The other problem is the leftist bureaucracy–the socal workers who finagle was to get “free” (ie taxpayer paid) money to them and educrats who are indoctrinating kid in sociallism and social justice,i.e. dependency on having someone else pay for everything you need and want for the rest of your life. Afgter all, it isn’t fai r that someone who did well in school, worked hard and did crummy jobs and aited to get married to have kids, should actually get paid more than someone who can’t write a pararaph in English, can’t divide and has no other skills, and of course has a right to speak whatever vulgarity is on their mind including swear word. But of course, their “culture” must be respected above all. I see it every day, I teach in New York,and I know what ittakes to be a good student, get rid of the bureaucracy, give no benefits unless the kid is in school every day every class, behaving, doing homework and passing most of their classes. And, parents who reqquire their kids to spend at least an hour every day on schoolwork whehter they have homework or not. We don’t need more money, we need students and parents.

This documentary confirms my belief, that these people, like all terrorists, are sick. They engaged in what Prof. Lee Harris calls “fantasy ideology”:

“…It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge, and it is our fantasy world that allows us to fill this gap. But normally, for most of us at least, this fantasy world stays relatively hidden. Indeed, a common criterion of our mental health is the extent to which we are able to keep our fantasies firmly under our watchful control . . . Yet clearly there are individuals for whom this control is, at best, intermittent, resulting in behavior that ranges from the merely obnoxious to the clinically psychotic. The man who insists on being taken more seriously than his advantages warrant falls into the former category; the maniac who murders an utter stranger because God – or his neighbor’s dog – commanded him to do so belongs to the latter.”

Lee Harris, “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology”,
http://www.policyreview.org/AUG02/harris.html

In his article, he relates a “personal recollection” of first encountering this type of fantasy while having an argument with his college roommate over how to conduct their anti-Vietnam War protest. It is somewhat long, but worth the read.

Of all the poisonous branches of the “critical studies” tree (gender studies, African American studies, etc.), to me the two most dangerous are science studies and critical pedagogy. You’ve ably illuminated the latter in this post; science studies attempts to extend the usual Marxist relativist claptrap to the scientific method and the facts it discovers. But of course, scienctific knowledge is filtered by one’s culture, don’t you know…