Bud Talkinghorn: Political Correctness & Feminists & Academic Freedom, Aboriginals, Muslim Conspiracy Theories

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder--unless you are the PC police of St. Mary's University

The National Post (Tues. 11 A-2) had a most amusing article on the lengths that the politically correct movement will go to in order to crush freedom. The story concerns one Paul Pedersen, a third year student taking an entrepeneurial course at St. Mary's University in Halifax. The assignment was to take $10 and try to parlay it into some profitable business. Pedersen brilliantly decided to create a calendar called "The Girls of St. Mary's". He approached businesses to sponsor different months. His attempts to recruit models was thwarted by the ususal puritannical left, who kept tearing down his advertisements. Being a Donald Trump sort of guy, he started approaching pretty students directly. In no time he had his models. The finished calendar was so popular that it made $10,000 in off campus sales alone. The feminists were incensed and tried to block his right to sell. Finally, the stuffy, repressed members of the student body and their professor allies stopped the sales, even though it was enormously popular with both female and male students. One of his most vocal opponents was Sally Whitman, the co-ordinator of the university Women's Studies Center--no surprise there, of course. She was quoted as saying, "My problem comes down to the fact that it's promoting a narrow view of what women are supposed to look like to be sexy and beautiful." Gee, if you don't include the obese, homely, and those with string warts, then you shouldn't be allowed to make a calendar. I guess poor Mary must be forced to boycott all portrayals of women on television and in the movies, as they also present a "flawed" concept of beauty.

Mary and those of her ilk are the bad news; that Paul and his cuties are still making a mint doing promotionals at Halifax bars and selling the calendar on-line is the good news. Let us just cross our fingers that Mary Whitman doesn't graduate and become Nova Scotia's next Human Rights Commissioner.

© Bud Talkinghorn


Do you suppose the politically correct will be able to outlaw sexual attractiveness? This sounds like the kind of activity for the jealous unattractive--or other-gendered. I looked at the pix of two of the calendar girls and thought they were delightful samples of young womanhood who might as well enjoy their beauty while they have it -- but I am only a woman. NJC


Academic freedom is under attack -- "campus political correctness generates a frosty anti-intellectual climate hostile to academic freedom." -- excellent!

Academic freedom is under attack Barbara Kay, National Post, Jan. 12, 05

Canadian students in the arts and social science departments of our universities are being recruited to the hyperorthodoxies of multiculturalism, feminism, Marxism, postmodernism and bio-politics. Proponents of these ideologies prefer social engineering and the subversion of Western values to the advancement of learning and respect for Western achievements. Furthermore, today's welfare campus fosters a culture of comfort/grievance for women, aboriginals, other visibly distinct races and all sexual orientations: for everyone, that is, except Americans, Israel-sympathizers and heterosexual men of European descent. [. . . . ]

© Bud Talkinghorn

Bud was on this one in a flash. I'm sure the beauty in the calendar had nothing to do with it.




Universities are becoming a swamp of political correctness

Barbara Kay's column in The National Post (Wed. 12) highlights the total absurdity of much of the liberal arts programs. I have harped on this theme before, but must share some of her findings. These were gleaned from 100 interviews she conducted with college students across Canada. Many thought that parrotting anything but the prescribed leftist mantra was a sure way to a lowered mark. However it is the most egreious examples of this mantra that are shocking. It is not only the individual statements made, but that the university as a whole condones them. Here are four that Kay collected from students:

1) Political Science professors who wouldn't allow the Economist magasine to be used, as it was too right-wing. In another case it was The Fraser Institute's findings that wouldn't past the socialist sniff test.

2) A Political Science class taught by a feminist, who wouldn't allow statistics to be used because (steel yourselves for this one) "mathematics is a male construct for a male-dominated world".

3) A feminist nursing professor demanded that all male students join in the Montreal Massacre Commemoration. When one refused to take part because he didn't see how he was responsible for the act of a crazed Muslim fanatic anymore than holding her responsible for Karla Homolka's actions, he was forced to take "corrective counselling". That, to me, has the ring of the Vietnamese commies' "educational rehabilitation" programs. Or maybe Big Brother's "true think" is a more appropriate analogy.

4) I have saved the best for last. One female student told Kay that a brilliant PhD lecturer who was teaching "Canadian-American relations since 1939" was the best she had witnessed. However, he was replaced in the next semester by "a more qualified teacher", who said, "All Canadian-American relations since 1939 should be viewed "through a gay/lesbian/transsexual lens" and that they would devote part of their course to "lesbians who are claiming refugee status in Canada after Bush's re-election."

On first reading, I thought that Kay would end with the acknowledgement that these examples were a parody of the loony-left academics; however, she presented them as the students' true witness of academic freedom being trampled by a bunch of social engineers. To add a chilling coda to her examples she quotes Abraham Lincoln, who stated, "The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of governance in the next".

© Bud Talkinghorn

I have had occasion to talk with a student who described one university instructor's assignments as similar to what Barbara Kay writes of; the way to an A is to go along--to give the expected responses and essay perspective. I have read one of the ones that garnered an extraordinarily high mark. It would have been tossed out with an F years ago--off topic, including amazingly prurient content, and offering of opinion--not research with reasoned conclusions. Not today! Despicable! I hear that many instructors are failing to show up for classes and meetings scheduled with students. Why? How are they getting away with it?

By way of comparison, one instructor (whose classes I have attended) comes every day, is experienced, logically and well-prepared, works the whole time instead of wasting time, is available for students' questions and help and is simply an excellent teacher, in my opinion. ("Fun" is not part of the class time.) This instructor marks what is written honestly, as far as I can tell. To read student assessments though . . . . I see students who do not work very hard getting passed year after year, rewarded when they do not work very hard--but they get to assess good instructors, perhaps ruining their careers. This is not good. What is the solution? NJC




A few words of tough love for Grand Chief, Phil Fontaine

Mr. Fontaine maintains that only aboriginals should define who is an Indian. Theoretically, he believes that anybody who has a drop of Indian blood should be able to enjoy the monetary benefits of status. It is time for him to realize that the Canadians who support his people are getting ***** fed-up with the waste of their tax dollars. Besides the billion(s) directly spent on them, the government has other pipelines that send money their way. To compound this problem, we have Paul Martin trying to bring the Metis into the pipeline. Add to these pay-outs the billions that the government hands over to various tribes, based on 'oral histories" of treaties--treaties that have not a shred of legal evidence backing them up. Using the criteria that Fontaine employs, I could go back to my anestral homes in Scotland and France and claim land and welfare. After all, my ancestors were forced out of both countries because of religion and ethnicity. Instead of endlessly cloaking ourselves in victimhood, these ancestors got with the program, emigrated and then integrated into Canadian society. This is the path that all successful peoples have taken. The Chinese-Canadians I know don't sit around bemoaning the 'head tax' that their ancestors had to pay. Rather, they see the huge advantages that joining the productive economy have given them.

Finally, the day that the Grand Chief tells his people to buck up and join the collective workforce, hence becoming tax payers rather than tax recipients, I will support his right to call anybody he chooses a First Nations' citizen. Until that time, he should accept the status quo.

© Bud Talkinghorn




The Muslim conspiracy theories know no logical bounds.

The National Post collected a number of speeches and articles from Gaza, Egypt and Saudi Arabia that suggest that the tsunami was Allah's punishment on those fornicating Christian tourists and Buddhist Thais. Just in case those infidel Hindus might escape censure, there is the accusation that Indian nuclear testing might be the cause. All blatant nonsense, of course. If it was Allah's punishment on the wicked infidels, than why did the greatest damage occur in Banda Aceh province, which is not only exclusively Muslim, but a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism? Then there are all those Muslims that perished in India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Maybe these people should consider that Allah might be getting tired of having these Cult of Death terrorists and their apologists misusing his name and message.

As for the Egyptian journalist's nuclear theory, it is a tad ironic considering that, besides Pakistan conducting its own tests, there is Iran--and possibly Egypt--trying to join the nuclear club. These paranoid fantasies would be humourous, if they didn't have such an impact on their gullible co-religionists.

© Bud Talkinghorn