This week in disenfranchisement: college students

By Dan Brooks in Inequality 3 Comments

Dirty hippies moan around their crap bus.

If you live in a college town like I do, you’ve probably noticed that the streets go unpaved and everyone pays exorbitant taxes so the state can give free abortions to black girls. That’s because all the students overbalance the electorate, forcing real, over-25 human beings to cow to their agenda of ignorance and, I dunno, socialism. College students don’t know anything about politics. They may live in one town for four to six years, but they don’t actually live there, because they’re too busy swallowing live goldfish and listening to raps. They’re not real people, which is why they should only be allowed to vote wherever they came from—presumably where their parents live. That’s the reasoning behind House Bill 176 in New Hampshire, which would bar college students from voting in the cities where they attend school, and Republican opposition to HB 130 in Montana, which would have expanded voting by mail.

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NY Times continues its abusive relationship with phrase “digital age”

By Dan Brooks in Millennials 3 Comments

Quoted source Sarah Brookover, left, who needs to stop snitching

The New York Times once again stretches its credulity to stretch ours with this article about student plagiarism, whose central thesis seems to be that kids today don’t understand the concept of authorship. Props to Mike Sebba for the link. The article contains the usual professorial stories about hilariously obvious student copying, including this classic font-shift tell:

The tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

First of all, way to hand the problem off to the writing tutor, professor who does not want to have to go to academic court. Second, the article considers this and other anecdotal instances of egregious ripoff—plus the omnipresent recent surveys, in which the number of respondents who say that copying from websites constitutes “serious cheating” declined from 34% to 29%—and concludes that modern college students don’t understand the concept of plagiarism. Guess why? If you said “the Internet,” then congratulations—you’re ready to write trend pieces for the New York Times. Here’s your Zune.

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