David Burge explains all:
Fun facts:
(A) calling for genocide against Jews, if not delivered to incite a mob to violence, is 100% Constitutionally protected speech- only in the sense it can't be punished by government.
(B) You are not the government, you are a cowardly college administrator and in no… https://t.co/1MYvTm5gz0
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 7, 2023
I am confident David Burge, a.k.a. Iowahawk, will forgive me if I put the text of his tweet below in case something happens to it:
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
Fun facts:(A) calling for genocide against Jews, if not delivered to incite a mob to violence, is 100% Constitutionally protected speech- only in the sense it can’t be punished by government.
(B) You are not the government, you are a cowardly college administrator and in no way does the 1st Amendment force you to accept brain dead neo-Nazis in your student body.
The context is that Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were all asked by New York State Representative Elise Stefanik whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment under the rules of their respective universities, and all three were, like, “Ooh, that’s a tricky one.” You can see the video of their responses in in this tweet from Nicky Clark.
As reported by the Times of Israel:
In a high-profile congressional hearing Tuesday evening, the presidents of three of the top universities in the US refused to explicitly say that calls for genocide of Jewish people violate campus rules on harassment.
When New York Republican Representative Elise Stefanik asked directly if “calling for the genocide of Jews” is against the codes of conduct of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, all three presidents said the answer depended on the context.
“It is a context-dependent decision,” Penn president Liz Magill responded, leading Stefanik to reply, “Calling for the genocide of Jews is dependent on the context? That is not bullying or harassment? This is the easiest question to answer ‘yes,’ Ms. Magill.”
Responding to the same question, Harvard president Claudine Gay said, “When speech crosses into conduct, we take action.”
Calling for genocide is OK at Harvard so long as you don’t do any actual genociding within the precincts of the University.
MIT president Sally Kornbluth said that such language would only be “investigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.”
I would hate you to think that these illustrious universities did not care about harassment. Why, MIT has its own Institute Discrimination & Harassment Response Office, which is hard at work producing pronoun stickers.
Harvard is so focussed on combatting aggressive speech that it will even investigate cases where the aggression is unconscious: “Harvard to interrogate profs accused of ‘microaggressions’”. You see, the whole point about microaggressions is that the microagressors do not know they are committing them, so they have to be educated. In contrast those who call for genocide know exactly what they are doing, so there is no need for the University to bother them.
And I don’t know why everyone is making such a fuss about protests at the University of Pennsylvania. All that UPenn faculty members like Distinguished Professor of Political Science Anne Norton want is for more of its students and staff to feel “joyful and empowered” like UPenn student Tara Tarawneh did when she saw “the joyful and powerful images that came from the glorious October 7th”. See how happy and supportive everyone at that rally was. That’s because they knew Penn was a safe environment for them.
It seems imperative now for a group of Harvard students to test Harvard’s sudden rediscovery of the sacred nature of free speech by calling for the condemnation (doesn’t even need to be genocide, since only state-loving leftists ever call for genocides) of some group like transsexuals, or Muslims, or perhaps Muslim transsexuals.
I feel certain that Harvard’s administration would be absolutely as protective of that speech as they are of speech calling for the genocide of Jews.
Sure they would.
In my personal opinion iowahawk is broadly right about (A) but wrong about (B). If a college accepts government money, the First Amendment is implicated in any decision they make about penalising speech. This is what FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as they were previously known, cut their teeth on.
However, just look at some of FIRE’s cases and it’s perfectly obvious that colleges have trampled over the 1A all the time in order to prosecute their agenda. Like the UK police, who suddenly remember ECHR art. 10 when it’s one of “their guys”, colleges have suddenly remembered the 1A.
Where I would hesitate a little to agree with iowahawk on (A) is because there might arguably be a connection in some cases between calls for genocide and actual attacks on Jews (whether on campus or in the ME, albeit the latter not necessarily affecting US citizens and therefore maybe not a compelling govt interest to restrain as it might turn out). However, the Brandenburg test is very difficult to meet – the potential violence has to be both likely to stem from such speech, and imminent — it can’t just “create an atmosphere of intimidation” or some such. This is a very high bar, and the separate “true threats” standard is almost certainly not met. The older “clear and present danger” test may have been met, I think.
On another level, incitement to genocide is considered illegal under international law – though I’m not au fait with the specifics. I think in such cases it has to be coming from a prominent person (usually a government figure), i.e. someone who might be able to influence other people (either people under their control, or another government or armed group) to commit a genocide. And there probably has to be an actual genocide to point to. Many of Putin’s circle probably could be indicted under this, although we haven’t heard about that from the ICC yet as far as I know.
In an extreme case, if there were calls for genocide of the Jews from some US professor before Oct 7th and Yahya Sinwar had said “on the basis of that advice, we’re attacking Israeli Jews” then that would be grounds for firing them, and they could be prosecuted under 18 U.S. Code § 1091.
So context does matter.
I wonder if UPenn is regretting their position after the withdrawal of $100 million donation from Ross Stevens of Stone Ridge Asset Management this morning?
Time for a change of management, I suspect.
As David Burge, and Ferox, indicate – the hypocrisy is total.
Call for genocide against the Jews “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea” and it is Freedom of Speech.
But, truthfully, say that Mr George Floyd was not murdered – that he died from the drugs he consumed, or say that women, or male abortionists, should not kill babies, or that “Transwomen” are NOT women, or that illegal immigrants should be deported (or, at least, denied government benefits and services – such as schooling) and you will be out of these universities so fast your feet will not touch the ground.
Imagine what would happen to a student, or an academic, who chanted “kill the blacks!” or “drive the blacks out of the cities they did not build!” – but demanding the extermination of Jews is just fine.
What should the response be?
No more charitable status for these far left political institutions such as Harvard – let them pay tax like anyone else.
And no more gifts or taxpayer funding – including no more taxpayer backed “Student Loans”.
And – as only people endorsing wickedness can now (now – not in the past) graduate from these places – employers should openly declare that they will not employ new (new) graduates of these institutions.
Parents send their children to these “elite” colleges for “networking” – so they can get “good jobs” in the government and Corporate bureaucracy (which is much the same), students do NOT go to these places out of love of traditional learning and free discussion – such things are no longer allowed in these “Woke” (Frankfurt School of Marxism) institutions.
I see that more wealthy donors are pulling out funds from these places. Good.
The University of Pennsylvania is as corrupt as elections are Pennsylvania – and elections are very corrupt in Pennsylvania.
Ian Rons “context matters” – so if a student or academic chanted “kill the blacks” or “drive the blacks out the cities – they did not build them!”, but no one directly acted on these statements, the student or academic would face no bad consequences from these universities?
We both know that such a student or academic would be OUT – so the hypocrisy of these places is total, to them to call for the genocide of one group of people (say blacks) is outrageous, but to call for the genocide of another group of people (say Jews) is just fine.
And it is not “just” Jews – the universities teach hatred of heterosexual men (to be a straight man is to be evil), and they teach heated of white people – “whiteness” is the ultimate crime.
Why do they get special treatment in tax law (as if they are charitable bodies), and why do they get government backed “student loans”?
I’m afraid this makes the common American mistake of confusing the First Amendment with free speech. Just because the First Amendment does not protect a speaker in some circumstances does not detract from the fact that someone attempting to prevent them from speaking implicates freedom of speech issues.
If the university hierarchy intervenes to rescind a student society invitation to Ben Shapiro, I’m prepared to consider that a “freedom of speech on campus issue”, irrespective of whether the university’s acceptance of tax dollars comes with First Amendment strings.
By the same token, if these administrators really were free speech absolutists determined to protect even the most awful speech as long as it was not actively targeting an individual, I would have some sympathy.
I have no such sympathy, because these three women are plainly lying. They have absolutely no interest in a principled defense of free speech on campus, and are actively engaged in strenuous efforts to shut down speech of which they disapprove. But they are fine with Jew-hate, and quite happy to condone those that spread it.
This makes these college administrators unfit for office, and generally disgusting people on three independent counts: because they’re viciious antisemites, because they’re bare faced liars, and because they’re petty tyrants destroying real free speech, the fundamental basis of universities. Let them rot in hell.
Paul:
As you know, i never attribute to wickedness what can be adequately explained by insanity.
It follows that, as an employer, i would not hire even past graduates, unless they already have a proven record in employment.
I might hire the wicked, if their wickedness is irrelevant (or beneficial) to the job, but why would i hire the insane?
You have a point Snorri – as white (or non white) prospective employees who hates (on principle) all white people, could be argued to have a form of mental illness – certainly the left regard hatred of all black people as a mental illness. Corporations that such people (those who hate white people on principle – even when they are white themselves) already control, such as the Disney Corporation and BlackRock, do act in ways that appear insane – and which would not last long without favourable tax law (corporate entities pay much lower tax rates than individuals – and the defence that this is because the corporate entities merely represent individual “Aunt Agatha” share holders, is utterly false), and the endless flow of Credit Money – yes one of my favourite targets, but validly so.
And it is not “just” the universities – American schools also fill the minds of children with hatred of white people, especially white heterosexual males (who are presented as responsible for everything evil in the world).
Whether it is wickedness or insanity, the American education system, including the elite private schools, is now rotten to the core – the decay has reached the point where reform is, I believe, impossible, the system needs to be utterly rejected – by Home Schooling and the creation of new schools (although new schools that do not employ “qualified teachers”, i.e. leftists, are, I am told, illegal in California).
I repeat – the system is now rotten to the core. And this is not “just” in the United States.
One of them even said “we would only act is somebody called for genocide of a particular person”.
No, you over-credentialed moron. The VERY DEFINITION of genocide is the killing of a GROUP of people, not a person.
I believe $100m would represent less than one half of one percent of the total UPenn endowment. In the great scheme of things barely noticeable but such is the avaricious nature of American colleges there is a fair chance President Magrill will be booted out.
She was the wrong colour anyway.
How uncool to be seen in public defending the Jews.It was far easier making moral idiots of themselves in front of the world than to do that one decent thing.
Changing the leadership seems unlikely to help. What i’d like to see are Nuremberg-style trials for all admin staff, especially DEI staff.
The only trial I want to see is the tried and tested one of whether they sink or float
Here is a detailed article on the legal/constitutional aspects in US law.
There are some grey areas. In particular: the 1st Amendment allows people to call for genocide, but should people be allowed to call for genocide in public spaces? On a university campus?
I think that there is room for discretion here, by local authorities /university administration. But, in turn, such discretionary power should be subject to oversight, ultimately by the public.
I should make it clear that i want to be free to call for genocide of American university administration.
I’m afraid I am a free speech absolutist and I defend the right of these horrible people to spout their horrible slogans, including genocidal ones. So I do not at all think the administrators (loathsome though they might be) should resign for allowing it. In fact, in a sense I commend them for it.
Now if the argument is, and I do think this is the main thrust of Natalie’s op, is that they should resign for the overwhelming hypocrisy since the same standards are not applied when Ann Coulter comes to speak, then that is true. Do I object to their threading the needle on “when words become conduct”, absolutely not. They are exactly right about that. It does depend on the context, it does depend on “when words become actions.” And I found Stephanik’s unwillingness to examine this quite disconcerting.
Much as I loathe these lizardly administrators, we have to defend free speech no matter who is speaking.
The solution is not at all to ban the “gas the jews” speech, but to stop banning the “trans women are not women” speech. And in a sense this is an amazing opportunity for free speech advocacy. There were a couple of Onion headlines that captured this. “Outside Ilhan Omar’s office, the Palestinian flag threw the Gay Pride flag off the roof of the building to its death.” and “Students complain about scheduling when they had to leave their ‘Microagressions’ seminar early to get to the ‘Gas the Jews” rally.”
Free speech advocates can use this to advocate for their own speech and perhaps shame these administrators with their manifest hypocrisy to take away the excuses they have used to ban speech they don’t like. “It is a campus safety issue” my ass.
And we DO need to thread the needle. Yelling “gas the Jews” is one thing, hammering on the doors of a locked down library is another. Threatening specific individuals is different than general vague threats. What we are doing by threading the needle is protecting free speech without allowing criminal conduct.
So what is the solution? At these rallies where people are shouting outrageous things (and for that matter, at protests when Riley Gaines gives a speech), the police should be out in full force. Allow people to say what they will but as soon as they break the law, whether assault, battery, obstructing the highway, making individual threats, damaging property, using amplified speech at inappropriate places and times, harassment and so on then they should be arrested and aggressively prosecuted.
It is certainly true the Universities are private institutions and so can make their own rules, but Universities should be bastions of free speech, even the most loathsome of speech because the people whose speech you loathe probably loathe what you say. It is a bargain — you get to say whatever you want even when I hate it, and I get to say whatever I want even if you hate it.
Let’s not make the mistake of becoming like them, and trying to silence what we don’t like. I wanna hear it, I wanna know who is saying these things so I can make sure to stay the hell away from them.
@Snorri,
Technically, the term you want to use here is “Politicide”, defined here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_cleansing_of_population#References
This is precisely what we should have done to the KKK and the Nazis, among others.
Do note, also, that such things were deliberately kept out of the UN rules, mostly at the behest of the very people who so very badly need this applied against them:
Ironic, no?
And BTW, is it just me or are you bothered by the mindless chanting. Some guy yells in the loudspeaker “from the river to the sea” and the crowd repeats, then he yells “Palestine will be free”, then the crowd repeats it, and then loop back and start again. It is utterly mindless, empty bleating. These people sound like vacuous, unthinking robots to me. I can’t imagine they convince anyone. Can’t they think for themselves?
Fraser Orr: But yelling at these people when they ban Ann Coulter accomplishes nothing, while yelling at the same people when they don’t ban “kill the Jooz!” gets them fired.
It’s not that we all decide that free speech is no longer important and it’s time for us to become speech guardians along with them.
It’s the schadenfreudish fun in hoisting them by their own stupid petard!
We’d rather that society not live this way, but if we’re forced into it, then they’re sure as hell going to have to live up to it too.
And when they stop banning Ann, we’ll stop yelling back at them. Not an entirely rational position, but way more fun than simply constantly losing.
(P.S. Have you ever taken part in the wave at a Bears game at Soldier’s? That’s what protest chants are – cheerleading to keep up the spirits. Protesters are the ultimate team-joiners.)
The mind of Harvard, MIT and Penn are so rotten that i don’t think it can be fixed. What occurred is something that is allowed by the whole administrative and functionaries body.
Edit: Concerning what is moral, if we are at war things change. I don’t support bombing cities but if the enemy bombs our cities and gains an advantage then i support bombing their cities several times over if it takes that advantage from them.
lucklucky said:
This is one of those things where you have to calculate and gauge things based off of what your opponent is doing. If the enemy isn’t likely to bomb your cities (and, that’s a judgment call you’ll have to make on your own…) then you’d be morally wrong and stupid to start bombing his. However… I don’t think anyone is too likely to run into an “ideal enemy” who retains their moral high ground in the face of defeat. It’d be nice, but… Ain’t happening, unless there’s a huge disparity in technology and strength.
The likelihood is that if you’re dealing with anyone even remotely peer-level, then the cities are going to get bombed no matter what. The calculus then becomes “do unto the enemy before he does unto me, and do it hard enough to end the war as quickly as possible…”
I would make the case that the sort of tit-for-tat escalation idiocy practiced by the likes of LBJ and Kissinger is utter immoral folly. Go hard, get it done, save as many lives as possible on both sides. An endless grinding war like Vietnam or the one in Ukraine, right now? That’s morally indefensible, and should never be allowed. Russia’s ambitions could have been crushed utterly, back in 2014, had anyone in the Obama administration had the balls to do it. They did not, and here we are, with hundreds of thousands of dead to show for it. Was that a moral thing, what they did in 2014, looking the other way as Russia fomented separatist movements in Donbas and Crimea? Or, the way they behaved in Chechnya or Georgia?
If the West meant to stop Russia, they should have done it back then, and put an emphatic point to saying “NO”. As well, buying Russian resources and selling them technology, which they’re still doing? WTF?
Same stupid crap was done during the run-up to WWII; did we learn nothing?
No, we did not. At least, our halfwit political class did not.
An additional advantage to this approach is that it doesn’t allow your enemy the hope that they might persevere against you in spite of an enormous difference in destructive capability.
Imagine how Vietnam might have gone had we treated it like a full-commitment war from the beginning. It would have been over by the mid-60s, probably, with countless lives saved and the further bonus of Vietnam not having to endure years of communism.
And by extension, if they think we are going to come with the full monty right from the start, might our enemies be disinclined to even begin the conflict in the first place? If we had that full-throttle philosophy, we might stifle a great many conflicts without ever firing a shot.
Contrarily, when your enemy knows you are going to dither around uncertainly and slap ineffectually at him, he is emboldened to attack.
“Free speech advocates can use this to advocate for their own speech and perhaps shame these administrators with their manifest hypocrisy to take away the excuses they have used to ban speech they don’t like.”
You seem under the impression these people have any shame, or moral principles that they would uphold to help those they despise. The Left are only interested in power, and what gets them it. They will say black is white and vice versa the next day, if that helps. They cannot be shamed, or cajoled into doing the right things.
Yes.
The administrators don’t exist in a vacuum and are not all powerful. They mirror and implement the policies determined by their boards. I’m not excusing them. In fact I suspect they championed the double standards. Yet, I don’t understand why these 3 women are have been singled out for criticism.
Also I am concerned that the firestorm surrounding this story is an opportunity to slip speech codes in through the back door.
The rot’s been there for generations. Whatever a credential was worth, back in the day, today’s universities and colleges are conferring radically devalued products. Especially when you consider the grade inflation that’s gone on from top to bottom.
I happen to think that an education is a good thing to have. I also recognize that much of what’s going on in academia today ain’t education, either. It’s mostly indoctrination, and of the worst insidious sort.
Friend of mine in the Army was a fairly pragmatic apolitical sort of guy. He got out, went to get himself educated at one of the local universities, and then got a job as a high-school teacher of history. Last time I talked to him, he had undergone a 180 degree change in attitude and politics, which I think stemmed from immersion in the environment and then going to teach in a very liberal city high school. From what I could tell, I don’t think he was even aware of how much he’d changed, and other mutual friends who’re doctrinaire “right-wing reactionaries” (read: Normal patriotic Americans not of the Democratic Party) had called him on some of it, and he denied, denied, denied having changed at all. He had, and I honestly believe it was the four years he spent at the university plus the time teaching around similarly-indoctrinated people.
If you’d have asked me beforehand, whether that would affect him? I’d have said “Nope… Not him.” It very obviously worked, in his case, and I seriously doubt that any young person exposed to that same crap could have resisted it at all. You wonder why your younger relatives coming back from college are insufferable, at holidays? Thank the environment they’re in the rest of the year.
They’re not doing education any more. I’m not sure what it is, but it ain’t education. Not in the classical sense I was taught to respect and honor, at least.
Fraser:
You mean, like ChatGPT?
Banning them from university property in no way violates their rights.
@Snorri Godhi
You mean, like ChatGPT?
That is complete nonsense. ChatGPT is nothing like you seem to think it is. The simple fact is that it does a huge amount of useful work, even if it does have its limitations. I’ll bet it is doing millions if not hundreds of millions of man hours equivalent of useful work right now. I use it very frequently in my work and it is probably 25% leverage on my time. I could probably do a lot more with it too. There are some things it is very good at, and some things it is not good at at all. You know, kind of like you, or me.
FWIW, it seems one of those presidents did resign.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/09/upenn-president-resigns-following-backlash-of-congressional-antisemitism-testimony-.html
Dumb, uninformed, and very off-topic question that can be ignored if it’s too far OT:
How do you use it in your work? What does it do for you exactly? In my limited understanding, I’m picturing someone prompting it with “write a short article about baseball bats.” But I know I’m simply not getting what it does.
Again, if this is too OT, nevermind.
@SteveD
Banning them from university property in no way violates their rights.
It doesn’t, you are right. Neither does the university censoring them in University related activities. But it is also true that banning Riley Gaines from expressing her views on transgender athletics, or banning Salman Rushdie for expressing his views on Islam also in no way violates their rights.
But it entirely misses the point, the point of a university. Which is to say the open, unfettered expression of ideas, the exposure of students to ideas they hate, a place where you can say anything without risk of losing your scholarship or your academic career.
Perhaps we libertarians have forgotten this idea — free speech is your right to say things I hate in exchange that I can say things that you hate. The first part is just as valid. Do I hate these from the river to the sea views. Yes I do. But allowing them to be expressed is the price I pay so that I can express my views unfettered.
Say that this principle is hypocritically applied and I’ll agree with you. But the solution is not banning speech I hate, but unbanning speech that they hate.
Who would have ever thought that Universities, supposedly the bastion of free expression and thought, would be the bleeding edge of censorship, the flag waving army crushing one of the very principles on which they were founded. Let us be thankful for small mercies when it comes to free speech.
Again again, an important aspect of free speech is that you know who is speaking these vile views, and you can adjust your relationship with them appropriately.
@bobby b
Dumb, uninformed, and very off-topic question that can be ignored if it’s too far OT:
Off the top of my head:
* Great for summarizing long boring emails and documents (unless you need to focus on the minutia)
* Great for coming up with ideas for things like presentations, blog posts, seminars (it’ll need refinement, but great for a raw starting point)
* Great for taking a basic idea and expanding it into something larger (which you then have to edit)
* Excellent for writing simply computer programs, or coming up with specific techniques. For example, I needed a program to rename files so that the filename began with the date in yyyymmdd, and ChatGPT wrote it for me. Or “write a function to loop through the files in a directory in Linux in C”, I did recently. I can look it up, but ChatGPT just writes the code for me.
Those are a few things I can think of off the top of my head, but many more. You need to learn how to use it though
@bobbyb
Here is a specific example…. I tend to avoid Kirk’s comments since they tend to be nasty, dismissive and unhelpful. But sometimes you have to read that kind of thing. So I ran his last comment above through ChatGPT and asked it to summarize. It did so, gave a fair summary and took out all the nastiness so that I feel able to actually read it:
You do not have my permission or consent to present anything I’ve ever written to any form of AI, Mr. Orr.
Bear that in mind, in the future.
‘But it entirely misses the point,’
No. Giving people a platform to advocate genocide is immoral. That is my point.
But what if you believe that the only time that the left is ever going to pay attention to freedom of speech is after they’ve been abused with speech controls themselves? What if these recent pushbacks actually accomplish a change that we’ve been unable to procure otherwise? I guess I think that’s worth a try.
And, re: your example: That’s a much better summarizing result than I would have predicted (in my ignorance.) I guess I’ll have to start learning more about it. Thanks.
(ETA: Are we at a stage where you can rely upon the AI result, or do you still need to go back and read the source comment and compare it to the summary to ensure accuracy?)
Kirk:
1). Once you put your words out there on the internet, my impression is that AI systems are already using them for “training.” Plus, publication abandons control.
2). Curious – how would you yourself rate the summarizing that Fraser Orr included? It did a better job than I would have predicted.
@SteveD
No. Giving people a platform to advocate genocide is immoral. That is my point.
A few points:
1. Giving people a platform to out themselves as advocates of genocide is an extremely good thing.
2. Your argument is exactly the same one used to prevent conservative speakers. The no-platform argument demands that someone be the arbitrary of what speech is acceptable, and that is a very bad thing.
3. AFAIK, they aren’t giving them a platform, they are just marching in the streets like a bunch of ignorant dorks.
4. Ramaswamy is right: if you shut down people’s voice then they start to act in very bad ways. Better for them to shout about genocide than actually be genociding.
5. Right now they left are trying to de-platform Donald Trump with the legal system. A VERY large number of people in the US think he is just as evil as you think these morons are. Free speech means all can speak, and if you don’t like it turn the channel, vote for the other guy, yell back at them, and, whatever you do, don’t hire them to your fancy white shoe law firm.
but such is the avaricious nature of American colleges there is a fair chance President Magrill will be booted out.
That didn’t take long did it?
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/09/penn-president-resigns-00130961
Obviously Ms Harvard is safe but Sally Kornbluth of MIT must be on borrowed time.
Well, my sarcasm ultimately did some good in making Fraser give some examples of whast ChatGPT can do.
This is indeed useful; to what extent it is intelligent, depends on the answers to bobby’s questions to Fraser and Kirk.
But a human might well do a worse job,
since we tend to focus on the parts that are more important to us.
My view is that the really intelligent part is the refinement, the editing, and the debugging. To automate that, you need an iterative algorithm.
“I tend to avoid Kirk’s comments since they tend to be nasty, dismissive and unhelpful. ”
But usually right. The truth is rarely ‘nice’, especially when one has strayed a long way from it.
This is a exceptional summary on Instapundit.
I could not have said it better myself.
https://instapundit.com/621268/
Re: Instapundit post
To my knowledge, the current heroes, Bill Akeman and Ross Stevens were enablers. Is anyone aware of them calling out the flagrant discrimination and blatant censorship over the last decade or were they MIA?
Exasperated:
Here again i apply my motto:
Never attribute to wickedness what can be adequately explained by insanity.
Ackman and Stevens were probably too insane (IyI: intelligent yet insane) to realize what was going on.
Want supporting evidence? Sam Altman, who, unlike me, is Jewish and lives in the US, has noticed only now what i noticed over a decade ago.
Glenn Reynolds started writing about antisemitism at Berkeley 20 years ago.
I think it also significant that, unlike American Jews, French and British Jews support conservative parties by large majorities.
@Snorri Godhi
This is indeed useful; to what extent it is intelligent, depends on the answers to bobby’s questions to Fraser and Kirk.
I don’t believe I claimed it was intelligent. Just useful. Whether something is intelligent or not entirely depends on what you mean by “intelligent”. Like most philosophical discussions it comes down to the meaning of words, at which point the discussion devolves into “but my dictionary says…” at which point I usually tap out before my will to live evaporates with the futility of it. “Intelligent” is probably not objectively measurable, “useful” is.
@Jim
But usually right. The truth is rarely ‘nice’, especially when one has strayed a long way from it.
I’m glad you find his comments helpful. Me? I find it occasionally has some acorns of value, I find his experience in military life often illuminating. But those acorns are buried in a leaf litter of straw men, unjustified assumptions, plainly incorrect claims, and piles and piles of rude invective.
The truth does indeed sometimes hurt, but commentary is a lot less enjoyable to read when it is unnecessarily unpleasant. Here is a truth, America is largely, irredeemably kaput and I have argued for that position here many times. That is a hard and painful truth. But you’ll never hear me say “you stupid americans, I hope you rot in your own juices.” That would be entirely unnecessary. Rather I’ll say “America is kaput, sorry, but here is what you can do about it.”
Not that I am some paragon of getting it right. But at least I am not consistently cruel and unpleasant, except perhaps about this particular individual.
I very much favor his right to spout his nastiness, but I am exercising my right to change the channel.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, the discussions here don’t change anything. Even if we were all billionaires with power our ranting wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. This is, after all, just recreational. I don’t put up with rude, nasty bullies when I am playing basketball either. Life is too short, and my hope of reaching the NBA was disappointed back in middle school.
@Exasperated
To my knowledge, the current heroes, Bill Akeman and Ross Stevens were enablers.
I read an interesting article “The Problem With Elite Complaints about Elite Schools” on largely this subject that I’d recommend.
Thanks for the link, Fraser.
These academics and administrators may not be the “intellectual elite” they pretend to be – but they are stupid, they know perfectly well that the activists they support want to commit genocide.
And if anyone said “kick the blacks out of ….., they are occupiers of this city and they rob and murder white people” they would be out of the university so fast their feet would not touch the ground. Attacking blacks or Hispanics is wrong (and YES it is wrong – as people must be judged as individuals, not by their racial group) – but attacking Jews, or non Jewish whites, is just fine. Even calling for genocide of these groups – is just fine, because of the Marxist (yes Marxist) doctrine that the poor are “exploited and oppressed” and the rich are, by definition, the “exploiters and oppressors” – Jews and non Jewish whites are, on average, wealthier – and, therefore, evil and in need of murder.
It is that brutally simple – and, quietly, includes Asian Americans as well – as they are, on average, wealthier than whites, so they are also “capitalist exploiters and oppressors”.
Rebranding Marxism as “anti racism”, or “third wave feminism”, or “Trans Rights”, is a simple trick – yet is has worked incredibly well.
Largely because hardly anyone seems to be prepared to tell the truth – that this is all MARXISM.
Marxism has been allowed to dominate the American education system, schools as well as colleges, and much else of the culture – the institutions, both public and private.
Slightly off-topic, but i think relevant to see this kerfuffle in historical perspective.
In 1984 (the date is just a coincidence) i went to watch The Man Who Would Be King, at the movie theater on the campus of an Ivy League university.
You know the scene where Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) throws an Indian out of the train? When that happened, the audience erupted in laughter+cheering.
At the time, i did not understand it; but gradually, i came to accept that i cannot find any explanation other than racism. But if you can, please let me know.