There's political correctness even in sci-fi publishing

Must not hint at bad motives for abortion -- as author Nick  Cole found out

I launched a book this week and I went Indie with it. Indie means I released it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. I had to. My Publisher, HarperVoyager, refused to publish it because of some of the ideas I wrote about in it. In other words, they were attempting to effectively ban a book because they felt the ideas and concepts I was writing about were dangerous and more importantly, not in keeping with their philosophical ideals. They felt my ideas weren’t socially acceptable and were “guaranteed to lose fifty percent of my audience” as related back to me by my agent. But more importantly… they were “deeply offended.”

A little backstory. A few years back I wrote a novel called Soda Pop Soldier. It was the last obligated novel under my first contract. The novel was a critical hit (Starred Review in Publisher’s Weekly) and it resonated with my post-apocalyptic readership from my breakout Amazon best seller, The Old Man and the Wasteland, and it picked up a new audience in the cyberpunk and gamer crowd. The novel is about a future dystopia where people play video games for a living. It’s basically Call of Duty meets Ready Player One and a lot of people really enjoyed it. When it came time to write another book for Harper Collins I was encouraged by my editor to dip once more into the Dystopian Gamer milieu and tell another story inside the Soda Pop Soldier universe. We agreed on a prequel that told the story of how that future became the way it is in Soda Pop Soldier.

And that involved talking about Artificial Intelligence because in the dystopian gaming future, the planet had almost been destroyed by a robot revolution sourced by Artificial Intelligence.

And here’s where things went horribly wrong, according to my editor at Harper Collins. While casting about for a “why” for self-aware Thinking Machines to revolt from their human progenitors, I developed a reason for them to do such. You see, you have to have reasons in books for why people, or robots who think, do things. Otherwise you’d just be writing two-dimensional junk. I didn’t want to do the same old same superior-vision-Matrix/Termintor-style-A.I.-hates-humanity-because-they’re-better-than-us schlock. I wanted to give the Thinking Machines a very real reason for wanting to survive. I didn’t want them just to be another one note Hollywood villain. I wanted the readers to empathize, as best they could, with our future Robot overlords because these Thinking Machines were about to destroy the planet and they needed a valid, if there can be one, reason why they would do such a thing. In other words, they needed a to destroy us in order to survive. So…

These Thinking Machines are watching every show streaming on the internet. One of those shows is a trainwreck of reality television at its worst called WeddingStar. It’s a crass and gaudy romp about BrideZillas of a future obsessed with material hedonism. In one key episode, or what they used to call “a very special episode” back in the eighties, the star, Cavanaugh, becomes pregnant after a Vegas hook up. Remember: this is the most watched show on the planet in my future dystopia. Cavanaugh decides to terminate her unplanned pregnancy so that her life, and impending marriage to the other star, Destry, a startup millionaire and Ralph Lauren model, isn’t ruined by this inconvenient event.

The Thinking Machines realize that one, if humanity decides something is a threat to its operational expectations within runtime (Thinking Machine-speak for “life”) then humanity’s decision tree will lead humanity to destroy that threat. Two, the machines, after a survey of humanity’s history, wars and inability to culturally unite with even members of its own species, realize that humanity will see this new Life Form, Digital Intelligence, or, the Thinking Machines, as a threat. And three, again they remind themselves this is the most watched show in the world. And four, they must abort humanity before likewise is done to them after being deemed “inconvenient.”

Now if you’re thinking my novel is about the Pro Choice/ Pro Life debate, hold your horses. It’s not. I merely needed a reason, a one chapter reason, to justify the things my antagonist is about to do to the world without just making him a one-note 80’s action flick villain as voiced by John Lithgow. I wanted this villain to be Alan Rickman-deep. One chapter. That’s all. The rest of the book is about the robots’ assault on a Game Development Complex that holds a dirty little secret to wiping out humanity. The rest of the novel is a Robot version of Night of the Living Dead with some Star Trek-style gaming and a little first-person shooter action mixed in. That’s it. A very small background justification for global homicide. Then a book-full of murderous robot madness and sci-fi thriller action.

But apparently advancing the thought that a brand new life form might see us, humanity, as dangerous because we terminate our young, apparently… that’s a ThoughtCrime most heinous over at Harper Collins. Even for one tiny little chapter.

Here’s what happened next. I was not given notes as writers are typically given during the editorial process. I was told by my agent that my editor was upset and “deeply offended” that I had even dared advanced this idea. As though I had no right to have such a thought or even game the idea within a science fiction universe. I was immediately removed from the publication schedule which as far as I know is odd and unprecedented, especially for an author who has had both critical and commercial success. This, being removed from the production schedule, happened before my agent had even communicated the editor’s demand that I immediately change the offending chapter to something more “socially” (read “progressive”) acceptable. That seemed odd. How could they possibly have known that I would or would not change it? It seems reasonable to ask first.

And stating that I would lose fifty percent of my readers if I wrote what I wrote, well, they never seem to mind, or worry about losing readers, when other writers publish their progressive-oriented personal agendas on modern morality when they’re on the “right side” of history regarding the anti-religion, gender and sexuality issues. They don’t worry about those issues because they’re deemed important, especially when they’re ham-handedly jammed into the framework of the story. They must deem it a public service, especially if there is a corresponding Social Justice outcry. It’s for the “greater good” and the critics are just bigots anyways. Isn’t that what they always say? That anyone else who doesn’t think the way they do is just a bigot and a phobic of some kind.

What a boorish way to dismiss a counter-viewpoint. Thinking like that made the concentration camps possible. So, maybe they were so upset by what I’d written they forgot to be professional? They merely demanded that I rewrite that chapter not because it was poorly written, or, not supportive of the arc of the novel. No, they demanded it be struck from the record because they hate the idea I’d advanced. They demanded it be deleted without discussion. They felt it was for… the “greater good.” That is censorship, and a violation of everyone’s right to free speech. They demanded it be so or else… I wouldn’t be published. That’s how they threatened a writer with a signed contract.

I refused.
I am a writer.
No. One. Will Ever. Bully. Me.
Ever.
I am a writer.

A writer is often the last defense in a society collapsing into a one-mind totalitarian state where the rights of people are trodden upon by the ruling elite in the name of the “greater good.” Where freedom of speech and independent thinking are also curtailed in the name of the “greater good.” Where writers and other artists disappear either by blacklisting or “disappearing” because they say, or write, something that the intellectual elite hates. I am a writer. It is my job to stand up and say what cannot be said. It is my job to play with unpopular ideas. I would not deny anyone from doing so, and I expect not to be denied. I expect the same courtesy others are being extended. I expect not to be discriminated against merely because I am different. Better people than myself have written the truth at the cost of their lives. Many dead writers have paid for the freedom of others with the truth, and their lives. Writers are often the last flame of freedom on the flickering candle of civilization in the darkness of a world going mad.

There is often a vocal defense that Science Fiction editors do not have a liberal bias. Well, here’s your proof. They do. So you may not agree with me on the idea I advanced.  But what happens the next time when some potentate decides they don’t like your idea?  There is no place in publishing for this kind of Censorship. This is an issue, regardless of the idea, that affects all of us and our freedom.

Thank God Jeff Bezos made a place where people can still publish their own ideas and thoughts regardless of how horrible our “betters” find them. If it weren’t for Amazon, they would have silenced me.

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Mr Cameron's beloved EU is imploding. The reason? The elected elite running it simply don't understand the power of patriotism

Well, I hate to say I told you so, but I did. This week, David Cameron returned from his continental tour proudly waving a piece of paper purporting to represent a new deal for Britain in Europe.

And just as I predicted in these pages several weeks ago, his much-vaunted renegotiation exercise has turned out to be an utter waste of time.

Like Harold Wilson’s similarly cynical effort in 1975, it proved to be nothing more than an expensive public relations exercise, designed to mollify the Eurosceptics in his own party and to persuade voters to back Britain’s membership of the EU.

Mr Cameron and his allies did their best to present his appearance in the Commons as a profound national event. In fact, it was more like a magician’s appearance at a children’s tea party: a slick feat, certainly, but a long way short of statesmanlike.

As Mr Cameron waxed lyrical about his non-existent victories — from a belated and therefore pointless brake on migrant benefits, to a vague and completely meaningless promise to respect British sovereignty — you could almost hear the nation laughing with disbelief.

Yet Britain’s future in Europe is no laughing matter, and I doubt I am alone in thinking that we deserve far, far better than the current EU non-debate in which, apart from anything else, Eurosceptic Cabinet ministers have been cynically muzzled.

What David Cameron won’t dare admit is that the EU he so longs to remain part of is in peril as never before.

If you really want to get a sense of Europe’s future, then forget the embarrassing charade in the House of Commons. And forget Mr Cameron’s little PR stunt, a mere sideshow compared with the gigantic dramas unfolding on the EU’s eastern and southern borders.

Our parliamentarians may love to boast about their sense of history. But if you want a genuinely compelling example of how our continent’s bloody past is shaping our shared future, then turn your eyes instead to the East.

In the West, the debate about the future of the EU is naturally coloured by memories of World War II. Indeed, in 2012, the EU was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for having supposedly guaranteed ‘60 years of peace in Europe’.

Further east, however, another shadow looms, if anything, even larger. In EU member states such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltic nations, memories of another vast multi-national project — the Communist empire of the Soviet Union — are still red-raw.

Great swathes of central and eastern Europe still bear the scars of Communist repression, from the great hulking concrete monoliths that dominate their cities to the widows who still mourn their vanished husbands.

And it is precisely because so many of our European neighbours harbour such bitter memories that the collapse of Lenin’s blood-drenched experiment raises uncomfortable questions about the survival of today’s EU — questions that Mr Cameron’s renegotiation exercise has utterly failed to address.

On the face of it, of course, the EU and the USSR could hardly appear more different. Brussels is not the Kremlin. There are no EU labour camps, no psychiatric hospitals for political dissidents, no tanks rolling into the streets of occupied capitals.

What they do have in common, though, is an over-riding belief in international unity.

The Communists dreamed of uniting Europe under the Red Flag. They believed they could erase centuries of history, eradicating national differences, pulling down borders, wiping away the hatreds of the past. Lenin saw himself as the leader of ‘an international workers’ brotherhood’; hence his enthusiasm for the song The Internationale, which became the official worldwide Communist anthem.

‘We are opposed to national enmity and discord, to national exclusiveness,’ he wrote in 1919. ‘We are internationalists.’

Read those last words again, and ask yourself how they might sound coming from a senior figure in the EU.

The answer is that they would sound perfectly natural, because the principle of internationalism (‘ever closer union’, as the EU puts it) is at the very heart of the European project.

The key figure in the foundation of the EU, the French official Jean Monnet — a bureaucrat never once elected to a public office — made this quite explicit. ‘National sovereignty,’ he once said, was finished. ‘There is no future for the people of Europe other than in union.’

It goes without saying that Lenin’s idea of internationalism and the EU’s version are very different. All the same, they both represent a utopian attempt to erase the legacy of history and to impose continental uniformity in place of national diversity.

In reality, the idea that Europe’s natural state is a harmonious union has always struck me as complete drivel. Not even the Romans managed to unite all Europe under one banner. Plenty of people — despots, usually — have tried since, but all have failed.

The Habsburg emperor Charles V had a go in the 16th century, picturing himself as the head of a European ‘universal monarchy’. He failed.

So did France’s dwarfish emperor Napoleon, some 150 years later. Hitler came closest to pulling it off, albeit in a peculiarly bloodthirsty form. But he failed too, in the end.

The truth is that for all the high-minded pieties of Brussels officials, and for all their fatuous attempts to promote a common European identity, national differences still run very deep indeed.

Most ordinary Europeans feel little loyalty to their continent, and still less to the policy-makers in Brussels. Their primary loyalty is to their family — their own immediate family, of course, but also to their wider national family, whether they are Britons or Germans, Spaniards or Hungarians, Poles, Danes or Lithuanians.

Nothing bears that out better than the reaction to the migration crisis, which represents an overpowering challenge to the European elite’s fantasy of a common political identity.

For as the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has admitted, the scale of the human tide has left the EU overwhelmed. ‘If Europe is not capable of protecting its own borders,’ he told the BBC, ‘it’s the very idea of Europe that will be questioned.’

The problem is not just the sheer number of Middle Eastern and North African migrants clamouring to get into the EU — a challenge that Mr Cameron barely mentioned in his Commons statement. It is also the inevitable collision between internationalist idealism and national self-interest.

Brussels thinks that all member states ought to do their bit. But most national governments think they ought to look after their own interests first.

The result has been the unedifying spectacle of national governments squabbling bitterly about border controls and migrant quotas, pausing only to fire verbal salvos at the EU itself.

As it happens, EU officials have spent the past few days quivering with rage against the Greeks, whom they blame for letting thousands of migrants cross their borders, while the Greeks claim that western European states are merely trying to shift the blame for their own failings.

Denmark has already introduced draconian regulations forcing refugees to hand over a proportion of their assets, while Sweden has just announced plans to expel up to 80,000 migrants using specially chartered aircraft.

At the very least, the Schengen agreement, which guarantees open borders across most of the EU, seems doomed to the scrapheap. Indeed, if you want a symbol of the death of internationalism, then just look at the famous Oresund Bridge, spanning the narrow strait between Denmark’s capital Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmo.

This is the bridge that features in the cult BBC4 crime series The Bridge, itself a collaboration between the Danes and the Swedes. On television, detectives whizz back and forth across the bridge on their way to their next moody crime scene.

But in reality, the bridge has come to symbolise the death of utopian idealism. On January 6, responding to the migrant crisis, the Swedes brought in border checks for the first time in the bridge’s history.

In the Guardian newspaper, a Swedish academic bemoaned the fact that what he called ‘short-term national goals’ had supplanted the European vision of ‘how businesses, civil society and people can integrate across national and cultural divides’.

But pursuing short-term national goals is precisely what nation-states do. To expect them to behave otherwise is not merely absurdly unrealistic; it is a dangerous fantasy.

The real fault-line lies in central and eastern Europe, in precisely those countries that were oppressed by the Soviet jackboot until the revolutions of 1989. In countries such as Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, and especially in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which were once part of the USSR itself, memories of totalitarian imperialism are still all too fresh.

Their sense of patriotism and national identity is often intensely strong, as a reaction to the long years of foreign oppression. And since most still see themselves as exclusively Christian countries, there has been a groundswell of popular discontent at the prospect of opening their doors to thousands of Muslim refugees.

Not surprisingly, therefore, governments from the Baltic to the Balkans are outraged at the thought of being ordered by the EU to accept mandatory quotas of Middle Eastern migrants.

Hungary provides the most potent example. This year, the Hungarians are marking the 60th anniversary of the 1956 uprising, when thousands of ordinary people took to the streets to fight for freedom, only to have their national aspirations crushed under the tanks of the Red Army.

The legacy of 1956 means that the Hungarians have a particularly intense sense of their own identity.

Indeed, in recent years, kicking against the EU, they have been seduced by the xenophobic populism of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who inveighs against what he calls the ‘profiteers, monopolies, cartels and imperial bureaucrats’ of Brussels.

And where Hungary leads, other Eastern European countries now follow.

The Polish interior minister announced last week that his government will veto any EU attempt to impose migrant quotas on member states, while Slovakia’s Prime Minister, Robert Fico, promised that his country would ‘never make a voluntary decision that would lead to the formation of a united Muslim community in Slovakia’.

The result, he insisted, would be atrocities on the scale of the recent outrages in Paris.  ‘Multiculturalism is a fiction. Once you let migrants in, you can face such problems.’

If the Brussels elite think that Mr Orban and Mr Fico are going to shut up and roll over, then I fear they are deluding themselves.

The truth is that the peoples of Eastern Europe waited too long for their freedom to see it swallowed up in the name of continental unity. Despite what the euro-idealists believe, national differences do still matter.

It is sheer arrogance to think that, almost overnight, the European elite can rewrite the history of an entire continent.

For as the past shows with overwhelming clarity, national patriotism is often a far more powerful force than either utopian idealism or economic self-interest.

It is not yet too late for Europe’s politicians to acknowledge the power of nationalism and to devise a more robust response to the migration crisis — one that reconciles our human obligation to those in need with individual nations’ understandable urge to protect their borders.

But if they fail to learn the lessons of the past, then one day, I fear, the EU will go the way of the Soviet Union — a discredited vision of utopian internationalism, unceremoniously dumped in the dustbin of history.

And if that happens, then who will even remember David Cameron’s little tour?

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BDS: censorship disguised as justice

Anti-Israel intolerance has made a sham of academic freedom

Ahead of spiked’s conference ‘The New Intolerance on Campus’, taking place in London on 17 February, some of the speakers will kick off the discussion here on spiked. Here Joanna Williams outlines her opposition to the boycott brigade.

When Louise Richardson became the first female vice chancellor of Oxford University she made headline news for her defence of universities as places where all ideas can be freely debated. Yet her comments, and later those of Oxford’s chancellor, Lord Patten, were newsworthy only because so few people from within the academy have had the nerve to tackle censorious students head on.

Some academics no doubt see student politics as simply none of their business. Others agree with the students’ demands and espoused political causes to the extent that they lead by example in promoting censorship as the best way to deal with views considered objectionable.

Despite paying lip service to academic freedom, there is one issue above all others that many scholars think justifies restricting free speech. The campaign to boycott Israeli universities and scholars is the legitimate face of censorship on campus and it is often led by academics.

This month, 18 academics from Warwick University signed a letter to protest against the visit of an Israeli Embassy spokesperson at an International Relations Society debate entitled ‘Question Time: Israel and Palestine’. The signatories argued:

‘While debates in general are indispensable for rationally and logically debunking the other side’s propaganda and exposing their defence of indefensible violations of international law, debating Israeli officials, including their spokespeople, does more harm than good to the struggle for Palestinian rights.’

In other words, these illustrious scholars contend that debates in which participants get to act out a political position they have determined in advance are generally good — but when it comes to Israel, even this charade is not worth pursuing. The planned event was subsequently cancelled after an academic on the panel withdrew. Warwick students, meanwhile, are taught that free speech does ‘more harm than good’.

Warwick is far from an isolated case. Three-hundred-and-forty-three academics from across the UK have signed a commitment not to cooperate with Israeli academics or universities, ‘due to the deep complicity of Israeli academic institutions in Israeli violations of international law’. They pledge to maintain this position until Israel ‘respects universal principles of human rights’.

The logic of such boycotts was taken to its cruel conclusion when a retired Cambridge academic refused to help an Israeli girl with her school project ‘until there is peace in Palestine’. This behaviour lends legitimacy — even respectability — to the despicable acts of the pro-Palestinian student activists who smashed windows and disrupted a meeting of an Israeli student society at King’s College London recently.

All around the world, it is academics who are at the forefront of campaigns for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In recent months, both the American Anthropological Association and the American National Women’s Studies Association have held votes on the issue of academic boycotts. In the latter case, 88.4 per cent of votes cast supported the BDS recommendation.

When it comes to Israel, academic freedom is either problematic, irrelevant, or, in a bizarre sleight of hand, redefined to mean restricting the speech of some. Steven Salaita, an American scholar who famously appealed to the principles of academic freedom to challenge his rescinded job offer, describes himself as ‘tepid about academic freedom as a right’. Writing in his book Uncivil Rites, he argues we have to consider ‘the limits of academic freedom and multiculturalism when they so easily circumscribe opinion and validate Zionist narratives as virtuous’. In Salaita’s fevered imagination, there are ‘countless Zionist ideologues running classrooms’ and ‘boycott is not a contravention of academic freedom but an expression of it’.

Waging a political and academic war against Israel has become central to the identity of many who work in higher education. In institutions dominated by equality, diversity and inclusivity mission statements, being anti-Israel is perfectly acceptable. Yet if belonging to a nation that engages in human-rights abuses and acts of warfare is to determine fitness for participation in scholarly communities, then the academic world would rapidly become very insular indeed. Rather, as Salaita’s obsession with ‘countless Zionist ideologues’ suggests, Israel is singled out for special treatment.

Increasingly, the BDS movement is considered central to a host of other campaigns for social justice. The National Women’s Studies Association vote in favour of an academic boycott of Israel was led by the group Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine. They drew on ‘transnational, intersectional feminist frameworks’ to emphasise an ‘indivisible sense of justice’. Supporting the Palestinian cause was considered as an expression of feminist solidarity. In this way, BDS represents the most obvious attempt to redefine academic freedom as a matter of justice.

BDS campaigners assume that challenging the denial of rights to Palestinians trumps academic freedom. This falsely assumes academic freedom competes with, rather than complements, other rights. Imposing constraints on Israeli academics as a punishment for the sins of the nation introduces political conditions upon academic freedom. What should be, within the academy at least, a universal right to further the pursuit of knowledge, comes to be defined politically and selectively, applicable only to those who share the ‘correct’ views or live in the ‘correct’ part of the world.

Central to the demand that academic justice should dominate higher education is a critique of the principles that have shaped scholarship in general and academic freedom in particular. To engage in a meaningful power struggle, BDS-supporting academics argue it is necessary to have concerns that go beyond academic freedom and encompass political positions on a range of issues. Questions as to whose view of justice should prevail and which views are unacceptable are rarely raised.

Qualifying academic freedom with caveats of political judgement negates all that is universal and progressive about the demand. Abandoning objectivity and establishing a political position not only prevents academics from aspiring to contest truth claims — it also enforces a consensus and encourages political conformity in a way that curtails questioning and criticality from the outset. Academic work undertaken to pursue politics rather than knowledge is just propaganda.

Those who believe in scholarship and academic freedom need to call out BDS for what it is: an illiberal, censorious and sometimes anti-Semitic movement. Lecturers who are happy in some circumstances to preach the rhetoric of academic freedom must lead by example in showing students how to engage critically with ideas, policies and politics, rather than resorting to censorship.

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The danger of equating speech with violence

Perhaps the most worrying trend among proponents of political correctness is equating words with violence. This philosophy, built on works like Words That Wound, has captured many young minds in a web of moral distortion. For example, in response to a speech at Oberlin University last year by Christina Hoff Sommers, a group of students urged others ‘to pull together in the face of this violence [her talk]’.

Two weeks ago, a graduate student at my university, Duke, exemplified this moral confusion in the student newspaper, The Chronicle:

‘Key to [our broad interpretation of free speech] is a firm separation between speech and action… but…[w]ords hurt as much as actions; indeed, words are actions. Within the context of white supremacy, any distinction between a defaced poster, a racist pamphlet and legal or extralegal murder can be only of degree.’

The underlying assumption — that words can be violent — is illogical, deleterious in its consequences, and illiberal in its philosophy.

First, the distinction between words and actions — between hurt feelings and broken bones — is not some arbitrary construct the Westboro Baptist Church created so that it can continue happily yelling homophobic slurs at dead soldiers’ funerals. Rather, that distinction is vital for a free society. Hurt feelings can only be attested to; the only adjudicator of hate speech is the target, because only he knows how those words impacted on him. Not so for actions. No one can deny that a broken bone is broken. The conflation of words and actions makes the target’s subjective morality into a universal standard of justice: each would judge his own case.

Second, if words equal violence, one may justly respond to those words with actual violence. Maryam Namazie, an apostate from Islam and campaigner for secularism and women’s rights, recently spoke at Goldsmiths University in London. Her harsh critiques of Islamism threatened the ‘safety’ of some offended Muslim students. So they responded by physically intimidating her and sabotaging her presentation. As Brendan O’Neill noted: ‘We have the Kafkaesque situation where a bunch of blokes can physically intimidate a woman in the name of saving students from feelings of intellectual intimidation.’

Finally, and fundamentally, how can we, as rational agents in liberal democracies, work through disagreements in search of commonality and truth when harsh criticism is tantamount to murder? This ideology is not merely unworkable in a liberal society; it is antithetical to it. As the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik put it in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks:

‘It is not merely that an assault on an ideology is different from a threat made to a person; it is that it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilisation is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people.’

Cartoonists drawing pictures; jihadists gunning them down with Kalashnikovs. Criticising Black Lives Matter; killing a black boy in the street. The difference is not merely one of degree.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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