Fred - I'm sorry I sounded so angry at you in that first post I addressed to you.
No problem. I'm very thick skinned.
A lot of my personal friends are in that group and I did take it personally.
Several of my personal friends used to be in that group. I say used to because in the wake of 9/11 I spent quite a bit of time (too much as it turned out) connecting with, and talking to friends who, for the most part, were members of academia. More often than not they forgot who they were talking to as we chatted. They fell into the musings about "how America had 9/11 coming to it". Musings they were so accustomed to in their daily lives in the halls of higher learning. In one case I had to tell the friend that it would be quite unlikely that I would ever return to our old stomping grounds back east, but if I should, he would do best to turn and run in the opposite direction should he ever see me walking down the street.
In the past I often looked askance at my former friends when they would say things that put them in obvious sympathy with enemies of the United States. I would sort of roll my eyes and laugh uproariously when they would attend town hall meetings in which they voted to become a "sister village" to some half-baked Cuban landfill of a village. They were my friends. Misguided, naive, sometimes annoying, but my friends.
When they would cleave to our communist enemies because of their sadly mistaken belief in communism itself I cut them some slack. Many of them never knew a real day of danger in their entire lives, and so I figured they could be forgiven for not knowing the thruth.
When death-cult psychotics attacked and killed 3,000 fellow Americans my friends from in and around academia did quadruple backflips in order to position themselves in a way that would enable them to
blame America first. They didn't skip a beat. The bodies in the four smoking holes in our ground weren't even cold yet.
So hey, if the folks you know in "the heartland" halls of academia don't share the nearly universal views I have experienced with my friends from the Ivory Towers, then good for you is all I can say. Maybe there is hope for us yet.
All I'll ask is for people to think for themselves. They need to ask themselves if it really is a coincidence that people like Mr. Churchill gain tenure despite having nothing approaching the proper credentials. They have to ask themselves if it makes sense that professor Bellesiles recieved heaps of accolades for a book whose premise was laughable on its face. Ask questions like "Do unarmed sheeple zone laws spring out of union halls, or do they spring out of places like Berkley?" Those are just the first of a hundred questions they could ask.
Your hostility to academia is pretty obvious and your comment reveals much more about you than the people you falsely accuse.
Like you I'll stand by my words, but without apology.
