Franklin, you're too kind. Of course all three presidents should resign or be otherwise removed (which shouldn't be too hard with the ones from Penn and MIT, who are conspicuously white), but Gay was exemplary, so to speak. She looked as if she could scarcely believe she was being questioned, not about antisemitism but about anything whatsoever. I mean, the nerve. It was sort of reminiscent of Wife of Bill at the Benghazi hearings, albeit more tony and less truculent. Still, these women aren't in their jobs for nothing, and they're basically symptoms, not the disease.
Someone on X posted this morning that Gay's lifetime publication record resembles one or two years of production for a typical academic. Not only are these people political hires, they went in front of Congress and attempted to make a Constitutional argument about speech rights that they have obviously never supported. It's like I said about Velasco - his appeals to free speech might have carried some weight if he had spent six years fostering plurality of opinion at Artforum. Instead it looked like sniveling.
So would a straight white male with the same publication record and IQ as Gay have even been considered for an interview for the presidency of Harvard? Don't ask. No need to.
Supporting a police state (Hamas) over a free state (Israel), the only representative of Western civilization in the Middle East, is indeed evidence of social breakdown via moral fog. But it is not new in the US. Jane Fonda led a lot of college kids around by their noses with a similar attitude toward North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s. The breakdown began in the mid '50s via public schools and media. I saw it unfolding in the Dallas high school , ironically named "Sunset," I attended. The newer teachers operated like warehouse workers rather than dedicated, caring professionals. By the late 1960s the college campuses that I had experience with had been irredeemably infected with and guided by leftist ideology.
Ah, dear Jane. Well, it's not her fault that what amounted to treason was treated as mere Hollywood eccentricity, to call it that. Besides, it's not as if the public rejected her to the point of ruining her career. And she's still at it, too. Such a trooper.
It still is treason to a surprising many. A client came over wearing a jacket with patches sown on it, one of which read "Jane Fonda is a communist bitch." He had worn the jacket earlier to a church service! Anyway, I thought I saw a few days ago that making a case for dating younger men was her latest attempt at relevance. Heavens, all of that money and what's left of that celebrity couldn't make me see past all or even some of those cosmetic surgeries. But we digress.
The perception from Dallas, a blue city where money is all that keeps the usual attendant blue woes from undoing everything, is that the three ladies' gleefully smug answers to Stefanik's questions are just more evidence of the left's having again allowed that customary arrogance, one of the left's array of historic Achilles heels, to overplay its hand. The stench of wokeness is now even in the nostrils of the blue vote, and that vote is now torn, such that the question around here is whether the blue vote will California things by continuing to vote blue just because blue isn't red.
I have to ask, if Israel had remained a Norman conquest and it was a bunch of Aryans doing the bad stuff picking on poor innocent Palestinians, I wonder would modern liberalism give a damn? I mean, would anyone side with them, the Normans? After all, Israel was the holy land for them too.
I'm not asking this as an individual. I've simply noticed how modern liberalism ranks people on a scale of victimhood. Who's higher, who's lower. Ask yourselves: are you rooting for Kneeling Nancy or Derek Chauvin? Who's side are you on? Or, do you say, I don't have a dog in this fight?
Chauvin was doing his job in a really rough neighborhood. Maybe he made a mistake kneeling on the neck of sacred victim while being videoed by a very hostile group, who quite frankly, he may have begun to dislike after dealing with them for a long time. Sound familiar? Could Chauvin have been put – like the Jews in Israel – in an impossible position?
The thing with the Jews is that they're a two-for-one deal: they can be bashed solely on the basis of their imputed whiteness, but the bashers can also get their jollies (more covertly) from acting on their antisemitism under the guise of "virtue." I just hope hitherto deluded Jews wake up.
Virtue as in pushing for Sam Brinton car-jacking kumbaya you go girl safe spaces and all the other stuff? Or are you referring to neo-nazi hater bigot beavis and buttheads marching through the cornfields?
From a cultural standpoint I think non-Jewish whites are being bashed more. So far, statues of famous Jews are not being melted down. I don't know if the climate rebellion types are targeting Jewish artists.
The thing is that Gay, who doesn't have to "make up for" being white like Magill and Kornbluth, could have made herself look really good by rising above "progressive" orthodoxy and taking the high road. Of course, maybe she feels she has to dance with the one that brung her, as it were. It's all twisted.
She attempted to do exactly that. The problem was that Harvard has so obviously been run according to woke racism for so long that congressmen threw its own behavior back in its face.
I suppose that even normalized hypocrisy can overreach and go too far, which is a form of hubris. Harvard has gone so far out on a limb because it felt untouchable, not to mention giddy from its cutting-edge wokeness. The question is, will it get away with it?
So, in the latest Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Annual College Free Speech Rankings, released two weeks prior to October 7th, FIRE announced that Harvard achieved its lowest free speech ranking ever, ranking last out of 254 universities, with a rating of 0.00, the only university with an "abysmal" speech climate. Thus, any claim by Gay that Harvard truly respects free speech (by anyone, not just selected speakers) is exceedingly dubious, not to say a contemptible crock--assuming she's not totally clueless about and divorced from what transpires on her campus, which is unlikely.
Franklin, you're too kind. Of course all three presidents should resign or be otherwise removed (which shouldn't be too hard with the ones from Penn and MIT, who are conspicuously white), but Gay was exemplary, so to speak. She looked as if she could scarcely believe she was being questioned, not about antisemitism but about anything whatsoever. I mean, the nerve. It was sort of reminiscent of Wife of Bill at the Benghazi hearings, albeit more tony and less truculent. Still, these women aren't in their jobs for nothing, and they're basically symptoms, not the disease.
Someone on X posted this morning that Gay's lifetime publication record resembles one or two years of production for a typical academic. Not only are these people political hires, they went in front of Congress and attempted to make a Constitutional argument about speech rights that they have obviously never supported. It's like I said about Velasco - his appeals to free speech might have carried some weight if he had spent six years fostering plurality of opinion at Artforum. Instead it looked like sniveling.
https://dissidentmuse.substack.com/p/look-whos-suddenly-interested-in
But yes, they're symptoms. The disease is that society is breaking down. That Bari Weiss link is worth your attention.
So would a straight white male with the same publication record and IQ as Gay have even been considered for an interview for the presidency of Harvard? Don't ask. No need to.
Supporting a police state (Hamas) over a free state (Israel), the only representative of Western civilization in the Middle East, is indeed evidence of social breakdown via moral fog. But it is not new in the US. Jane Fonda led a lot of college kids around by their noses with a similar attitude toward North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s. The breakdown began in the mid '50s via public schools and media. I saw it unfolding in the Dallas high school , ironically named "Sunset," I attended. The newer teachers operated like warehouse workers rather than dedicated, caring professionals. By the late 1960s the college campuses that I had experience with had been irredeemably infected with and guided by leftist ideology.
Ah, dear Jane. Well, it's not her fault that what amounted to treason was treated as mere Hollywood eccentricity, to call it that. Besides, it's not as if the public rejected her to the point of ruining her career. And she's still at it, too. Such a trooper.
It still is treason to a surprising many. A client came over wearing a jacket with patches sown on it, one of which read "Jane Fonda is a communist bitch." He had worn the jacket earlier to a church service! Anyway, I thought I saw a few days ago that making a case for dating younger men was her latest attempt at relevance. Heavens, all of that money and what's left of that celebrity couldn't make me see past all or even some of those cosmetic surgeries. But we digress.
The perception from Dallas, a blue city where money is all that keeps the usual attendant blue woes from undoing everything, is that the three ladies' gleefully smug answers to Stefanik's questions are just more evidence of the left's having again allowed that customary arrogance, one of the left's array of historic Achilles heels, to overplay its hand. The stench of wokeness is now even in the nostrils of the blue vote, and that vote is now torn, such that the question around here is whether the blue vote will California things by continuing to vote blue just because blue isn't red.
Some good news resulting from the woke "white man bad, Jew white, thus Jew bad" theme: philanthropist Bill Ackman's letter to Harvard: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/11/05/bill-ackmans-letter-to-harvard-re-widespread-antisemitism-on-campus/
Yesterday Ackman was calling on all three of them to resign. One of the Penn former megadonors said “I wish I could quit giving twice.”
https://archive.ph/HZaFM
A lot of people need to be welcomed back into the civilizational fold now that they've realized that they've been marching behind screwballs.
Franklin, the Three Stooges were screwballs; the people you refer to are something else--something immeasurably more sinister and perverse.
I have to ask, if Israel had remained a Norman conquest and it was a bunch of Aryans doing the bad stuff picking on poor innocent Palestinians, I wonder would modern liberalism give a damn? I mean, would anyone side with them, the Normans? After all, Israel was the holy land for them too.
I'm not asking this as an individual. I've simply noticed how modern liberalism ranks people on a scale of victimhood. Who's higher, who's lower. Ask yourselves: are you rooting for Kneeling Nancy or Derek Chauvin? Who's side are you on? Or, do you say, I don't have a dog in this fight?
Chauvin was doing his job in a really rough neighborhood. Maybe he made a mistake kneeling on the neck of sacred victim while being videoed by a very hostile group, who quite frankly, he may have begun to dislike after dealing with them for a long time. Sound familiar? Could Chauvin have been put – like the Jews in Israel – in an impossible position?
The thing with the Jews is that they're a two-for-one deal: they can be bashed solely on the basis of their imputed whiteness, but the bashers can also get their jollies (more covertly) from acting on their antisemitism under the guise of "virtue." I just hope hitherto deluded Jews wake up.
Virtue as in pushing for Sam Brinton car-jacking kumbaya you go girl safe spaces and all the other stuff? Or are you referring to neo-nazi hater bigot beavis and buttheads marching through the cornfields?
I was referring to purported liberationist, anti-colonial and anti-oppressor virtue.
From a cultural standpoint I think non-Jewish whites are being bashed more. So far, statues of famous Jews are not being melted down. I don't know if the climate rebellion types are targeting Jewish artists.
See the Seth Baron link overhead.
Whites are becoming Jews, or like them? Interesting idea. Baron might be right. The way things are going it's certainly possible.
The thing is that Gay, who doesn't have to "make up for" being white like Magill and Kornbluth, could have made herself look really good by rising above "progressive" orthodoxy and taking the high road. Of course, maybe she feels she has to dance with the one that brung her, as it were. It's all twisted.
She attempted to do exactly that. The problem was that Harvard has so obviously been run according to woke racism for so long that congressmen threw its own behavior back in its face.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-big-university-fail
I suppose that even normalized hypocrisy can overreach and go too far, which is a form of hubris. Harvard has gone so far out on a limb because it felt untouchable, not to mention giddy from its cutting-edge wokeness. The question is, will it get away with it?
So, in the latest Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Annual College Free Speech Rankings, released two weeks prior to October 7th, FIRE announced that Harvard achieved its lowest free speech ranking ever, ranking last out of 254 universities, with a rating of 0.00, the only university with an "abysmal" speech climate. Thus, any claim by Gay that Harvard truly respects free speech (by anyone, not just selected speakers) is exceedingly dubious, not to say a contemptible crock--assuming she's not totally clueless about and divorced from what transpires on her campus, which is unlikely.
Someone cited the FIRE report to Gay at one point. She dismissed it.
Well, she could hardly confirm its findings, which would have sunk her completely.