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How do we relate to our ancestors who did things that we would and do not do, for example hold slaves or express views about racial differences we find abhorrent? The impulse nowadays is to react to our ancestors who lived in the past and who produced us as unacceptable versions of ourselves -and to show this we frequently feel we must take down their statues and re-name buildings and institutions. This is a form of colonialism of time rather than place. The past is always different than the present, which is why we see it as the past, whether better or worse. Yet it is part of us and made us who we are., Author(s): Bruce Fleming [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.265465.6, 0000 0001 2296 3025, Department of English 12B, US Naval Academy, , 21402, Annapolis, MD, USA Slurping Fucking Farting Norbert Elias's book [...]

Conservative thought is structurally different from liberal. Conservative thought defines actions that all individuals must take, and therefore is absolutist. Liberal thought focuses on individuals, their desires and motives, and therefore is relativist, allowing many valid courses of action. Liberalism, which defines the modern Western state, is like a credenza that allows many cubbyholes, each of which can be filled by a conservatism. Conservatism is intolerant of other conservatisms, so only liberalism can serve as the overstructure of many; any conservatism can threaten to expand outwards to take over the whole. Yet another current threat to the liberal over-structure is Perverted Liberalism (PL), which uses the vocabulary of liberalism but attempts to take over its relativist structure like a conservatism. The goal of PL is however not to change the world, it is to force expressions of guilt and contrition on the part of those its adepts see as the more powerful. Because the victories of PL are victories of words only, it has taken root in the temple of words, academia., Author(s): Bruce Fleming [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.265465.6, 0000 0001 2296 3025, Department of English 12B, US Naval Academy, , 21402, Annapolis, MD, USA It helps to be schematic and [...]

The admissions process at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis is both like and unlike the admissions process at US civilian schools. It is similar in that the institution reports a low admission rate as evidence of its high quality, and dissimilar in that it inflates the number of real applicants by about a factor of four to achieve the appearance of this selectivity. It is like civilian schools in awarding slots to non-white racial minorities and recruited athletes, and unlike them in that these are categories that determine the level of academic standards applicants must meet rather than parts of a holistic decision process. It is like civilian schools in that applicants know they will take classes that are for the most part identical to classes at civilian universities and receive a bachelor's degree upon graduation, yet unlike them in that graduates are guaranteed employment for at least five years in the Navy or Marine Corps. It is unlike civilian schools in its strong 'pull factor' of zero cost to students; the whole cost of about a half a million dollars per student over four years is borne by taxpayers, despite the fact that much cheaper commissioning pipelines produce 80% of new officers. Finally. admission is not by the Admissions Board, which only labels applicants 'qualified' or not; it is the military brass which decide who receives this free-to-students education., Author(s): Bruce Fleming [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0001 2296 3025, grid.265465.6, Department of English 12B, US Naval Academy, , 21402, Annapolis, MD, USA My home institution, the U.S. Naval [...]

Academics nowadays have invented many phrases for which they demand widespread acceptance that do not accurately represent reality, or which make no sense when we consider them closely. Prime among these is the concept of 'sexual assault,' which has made its way into state laws and the UCMJ since its coinage in the 1960s and 1970s and is now a mainstay of training on college campuses. This concept is flawed because it includes all sexual actions under the rubric of the noun 'assault,' as if we spoke of 'driving aggression' rather than 'aggressive driving,' to color all driving with the possibility of aggression. It is simply not true that sexuality is nothing but one more form aggression, and that all sex is potentially aggression if it is perceived by one partner as such. Another false coinage we are asked to accept is the notion that men 'objectivize' women. In fact few men want to sleep with or get an erotic charge from objects; if anything the issue seems to be focus on physical details. Then there is the widely repeated assertion that 'gender is assigned at birth.' Rather than debating whether or not this is so we should ask whether the concept itself makes sense. Assigned? By what entity? Just at birth? These are examples of linguistic over-reach, the attempt to change the world with words rather than letting a change in the way we see the world (Kuhn's paradigm shift) produce corresponding words in a more gradual way that most of us can accept. Just because we hear these phrases all the time from professional wordsmith academics with axes to grind, we need not feel constrained to accept them if they are not accurate representations of the world., Author(s): Bruce Fleming [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0001 2296 3025, grid.265465.6, Department of English 12B, US Naval Academy, , 21402, Annapolis, MD, USA People use phrases all the time [...]

The predominant paradigm nowadays for understanding male sexuality is derived from Kinsey's assumption that men can be classified as individuals with specific scores on a scale, scores that predict whether future partners will be male or female. Each man is defined by an essence, homo- or heterosexual or somewhere in between. However this is an incorrect view of male sexuality, because it makes us unable to say why a man is attracted to or has sex with a specific person: the same person can be attractive or unattrative depending on circumstances, and he can act or not act on his inclination depending on circumstances. The more correct view of male sexuality is thus of 'fly' and 'no-fly' zones, which understands male sexuality as defined by variable situations, not a score of the individual in all situations. This conception allows us to avoid the theoretical mistakes of the current assault on 'sexual assault.', Author(s): Bruce Fleming [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) 0000 0001 2296 3025grid.265465.6Department of English 12B, US Naval Academy, 21402, Annapolis, MD, USA Almost all our contemporary academic views of male sexuality [...]

The US military today is full of problems, ranging from its corrosive and destructive campaign ostensibly targeting sexual assault but actually designed to satisfy politicians, to the rampant malfeasance of numerous commanders removed from their posts. These problems are the result of the military's too-great reliance on self-serving notions like 'character' and on the personal nature of command in the military, as well as the fact that the military acts even within its ranks by top-down force, not discussion and rationality., Author(s): Bruce Fleming [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) Department of English 12B, US Naval Academy, 21402, Annapolis, MD, USA After the US Senate, on March 10, 2014, unanimously passed Sen. Claire [...]

The article considers the nascent vocabulary of transgender theory. What are the implications of separating 'sex' from 'gender' and such locutions as someone 'being a woman in the body of a man'? It suggests that this vocabulary is problematic and based on a false view that I alone can control the vocabulary others use to refer to me., Author(s): Bruce Fleming[sup.1] Author Affiliations: Bruce Fleming is in his 28th year teaching English to midshipmen at the US Naval Academy. He is the author of over a dozen books [...]

The most visible buildings and those that set the architectural tone of the U.S. Naval Academy, where I've taught English for almost a quarter century, are in a florid American [...]