) received any serious punishment, except no. 2.

However, the next two views did get a swift and severe response from the university:

9. A tenured professor at Marquette University (a Catholic university, mind you) was fired for having criticized a graduate student who refused to allow any opposing view on gay marriage in her classroom.

10.  An offer of tenure at the University of  Illinois was rescinded after the candidate tweeted angry comments about Israel’s Gaza offensive in the summer of 2014.

So what’s the distinction between the first eight incidents and the last two?

The first eight all conform to the larger goals of the New World Order elites; the last two constitute obstacles to those goals.

Thus,

1. and 8. Race hatred against whites distracts from the elites who manipulate whites and non-whites.

It drives a wedge between the two groups, preventing their alliance against the real enemy. Inflammatory racial rhetoric against the right groups is never discouraged by the elites.

2. and 7.  Hatred of gun advocacy promotes gun-control. The NWO needs the population to be disarmed and cowed by the police and the military.

3. Indoctrination in global warming orthodoxy prepares the public to accept the social and economic controls being imposed on it in the name of climate change.

4. Hatred of masculinity provides the justification for female tyranny and privilege and the redistribution of wealth from the private sector (dominated by men) to the public(driven by feminist/female votes).

5.  Radical abortion and infanticide constitute a form of depopulation, another elite goal. They also destroy maternal feeling and undermine the family. Atomized individuals without strong family bonds are  more easily manipulated by propaganda, military recruiters, and gang-leaders; they are more easily addicted to drugs and pornography both big money-earners for the New World Order elites.

6.  Polarizing party politics prevents the population from thinking outside the prescribed binaries and diverts attention from the elites. Inflammatory, personalized political comments make great “noise” drowning out more serious analysis.

On the other hand, oppose gay marriage or the foreign policy of the Israeli state and you invite reprisals.

Greater Israel and the higher sodomy are both central dogmas of the New World Order.

No hate speech on American campuses?

Not for a moment. Hate is just fine in the classroom, so long as it’s the right kind.

A racist site, “Christian Identity.net,” (Christian identity claims only Europeans are true Israelites, considers Jews to be descendants of Satan, and Asians and blacks to be pre-Adamic descendants of the animals) wakes up to the fact that most racist or race-conscious  groups in the US are thoroughly infiltrated by agents provocateurs.

They have opportunistic government informers running them and are simply cashing in on their followers’ credulity with extreme rhetoric.

New World Order -related groups like the ADL (the anti-Defamation League), the SPLC, and the B’nai Brith, which act as American franchises of the Mossad, often have a cozy, symbiotic relationship with their supposed foes, white Christian nationalists:
“The second morning after each literature distribution the local newspaper always runs an Anti-Defamation League written template article about ‘hate’. This boilerplate article serves both the National Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League’s fund raising goals. The ADL routinely hails the NA as the “most dangerous organization in America”, even though ADL ‘investigators’ have long known about the NA’s true structure. The entire transaction scares up more donations for the ADL from neurotic Jews while also recruiting still more customers for the NA.

This mechanism is also the major reason why the pro-white movement is teeming with so many criminals and borderline psychotics.[Emphasis added.] The NA’s only positive goal is to maximize its own profits, just like any other private corporation. In the furtherance of this profit goal the National Alliance, Incorporated has willingly allowed its ostensible deadly enemy, the Masonic Jewish supremacists of B’nai B’rith, to define the pro-white cause for the American public.

With minor variations this business model has now been operating for three decades, ever since the National Alliance was incorporated in 1974.”

“Hate” and the “eradication of hate” are thus part of a lucrative racket that depends on whipping up fear on either side.

The same racket works in India, where NGOs get donations to fight supposed Hindu supremacists, who in turn scare their own followers out of funds on behalf of fighting secularizing leftists.

Meanwhile, the two supposed enemies collaborate at every turn to sell both sides further to the cabal of financiers at the top.

The Oklahoma fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon that was shuttered for racism a couple of days ago by Oklahoma University President David Boren now has high-profile defense attorney Stephen Jones  representing its board of directors.

Jones, interestingly enough, was the lawyer for Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted and put to death for bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, the worst massacre on US soil until the WTC attacks took place only three months after McVeigh’s execution in June 2001.

This is not the first time that Jones, a Republican, has gone up against David Boren, a prominent Democrat Senator and influential member of the Senate  Intelligence Committee.

Jones contested Boren’s Senate seat in 1990.

This whole story has sounded contrived to me from the beginning; now, I’m even more suspicious.

I’ll  explain why in another blog.

Why did the entire Western political establishment march in sympathy with the seasoned  and very political cartoonists who drew vile anti-Islamic images in a publicly circulated magazine, while the same Western establishment – or at least its American subsidiary- comes down hard on some barely adult  (19-year old) frat boys mouthing racial slurs on a bus-ride with other frat boys?

What’s the difference?

As usual, it amounts to whose ox is being gored.

We marched with Hebdo, because that suited government objectives in foreign policy, and we don’t march with Oklahoma, because, equally, that suits the government’s domestic objectives.

Think about it.

The culpability of the Hebdo cartoonists was far greater than that of the fraternity students.

They were experienced professional newsmen, who had a history of selective provocation in the service of neoconservative political and military goals (see here).

The frat boys were youngsters (19 and 20), apparently drunk,  with no obvious agenda beyond expressing crude sentiments they probably picked up from adults in their circle.

The Hebdo cartoons were disseminated for public consumption in France, where the interaction between Muslims immigrants and native French is incendiary.  The cartoons were released in a context of a global ‘war on terror” directed mainly against Muslim cultures. A global war in which millions have died and whole nations have been uprooted and destroyed.

The frat boys voiced their opinions in what they assumed was a private group of like-minded peers. There was no intent to disseminate it to the public, especially not to blacks.

The Hebdo cartoons are easily seen as an act of provocation directed at an embattled religious culture .

Their lewdness was not simply “expression” but act  – the images  crossed the line into pornography  that forced the viewer into participating as voyeurs.

The frat boys’ chant was not directed at anyone and the reference to lynching in it, while ominous, is not actually an explicit threat to anyone, even within the context of the song.

The Hebdo cartoons were published by free, private citizens, civilians, who were not censored in any way.  The reaction of other free agents or civilians to them – however violent –  do not fall under the provisions of  First Amendment law, although they certainly do constitute criminal actions (murder).

The Oklahoma students attend a government university, making this by definition a First Amendment issue.

It is settled constitutional law that the government cannot punish the speech of citizens, especially those not directly employed by it,  if  that speech does not directly endanger the lives of anyone.

Public university speech codes are mostly unconstitutional.

I don’t suggest for a moment that the Oklahoma fraternity chant – as it is represented in the media  – is anything but disgraceful and repulsive.

But the legal distinctions are clear and easily verified.

Meanwhile, from a political angle, the boys are an easy target…. and a favorite one too.

The racist deep South, steeped in pre-war bigotry is the red rag that the liberal establishment (is there any other?) most often waves in front of the population in its ceaseless effort to demonize traditionalist cultures that form the only resistance to its relentless program of homogenizing and atomizing populations.

But it is more red herring than red rag.

Nearly as many blacks died at the hands of blacks in 6 months in 2012 than were killed by lynching between 1882 and 1968, and while that fact does not in any way, shape, or form, exonerate that era  of its evil, it surely convicts this one of a different evil.

What that  might be is irrelevant, really.

Whether institutional racism is the villain of this era, or gang wars, or drug policy, or welfarism, Dixie is the architect of none of these.

The Great Society welfare programs that broke the back of the  black family (and, increasingly, the white family) might have been enacted under Lyndon Baines Johnson, a good old boy if ever there was one, but they were hatched by left-wing ideologues like Richard Clowen and Frances Fox Piven, professors at Columbia University, one of the roosts of the liberal establishment.

When the next cell-phone recording catches one of those worthies with their intellectual and moral pants around their knees, let me know what they’re saying about free speech on American campuses.

Meantime, I’m marching with the Nazis at Skokie.

What, you didn’t see #JeSuisSAE on Twitter after the upheaval at Oklahoma University over that racially charged fraternity chant?

No march for Oklahoma’s fraternities on behalf of the sanctity of free speech in the free West?

“We are all Charlie Hebdo,” pronounced  libertarian Nick Gillespie earlier this year. Speak for yourself Nick, though, to be sure, the loud mouth Okies have only been “blown away” figuratively, not literally.

But Hebdo was not a government organ, while the University of Oklahoma certainly receives federal funding and is subject, also, to federal anti-discrimination law.

So freedom of speech was not at issue in Hebdo, whereas it is here, although you wouldn’t know it from the commentary.

If we can lock arms in solidarity over our right to depict Mohammed as a camel-humping pedophile in Paris, surely we can lock arms in solidarity over our right to taunt  “n******”  with lynching, lest they crash Oklahoma fraternities….

and Eugene Volokh makes the constitutional case for that position here:

1. First, racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech. That has been the unanimous view of courts that have considered campus speech codes and other campus speech restrictions — see here for some citations. The same, of course, is true for fraternity speech, racist or otherwise; see Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University (4th Cir. 1993). (I set aside the separate question of student speech that is evaluated as part of coursework or class participation, which necessarily must be evaluated based on its content; this speech clearly doesn’t qualify.)

Meanwhile, can we wait a bit to find out what actually happened, before we make this another national racial moment?

At Harry’s Place, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi spots some important discrepancies in the writing of conservative Theodore Dalrymple, who, despite his goyische name, is actually of Jewish descent. (His real name is Anthony Daniels). Correction: I wrote Andrew earlier, by mistake.

Long before I knew that little factoid about Dalrymple’s name, I had an inkling, from style alone, that the man was temperamentally closer to neo-con than to con.

How could he constantly agitate against the third-world, against Islam and against immigrants, and yet be so so strangely silent on the immigration debate?

That inflexible adherence to one of the lynch-pins of modern liberalism betrays TD as an ideological individualist and no cultural conservative.

Then came another factoid: Dalrymple had been a communist in his youth.

And another:

Dalrymple is a close friend of Alexander Boot and his son, Max (one of the scribes of American empire and a card-carrying neoconservative).

It goes without saying that that association of itself doesn’t make Dalrymple guilty of neo-connery.

But it helps one understand the somewhat unconservative tone of this supposed conservative mouth-piece.

And it does suggest why he focuses so much, and so virulently, on Islam:

See, for eg., The Case for Mistrusting Muslims;  The Question of Islam ; and Islam’s Night-Club Brawl

Al-Tammimi’s sharp observations add to my questions about Dalrymple:

Recently you may have seen several citations of a certain Theodore Dalrymple (the pen name of Anthony Daniels) in prominent media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, where he is interviewed to provide psychoanalysis of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik. These appearances are not the first time Dalrymple has come into the public spotlight: over the years, he has written for publications across the political spectrum, ranging from the Independent to the Daily Telegraph.

In advancing his arguments, Dalrymple, who previously worked as a prison psychiatrist in England, primarily draws on anecdotal experiences with the numerous patients he has treated throughout his career. Indeed, in the introduction to his collection of essays entitled “Life at the Bottom” (Ivan R. Dee 2001), he claims that he has “interviewed some ten thousand people who have made an attempt (however feeble) at suicide” and that from this source alone, he has “learned about the lives of some fifty thousand people” (pg. vii).

I have never been fond of arguments based on hearsay, although I have enjoyed reading Dalrymple’s essays for quite some time because of his style of prose that is marked by highly comprehensible sentence structure and is peppered with Latin phrases. In any case, I am not here to discuss the merit of themes in Dalrymple’s work. Rather, the real question is whether the doctor’s anecdotal accounts are actually true. In short, as a former “distinguished foreign correspondent for the BBC” once supposedly asked him: Has he simply “made it all up” (from the article in “Life at the Bottom” entitled “Seeing is not Believing”-pg. 245)?

The other day I remembered that one of the essays in “Life at the Bottom”- entitled “And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day” (published 2001)- contains an anecdotal account (pg. 175-77) related to the essay’s broader theme of being cowed by accusations of institutionalized racism, whether in the workplace or in media. It turns out that this same account appears in somewhat condensed form in a later article by him with the title “A Modern Witch Trial,” which deals with the same subject and appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of City Journal, a publication to which Dalrymple regularly contributes.

The outline of the story is as follows: a young black man who turned into a recluse attempted suicide by barricading himself in the house and slitting his wrists. Dalrymple, thinking the man was mentally ill, suggested to the patient’s mother that he should not be released from hospital; that he might remain for further treatment. At first, the mother agreed, but then at least one friend of the young man- also black- accused Dalrymple of racism. The mother subsequently turned against the doctor. Feeling the heat amid the prospect of a violent row, Dalrymple agreed to release the young man from hospital, even though he had power within the law to retain the patient for further treatment. He therefore issued a declaration (only with moral validity, not legal) to make it clear that neither he nor the hospital could be held responsible for anything that might happen to the young man on release. The young man later killed himself, although family and friends decided not to hold Dalrymple responsible.
However, there are variations in the story:

(i) In “And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day,” the mother called the fire department to break into the barricaded house, discovering the young man unconscious with his slit wrists (pg. 175), but in “A Modern Witch Trial,” police and family were the ones who forced their way into the barricaded house.

(ii) In the 2001 essay, Dalrymple claims that both one of the young man’s brothers and a friend of the young man accused him of racism, and threatened to bring in other friends and family to cause a disturbance in the hospital if the patient were not released (pg. 176). Nonetheless, in the City Journal article, he just says that the friend came in and threatened to bring in other friends to stir up a disturbance in the hospital. Furthermore, in “And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day,” Dalrymple only claims that he made the mother sign the declaration warning that he could not be held responsible for what might happen to her son (ibid.), but in the City Journal article, he says that both the mother and friend signed the declaration.
(iii) The cause of death: in the 2001 essay, Dalrymple states, “A few weeks later the young man killed himself by hanging” (ibid.). However, in “A Modern Witch Trial,” he claims that “six weeks later, the young man gassed himself to death with car exhaust.”

How does Dalrymple explain the discrepancies in the two accounts of this affair? It seems that the narrative in City Journal is designed to provoke greater outrage: notably with Dalrymple giving in to the threats of a mere friend of the young man (rather than the latter’s family members); and gassing oneself to death sounds much more unusual and horrific than suicide by hanging.

Assuming the incident is true, he must- for obvious reasons- omit names and certain factual details that risk revealing the identities of the patient, his family and friends, and work colleagues. Nevertheless, omission is not the same thing as alteration. If, for example, the young man did kill himself by hanging as he states in the 2001 essay, why not either repeat this detail in the City Journal article or omit it and just affirm that a few weeks after being released the young man committed suicide without specifying how he did so?

What further suggests to me a habit of embellishment is the fact that, when he could name specifics so that readers might check the veracity of his statements, he does not do so. For example, he does not tell us the name of the former “distinguished foreign correspondent for the BBC” who asked him whether he simply made up these accounts of personal experiences with patients in his career as a psychiatrist. Nor does he name the “famous and venerable liberal publication” that hosted the lunch meeting where he supposedly encountered this former BBC correspondent (pg. 245).

Dalrymple assures me that there are no discrepancies at all: the point is, he says, that the fact of the young man’s suicide matters more than the method used. He added that suicide is possible by more than one means at the same time. His first rationale illustrates a reckless disregard for proper fact-checking and concern for consistency. Like Edward Said in his book Orientalism, Dalrymple appears to think that it is okay to play around with specific points like Play-Doh, just as long as he is on to some sort of “Higher Truth.”

As for the second point, he is of course correct (incidentally, Dalrymple had no reason to presume that I did not know this), yet it is highly improbable that you can hang yourself and use car exhaust to kill yourself at the same time. Moreover, he specifies different time intervals for each method of suicide. A few weeks do not amount to six weeks. Either the man killed himself by hanging a few weeks after being released, or he used car exhaust six weeks after his release. Which is it, my dear Theodore?

I urge for a crowdsourcing project of Dalrymple’s writings to detect other instances where he has used the same anecdotal accounts with discrepancies in different articles. Readers can contribute any discoveries they make on this matter in the comments threads, and I will add them as updates to the original blog posting. If Dalrymple is guilty of embellishment as I suspect (or at the worst, complete fabrication- a charge that I will not deign to throw at him owing to insufficient evidence), then he must be exposed publicly, just as Johann Hari’s failure to live up to the basic standards of journalism was brought to light

.”