Nobody puts Baby in a corner...

... unless Baby doesn't actually want to kill babies, that is.

Please take a couple minutes to digest this interview over at HotAir. So creepy.

This went on at Harvard to a much, much lighter extent. Never had one-on-one meetings with RAs, and I'm quite sure none of my conversations were typed up for the university files to keep track of my progress and "treatment." But I do remember the stand-in-the-corners game, good times! The facilitator (this was not the RA, just some random sensitivity trainer, as I recall) would ask about some controversial issue and then have us stand in different parts of the room depending on what our positions were. Always done in small groups of ten to fifteen, so you could see where everyone stood. The only point of the whole silly exercise was to immediately (this happened during the first week or so of school) point out and isolate the conservative minority (it's college, we're always the minority) - to quite literally put them in a corner. Liberals dream these hippie exercises up because they know it would work on them - that is, faced with isolation, they would cave and believe whatever it took to get them back with the crowd, maybe come up with some chants, paint a few signs, pass around a fat j, whatever, it's cool, dude, don't be a fascist. Unfortunately for them, with conservatives, this sort of stuff just backfires, since we enjoy pissing them off and like being troublemakers.

My point being, yes, please do get yourselves all up in arms over the Delaware sitch (yeah, I said sitch, deal with it), which is ridic, but don't forget that less blatant attempts at indoctrination are going on at just about every other campus, too.

And no, it doesn't really matter to most intelligent people (my dad's only concern as he underwent both nazi and communist indoctrination was to keep from giggling), but it certainly does do harm to the naive and unsuspecting. In any case, it's a total waste of time, perhaps even more so than actual college classes.

Creepy

(I posted this in the comments over at Rain in the Doorway, but thought I should put it up here, too.)

I came across this video (no embed, sorry) some time ago because I love old Russian songs, and it really creeped me out. Still does. Note how the spotlight isn't used to highlight anyone on the stage, but pans back and forth across the audience instead! Reminds me of when my dad was finishing up med school in Budapest right after the war, and said the Soviets took over classes to lecture on communism and videotaped the audience to make sure everyone was paying attention (my dad wasn't, he and the guy next to him were whispering the whole time, and he found out they were being videotaped since they were called in to get a talking to from the authorities and shown the tape of themselves!)

Creepy

I have no idea if this is accurate, but if it is, then... damn.

Hollywood's Hidden Conservatism

So obviously Hollywood would never consciously produce a film with anything but an ultra-liberal message, but a few current examples suggest that, when packaged with enough sex, obscenity, and violence, a hint of conservatism might sneak through and end up on the silver screen. I already wrote about Tarantino's Death Proof and its pro-gun, anti-victimhood message. Today, Hugh Hewitt's movie guy, talking about the extraordinarily vulgar Knocked Up, said that it would be very difficult to have an abortion after having seen the film and its full-screen sonograms (follow the Hewitt link for audio). Also today, a zombie-loving friend excitedly sent me a link to this movie, which, at least based on the trailer, could be seen as a parable about the dangers of abusing an illegal immigrant underclass to tend the lawns of the WSJ editorial board (although I am, as you may remember, greatly turned off by anti-Fifties themes in cinema).

Whit Stillman managed to film a first-class conservative body of work by writing scripts that went over liberals' heads, getting the critics, whose default setting is to praise that which they do not understand, to applaud works about their own shallow immorality. For those of us without Stillman's skills, however, it now seems that there is another way to sneak some sense past the p.c. focus groupthink. Call it the Apatow Approach: the most square, most old-fashioned values in the world can make it big in Hollywood as long as you couch them in enough swear words, penis jokes, and, in extreme cases, an occasional disembowelment.

UPDATE: A quick Google search on "Apatow's conservatism" reveals that Ross Douthat and the New York Times beat me to the punch.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My tip made it onto HotAir!

OKAY, LAST ONE: Prof Althouse mentions the surprising theme of Knocked Up, too!

"in the very detailed index for the book, the entire entry for 'Communism' is: 'Communism, see McCarthyism, McCarthy era; countries and conflicts'"

Hitting on a couple recurring themes from this blog, Roger Kimball has a great post up about David Halberstam. Read the whole thing, as they say!

The Truth about History

You know that saying "History is written by the winners"? Couldn't be further from the truth. History is written by the losers. It is also, more often than not, written by losers. This is why, for example, I had one professor tell our class about the Ukrainian famine, and how it was an unfortunate accident resulting from bad planning in a tough year. Yeah, Stalin had nothing to do with it.

I'm not going to make this into a rant about commie bias in the academy. Frankly, I don't care. My parents both did their time in good ol' fashioned soviet propaganda schools and made it out just fine, I figure I can handle the Ivy League without whining. It's just that you should be aware that a great deal you read in mainstream history texts is a lie or a distortion written by communists or their sympathizers. That's why we never stop hearing about the evils of the blacklist and crazy Joe McCarthy, yet never hear anything about all the honest-to-goodness Rusky agents in Hollywood and the government. Or about what America's professors were really saying about the USSR before it fell. Or the truth about Carter (who was not, as one of my professors insists, just a very kind and nice man who wasn't cut out for the presidency). And don't even get me started about Vietnam. (Okay, so it did kinda turn into a rant about commie bias in the academy - sorry!).

That's probably the greatest thing about the blogosphere. This time around, leftist idiocy, subversion, and treason won't just go down the memory hole, it will be archived forever. That's why part of me actually enjoys all this global warming hysteria - fifty years from now, I don't know if I'll ever be able to stop gloating, and I'll have all the heartfelt pleas from the Huffington Post to back me up.

Winners go out and lead productive and happy lives in the real world; losers have no lives of their own, stay in the comforting uterine warmth of the Academy (except the really dumb ones, who can't crack grad school and end up working for the New York Times), and devote themselves to writing with bitterness about the lives of others.

Only now, finally, thanks to the marvels of the blogosphere, do we finally get a chance to see history as written by the winners.