…plus ce c’est la meme chose.

UPDATE: My French is, how you say, not so good.

I am amused that these First Circuit types couldn’t find it in their hearts to declare the Church of Body Modification a non-church. They did find against the “Modifier”, which seems right to me, but really to read this thing…

I’ve got to start a religion of my own. Of course, if I’m looking to get fired, probably not showing up would work as well, and without all that pesky, new religion paperwork.

I missed it at the time, but that peerless Slater column from last week apparently got listed on Fark, whose posters show Ms. Slater every bit of the polite restraint for which they are famed, right from the first comment.

A couple of follow-up points to Dan and Tyler’s comments:

Firstly, something quite similar to this happened two years ago. The principle of “viewpoint neutrality” as applied to student programs means that the PFC cannot, when deciding whether and how much to fund a student group, use that group’s politics as a factor in their decision. Sundry PFCs have misread this to mean that student programs themselves cannot express opinions on political issues. One glance around the campus will convince you, however, that they are not enforcing this rule with much vigilance; it is kept in a closet and dusted off every so often in an attempt to defund this humble little publication.

Second, the business about being “advantageous to the cultural or physical development of students”. I had supposed this to be a no-brainer, since having a wider variety of viewpoints discussed and explicated on campus surely meets the first of these criteria. (As for the second, students are welcome to come and carry boxes of issues around.) But I wasn’t thinking carefully enough. The PFC is considering only the “cultural development” of students participating in the program, not the consumers of the end product. Hence the concern that we are not hiring enough Marxists.

Leave aside the fact that the OC has a wide variety of more or less sane political persuasions among its ranks (to the extent that we might need some kind of affirmative-action program for Republicans here) and the mission statement is carefully worded to admit conservatives, libertarians, classical-liberals, and virtually anyone who has a bone to pick with the frequently bizarre milieu of Eugene. If the PFC is going to apply this standard to everybody (viewpoint neutrality, remember) then there will be no student programs left. I for one have not derived the slightest benefit from the Ornithology Club. At our friendly little chat earlier today, I asked how, then, we were supposed to bring about the cultural development of people who don’t volunteer to write for us. Answer came there none.

Ultimately, this is the first salvo of what will be an interesting few months. Updates will be forthcoming.

Without a steady stream of Emerald articles to serve as fuel, I’m afraid my blogging output is going to revolve around my daily collection of frets and worries. Hence teaching, basketball, and this marvellous piece from (surprise!) Reason on immigration. My own opinion on the issue is entirely predictable. (Optional Practical Training, here we come.) Some choice quotes:

The fashion across the political spectrum, from the tree-huggers at the Sierra Club to Rush Limbaugh’s pugnacious “ditto-heads,” is to hammer away at immigrants. They steal our jobs. They use up our national resources. They dilute our culture. The timid few who demur are almost universally scorned as ivory-tower knuckleheads who mistake poetry for policy. They aren’t out there in the real world. They don’t “focus on the immigration influx in practice, as opposed to libertarian theory,” as National Review acidly puts it.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton seems to be considering a policy feint in this unpleasant direction:

People have to stop employing illegal immigrants. I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie responds in fine form:

Yeah, that’s really fucking heartbreaking to see people lined up to work in the morning. God, this used to be a beautiful country, before all these people–many of whom look different than Hillary–started getting up early in the morning and working really hard at shit jobs for a living.

This piece – also by Glenn Garvin, also linked to by Gillespie in the Hit & Run entry above – is also fantastic. Especially notable is the story that opens the piece, which is the best example of “journalism as blunt object” that I’ve seen in a long while. You’ll know the bit I’m talking about. It involves a violin.

On a less serious note, if you care at all about that game where they try to put the ball in the hoop-like thing with the net, then you should be following Bill Simmons’ LA Clipper Götterdämmerung. Here‘s the latest instalment. (He remains to be convinced about Luke Jackson.)

For unfortunate reality-based reasons, I have had to spend quite a bit of time recently thinking about the practice of teaching, which has ended up with me reading things like this interview with University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson.

He’s a big booster of Emerson and Thoreau. I’ve never read Emerson, what little Thoreau I’ve seen has struck me as a bunch of hippie claptrap, and lines like

Thoreau is a tough, brutal critic of one central tenet — one central tendency in American life, and that is consumerism, all right? Simplify, simplify, simplify. There`s no writer who knows more about the perils of consumerism.

don’t exactly inspire me to pursue it further. (Thoreau’s noble embrace of asceticism led, if I recall correctly, to his dying of TB.) Regardless, Edmundson seems like an interesting fellow, and there’s some good stuff here on the seemingly deathless issue of politics in academia:

Also, I think a lot of the kind of angry conservative movement that rubs me the wrong me, the Rush Limbaugh kind of stuff, came about because people going to college felt, All my professors are liberal, I could never give them my reservations about the liberal line, so that those things festered and got darker and nastier. And then, you know, welcome to talk radio. There they are, expanded to 90 times their size. If they`d been listened to in a tolerant way and disagreed with in an affectionate way, we might have a little bit better civil discourse in the country… one of the things that English departments, in particular, need to do is become receptive to hiring more people who have conservative political views. You can`t have a real dialogue if all you have are liberals, leftists and leftists to the left of leftists.

I particularly like the phrase “disagreed with in an affectionate way”.

Read all the way to the end and, in lieu of a cookie, you get an amusing Hayek-related moment.

Everyone’s busy with finals and whatnot, so you may have missed this little gem. Some people, this Ailee Slater being one, apparently consider the problem to be that the undergraduate degree has not yet been sufficiently devalued:

Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the University system makes absolutely no sense. Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we’re learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn’t happy with the cleaning job. If I’m paying someone to do my housekeeping, I’ll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn’t it be the same with education?

Ms. Slater has paid good money to be told that she understands things, and she expects to be told that she understands them, chop-chop. The question of whether or not this is actually the case seems to be unworthy of consideration. It all makes one wonder: why doesn’t she just go ahead and ask her housekeeper to issue her with a BA? It could scarcely be less meaningful, and the domestic help wouldn’t dare get uppity.

There’s more, much more. This plaintive theme recurs:

I pay the teacher to teach me, and then I get slapped with the label of failure if the teacher deems that I haven’t learned the correct information?

That is absolutely correct. Well done! I see this “college” thing hasn’t been a complete waste of time after all.

(See also: this editorial. Summary: You can’t expect us to work this week! We just had a four-day weekend! We have to ease back into this stuff!)

It’s happened. It’s finally happened. After years of waiting – years in which I was not sure I would be around to see this – it is upon us. If you are one of our curious liberal visitors wondering how one could become so alienated as to be uncomfortable with the seemingly innocuous term “liberal”, if you are reading this outside Eugene and think that we’re just making this shit up, even if you never bother to follow the links in these damn posts – then you must read this.

I present to you the Ultimate UO Story. Bar none.

I can’t even Spew it. I’d have to Spew the whole thing. It’s pure gold.

Background? OK. Last year the term “Vagitator” was coined to describe the protestors surrounding the Women’s Center production of the Vagina Monologues. The story’s comedy potential got it some attention nationally (the Volokhs, in particular), and this must have pleased the participants, because this year they sound like they’re shooting for cable news.

“The fact that they had auditions means that some people are automatically excluded.”

Yes. Yes, it does. Just read it. If this story is for real, and not something Gabe Bradley has made up for giggles, it may be the greatest thing I have ever seen in my life. Meanwhile, student groups are being asked for their input on the cast list. Needless to say, I have suggested Tyler for a role.

Domestic violence is no laughing matter. So why do I find myself becoming incontinent while watching these ultra brutal anti-domestic violence PSAs from the Great White North? Am I an asshole? Have I become desensitized to the horrors of the real world? Have I lost my last remaining shred of empathy?

Clearly I have.

Seriously, I thought these were jokes until I read that they had been put out by a Canadian advocacy group called Home Front, whose mission, as best as I can understand it, is to improve upon the work of The Kids in the Hall.

I can clearly envision a mustachioed Scott Thompson sitting at a diner with his two children when suddenly a waitress, played by Mark McKinney in drag, accidentally pours coffee on Thompsons leg. Thompson jumps back from the table, a look of sick rage or painful bowel discomfort crosses his face as he screams You fucking bitch while at the same moment lunging at McKinneys throat. A fracas ensues, which quickly escalates to Thompson pinning McKinney against a table, pouring scalding coffee on his fake bosoms and slapping him. Bloodied, beaten and disheveled, McKinney slides off a tabletop and crumples on the floor. Thompson then dusts himself off, looks at the restaurants gawkers all Canadian Mounties as if to say What? The bitch poured coffee on my Levi’s, and goes back to eating his eggs soaked in maple syrup and chatting with his children about the latest lumberjack competition they saw on TV.

Watch for: A businessman slamming a co-workers head into a boardroom table, pushing her to the ground and then, as a mere afterthought, throwing a stapler at her head. Its a lot funnier than it sounds.

Yes, Im going to hell.

Please, God, no.

The story isn’t quite as horrifying as it first appears, and the writer has to grudgingly conclude that “few colleges say they give admissions preferences to boys…” – but along the way he has a fine old time trying to drum up business:

Football was dropped in 1993, but now thousands of students instead fill the stadium to cheer the women’s soccer team. Women routinely hold most of the campus leadership positions. And when the student union was remodeled recently, the number of men’s toilets which had been more than double those for women was cut to make space for more women’s stalls.

The horror! The horror!

This stuff isn’t complicated. Admit the best students and let the chips fall where they may. (Deciding which students are the best is complicated, to be sure, but the principle is extremely easy.)

(Noticed on Volokh, of course, but it’s all over the place by now.)

As I’ve said before, it has got to be basically impossible to produce a daily paper’s worth of interesting and/or relevant material on this campus, so I certainly don’t want to fault the ODE too harshly for their struggles.

On the other hand, Web logs transform expression methods? For Christ’s sake. What’s more, if we want to know what drives students to drink – which we apparently do – I think sentences like “Among the many facets of student life, drinking alcohol is one aspect that has become heavily embedded into college culture” have to be considered among the main culprits.

An analysis of the OC website stats leads us inexorably to the following observations:

This is golden (and refreshingly level-headed) stuff, especially the rip on Terry Eagleton. From local blog No Credentials.

There’s a decent post to be written about unseemly conservative whining (and its relation to the unseemly liberal whining that we have all come to love so well), but this piece of filigreed nonsense from Princeton is nowhere near it.

First, liberals are intolerant not of conservative viewpoints per say [sic], but of the persistence of these opinions in spite of the fact that they are overwhelmingly false, politically opportunistic, and proven to consistently fail America and its citizens. If we are antagonistic toward expressions of conservative ‘thought,’ it is because we are intolerant of positions that persist in spite of evidence proving they are intellectually dishonest, and of policy prescriptions that do more harm than good…

Well, I’m glad we cleared that up! Jesus. If we switch the instances of “liberal” and “conservative” in the above, it’d fit neatly into place on any number of right-leaning websites. It’s completely content-free.

Also, a fine piece of bait-and-switch debate. Ready? Here’s the bait:

Similarly, we have indisputable evidence that there was Iraq and Al-Qaeda did not collaborate with the purpose of attacking America on 9/11. We know for a fact that the assaults on New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania were the work only of Al-Qaeda, not of Iraq. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission report states very clearly that we have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on the attacks against the United States.

And here’s the switch:

What, then, are we to do when a conservative student, perhaps in a class on international relations, repeats the demonstrably false claim that there was a substantive, working relationship between Iraq and Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11, in spite of the facts?

See? “Substantive, working relationship” is a far cry from “organized 9/11”. Now, one may fairly question whether the nature and extent of the relationship warranted invading the damn country. (I have a feeling I’m going to be on the fence about this one for as long as I can manage to stay balanced there.) But that’s an actual argument, where both sides have valid points to make, and there’s no clear-cut answer. Where’s the fun? It’s easier to just write off everyone who disagrees with you as a moron.

(Hat tip: the CN, who may or may not still be speaking to us.)