And Now For A Comment On Dr. Who's Willie

The many actors who have played the role of Dr. Who since 1963

Not being gay, rare it is when I focus on another man's willie, Anthony Weiner's weiner notwithstanding. And yet, today, I am being forced to focus on the genitalia of Dr. Who, the main character of a wildly popular BBC sci-fi show of the same name. As Wiki explains the series:

The programme depicts the adventures of a Time Lord—a time travelling, humanoid alien known as the Doctor. He explores the universe in his 'TARDIS', a sentient time-travelling space ship. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, a common sight in Britain in 1963, when the series first aired. Along with a succession of companions, the Doctor faces a variety of foes while working to save civilisations, help ordinary people, and right wrongs.

The show is fast paced, funny, clever and usually quite good, though the quality does vary. Being a BBC production, the show also gets very preachy at times about modern left wing values. For but one example, the show is virulently anti-gun. That said, only on occasion does the show go so overboard in preaching modern left wing values that I turn off the television in disgust.

At any rate, every, year or two, the Doctor undergoes a metamorphosis. His body becomes fatally damaged, he goes into the TARDIS and emerges a wholly new, well, middle aged British actor. It's been going on that way since 1963. And it appears that the next Doctor, whom we will be meeting around Christmas 2013, will be played by a 55 year old Scottish comedic actor, Peter Capaldi.

This news has brought out the most estrogen laden primal scream one can imagine from one writer at The Atlantic. Bemoaning the "misogyny" of the show as well as the "cultural marinade known as The Patriarchy," the fact that the next Dr. Who, like every previous one over the past half century, will have a willie rather than a vagina has the writer's thong in a twist. Here is a taste from what is a masterpiece of gender pc writing:

And yet, not taking a bolder leap in the casting and switching up the gender and/or race of the Doctor feels like a missed opportunity. The Feminism of Doctor Who Tumblr, in anticipation of the announcement, ran a feature called The Time Lady Project, which suggested dozens of potential actresses who could play the part. Some of these were pie-in-the-sky because they were such big stars (Tilda Swinton, Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson), but many of them were in that really-good-but-not-too-big-to-commit-to Who's-grueling-schedule range. And having a woman as the smartest, bravest person in the universe, being able to fix any problem, save the world with her wits, a magical vehicle, and boundless courage--who wouldn't want to watch that show?

But instead, another white guy. The structural sexism of the show remains intact. As this will be the first-ever real-time regeneration since I've become a fan, it's a bit of a letdown. . . .

. . .Flipping the power-imbalanced relationship between a male Doctor and a female companion could have given the show a jolt of new energy and perhaps taken the storytelling in unexpected directions.

Of course, maybe it's for the best that the first female Doctor isn't in the hands of the current showrunner. During the regeneration of Mels into River Song, after all, we were treated to such Moffaty gems as her "focusing on a dress size," weighing herself, and going shopping.

And as we all know, no real women would ever concern herself with a dress size, weigh herself or go shopping. Ah, those unrealistic gender stereotypes that must be driven from polite society. I would note that River Song was a very rounded character, comparable in most ways to her husband - The Doctor. Both she and the Doctor are shown as being admirable and imperfect in their own ways - which is how it has always been with virtually every doctor and most every female companion. What the writer is really bemoaning, like virtually every modern feminist, is not the lack of equality among the sexes, but that we recognize any differences between the sexes and, ultimately, that we do not live in a matriarchal society. I am pretty sure that Instapundit's wife has had something to say on this topic.

Having read through this estrogen laced scream, I looked to the by-line, expecting it to have been written by a radical women's studies prof or a NOW organizer, or perhaps even Sandra Fluk. But no, this was written by one Ted Kissell, a middle aged white male writer and editor out of Southern California. It is my sincerest hope for Mr. Kissell that he is writing things like this simply to get in with the local femenists so that he can get laid. Otherwise, this guy needs reconditioning, testicular implants and an immediate round of testosterone therapy.

Update: The NYT has published an op-ed piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan, likewise bemoaning the fact that the next Dr. Who will have a willie. Boylan - a transgender woman, originally born James, leaves little doubt that she would see the casting a female Dr. Who as an affirmation of his / her gender choice.

Update 2: Powerline is covering a seemingly similar set of arguments being made in regards to who Obama should choose for the next Fed Chairman. I didn't know that Larry Summers had sent infamous race hustler Colonel West packing from Harvard, where he was a professor in African American Studies. Summers gets my vote for that alone.

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A**holes On Parade - Lena Dunham

Dunham is an actress in the HBO series, Girls, as well as the woman who made the Obama ad comparing voting for Obama to losing one's virginity. She recently discussed her show's upcoming season, where her character begins to date a, horror of horrors, black Republican. As she explains the reason for the new plot line and the naivete of her character:

Dunham: [The black character is a] clear statement that we are comfortable, that there isn’t a political agenda against having black characters in the show.

Q: Why make him a Republican?

Dunham: We liked the idea of a Republican entering their universe. And Hannah doesn’t really have a clear sense of why you shouldn’t date a Republican; it’s kind of just like the same reason why you shouldn’t date a Nazi: You just shouldn’t.

(H/T Black & Right)

I wasn't sure whether to title this post as "Airheads" or "A**holes." The latter won out because Ms. Dunham's comments exhibit not merely vacuousness on a grand scale, but a level of casual hatefulness that clearly crosses the line.

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British Diversity

From one of the most interesting blogs on the net, Police Inspectors Blog - run by an upper level police officer who blogs under the pseudonym, Inspector Gadget, the latest most wanted posters from Scotland Yard:





Notice any common threads?

This from a comment by the blogger at Thin Blue Line to the Police Inspectors blog:

Not sure about the number [of immigrants] paying tax, though there are figures available about those issued NI numbers, which might indicate the numbers on benefit. Here are a few lines from one of our recent posts that might give you an idea.

The Extra Cost To The Tax Payer Of Immigration :-

• Local Authority race relations £3.1m
• Higher Education race relations £6.7m
• Commission for racial equality £32m
• Translation costs £100m
• Ethnic minority awards scheme £169m
• Security £174m
• English lessons for immigrants £80m
• Treating immigrants with HIV £330m
• Border Controls £690m
• Money sent home by foreign workers £1.4bn
• Asylum support & processing £1.6bn
• COST OF IMMIGRANT CRIME £4bn

Crime related costs, at £4Billion is by far the largest cost attributable to immigration.

Labour’s ‘open door’ policy on immigration costs every household £350 a year, claims Professor David Coleman, an Oxford University academic, who puts the total annual bill to the taxpayer at almost £8.8billion.

In a submission to a House of Lords committee, he said there had been a commitment to increase the population by one million every five years. With the population having swollen by 2million since 1997, they’re well on track for that one.

Apparently, Nu Labour research prior to taking power suggested that 80% of immigrants would vote Labour if they acquired citizenship.

On topic, Panorama did a piece on immigration tonight but conveniently left out the effects of immigration on the social fabric and criminal justice system.

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Multiculturalism's Early Obituary

Canadian Muslim columnist Salim Mansur writes the obituary for multiculturalism, though I think he is being far too optimistic on that point. Nonetheless, he does give an exceptional critique of this socialist paradigm.

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This from Salim Mansur in the Toronto Sun:

Future historians of the phenomenon known as "multiculturalism" that the West bone-headedly adopted towards the end of the second millennium will note the precise time when it was dealt a mortal wound.

It was at 8:46 on Tuesday morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the first of the four commercial airliners hijacked by Islamist terrorists -- all of Arab origin -- struck the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.

Since that time other western cities -- Madrid, London, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Toronto, Paris, Washington --have been targets of successful or failed attempts by Islamist terrorists determined to spread random death and destruction.

Those involved in the planning and execution of such terror are immigrants or born of immigrant parents belonging to the rapidly growing Muslim population in the West over the past 40 years. I happen to be a part of this wave of immigration to the West.

This western Muslim population, with its ethnic diversity reflecting the vastness of the Arab-Muslim world -- stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa -- could have given some timely ballast to multiculturalism by unambiguously and unapologetically defending the West against barbarity.

This was the minimum Muslims in the West owed to the civilization where they sought refuge, and where they found security, prosperity, freedom and self-fulfillment of the like denied them in their native lands.

Instead Muslim-based organizations, at first having offered denial, followed with an unending volume of polemics condemning the West for past sins. By exploiting the West's post-colonial guilt they held it responsible for the conditions in the Arab-Muslim world that breeds the politics of terrorism.

These bald-faced polemics are sheer nonsense, and yet they resonated in much of the West that went limp with the anodyne of wishful multicultural thinking.

The idea that all cultures are equal in merit and deserving respect, an idea devoid of any historical perspective, could be seriously proposed and adopted only in western liberal democracies. And logically such an idea meant only one thing, the diminution of the West and its achievements in comparison to other cultures. . . .

Read the entire article.

Unfortunately, I think that multiculturalism is inextricably intertwined with socialism and a world view that holds in contempt traditional western values. It forms the paradigm for far too many of our elite and academics to be jettisoned at this point, despite the clarity of the evidence of multiculturalism's suicidal fatuity. Multiculturalism will not die until socialism itself begins to wane in the world.

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Our Universities Need Real DIversity

Professor Robert Maranto is a lonely Republican in academia. In a recent article for the Washington Post, he documents the left wing bias in academia, in addition to decrying its ill effects on both academia and society as a whole.

Are university faculties biased toward the left? And is this diminishing universities' role in American public life? Conservatives have been saying so since William F. Buckley Jr. wrote "God and Man at Yale" -- in 1951. But lately criticism is coming from others -- making universities face some hard questions.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are "the third group," far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was "the right half of the left," while at Harvard he found himself "on the right half of the right."

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views -- commonplace in American society and among the political class -- are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I've taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused "a sensation" at his university. "It was as if I had become a child molester," he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because "you don't want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts."

. . . Recently, my Villanova colleague Richard Redding and my longtime collaborator Frederick Hess commissioned a set of studies to ascertain how rare conservative professors really are, and why. We wanted real scholars to use real data to study whether academia really has a PC problem. While our work was funded by the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, we (and our funders) have been very clear about our intention to go wherever the data would take us. Among the findings:

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors' political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.

Despite that bad job-hunting experience I had, I doubt that legions of leftist professors have set out to purge academia of Republican dissenters. I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

. . . Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

There are numerous examples of this ideological isolation from society. As political scientist Steven Teles showed in his book "Whose Welfare?," the public had determined by the 1970s that welfare wasn't working -- yet many sociology professors even now deny that '70s-style welfare programs were bad for their recipients. Similarly, despite New York City's 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.

. . . Ultimately, universities will have to clean their own houses. Professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate. And since debate requires disagreement, higher education needs to encourage intellectual diversity in its hiring and promotion decisions with something like the fervor it shows for ethnic and racial diversity. It's the only way universities will earn back society's respect and reclaim their role at the center of public life.

Read the entire article. I know of no one who would argue with his conclusions, though I think that the Professor is giving a big pass to the decision makers in academia who are excluding conservatives. I do not believe that the discrimination that they practice is largely unconscious. To the contrary, neo-liberals of today, both in and out of academia, have demonstrated time and again that they have no affinity for free speech or ideas contrary to their own. It is the antithesis of the spirit of classical liberalism that is supposedly so cherished in academia. Consequently, I believe that the Professor's solution to this problem is naive and unworkable. If academia is ever to achieve real diversity - i.e., diversity in thought - it will have to be forced upon them from the outside.

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