Assorted

1. Dynasties

The last nine GOP presidential tickets:

• 1980: Reagan-Bush
• 1984: Reagan-Bush
• 1988: Bush-Quayle
• 1992: Bush-Quayle
• 1996: Dole-Kemp
• 2000: Bush-Cheney
• 2004: Bush-Cheney
• 2008: McCain-Palin
• 2012: Romney-Ryan

And we might soon face a tenth ticket with a Bush on it. Does it sound to you as if a single family just might have undue influence over the Republican Party?

Yo, GOP strategists and kingmakers: This is America. We're opposed to handing out positions on the basis of inheritance or family connections. If you need that explained in any greater detail, there's an operating manual you might want to consult.

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2. Students And Masters

The recent threats from North Korea over the aborted release of The Interview are not a datum in a vacuum. Note how assiduously the Left has used threats of every sort to impede entertainment they disapprove (e.g., The Passion of the Christ), to interfere with speakers they want silenced, and to obstruct the mature, objective discussion of any and every subject they want suppressed.

That the monsters who rule North Korea, the last bastion of uber-Stalinism on Earth, should have learned a tactic from our own domestic traitors is only surprising in that we would have expected the lesson to flow in the other direction.

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3. Social Controversies Placed Beyond Discussion

We’re not permitted even to discuss same-sex marriage any more:

Marquette University has suspended with pay and barred from campus the tenured professor who criticized a graduate student instructor in a personal blog, pending an investigation into his conduct.

John McAdams, an associate professor of political science at Marquette, last month wrote a controversial blog post accusing a teaching assistant in philosophy of shutting down a classroom conversation on gay marriage based on her own political beliefs. He based the post on a recording secretly made by a disgruntled student who wished that the instructor, Cheryl Abbate, had spent more time on the topic of gay marriage, which the student opposed. McAdams said Abbate, in not allowing a prolonged conversation about gay marriage, was “using a tactic typical among liberals,” in which opinions they disagree with “are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

Please read the whole thing. Also, please read McAdams’s blog post. Finally, reflect on the use of the word “controversial” in describing the blog post. Isn’t controversy the very meat and drink of academic debate? Isn’t that what the faculty and students are there to immerse themselves in?

Incidentally, Marquette is a Catholic university, run by Jesuits. So Miss Abbate’s decree that same-sex marriage cannot be discussed in a Marquette classroom is equivalent to expelling Catholic doctrine from a Catholic institution.

I shan’t speak for you, Gentle Reader, but this makes me want to lock and load.

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4. The Campus “Rape Culture”

If the previous topic didn’t raise the hair on your neck, this one should do the trick:

The latest feminist obsession with rape has reached the point where false accusations are now being thrown around loosely. It has resulted in a negative stigma toward men on college campuses, and destroyed the lives of those falsely accused. Fortunately, one man videotaped his entire encounter with a woman who wrongly accused him, proving her wrong and probably saving him from arrest and prosecution.

Fly Height posted the video, showing a disheveled looking woman who appears to be high and trespassing in a man’s room. She cries out, “Don’t touch me, rape, he wants to rape me! Help me!” The startled man responds back, “stop hitting me lady.” With the door wide open and her boyfriend standing next to her, she continues, “I promise I won’t squeal on you anymore … I’ll do anything you want!” She then bangs on his door, yelling, “I was trying to get out of your room, you won’t let me.” The victim asks her repeatedly, “Please call the cops and get out of my room.”

Another man, possibly a landlord, approaches her as she finally leaves the man’s place, sympathetically taking her side. But it won’t matter, all the evidence is preserved on video.

With those accused of rape being treated as guilty until proven innocent, unscrupulous women poised to gain materially from making false accusations, and a loud chorus of feminist voices demanding that we never doubt such an accuser, what else could we have expected? Incentives matter — and they don’t stop operating because we want them to.

Add to that observation the slander being laid upon young college men about a “campus rape epidemic.” The Bureau of Justice Statistics has released figures that utterly contradict the shrieking harridans of the Left so anxious to promote women’s fear of men. The harridans’ response? The statistics are irrelevant! Always believe the accuser! Not to do so constitutes “blaming the victim” and makes one a “rape apologist!”

Watch the video of this incident and decide for yourselves: Are our college campuses truly suffering a “rape epidemic,” or are young women merely following the incentives the law and the gender-war feminist harridans have created around us?

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5. How Dare You Be...A Republican?

Academia isn’t just hostile to men:

A University of Michigan department chairwoman has published an article titled, “It’s Okay To Hate Republicans,” which will probably make all of her conservative students feel really comfortable and totally certain that they’re being graded fairly.

“I hate Republicans,” communications department chairwoman and professor Susan J. Douglas boldly declares in the opening of the piece. “I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal ‘personhood.’”

She writes that although the fact that her “tendency is to blame the Republicans . . . may seem biased,” historical and psychological research back her up, and so it’s basically actually a fact that Republicans are bad!

May “seem” biased -- ?? Well, perhaps. Just possibly. What do you think, Gentle Reader?

It’s been known for a long while that openly right-of-center political views can obstruct an academic’s career. Indeed, they can result in his not being employable, regardless of his scholarly credentials. Ask Townhall.com’s Mike Adams about his experiences.

This subject has a personal resonance for me. I left academia for these reasons, among others. Indeed, I declined an opportunity to return, this time to study economics, because of ideological harassment.

Young men are showing an increasing, entirely rational preference for courses through life that don’t involve enduring a term at some “institution of higher learning.” The above attitude, added to the fanatical behavior of so many campus “activists” and the increasing hostility of young college women, provides all the explanation anyone should need.