The results of the Curmie Award vote are up at Curmudgeon Central, where blogger Rick Jones tracks episodes of supreme embarrassment for his profession, education. I think next year’s winner may have already arrived. It’s not that I can’t imagine worse conduct by an educator—I have a lively imagination—it’s just that the conduct California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) professor Robert Donald Weide is an apt symbol of why U.S. higher education is no longer a solution to anything, but a tragic problem in itself. There is no reason, none, why any school shouldn’t immediately sack a faculty member who behaves like this. If the issue is tenure, then tenure needs to be abolished. Tenure should not shield campus fascists.
What did Weide do? CSULA’s branch of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative political organization, dared to invite Ben Shapiro to give a lecture called “When Diversity Becomes a Problem” about such emerging issues as Black Lives Matter, “microaggressions,” “safe spaces,” trigger warnings and other assaults on free speech on campuses and elsewhere. Naturally, since the topic is an important and legitimate one, many at CSULA are attacking the event and arguing it should be blocked by the university, citing trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, and, of course, the ever-useful censorship concept of “hate speech.”
Perhaps here is as good a place as any to note that I wouldn’t cross the street to listen to Ben Shapiro, and wouldn’t do so even before his website, Breitbart, decided to shill for Donald Trump. That, however, doesn’t alter the fact that he is every bit as worthy of a campus speaking gig as Lena Dunham, Bernie Sanders, Sean Penn, or the Pope.
On this campus, however, Weide, an assistant professor of sociology, feels that faculty libel and threats are appropriate.Weide posted a comment on the event’s Facebook page calling the group white supremacists whose invitation to Shapiro was an attempt at intimidate people of color (he abbreviated this “POC” as if everyone knows the shorthand for this most silly and pompous of all mandatory politically correct euphemisms, or should that be “euphemisms of pompous” (EOP)?). Then he predicted the group would need police protection from the mob violence he obviously hoped would try to shut the lecture down. In a final apotheosis of anti-speech bullying, Weide then challenged Shapiro defenders to meet him at the campus gym to duke it out, warning potential combatants by saying “I lift bro.” Here is the jaw-dropping exchange:
A professor threatening students with physical violence because they defend the sponsoring of a lecture he disagrees with? What???
Intolerable. Inexcusable. Inherently hostile to academic freedom, freedom of thought and free speech. The university has a professional, societal, ethical and educational obligation to immediately…
- Fire him. No investigation should be needed. This is instant dismissal territory.
- Apologize and make an official statement that the university rejects such words and sentiments from any university official, and that it welcomes diverse opinions and speakers of all kinds on campus.
- Investigate how someone this alienated from the purpose of education was hired in the first place.
Ethics Alarms 
I wouldn’t have occurred to me that anyone wouldn’t know that POC meant people of color.
It comes from living in different worlds and speaking different languages. It’s the same reason I blank out on right-wing shibboleths. Things well understood to one group get tossed out there with only one group having the accompanying connotations.
And I don’t know the answer to fix it. How do you un-polarize people’s preferred communications? Do I stick around and try to follow a right-wing site where people who vote democrat might be called commies and traitors, plus of course Nazis, someone always has an excuse to go Godwin? Are you going to hang out in places I might enjoy when your pro-police statements would get you called a fascist, someone’s always gotta go Godwin.
I speak American English, I somewhat speak social justice, I speak radical feminist, I speak enough French to get by in a pinch (or for playing the language game in an international airport) but I don’t speak right-wing and it’s easy to forget that right-wing speakers see social justice as a different language.
Typical of male-pattern violence directly resulting from males being socialized to think that dominance is the defining feature of manhood this the necessity of oppressing women and treating anyone who can be oppressed as less of a person. Note the comment about growing testicles really cements that exchange.
See, told you I could speak radical feminist. 🙂
How do we fix it? DON’T DO IT. This isn’t the Tower of Babel: pointless divisions in rhetoric lead to divisiveness. I rejected the ridiculous “people of color” directive the first time it reared its pompous, empty head. It is offensive, a self-anointed arbiters of race-etiquette dictating that while “colored people” is racist and offensive, “people OF color” is properly respectful, even though they not only mean the same thing, the phrases contain the same words except for the extra “of” which merely substitutes for the missing “-ed.” That was in the Eighties, I believe, and “people of color” has declined in usage since, because it is stupid, not because it is “left wing.” There aren’t “different worlds” on a college campus. It’s there to prepare students for THE world, and jargon is an impediment to finding common ground and communication. And often is intended to be just that. As an aside, I know plenty of African Americans who find “people of color” to be as dumb as I find it. I believe it is at heart racist, intending to divide the world into whites and non-whites, as if non-whites have anything in common other than skin-color.
People of color is outdated and certainly never reduced to “POC” anywhere I have had dealings. Talking history maybe we’ll reference the 24th Colored Infantry or the Free Men of Color, both actual military units, but that’s just placing things in historical context. Of course it’s another attempt to divide the world into yet another “us=good, them=bad,” that’s as transparent as cellophane, yet people keep buying it, because everyone needs a reason to either think he is better than others or disregard the thoughts of others.
Male-pattern violence? I wasn’t aware violence had anything to do with baldness, but ok. I will say this, if I had a nickel for every time I threatened violence not really intending to go forward with it or was threatened with violence by someone who (probably) didn’t intend to carry it out, I’d be a very rich man. It’s a dangerous bluffing game we play, unless we really are thugs, and carrying through with a threat is likely to achieve the opposite of getting you cred if you are older than high school.
Yes, I threatened to throw another attorney down the stairs when he stepped out of line in a deposition, and yes, one of the union reps threatened to break my arm because he didn’t like my approach in a hearing. Yes, Michael Grimm threatened to pitch a reporter over a balcony, and yes, a male-to-female transgender journalist threatened to send Ben Shapiro home in an ambulance. Frankly every one of those folks, me included, would have been justly thought of as idiots if we’d carried through on what we said and deserving of whatever consequences followed. This is just more of the same bluster and attempts to intimidate. It’s almost never appropriate if you’re sober and in your right mind and it should be a firing offense anywhere.
The kicker for me here isn’t any of what’s already been mentioned, but that the bullying here is coming from the left, who are supposedly the peaceful, tolerant side. They’re as full of bullies, thugs, and totalitarians as any other shade on the political spectrum, either those looking to achieve or keep power, or those who know what to say and do to get in a lefty coed’s panties.
Why don’t we just call them the “coloreds” and get them shiny new water fountains?
By the way… “coloreds” didn’t create a squiggly red line. The more you know.
Actually, they have. Their calf muscle mass, proportional to the rest of their bodies and taken as a population average, is smaller than it is with whites.
Persons of Small Calf Mass, or POSCM.
OK…that explains why in my much (and I do mean much) younger days I could – at 5′ 10″ – dunk a basketball. Quite an impressive achievement for a POCW (Person of Color White). I am sure – for all you B-Ball fans – know that I was thusly a mini version of Billy Cunningham.
I suppose I should be abashed. I thought POC meant “piece of crap,” a sort of mild version of the well-known acronym, POS, which means (just in case you were never in the US armed forces) “piece of shit.”
For my money, I think they need to find a better acronym that isn’t likely to be confused with “piece of [insert profane pejorative here].”
Glenn,
POC read in the context of how it was used couldn’t possibly mean what you said. Say the words outloud in the context of the sentence; it is very clear that POC was meaning something other than what you implied, unfortunately, it may not have been crystal clear to some readers as to what he was actually saying.
My immediate guess was “piece of crap,” then I thought, hmmm, no, that can’t be it.
I did exactly the same thing, then I read it aloud. I figured it out based on the context.
Well, I was making an observation on Jack’s comment, not the professors, and was intended tongue-in-cheek.
“It comes from living in different worlds and speaking different languages. It’s the same reason I blank out on right-wing shibboleths.”
I had to Google shibboleths. Kudos. I’m genuinely interested though, perhaps because it’s the soup we swim in, but I can’t think of any short hand bumper stickers used by conservatives that fit in the same category. But that might just be the soup I swim in. Examples?
“I speak American English, I somewhat speak social justice, I speak radical feminist, I speak enough French to get by in a pinch (or for playing the language game in an international airport) but I don’t speak right-wing and it’s easy to forget that right-wing speakers see social justice as a different language.”
I think you need to rethink this. Social justice is spoken by social justice warriors. There are classical Liberals shaking their head at radicalized socialists on campus and wondering how the hell this happened. SJWese is pseudo speech comprised of portmanteaus and gobbledygook meant to sound erudite, the fact that no one outside your circles speaks it says more about you, and less about them. If you want to include everyone that doesn’t know what the hell “problematic” and “microagression” (Thank you squiggly red line) means as being “Right Wing” Then the left wing must look like a much smaller party to you than it does to me. This is probably some bastard child of a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. “If you don’t think exactly like me, you don’t belong to my group.”
“And I don’t know the answer to fix it. How do you un-polarize people’s preferred communications?”
Speak English, woman!
Some examples, it didn’t occur to me that anyone here would have to look up shibboleth, that’s not an insult, I’m not suggesting anything about you. To me it’s just part of the language when describing partisanship.
The soup we swim in, I don’t know if that variation is common in some circles, I always hear and read it as the water we swim in, or fish don’t need a word for water, and that’s the point, somehow we’ve managed to stop swimming in the same water, some of us are in soup and part of me is imagining Sphene and Zeiat having this conversation or perhaps Zieat and Breq. That’s one I don’t expect anyone here to get because it comes from a set of books for which enjoyment of them has become politicized (by people who as far as I can tell haven’t actually read them since their chief complaint is a rather minor part of the story and they keep complaining that it’s the entirety of the story, completely missing the part about the robot zombie AI out for revenge on the one who killed her.)
But here’s your example. Political correctness. It encompasses a set of ideas and feelings in people of right-wing orientation that I don’t fully comprehend. It’s exasperated when most of the times I hear it complained about is in response to someone being called out for being a jerk. I’m anti-trans, I don’t use the term tranny, and yet it would surprise me not to hear someone else shout political correctness when called out for using that particular slur. Thus I’m baffled. Don’t be an asshole gets translated to political correctness gone mad and then in my mind political correctness sounds like a very good thing, it sounds like don’t be an asshole, it sounds like people who complain about it are trying to turn being discourteous into a virtue. Clearly I don’t have the nuances of its usage down. If I tried to mimic a person who does use the term I’d get it wrong, be unmasked as a fraud. It is a shibboleth. There will be others–must be others–and they would bounce off as an odd turn of phrase and nothing more to anyone not swimming in that soup or water.
That’s how sub-cultures work. Usually people will know they’re doing it, goth kids will know they’re speaking goth and theater people will know they’re speaking theater. What happens when the group grows so large that interactions outside it grow infrequent? People are retreating into echo chambers, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. How much do you notice if your knitting circle also happen to share political views? What if it’s everyone in the breakroom at work, at least the ones who speak up? You get used to it, it’s just the way people talk, it’s how you talk, why wouldn’t everyone talk that way, it’s English right? I know what problematic and micro-aggression mean why wouldn’t everyone? Others know what political correctness means to them but all I see is the usage not the connotation.
Jack says don’t do it. I say how likely is it really that you’re going to notice the water or the soup until the point comes when someone dumps them into the same container? How do you get the swimmers to want to be in the same container?
“The soup we swim in, I don’t know if that variation is common in some circles,”
I actually thought I was speaking lefty because I picked that up from John Stewart, he said it being interviewed by Chris Matthews.
“robot zombie AI out for revenge on the one who killed her.”
I read this and then decided I needed to read whatever it came from. Google tells me “Imperial Radch”?
“Don’t be an asshole gets translated to political correctness gone mad and then in my mind political correctness sounds like a very good thing, it sounds like don’t be an asshole, it sounds like people who complain about it are trying to turn being discourteous into a virtue.”
You’re so close. So close. It’s not “Don’t be an asshole” or the more natural, “That’s not cool.” It’s the “STOP OPPRESSING ME YOU NECKBEARD, CIS-HET, MICROAGRESSING (TYSQRL)*, FEDORA-WEARING SHITLORD.” that we have a problem with. To which “Don’t be an asshole.” might be the appropriate response. Somewhere along the line social justice language police took the duty to confront and made an censorious art of it. We don’t use the teachable moments and we’re not nice to each other about anything, it doesn’t matter if someone UNDERSTANDS why what they did was wrong, so long as we punish them disproportionately and make sure they never speak again. Political correctness 20 years ago wasn’t a problem because it wasn’t costing people their lives. You can’t divorce the theory from the consequences of that theory.
We’ve recently seen, for whatever reason, a breakdown of descriptive language. “Racism” is shorthand for a lot of things that aren’t racist. Heck… sometimes not even racial. “Microagression” (TYSQRL)* means something different to damn near everyone that uses it. My opinion is that it’s an Alinskyesque tool designed to capitalize on the visceral feelings associated with a term to provoke a response to similar, but unrelated things. Rape is a great example. No one likes rape. But rape is being used to describe damn near everything from unwanted sexual contact to using logic and reason against a feminist**. I think the feminist knows damn well that she isn’t actually being raped, but she expects that the term will garner her an amount of sympathy. The problem is that as the term is overused, it loses potency. But that’s another conversation altogether.
The reason I wrote that, is perhaps in recognition that Political Correctness is being used as shorthand to gather ideas that aren’t in the scope of the original term. That is: You’re right. It reflects a… frustration. I think At being silenced, often unfairly, for an opinion that isn’t wrong so much as it isn’t popular with a crowd that has the resources, energy and will to ruin your life for expressing them.
Imperial Radch Trillogy yes.
Ancillary Justice
Ancillary Sword
Ancillary Mercy
Another shibboleth. You’re average liberal has never heard of Aliniski until the day they have the misfortune of being accused of following his teachings.
I can’t let that go. Rape is sexual contact without consent. I know that some people use that term for only forced PIV and nothing else, I disagree with them, they say a man can’t be raped. A man can be raped. Some say statutory rape isn’t rape, it’s rape. Some people cannot give consent, Sally Hemmings was a slave. She had no right to withhold consent and thus…
Coercion is rape.
Then there’s behaviors often called rapey. Flashers would be a prime example. They don’t touch, but they inflict on the unwilling in a sexual way. People who keep pushing after being told no. People who try to shame others into sex, people who tell a lesbians or a gay man that you need to just try it and see, people who say you’re awful if you won’t sleep with x. These people have stepped onto a slippery slope wherein they’ve already started dismissing a person’s sexual boundaries.
“Another shibboleth. You’re average liberal has never heard of Aliniski until the day they have the misfortune of being accused of following his teachings.”
Per-haps… But that doesn’t make it less true. If someone wanted to take all the resources on Earth and spread them out evenly, but had never heard of communism, they’re still exhibiting it.
And I have to apologize. The asterisks meant things, I was going to add:
*I will ALWAYS be grateful to the squiggly red line that vindicates my belief that social justice warriors speak in term that are not in the English language.
** The assertion was actually that using logic and reason in conversations, especially about rape re-marginalizes victims in a way similar to the original crime, and so when talking to victims of rape, we should coach our discussions in the mindset that using logic and reason to rebut a victim’s experience is indistinguishable to them from the original rape. I saw the argument posited around the same time Dawkins put his foot in his mouth talking about “rape rape”. Regardless, without context, it read differently than I meant it, and that was wrong.
But my point was that rape (and a whole catalog of other terms) is being used in ways never before imagined to describe things that it didn’t mean until relatively recently. Even using your definition, and allowing “rapey” to be discreet from “rape” (“rapey by the way is pure code.) I would have no trouble finding dozens of examples of feminists who said that all PIV (more code, by the way) is rape. Do you really deny this?
You’ll recall the question was of right-wing shibboleths.
So, yeah, didn’t think this was a contest.
Deny it? I could make the argument, I could do it using the language of feminists and I could convince you I believe it. That would dishonest though, so maybe the bare bones version?
We live in a patriarchy, males hold a privileged position.
Ergo all men have more power than any woman.
So any sexual relationship between men and women is uneven, one holds more power, it becomes coercive.
Sex by coercion is rape, all PIV is rape.
QED, but there’s one more point one makes in such discussions….
…Therefore all relationships between women undermine the patriarchy, can I buy you a drink?*
*This only works if you are female and talking to another woman who is sexually attracted to women.
That is the Coles notes version of sex negative feminism. Do you actually believe that?
Just learn to speak rational human being, Val. I know not one reaonable person who “speaks” in Tumblr, aka Social Justice. It’s an echo chamber that will turn you increasingly kooky.
I can almost-but-not-quite read and understand tumblr which is really more of a degenerate form of social justice. I’d liken it to a middle-aged american trying to follow a bunch of Australian schoolchildren speaking to each other using large amounts of slang. Attempts to do so make my head hurt, clearly I’ve gotten old and soon will be yelling at those damn kids to get off my lawn.
I wouldn’t call that radical. As I understand it, you’re saying that in general, any problematic behavioral patterns associated with human males can be attributed to socialization, to paradigms imposed on them by society and which can be overcome through character growth, instead of to some sort of innate gender-based sociopathic aggression. Granted, testosterone does have influence over emotions, but to treat people as being incapable of controlling themselves is to not treat them as people at all, and that’s what I’d call radical.
And yes, it irks me that people are using testicles as shorthand for important character traits that everyone should have, and that do not require testicles. It’s sloppy and often speaks of a need to feel superior to someone despite having few admirable qualities of one’s own, though I have no doubt that some people use the phrase completely figuratively and don’t have any disrespect for female humans in general.
I concur with Jack’s reply. To stop polarization, shun sloppy language. Talk descriptively whenever possible, and when you must express a normative judgment, force yourself and others to explain your reasoning, though it be uncomfortable for you and scandalous to them*. Don’t take shortcuts between descriptive and normative, because when you start thinking that a description is synonymous with a judgment, when it’s a given that “X people” by definition share any traits other than X, then you’ve already severed communication with anyone who doesn’t see things that way.
Take things back to basics. Talk about what you see and what you feel, but first listen to others talk about what they see and feel, and try to understand how it makes sense to them. It takes practice, but you can figure out where their paradigms, the assumptions upon which their conclusions rely, diverge from yours. Then you can figure out why, and then you can start to figure out which pieces of truth you both have. I virtually guarantee that in social matters, everyone has something important to say, and they’re probably wrong about most things because they’re ignoring everyone else’s important things.
*If you present yourself as agreeable but confused, you can practically force people to think. I speak from experience. It’s like the Holy Grail for persuasiveness, but the catch is you have to know how to recognize and admit every instance where you are wrong or may be wrong, and even actively look for reasons you are wrong and someone else is right. Luckily, a rational person embraces being corrected, because it’s much better than to have remained wrong unknowingly.
P.S. Where I work, everyone knows POC stands for “proof of concept.”
Change gender-based to sex based. Sex is a physical state, gender is the cultural baggage that gets imposed based on it.
Welcome to second wave feminism. The idea that gender isn’t inherent the way that sex is, is radical. It flies in the face of thousands of years of women are like this and think like that and men are like that and think like this and that is the natural order.
I knew that when I wrote “gender-based”; I was referring to the gender-based concept of “masculinity” being regarded as synonymous with “destroying things”, regardless of sex. I might not have been precise enough to encompass everything I reject, but I’m positive that some people believe in the concept that I described and dismissed. I reserve the right to dismiss more concepts than the one I described.
I’m not sure what second-wave feminism is, and I’m sure there are a variety of mutually exclusive definitions furnished by those who call themselves such, but I’ll wait and see what it does. Based on your definition, it at least avoids pinning people to their physiology, so that’s definitely a good sign.
How does one avoid being pinned to their physiology? Wherever you go, there it is. The objection is to tying in unrelated traits or worse, calling those traits defining features. I heartily endorse dividing prisons between people who have vaginas and people who have penises. I condemn dividing them between people who tend to wear skirts and people who tend to wear trousers as fashion is a cultural matter not an innate part of being male or female.
One avoids pinning people (conscious beings) to their physiology (the physical bodies they operate) by putting in a certain amount of effort to give them opportunities to disprove any assumptions one makes about them. I’m willing to believe anything isn’t innate if someone asserts that it isn’t innate for them. Putting in effort to alter their environment in accordance with their wishes is another cost-benefit analysis entirely.
As much as we reasonably can, at least as an ideal since obviously that’s not the world we live in right now. Even then it’s gonna come up. Private bathrooms showers and changing rooms are great, yet as you scale up it can’t always be done. There are places where mixing males and females just isn’t safe, like prisons. Times like those are when sex matters, the other 99% of the time one could wish we were more like the Radchaai (who incidentally don’t use long term prisons) and just didn’t care about that stuff.
Ahh, but would you believe something is innate if they claim that it is? And what if they confuse one thing that is innate for something else that is not? If one is left-handed it doesn’t mean the things said about left-handed people apply, and if one fits the pre-conceptions, it doesn’t suddenly make their right-hand less dominant.
I concur. Pragmatism matters even as culture can be changed. It occurs to me that in prisons, sex segregation is still insufficient to prevent sexual assault, but that just shows that prisons themselves are poorly designed as an institution.
Would I believe someone who told me that a traits of theirs was innate? That’s an excellent question. For physical traits it would be easier to believe, but some physical traits can be altered with different habits (hygiene, for instance). For mental traits… it could go either way. I probably wouldn’t press the matter if it was innocuous enough, such as an aversion to a particular type of food. However, if I thought it was a problem for the person or for others and required the person’s own effort as part of the solution, such as anger issues, I would not accept “it’s just my nature” as an excuse. However, I certainly wouldn’t take them at face value in either case.
I am more inclined to believe that a mental trait is mutable than that it is innate, because personhood is all about changing one’s traits in order to develop the power to make things more harmonious. Very few mental qualities are immutable if you put enough effort into changing them. The question only becomes whether it’s worth the bother.
Of course, this begs the question of why men who identify with the feminine gender want sex change operations, if gender is merely a state of mind totally unconnected with the function and structure of reproductive organs,
You’ll have to ask someone who thinks that and ask. Maybe you’ll get them to admit that the vast majority of those people don’t want sex change operations.
Jack; you left off the text of his scariest post:
“FYI tough guy provocateurs, we have open mat on campus in the gym in the USU building at 1pm Friday and noon on Saturday if you want to show us
your white supremacy. Heads up though, I lift bro…,”
I found myself shuddering uncontrollably at the cryptic meaning of …,
As a close friend of mine has stated many times; please engage sarcasm detector…
Why should they fire him, wasn’t Robert Donald Weide just exercising his own constitutional fight to freedom of speech?
Why should the University apologize for protecting Robert Donald Weides freedom of speech?
There is no reason to investigate staff exercising their free speech.
…disengage sarcasm detector.
Only pre-approved free speech instilling Liberal “values” is allowed on some college campus’, any speech that might challenge the PC Liberal “value” system is selectively deemed offensive and subversive and any means of stopping such speech is acceptable. That was NOT sarcasm!
Absolutely nothing will be done unless the streets are filled with chanting protesters demanding the immediate resignation of the University president and the professor and those protests are plastered in the media.
You should read the comments- and post some yourself.
https://www.facebook.com/events/520076668159706/
California State University Long Beach has a long history of hiring thugs such as Professor Karenga, who was previously spent time at Chino Men’s Colony for false imprisonment and torture and is Chair of the Africana Studies program. So this professors threats don’t surprise me. I hope the University administration doesn’t wimp out but I suspect they will.
Maybe he will challenge the administration to a fight…
I’m going to gently suggest that perhaps the professor was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with his gym challenge. The, “I lift bro”, is perhaps the biggest indicator of that. He is making fun of their meatheadness, telling him to “grow testicles” and such.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-even-lift
Other than that, he expressed an opinion that the group was similar in nature to white supremacists, and further opined that he felt their efforts were intimidating to the people of color on campus. People can disagree about his opinion, but they aren’t particularly outrageous.
He correctly points out to several of his critics that the security that will be present at the forum will be there to protect them, not him, as he is not the one in need of protection.
Honestly, I’m not seeing the outrageous conduct here. I clicked open this post, at least hoping for some cut mics, death threats, or an arson attempt. This is just a guy arguing on Facebook. I would say a good number of us do that everyday.
I have a question: Why wouldn’t he be in need of protection as well? If people are there to do violence, how are they going to know the good professor isn’t someone who should be a recipient thereof? I am assuming, of course, that he won’t be participating in the threat of violence, but that could be a faulty assumption.
There’s nothing wrong with his opinion as such, but don’t you think worrying about violence coming from his own “side” is a bit much? Also, don’t you think, at minimum, that it’s the least bit unprofessional, even if clearly meant in jest (which wasn’t clear at all), that an invitation to personal combat over ideology is big-time inappropriate for a university professor?
Perhaps we never should’ve outlawed dueling, n’est ce pas? That way the creepy and irresponsible, like the good professor and others of his ilk on both sides, could go ahead and exterminate themselves and improve the gene pool.
I have a question: Why wouldn’t he be in need of protection as well? If people are there to do violence, how are they going to know the good professor isn’t someone who should be a recipient thereof? I am assuming, of course, that he won’t be participating in the threat of violence, but that could be a faulty assumption.
I think you are assuming the professor will there at all, which he probably won’t be. If he’s around in the area he’ll probably be outside, protesting or some such.
At most events, especially controversial ones, on either side, security is normally there, as a preventative measure. It would be rather irresponsible of the university for it not to be there.
Deery, the professor was calling for a heckler’s veto, inviting it, and trying to use the threat of it as prior restraint. Clear as day.
Let me also say that if a speaker opposing “trigger warnings” risks violence, a school needs to reassess its entire curriculum , culture and admission policies.
Glenn, he’s not worrying about violence, he’s inviting it.
Oh, indeed.
In this case, though, it’s possible to give him way more benefit of the doubt than he deserves and still point out that he comes up way short of ethical. That was my intent.
I also believe that a faculty member has no business attacking the extra-curricular activities of students if they are lawful and within school rules. They are authority figures, and have unequal weight in the community. When did this become acceptable?
Or more pointedly, when did it become acceptable for teachers to be indistinguishable from their students in terms of maturity? We expect students to protest stuff and make threats and use “bro,” but really, teachers?
Professors may not use call for violence dog whistles and argue that speakers can’t speak. They may not stigmatize students as “white supremacists” for seeking to hear from a legitimate individual with an opinion that they might not even agree with. A Professor may not advocate content censorship on campus.
Sorry, those are values they may not advocate and remain employed, because it counters the purpose and function of education, and the nation.
Tongue in cheek. Right. Anything to excuse the inexcusable. 53. The Joke Excuse, or “I was only kidding!”
Ben Shapiro is a white supremacist? For one, he’s an Orthodox Jew and there aren’t many of them in white supremacist organizations that I am aware of. This is a favorite tactic of the left to brand opponents of their agenda as racists and probably as bad as Hitler.
It would be as dishonest to accuse people of Judenhass merely because they disagree with Mr. Shapiro.
Jack….your post is an obvious “microaggression!” I will hide under my blanket until spring.
I am stunned that anyone would think that it would ever be appropriate, indeed not a firing offense, for a faculty member to attack the character of students based on their activities in a student organization. It’s just wrong. I ran the Gilbert and Sullivan group on my college campus. Would it have been anything other than outrageous for John Kenneth Galbraith, or Daniel Moynihan, or Henry Kissinger, or even an associate sociology professor, to go on a public forum and say about my group, “These students are extolling the product of a sexist, racist empire that brutally subjugated POC! THey are white supremacists, and I hope they have securityto protect them from the righteous violent mobs that will try to shut down their production of “The Mikado”?? Of course, these were all smart, professional men and teachers who know that is a line that cannot be crossed. You make that line clear to the less smart and professional by enforcing it.
I would have made the same post about a conservative professor attacking a Pro-abortion student group as being made up of “baby-killers.” Of course, that would never happen. If there are any conservative professors, they are in disguise.
Calling supporters of abortion baby killers, calling the YAF white supremacists, or calling critics of Bwen Shapiro Nazi nithings defines the enemy too widely, and William A. Levinson wrote a great article about propaganda.
http://www.stentorian.com/propagan.html
Sadly, some of them engage in sheer intellectual dishonesty.
Here, people claimed that the filmmakers exposing Planned Parenthood were responsible for those murders in Colorado Springs.
As I point out, “For someone to be liable for wrongful death based on a lie they told, the lie must have either incited IMMINENT lawless action leading to death, Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) (per curiam), or that the lie misled a third party to believing they had LEGAL justification to commit the act that led to the death in question (e.g., calling the police and lying about armed persons holding hostages in a building, and the reaction leading to a SWAT officer killing someone).
Neither were at issue here.
Pro-choicers in general should not be called baby-killers, for the reasons I cite. But if a particular advocate for abortion engages in ad hominem attacks, intellectual dishonesty, or advocates undermining our freedoms, then it is fair to call that particular advocate a baby killer.
Per Jack, and it cannot be said loud or often enough: IF “colored people” is racist and offensive — which it was and is –, “people OF color” says and means the same thing, and POC stands for nothing but “people of color,” both of which stand for nothing but “colored” and all three of which are equally racist and offensive.
Bringing back a phrase that was already offensive to people I knew 30+ years ago, people whose parents had even then long been fighting to be called people (not black, not negro, not african-american) — only to find it come sneaking back by its initials as if that removed the insult — indicates something more insidious than simple stupidity. All of the aforementioned designations carry the same stigma, the same prejudice: that the people who use them cannot perceive the false differences, cannot conceive of not having to invent and re-invent names for themselves or other people, names that are barriers to observing the multiplicity of differences between individuals and among groups, names that reinforce an Otherness that does not exist.
It is beyond stupidity, as I said: it is refusal to let go of primitive weapons in a meaningless war, a war in which who is for or against what or who protects or defends whom makes no difference. This naming and name-calling is a function of superstition, a lazy, hazy-minded reduction of Black and White into black-and-white. It is a fatal lack of imagination, primarily but not exclusively infecting the young and self-identified liberals of our culture who inherited a weaker strain from their elders.
I have settled on “black” for the time being, resenting each time I use it being forced to acknowledge this artificial construct, watching it loom larger every year. The people I have long mourned were not Others, they were mine, my friends, my companions, my work- and playmates, my beloved, my family for several short, taken-for-granted years. And I was theirs and not an Other. It is simple to invent ideal situations, how everything “should be;” it is much harder to imagine how to constantly re-invent (not hold onto: to re-create) that which was essential in the past to the benefit of the now and the future.
I just realized I was echoing many of Jack’s sentiments here. I own to reading the blog posts carefully but not always the comments, especially not when I arrive late to the threads and don’t stop to follow all of them but just dive into creating a reply. I apologize for the reiterations; that is careless and rude. And such a waste of time, me writing, others reading. (I haven’t quite got the hang of the perfect apology, either. Sorry about that.)
That was a terrific post, and saved ME the time of writing something similar, that wouldn’t have been better. I once had a falling out with a good friend and marvelous man who was a psychologist for students at a local college. He mentioned POC, and I said, “You mean black people.” He said, “People of color.” I said, “Do you mean colored people?” He said, “No, people of color.” “Which color?” I asked.
“In this case,” be said, “black.” “Then you mean ‘black people,'” I said. “We don’t say that,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be easier to say what you fucking mean rather than speaking in code?” I said. “Are black people ashamed of being black?”
“Of course not,” he said.
I said, “Good, because that’s what I intend to call their race from now on.”
Thank you. I need the occasional boost to keep from giving up on the humanity of the human race.
Here is my link to that event page linking back to the blog post.
https://www.facebook.com/events/520076668159706/permalink/521429351357771/
“Investigate how someone this alienated from the purpose of education was hired in the first place.”
No investigation necessary. I can tell you exactly how this person was hired, the reason being that a lot of academic departments and programs are dominated by people who simply don’t conceive of the “purpose of education” in the same terms as you or I do. Sociology, professor Weide’s discipline, is particularly inundated with a group of people who don’t see the purpose of a university education as maximizing the intellectual potential of individual students, giving them the power to think through problems themselves, or even in terms of less practical (but I think very important) ends such as developing an aesthetic sense and appreciation for human culture. Rather quite a few denizens of sociology, anthropology, comp lit, English and other departments basically see their purposes as disabusing students of the ideological mystique, or the cultural attitudes produced by different power structures or social relations (white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism). Being as charitable as possible, I suppose they believe they are preparing students to be better citizens or members of their community by removing the political artifice and revealing “the reality behind the appearance.”
Of course, there is a lot of question begging that has to be ignored to accept this viewpoint as it regards education, and it seems to me that this constitutes political missionary work rather than pedagogy. But missionaries like other missionaries, so it’s not surprising to see someone like Weide, as juvenile and boorish as he may be, hired into a faculty position or even granted tenure.