Items of Interest, Free Speech 101 Edition
"Occasionally the mask slips."
Jonathan H. Adler, Private Universities That Reject First Amendment Principles Put Themselves At Legal Risk. “One thing I have always found curious about university administrators who seek to avoid conforming their policies with the First Amendment is that they are implicitly adopting at least one of two arguments. Either they believe that their students, staff, and faculty are not deserving of the same speech and expression rights as their state university counterparts, or they believe that (as administrators) they are less capable of fulfilling the university's educational and truth-seeking missions than their state university counterparts.”
Douglas Murray, Conversation Is an Art. “[Roger Scruton] argued passionately for the fundamental importance of beauty on many occasions; here, he tells the listener: ‘Beauty isn’t this casual thing that you might choose to be interested in or not—just as someone might choose to be interested in chocolate or something! It is, if you like, the thing that attaches us to the world in the first place. It is the thing that is telling us: “You belong here.”’”
Wilfred M. McClay, Free Speech Is Not Enough. “Yes, a university is a community of inquiry. But it also is something more than that: a community of shared memory, the chief instrument by which the achievements of the past are transmitted to the present as a body of knowledge upon which future knowledge can be built. Without the prior existence of that body of shared knowledge to build upon, the concept of progress is empty. This is what it means to be a civilization: a social formation in which such transmission takes place continuously and reliably, forming the basis of a rich and enduring common life.”
Michael Shellenberger, The World Just Took A Giant Leap Toward Totalitarianism. “[T]he totalitarian takeover of Brazil is a model for what the Democrats and the legacy news media want for the whole world. Pro-censorship scholars at Stanford and Harvard, Democrats in Congress, and the US news media have long recognized that the First Amendment is an obstacle to their plans. And so they have supported censorship efforts by nations with weaker free speech protections, like Brazil, Britain, Australia, and the European Union, to censor and even block X.”
Oliver Wiseman, The Global War Against Free Speech. “It’s easy for Americans to point at what’s going on in Brazil—if they’ve heard the news—and think it’s a bad thing that’s happening far away. But the logic of Brazil’s new censorship is in line with what many in America’s ruling class wish they could do here. Many are too polite to say as much. But occasionally the mask slips.”
, Eugène Boudin's beaches and skies. “Not only by simply observing from nature was Boudin able to create such an effect of frozen time and movement. Many pieces by artists such as Théodore Rousseau of the Barbizon school as well as John Constable’s English landscapes have the opposite effect in creating a sense of the eternal rather than the momentary. However, by situating himself always at a considerable distance from his subject matter, Boudin found his subjects blended into each other tonally, only distinguished by certain features and colors.” , The Wedge of Allegiance. “I was attacked last fall, in the middle of the city I’ve made my home for 30 years, in Times Square, following a pro-Hamas rally earlier that day. A random man came out of the crowd, punched me in the face, and called me a kike. I’d never been hit in my life. Was never attacked for being a Jew. What hurt more than the attack was the skepticism I was met with on social media, when I posted a photo of my bloody face and gave an account of what had happened. How could my black attacker know I was Jewish? He didn’t know I was Jewish. He just wanted to punch a Jew.”Helen Dale, Merit, Inclusion, and Raygun at the Olympics. “The best explanation for Raygun’s terrible effort and her presence at the Olympics amid a stellar performance from an able national team is this: she emerged from a tradition that does not enshrine excellence. That tradition is the academy. Yes, Rachael Gunn has a PhD in ‘cultural studies.’ She lectures in it at Australia’s Macquarie University. It’s called Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing scene: a B-girl’s Experience of B-boying. Follow the link. I promise I am not making this up.”1
David Miciks, The MAD Files. “MAD was, for all its cynicism, too determinedly silly to be cool, much less superior. The magazine never took on self-righteous airs, and never shared in the mean-spirited snarkiness that drives our current politically correct mud wrestling.”
Starts tomorrow: “David Ligare - A Specific View” at Hirschl & Adler, through October 4.
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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style by Wilhelm Worringer. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia” is an online exhibition representing the physical one in New York in June 2024.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.
I regret to inform James Beaman that he has absolutely no case as far as the usual suspects go, and wouldn't have one even if he weren't a Jew and had been attacked by mistake. Because racism, or cultural differences, or context (as in "my truth"). The point is not right or wrong, but fashion.
As for this "Raygun" person, please. I didn't watch any of the Olympics, since the opening ceremonies told me everything I needed to know about the whole business. No doubt there were great athletes worth watching, but sports to me is simply a form of entertainment, and one I can easily do without.