The point of a real seminar is that the participants correct you. So BUGS includes many things I only know part way or may be mistaken about. I went back to polisci grad school for a semester in 1994, I did well enough, but it was mainly to check out some of the more blatant assertions I make about the Professor-Priesthood.
One thing I discovered was that I had been right when I said that real seminars had died out, but that they had become even deader since I was in school decades before.
As in grammar school, you are assigned a “paper” of so many WORDS. Even an undergrad in the 1960s the idea of telling an UNDERGRADUATE how many WORDS should be in his work would be laughed at as childish.
You did that for assigned writing in Junior High.
In the sixties a professor would routinely present a proposal for an article he was going to submit to his seminar and often also to an advanced regular class. I assume that if you are a doctorate just beginning a concept for a journal article, you would want to submit it at its early stages to a group of engineers in grad school to check it for possible fundamental problems.
Nothing of the kind would even be contemplated in the so-called seminars I went to. They were like freshman high school English, where students would be in a lecture course, but would pick stories in the Reader’s Digest to report on.
You had to get the length of the report right and the teacher knew the article.
This was a unique experience, so I am reporting my basic findings to you. In real academia, i.e., the sciences, an article presents the results of a particular piece of research and other professors repeat the same experiment.
The more radical your conclusions the more likely later repeats will contradict it. But also the more radical your results the more likely they are to go into the media.
When the KGB files were opened up right after the fall of the USSR some professors took a quick look at them and said that Alger Hiss was not mentioned in them as a spy. Our local liberal newspaper had Hiss’s picture on the front page and blared this “news.”
The KGB files are larger than the Library of Congress. Some other readers found Alger Hiss and practically everybody else who was subjected to “McCarthyism” was, in fact, a KGB agent with thousands of pages detailing his activities.
The State Newspaper never mentioned any of that.
This is not an isolated event. Putting a story on the front page is a big decision. If you ask “Why is this information produced?” the answer is simply that it is a big story that, so far as the people who depend on the newspaper for their information, proves what the paper has been saying all along.
Any objections will be buried in the letters to the editors section, assumed to be coming from a biased source, or not at all.
We all know that is how the world works, but no one THINKS about it when it comes to things like the death of Seminars.
Even in the 1960s a professor was subject to some real losses if his article was silly or wrong. So he checked it out with his seminars. Today, if you are on the right side, if you are completely wrong all you have is another published article for your resume.
This is all between you and the editor. No one has ever suffered from being totally discredited by Jensen or other heretics.
#1 by backbaygrouch on 08/19/2010 - 6:17 am
The greatest power of the press is the power to ignore. The government’s parallel power is secrecy. A well informed people cannot be easily cowed. Therefore darkness must prevail. This can be accomplished by using two tools. First, debase the educational system so that critical thinking is not developed by the bulk of the population. Second, limit access to facts so that the Big Lie has no competition. The former is demonstrated by Bob’s observation of the present state of higher education. A good illustration of the latter has been posted today at antiwar.com.
http://original.antiwar.com/cook/2010/08/18/the-secrets-in-israels-archives/
The antidote is Mantra thinking. ever repeating the queries, Why is this produced? Cui bono? These questions cannot be asked too often.
#2 by Epiphany on 08/19/2010 - 6:46 am
Notice,
the Mainstream media hardly
ever bring up the sins of
the Soviet Union.
No, the Soviet Union is
forgotten altogether.
#3 by Epiphany on 08/19/2010 - 6:48 am
Could it be,
that the key to
everything is to bring
up the crimes of the
Soviet Communists over and
over again?
Why do they want Soviet
Communist crimes to be
forgotten?
I do wonder!
#4 by Dave on 08/19/2010 - 10:08 am
There is great need for the kinds of people who reflect back what is lacking in others. That is what the old time Oxford challenge was about, being forced to actually defend your own BS. I guess real seminars existed back then. It was a culture that tried to beat students up for being intellectuals, hoping they would give up.
But there is another aspect to it too and that it was an attempt to get students used to embarrassment, a fear white people especially suffer.
#5 by BGLass on 08/19/2010 - 10:53 am
that it was an attempt to get students used to embarrassment, a fear white people especially suffer…’
The “permanent record card” prepped us for knowing how each itsy bitsy infraction might destroy us forever and ever. No other groups had permanent record cards, but another lingo: amnesty, grace periods, recovery days, that thing where those presidents let people off the hook as they quit their jobs, I forget what it’s called. Oh, “pardons.” We didn’t make mistakes. We were RECORDED. Zero boo-boo tolerance and only 300 words in the position papers.
Like in school, the “amnesty” word gets parlayed into other things. Like amnesty if you break a school rule, you’re above the law. Whites don’t get amnesty at school. They aren’t the right population for amnesty. Amnesty is brown. Whites are record card.
They think amnesty was what being white was (getting off the hook due to “privilege on skin color.” But we always had the record card.
#6 by shari on 08/19/2010 - 3:17 pm
I think that seminars have been replaced with something called an e-portfolio. Even medical schools are to adopt this method. I don’t know for sure, but I THINK it’s a faux way to advance multicult,anti-white racism.
#7 by Creator on 08/19/2010 - 7:13 pm
I am a working stiff. Around 3 years ago I
went to this….. seminar, I suppose it could be called, about immigration (read invasion) that was held at the Icelandic University. It was my first (intellectual) seminar, and, probably, the last.
I thought that I was witnessing a scripted play in a theater. Top notch professional mental-masturbation. The mommy professors and guest speakers were stroked up to an unreal level with supportive, goody feely, questions and comments. First, I got nearly hopping mad but then I realized the absurdity and left laughing almost hysterically. Just the thought of that thing can still make me smile.
#8 by Alan B on 08/20/2010 - 4:11 pm
Mommy Professor Lowers the Bar.
The Soviet Union lasted 70 years and as Bob has said, this failed Marxist experiment went out with a whimper and left in its wake an impoverished people with a Third World economy.
For 70 years Mommy professor and the Media glorified the achievements of Soviet Communism, mean while, the United States was providing agricultural and industrial assistance to their utopia built upon words. In the end Soviet Communism collapsed, yet Mommy Professor would continue to worship Marxism, they blame the administrators for this failure.
The Professor Priesthood functions and operates like the Marxist government of the Soviet Union once did. They refuse to abandon their insane philosophy, creativity for them is a change of leadership, and the ideology is holy. The Professor Priesthood is dominated by dunderheads and political hacks, they cannot function outside the collective, like birds, when one turns left the whole flock responds in kind, neither rhyme nor reason, it just happens.
Left on its own, the Professor Preisthood the Leftwing Idealism and PC would crumble; yet, it survives thanks to the media and outside funding. Cut the funding and Kill the Beast! Like Bob said, PC IS a religion.