Duncan Black: "My favorite was in 2010 when they explicitly blamed voters for not voting. It's your damn jobs to get them to the polls."

Douglas Garrison, I am Done Explaining Islam to Americans: "At what point, however, must people take ownership and responsibility for their education and opinions?"

Atrios again make the liberal argument for government as opposed to civic participation. And "liberal" in this sense of course includes G.A. Cohen, who defended his right to be stingy because it was the government's job to take from him what he refused to give. It's a liberal axiom that good government makes virtue unnecessary.

Again and again: the ethos of rule-following is an ethos of moral passivity.
repeats of repeats

Duncan Black

I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is.
...The kids are fine. It's our elite overlords that are all screwed up.

As'ad AbuKhalil:

More students could name the three Kardashian sisters than name the Vice-president of the US in my American Government class (125 students). 

David Golumbia, on twitter, links to Siva Vaidhyanathan

The guru of “disruption” is a Harvard Business School Professor named Clayton Christensen. A fundamentally theistic thinker, Christensen achieved sainthood in Silicon Valley with his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. The book assured technology entrepreneurs that they were just as important as they thought they were, destined to topple all the established institutions they could get their hands on. Christensen has lately applied his gospel to higher education, lauding online course delivery and its “scalability” as the necessary future. And many leaders who should be able to detect a fraud—including the presidents of Arizona State and MIT—have been converted to his faith. 

...It’s not because higher education is ripe for disruption (an ahistorical and specious concept).

I send them both to google: "radical disruption" Modernism, "disruptive dissensus"
Both responded, missing the point. Permanent revolution is the capitalist fantasy, and also Goethe's Faust: from the individual imagination to its opposite; back to Baudelaire, Back to Santayana.
What do you say to critics of culture who have no sense of history?
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my comment on the page, reposted above.