Wikipedia says it means, "The mountains of Hind".
Either:
1. Prager is making a huge mistake because
-he heard this somewhere from some one he trusts to know, such as someone who speaks the language and
-he never looked it up himself.
or
2. Prager is a liar.
or
3. Prager heard some explanation and mis-remembered the information.
or
4. Someone vandalized the wikipedia page and put false information there so as to shine a softer light on whoever would be judged evil
* * * *
I consider (1) to have a fair degree of probability, maybe 25%. Usually Prager checks his information
(2) is utterly impossible. Remember that the word "lie" doesn't mean "making a mistake, repeating false information" without "directly intending to deceive".
(3) is more like something I would do than Prager.
(4) is by far the most likely, given what I've seen of people with an agenda saying whatever they want on articles.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Pragertopia
I wish I could afford a subscription. A nice lady just called up while I was replying to something earlier. She had a brilliant insight from the GPS lady ... but I don't know what it was. I know it was brilliant because Prager just started shouting "that's brilliant" but I'll never know what it was, unless I stay up till 2:45 AM and catch it on WIND, Chicago.
Sigh.
Prager, it's getting obnoxious hearing you constantly chiding us for not getting a subscription. Some of us just don't have seven dollars a month. I've been trying for two years to get enough money for the drive to Louisville so I can meet other Prager fans but I can't afford that, either. And no, I'm no spendthrift.
Sigh.
Prager, it's getting obnoxious hearing you constantly chiding us for not getting a subscription. Some of us just don't have seven dollars a month. I've been trying for two years to get enough money for the drive to Louisville so I can meet other Prager fans but I can't afford that, either. And no, I'm no spendthrift.
Prager: "It is a moral obligation to cite the source of your ideas."
I have gotten much of my worldview, or possibly it should be characterized as "way of looking at certain issues" from my reading. Often I cite the source because I can remember which book I read it in. But all too often it came from someone I was talking to and I can't even remember where, never mind whom I was talking to.
What do you do then? I just say, "I was chatting with someone I used to know, and she said..." That's often the best I can do.
What do you do then? I just say, "I was chatting with someone I used to know, and she said..." That's often the best I can do.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Caller: "You're telling me that air conditioning is moral?!"
"You're telling me that rich people who have air conditioning are moral."
Yah, well, this is one of the finest examples of a liberal nitwit who refuses to hear ONE SINGLE THING you've said for what you've said, but tries to tie you in knots with red herring after red herring. You started to fall for it, answering his silly statements (more like accusations, really, which is why you fall for it, defending what you've said or trying to straighten the poor fool out).
If you go to youtube and look for names like Chris Matthews paired with any conservative name, the video will often be placed there to show how "Chris Matthews rakes Condoleeza Rice over the coals" and yet the video is of the liberal named in the title, doing exactly the same thing, demonstrating himself to be confused and without a case, but he twists the guest's words and restates them, thinking he's "exposing" the guest as a fool, when to anyone who is precise with thought, debate, reason, and logic, the host is the fool, and the sneering respondents are the dupes.
Yah, well, this is one of the finest examples of a liberal nitwit who refuses to hear ONE SINGLE THING you've said for what you've said, but tries to tie you in knots with red herring after red herring. You started to fall for it, answering his silly statements (more like accusations, really, which is why you fall for it, defending what you've said or trying to straighten the poor fool out).
If you go to youtube and look for names like Chris Matthews paired with any conservative name, the video will often be placed there to show how "Chris Matthews rakes Condoleeza Rice over the coals" and yet the video is of the liberal named in the title, doing exactly the same thing, demonstrating himself to be confused and without a case, but he twists the guest's words and restates them, thinking he's "exposing" the guest as a fool, when to anyone who is precise with thought, debate, reason, and logic, the host is the fool, and the sneering respondents are the dupes.
The millitary practicing affirmative action for women
You see that feminists have still not given up on the notion that a woman is just a short man without a penis. They see no difference between the sexes, because a big woman can surely do more than a small man, so why not hire her as a fire fighter, jackhammer operator, or cannon fodder?
When I got out of college I pretty much had bought into this crap. By the way, when Prager talks about leftwing ideas being promulgated in college, this is one of the more prominent and one of the most dearly cherished ideas. There are leftists who would deny that leftwing ideas are promoted in colleges with few exceptions. They are either leftwing themselves, and faced only ideas that made them happy they assumed they were faced with normative, middle-of-the-road ideas; or they were not paying attention and assumed that these leftwing ideas were merely common sense and that any intelligent person would accept them.
Anyway, back to my experiences at UCLA. Many many many of my classes had literally been handed over to specialty departments, most prominently the women's studies department. The professor would come into the class, climb up to the stages as if to address his class of five hundred students (all of them were at least 300 students), and announce that today's class would be taught by two women from the department of feminist studies, and then repeat the announcement ten or fifteen days in a row. Then we would be indoctrinated in the sameness of women's and men's natures, social pressure, indoctrination, psychological pressure, the gross inequalities between women and men in patriarchal societies, the magnificent glories of matriarchal societies,
I especially absorbed the malarkey that the only reason men and women grew up to be different was that their parents pressured their kids into being that way. Mothers in Sparta did that sort of thing (as did all patriarchal societies) and we their descendants have been following in their footsteps ever since.
We were given numerous anecdotal studies involving little boys who lost or were born without penises and then were brought up as girls, and how thouroughly girlish and happy they were. Never were we told about the endings to the stories, how the boys had always felt "wrong" or "out of place" until their secret was discovered and they decided to be male after all.
Through the Eighties I heard again and again about colleges that were shoving this stuff down their students' throats. Orientation at many colleges involved forcing the incoming male students into seminars where they would be bullied and raged at until they confessed to being "a potential rapist". I don't just mean a dozen oddball colleges that had gone nuts, I mean a huge number of them, so that it was getting harder and harder to find one that might leave you to your own beliefs and not try to rescue you from them.
And that leaves me to a whole different subject area, critical thinking ...
When I got out of college I pretty much had bought into this crap. By the way, when Prager talks about leftwing ideas being promulgated in college, this is one of the more prominent and one of the most dearly cherished ideas. There are leftists who would deny that leftwing ideas are promoted in colleges with few exceptions. They are either leftwing themselves, and faced only ideas that made them happy they assumed they were faced with normative, middle-of-the-road ideas; or they were not paying attention and assumed that these leftwing ideas were merely common sense and that any intelligent person would accept them.
Anyway, back to my experiences at UCLA. Many many many of my classes had literally been handed over to specialty departments, most prominently the women's studies department. The professor would come into the class, climb up to the stages as if to address his class of five hundred students (all of them were at least 300 students), and announce that today's class would be taught by two women from the department of feminist studies, and then repeat the announcement ten or fifteen days in a row. Then we would be indoctrinated in the sameness of women's and men's natures, social pressure, indoctrination, psychological pressure, the gross inequalities between women and men in patriarchal societies, the magnificent glories of matriarchal societies,
I especially absorbed the malarkey that the only reason men and women grew up to be different was that their parents pressured their kids into being that way. Mothers in Sparta did that sort of thing (as did all patriarchal societies) and we their descendants have been following in their footsteps ever since.
We were given numerous anecdotal studies involving little boys who lost or were born without penises and then were brought up as girls, and how thouroughly girlish and happy they were. Never were we told about the endings to the stories, how the boys had always felt "wrong" or "out of place" until their secret was discovered and they decided to be male after all.
Through the Eighties I heard again and again about colleges that were shoving this stuff down their students' throats. Orientation at many colleges involved forcing the incoming male students into seminars where they would be bullied and raged at until they confessed to being "a potential rapist". I don't just mean a dozen oddball colleges that had gone nuts, I mean a huge number of them, so that it was getting harder and harder to find one that might leave you to your own beliefs and not try to rescue you from them.
And that leaves me to a whole different subject area, critical thinking ...
Monday, March 7, 2011
Michael Moore, "We have had it!"
Moore (interpreted): "We can no longer hold up state authorities to force more and more non-teachers' union workers to pay more and more money to support ridiculous state workers' pension plans."
Prager: We admire and respect the people who are represented in this.
Me: I'm not sure we should.
"Moore disputed the claims that Wisconsin is broke." That's the way of the radical left, I don't like what you're saying, therefore it's untrue and you are a vicious liar and destroyer. And you're evil, too.
Moore's answer is OF COURSE to take from the rich.
Prager asks how much the man gives away from his own stash. I know he gives a lot, but like all lefties, it goes to political causes, not to personal causes. I can't name the specific groups he contributes to (I'm sure it can be found on the internet) but it would be groups LIKE moveon.org, planned parenthood, greenpeace, or Amnesty International.
Prager read from the New York Times editorial page:
State Workers and NY's Fiscal Crisis
"At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees’ pensions than it did just a decade ago."
Amazing. Simply amazing.
Of course we can start out with assuming that the number of state employees has quadrupled. I don't know the real number but I sure do have to make that assumption else I would go on rampage. Then there's a hidden fact, that they just meant that the state was contributing more as a percentage of the pensions because the pensions are suffering from recession-induced shortages. In other words, the state guaranteed the pensions so that the union didn't have to behave responsibly and fire managers who mismanaged funds.
The misery is chronicled further, and since it's the NYTimes doing the chronicling, it must be bad indeed.
Please read the article.
And Michael Moore?
How can he get up there in front of the crowd and chant "We have had it!" as if this is the last of a long string of indignities. What were the previous indignities, insults to the teachers' paychecks or pensions?
Prager: We admire and respect the people who are represented in this.
Me: I'm not sure we should.
"Moore disputed the claims that Wisconsin is broke." That's the way of the radical left, I don't like what you're saying, therefore it's untrue and you are a vicious liar and destroyer. And you're evil, too.
Moore's answer is OF COURSE to take from the rich.
Prager asks how much the man gives away from his own stash. I know he gives a lot, but like all lefties, it goes to political causes, not to personal causes. I can't name the specific groups he contributes to (I'm sure it can be found on the internet) but it would be groups LIKE moveon.org, planned parenthood, greenpeace, or Amnesty International.
Prager read from the New York Times editorial page:
State Workers and NY's Fiscal Crisis
"At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees’ pensions than it did just a decade ago."
Amazing. Simply amazing.
Of course we can start out with assuming that the number of state employees has quadrupled. I don't know the real number but I sure do have to make that assumption else I would go on rampage. Then there's a hidden fact, that they just meant that the state was contributing more as a percentage of the pensions because the pensions are suffering from recession-induced shortages. In other words, the state guaranteed the pensions so that the union didn't have to behave responsibly and fire managers who mismanaged funds.
The misery is chronicled further, and since it's the NYTimes doing the chronicling, it must be bad indeed.
Please read the article.
And Michael Moore?
How can he get up there in front of the crowd and chant "We have had it!" as if this is the last of a long string of indignities. What were the previous indignities, insults to the teachers' paychecks or pensions?
The Fifty-thousand dollar orgasm and Northwestern University
Prager: This is from their NWU's Human sexuality class. You can graduate NWU without ever having read a line of Shakespeare, but you can get credit for a live sex show.
This is the problem I have with most modern education, the garbage they consider important and the important stuff they've dismissed as garbage.
The decline in modern education didn't begin in the Sixties, though most people think it does. I know in the Twenties a new generation of people calling themselves "Progressives" took over the educational establishment and immediately set to changing the definition of the word. Reaching all the way back to Rousseau, they decided that education should be "child-centered", which is to say, the child's own relationship with his world will determine what his education should consist of.
Thus, a little child's world being little, his educational experiences at this young age will be little ones. He will study his clothing and his family and his pets. Since he's never heard of George Washington, he won't study anything about George Washington. Eventually by the Forties, under the title "expanding horizons", this became enshrined by the educrats as curriculum dogma and every enlightened Teacher's College taught it as the only humane way to educate children.
Not only was George Washington banished from the "social studies" books, but so were the Greek gods and goddesses, the legends of King Arthur and his knights, Robin Hood, Orlando, the Swamp Fox, David and Goliath, and every other hero your grandparents loved and you yourself have never heard of. But for some reason, even though great Western stories were banned, the great non-Western stories were pushed into the curriculum, even though 99% of the students had never heard of them. Anansi, Genji, Siddhartha all will pop into the reading lists. Now, I'm all in favor of adding these to the curriculum, but not when our whiny educrats were busy ripping Western culture out.
It needn't be an either-or issue. In fact it never was. "We only have time to teach 125 historical figures, so we'll throw out these 45 Westerners and add these 45 non-western figures" was NEVER part of the debate. And this is where the hippies got their way as the new Progressives. With them it was much more a matter of, "We've been pushing Western culture down the throats of blacks, Mexicans, Oriental* kids, even the white kids are choking on it. It's good to get rid of so much Western culture** which was seen as a throwback to those evil old patriarchal societies. And thus, we are genuine geniuses because only a real genius could be so enlightened.
There were other Western things on the disposal list. Western lit, for one. On yahoo! answers back in 2010 I posted a question about the "classics" of literature and virtually none of the people who post there, neither students nor teachers, could identify a classic work of literature outside the usual seven: The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Animal Farm, and that racist manifesto, Huckleberry Finn. Out they all went, good riddance! And did we replace them? Well, I'm positive children only read a few books each year now, instead of the dozen they used to read. They don't read poetry and they never memorize it. They barely touch plays, though they'll likely read one by Shakespeare (which is now available in sissified English) and maybe "Our Town" or "Death of a Salesman".
*Yes, back then it was still "Oriental", not the very stupid "Asian" substitute.
**They actually denied and still deny the existence of American culture, much less the value of a kid who belongs to the West actually learning about the West. Color became the be-all of culture. If your skin was very dark, you were an "African" child. If your skin was olive, you were Latino and of course in both cases you'd only be interested in learning about Aztec gods or Congolese farming practices. Never mind that your ancestors came from Spain and Uruguay, or were Ethiopian Jews. And thus the hippies disproved their own case about ancestry determining who you are--but don't let that stop you.
Gone are Music theory, Music appreciation, Art history, Art practicum (drawing and painting used to be taught, and yes, they are teachable subjects, contrary to what the disciples of Rousseau preached), history (unless it's history of a part of the world you have nothing to do with), and even "western" math (math based on facts instead of feelings) is being done away with.
You've heard the usual complaints about what has taken the place of these subjects. "Self esteem" and "conflict resolution" are huge among the flakes controlling the curriculum. Yet no one feels that self esteem can be taught in a classroom except by being given challenges that the student has to overcome, which has also been removed from the classroom. "To challenge" has become synonymous with "to pressurize" and pressure is bad. We replaced it with "cooperative groups", since cooperation is a virtue and competition is bad. Now the groups of four students meet together, the three who don't know what they're doing leave all the work to the one bright kid and do nothing. This is not a good thing for our children.
And this is why you'll find courses like "Human Sexuality" at so expensive a college as Northwestern University. What strikes me as dumb about that one is that if left to their own devices these students would learn about human sexuality awfully well on their own. It's not as if there were a shortage of information out there. It seems that it's important to offer it as a "subject" so that some teacher can impart "the right values" to the students. Sorry but that's a mainstay of the educrat establishment, making sure that the students get the right values taught to them.
This is the problem I have with most modern education, the garbage they consider important and the important stuff they've dismissed as garbage.
The decline in modern education didn't begin in the Sixties, though most people think it does. I know in the Twenties a new generation of people calling themselves "Progressives" took over the educational establishment and immediately set to changing the definition of the word. Reaching all the way back to Rousseau, they decided that education should be "child-centered", which is to say, the child's own relationship with his world will determine what his education should consist of.
Thus, a little child's world being little, his educational experiences at this young age will be little ones. He will study his clothing and his family and his pets. Since he's never heard of George Washington, he won't study anything about George Washington. Eventually by the Forties, under the title "expanding horizons", this became enshrined by the educrats as curriculum dogma and every enlightened Teacher's College taught it as the only humane way to educate children.
Not only was George Washington banished from the "social studies" books, but so were the Greek gods and goddesses, the legends of King Arthur and his knights, Robin Hood, Orlando, the Swamp Fox, David and Goliath, and every other hero your grandparents loved and you yourself have never heard of. But for some reason, even though great Western stories were banned, the great non-Western stories were pushed into the curriculum, even though 99% of the students had never heard of them. Anansi, Genji, Siddhartha all will pop into the reading lists. Now, I'm all in favor of adding these to the curriculum, but not when our whiny educrats were busy ripping Western culture out.
It needn't be an either-or issue. In fact it never was. "We only have time to teach 125 historical figures, so we'll throw out these 45 Westerners and add these 45 non-western figures" was NEVER part of the debate. And this is where the hippies got their way as the new Progressives. With them it was much more a matter of, "We've been pushing Western culture down the throats of blacks, Mexicans, Oriental* kids, even the white kids are choking on it. It's good to get rid of so much Western culture** which was seen as a throwback to those evil old patriarchal societies. And thus, we are genuine geniuses because only a real genius could be so enlightened.
There were other Western things on the disposal list. Western lit, for one. On yahoo! answers back in 2010 I posted a question about the "classics" of literature and virtually none of the people who post there, neither students nor teachers, could identify a classic work of literature outside the usual seven: The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Animal Farm, and that racist manifesto, Huckleberry Finn. Out they all went, good riddance! And did we replace them? Well, I'm positive children only read a few books each year now, instead of the dozen they used to read. They don't read poetry and they never memorize it. They barely touch plays, though they'll likely read one by Shakespeare (which is now available in sissified English) and maybe "Our Town" or "Death of a Salesman".
*Yes, back then it was still "Oriental", not the very stupid "Asian" substitute.
**They actually denied and still deny the existence of American culture, much less the value of a kid who belongs to the West actually learning about the West. Color became the be-all of culture. If your skin was very dark, you were an "African" child. If your skin was olive, you were Latino and of course in both cases you'd only be interested in learning about Aztec gods or Congolese farming practices. Never mind that your ancestors came from Spain and Uruguay, or were Ethiopian Jews. And thus the hippies disproved their own case about ancestry determining who you are--but don't let that stop you.
Gone are Music theory, Music appreciation, Art history, Art practicum (drawing and painting used to be taught, and yes, they are teachable subjects, contrary to what the disciples of Rousseau preached), history (unless it's history of a part of the world you have nothing to do with), and even "western" math (math based on facts instead of feelings) is being done away with.
You've heard the usual complaints about what has taken the place of these subjects. "Self esteem" and "conflict resolution" are huge among the flakes controlling the curriculum. Yet no one feels that self esteem can be taught in a classroom except by being given challenges that the student has to overcome, which has also been removed from the classroom. "To challenge" has become synonymous with "to pressurize" and pressure is bad. We replaced it with "cooperative groups", since cooperation is a virtue and competition is bad. Now the groups of four students meet together, the three who don't know what they're doing leave all the work to the one bright kid and do nothing. This is not a good thing for our children.
And this is why you'll find courses like "Human Sexuality" at so expensive a college as Northwestern University. What strikes me as dumb about that one is that if left to their own devices these students would learn about human sexuality awfully well on their own. It's not as if there were a shortage of information out there. It seems that it's important to offer it as a "subject" so that some teacher can impart "the right values" to the students. Sorry but that's a mainstay of the educrat establishment, making sure that the students get the right values taught to them.
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