Victor Davis Hanson, writing at the Corner:
It is likely (a) that Ahmadinejad was one of the terrorists who took American hostages in 1979, and so helped to start the quarter-century rise of radical Islamic jihadism that blew up on September 11; and (b) that he wants to visit September 11 precisely for the purpose of boasting when back home “I am going there, because I can,†the subtext, if not the overt message, cynically to commemorate what we deserved.
Well, that, and he wants one of those “My Islamic jihadist movement helped bring down the WTC, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” t-shirts you can only get at a handful of novelty shops over the bridge in Newark.
But please, continue.
What is stranger is why Columbia university tried to invite a terrorist to speak who denies the first holocaust and advocates a second one. This is not a matter of free speech but of common decency and the most elemental common sense.
Ah, but you see, Dr Hanson, spouting such Enlightenment bromides betrays you as one who has misunderstood the entire philosophical thrust of the linguistic turn — and so marks you as a relic, a curio from the ever-receding hegemony of partriarchal/consumerist western thought. To wit: what is “common” about “common sense” is merely a function of consensus — and when that consensus is built around the kind of Enlightenment rationale responsible for systemic oppression of the Other (by way of judging those who operate from within a competing paradigm through a prism cut to refract only western moral and intellectual standards), it is a consensus worth pressuring, until its very commonality is divorced from the kind of self-regard that would presume to tie that commonality to righteousness, or even rectitude.
Further, one man’s decency is another man’s blue-nosed oppression of alternative aesthetic sensibilities.
So get with the program, Doc, or we reserve the right to sequester your speech from the “free speech” practiced in the academy — which, in keeping with principles of true universal tolerance, will not allow for the kind of intolerance and hate inherent in Enlightenment thinking, with its propensity for making value judgments based on the positing of some grand (and dubious) set of “universals.”
And because there is nothing more intolerant than value judgments, your value judgments will be shunned. In the name of tolerance!
In light of the UC Davis’s recent refusal to have Larry Summers speak, we see once again what’s behind the curtain at our top universities — a generic class of 9-5 boutique leftists who rant and rave over inviting a liberal President who only gave the various women’s projects $50 million at Harvard, but who in turn are largely quiet about hosting a thug whose thugs recently imprisoned an Iranian-American female scholar and do more than any other nation-state in oppressing women.
Apples and oranges. Summers must be held to a higher standard, given that his situatedness as a western scholar makes him capable of recognizing just how presumptuous it is for him to presume. Whereas it would be silly to expect such things from Iranians — whose ways we cannot presume to understand.
Or, to put it another way, Summers’ arguments amount to hate speech within the enlightened paradigm of post-Enlightenment thinking. Whereas Ahmanidinajihadi’s arguments must be viewed through the prism of Islamic fundamentalism, which we cannot presume to understand, and so are in no position to judge.
Well, until we’re willing to strap on a vest and shred some Jews for Allah, that is.
Make you a deal, though: the minute an Islamic fundamentalist criticizes his Islamic fundamentalism, we will construe that as a valid criticism. Before we dismiss it as the criticism of one who, by virtue of that criticism, is no longer an authentic Islamic fundamentalist, and so is no longer granted the kind of authenticity necessary to level a legitimate critique of Islamic fundamentalism.
— Which, if that seems a bit counterintuitive, we can chalk up to a fidelity to western modes of “logic” that require the kind of intellectual consistency that is no longer obligatory under post-Enlightenment paradigms. Because western “logic,” grounded as it is in western assumptions, may not jibe with Islamic fundamentalist logic, which is grounded in competing assumptions that, like our own, are but a function of a particular consensus — no more “right” or “wrong” than our own.
And anyone who argues differently is perforce wrong, and should be shunned in polite academic company. Again, in the name of tolerance.
Bigot.
But then for forty years we have been taught that there are no absolutes, only culturally-constructed relative impressions predicated on power. So while we “know” Summers, as a powerful, rich white man, is hostile to women ,we can not use such standards to suggest the same of one of the multi-cultural other’, long a victim of Western colonialism, racism, and sexism. Would the feminists at UC Davis have objected to Bill Clinton speakingâ€â€a target of a sexual harassment suit, and dallying with a young female employee in an “asymmetrical” power relationship?
See? Now you’re catching on…!
Still, if one examines the recent shameful treatment of Cherminsky at Irvine, Summers at Davis, and the idea of inviting a terrorist to Columbia, the lowest common denominator is not even politics, but stupidity on the part of university administrators, who blunder into decisions, then give sanctimonious lectures about free speech, a topic they have rarely [...] studied and know nothing about, and then usually cave when reminded of how embarrassing they’ve become.
Oops. You’re backsliding…
All this is just another reminder how divorced from our common culture and workplace academics have become, and how little respect the public accords them. Proof?
The replacement for the gender-insensitive Summers apparently will be Gov. Schwarzenegger — who fought serial accusations of groping in his first gubernatorial campaign and was once sued for sexual harassment.
Sure. But that was just part of the Hollywood culture, “Dr” Hanson.
It’s a celebrity thing. You wouldn’t understand.
So please. Stick to misinterpreting as gloriously nationalistic the inherent socialist message embedded in the performance of the Battle of Thermopylae, and leave the heavy thinking on cultural collisions to those thinkers who are smart enough to recognize that thinking requires a willingness to eschew thinking in the name of the kind of thinking that doesn’t rely on the kind of thinking that, given how we are culturally inscribed, we invariably find ourselves thinking through.
You intellectual peasant.
(h/t a fine scotch)
Comment by Dan Collins on 9/20 @ 10:41 am #
Vintage smackdown.
Comment by ducktrapper on 9/20 @ 10:50 am #
What Jeff said, Hanson, you poopy-wit.
Comment by FA on 9/20 @ 10:50 am #
I think Jeff is having one of his lucid moments. You better lie down, sir. You’re making sense again.
Comment by N. O'Brain on 9/20 @ 11:03 am #
Jeff, that last paragraph?
If I follow it right, you just screwed youself in the ground.
Sorta like an academic Garden Claw.
Comment by Jeff G. on 9/20 @ 11:06 am #
Whatever. I have yoga to do. Which I’m told has salutatory effects. If you happen to be from the sub Continent, that is.
Here, it’s quite possible that all it’s good for is flavoring a rubber mat with your foot stink. But then, who am I to judge?
Comment by Diana on 9/20 @ 11:09 am #
Read it again N. O’Brain … it floated a balloon.
Comment by Jeff G. on 9/20 @ 11:13 am #
That “whatever” wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular, by the way. Some comments showed up in the interim.
I don’t follow you, N.O. Brain. But then, I’m on cold medicine, so the fault is probably mine.
Comment by Wethal on 9/20 @ 11:15 am #
You really must submit this to an academic journal. It’s a deconstructionist delight. ;)
Comment by Patrick Chester on 9/20 @ 11:15 am #
“Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.” “I’m just getting warmed up!”
;-)
Comment by DPR on 9/20 @ 11:24 am #
It’s been so long since I’ve been at University. I can no longer remeber whether it was the required Plato or his writings on Socrates (yes, that long ago) where we were first warned of the Sophists that were so tellingly parodied here. Too bad the modern Sophists in Academia don’t have a solid enough education to realize their “Newspeak” is older even than Newspeak.
Comment by A fine scotch on 9/20 @ 11:44 am #
Hey, Allah (or Bryan or somebody else at HotAir) linked to this post! They like you, Jeff. They really, really like you.
Comment by Aldo on 9/20 @ 12:01 pm #
If we see photos of Ahmanutjob with his clenched fist outstretched over ground zero in every media outlet for the next month I hope that at least they will include the caption “sponsored by Columbia University.”
It might not even be as galling if Americans on the right were as welcome at universities as Ahmanutjob.
Trackback by The Autopsy: Ahmadinejad is Going to College on 9/20 @ 12:01 pm #
Ahmadinejad is Going to College…
Well, if you must ask, it’s all about Bush Derangement Syndrome. The enemy of my enemy and all of that nonsense. Because Ahmadinejad regularly thumbs his nose at the US and Bush, the ITIs at Columbia are just wetting themselves with glee that they ca….
Comment by mojo on 9/20 @ 12:03 pm #
But, on the other hand, if we’re lookin’ to start a war with Iran then arresting and burning Dinner Jacket at the stake would probably do the job.
Comment by syn on 9/20 @ 12:04 pm #
A year before my mom passes she shared this bit of wisdom with me ‘feminists ruined this country’.
That said, my gender sucks; feminism has made me ashamed to have been born female.
Comment by LionDude on 9/20 @ 12:06 pm #
Hanson’s writing at the Hoover Institute clearly comes from experience. You should see the conniption fits the Stanford faculty are throwing because the Hoover Institute is having Donald Rumsfeld as a visiting fellow. Now, the HI isn’t even a part of Stanford. It’s just located near campus. Yet the faculty apparently can’t bear to breathe the same air as Rummy.
Tolerance.
Academic freedom.
Comment by syn on 9/20 @ 12:08 pm #
I really meant to type ‘passed’.
See what I mean….Oprahfried!
Comment by Jeffersonian on 9/20 @ 12:26 pm #
Can we question their patriotism yet?
Comment by dicentra on 9/20 @ 12:29 pm #
Jeff is like Michael Jordan: his performance improves when he’s sick. Like that time MJ demolished the Jazz in their first-ever trip to the finals. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
What is stranger is why Columbia university tried to invite a terrorist to speak who denies the first holocaust and advocates a second one.
On the other hand, Jeff could have saved himself a lot of tiring finger-tapping by providing the Standard Explanation for Stupidity in Academia:
1) The Neanderthal right and their knuckle-dragging leader have identified Ahmadinejad as The Enemy.
2) Academics define themselves almost exclusively as They Who Are Better Than The Masses.
3) Ergo, the inversion of whatever the Neanderthals say is what we’ll do and think.
4) Thereby retaining Our Sophistication In These Matters.
I wish I could say that it were more nuanced than that, but having been an intellectual snob myself, I can verify that it isn’t. The Intellectual Class, as they see themselves, has throughout history been seduced by the notion that they are Better Able To Discern matters political and moral by virtue of their formal education.
If any Big Lie persists on college campuses through all the intellectual fads and fashions, it is that.
Comment by JHoward on 9/20 @ 12:44 pm #
Good stuff, Jeff.
So. With the wheels coming off all over the place, what actually is the Left’s maladjustment?
I hate to label leftists — led by that dazzling braintrust of theirs — as merely stupid as much as I’m willing to label them willfully manipulative, but I’m beginning to wonder. With as many intellectual trainwrecks, frauds, and policy failures as 2007 has brought these clowns, what kind of such mind keeps expecting to be taken seriously?
Comment by Patricia on 9/20 @ 12:47 pm #
Jeff, you are brilliant. If you were a professor, your leftist brethren would be beating you up in the bathrooms…or just making fun of you at faculty meetings. All in the name of the discourse, of course.
Comment by The Fabulous Timbo on 9/20 @ 12:57 pm #
Typing this hurts my already scraped knuckles, so bear with me. When will the Left Who Knows Better start using the Geico Cavemen to get their point across to us on the right? “UHC: so easy a Caveman can understand it.”
Comment by The Stranger on 9/20 @ 1:20 pm #
it was the required Plato or his writings on Socrates
Plato and Socrates are idiots, apparently, compared with the geniuses like Tupac and Biggie whose “lyrics”are actually part of course curricula in academia today.
Comment by happyfeet on 9/20 @ 1:22 pm #
I shocked myself yesterday when I wrote that I would be loathe to hire a Columbia grad. But I think that if that idea remains out of the boundaries of a discussion of the pathology of academe, then I think it’s a pretty feckless thing to bitch about. If we don’t insist that students are accountable for their institution, then there’s no change agent.
Comment by km on 9/20 @ 1:35 pm #
I hate it when you intellectuals get together.
Comment by Pablo on 9/20 @ 1:40 pm #
It’s insanity, Jeff, and you’ve distilled it perfectly with VDH as the foil. The Ahmadinejad/Summers conflation is brilliant.
And I think N.O. Brain is referring to the academic persona.
Comment by SarahW on 9/20 @ 1:49 pm #
thinking requires a willingness to eschew thinking in the name of the kind of thinking that doesn’t rely on the kind of thinking that, given how we are culturally inscribed, we invariably find ourselves thinking through
Boy do they need a Cheney algorithm.
Comment by memomachine on 9/20 @ 2:14 pm #
Hmmmm.
“My Islamic jihadist”.
Sounds like the must-have toy of the 2007 Christmas season.
Comment by Aldo on 9/20 @ 3:20 pm #
HuffPo has a post up arguing in favor of allowing Ahmandinejad into Ground Zero.
Be warned: It requires less of a gag reflex than Jessica Cutler’s to read this turd.
Samples:
Comment by Matt, Esq. on 9/20 @ 3:28 pm #
*Can you get the visual? Extending hands like an olive branch  saying to the world that it is high time for Iran and the U.S. to join together to end terrorism, root out rogue extremist groups, and combat the injustice that nurtures them?*
Maybe we could help them nuke Israel.
WTF is wrong with these people.
Comment by Aldo on 9/20 @ 3:52 pm #
#29: Be warned: It requires less of a gag reflex than Jessica Cutler’s to read this turd.
Do I win some sort of record for the most metaphors mixed into the smallest sentence?
Moonbat: combat the injustice that nurtures them
Unless by “injustice” you are referring to cult religious fanaticism you utterly fail to comprehend what is driving the jihadists.
Comment by RDub on 9/20 @ 4:25 pm #
Re: #29 – ah, one of the ‘Jersey Girls’. Possessed of nearly as much unchallenge-able moral authority as Ms. Sheehan, for similiar reasons. I don’t see much political calculation in what she says, just an enormous and depressing amount of naivete.
Comment by tanstaafl on 9/20 @ 4:48 pm #
All the delicate little questions Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger says he will present to Arachnidjihad in the name of “free speech”.
Repression in Iranian society ? Sheesh, it will be growing by leaps and bounds as Arachnid yaks away at Columbia.
“the Jews” ? Arachnid will dance and smile and say nothing substantive like he did when a chador’ed Diane Sawyer yakked with him in Tehran. Holocaust denial ? Heck, some “Jews” themselves attended that big conference in Tehran.
Arresting “scholars” who Iran might suspect don’t think too highly of the mullahs ? Ending their professorships at Tehran university ? Tehran University is practically free of original thought by now, I would imagine.
Oh wait, Columbia is probably free of original thought by now, too.
Arachnid’s ‘05 & ‘O6 UN speeches were pure D gobbledygook. He especially loves that limelight where his speeches were sometimes interrupted by “thunderous” applause.
He’s speaking at “The UN” again on Monday
I’m really moving this time.
Cuba sounds nice, by comparison.
Comment by ducktrapper on 9/20 @ 5:05 pm #
There must be a way to rig up a decent lightning bolt. So you let him come and stand at gound zero … here’s your mark Mr. President. Smile.
We all just say Inshallah. Ah, just daydreaming folks.
Comment by SmokeVanThorn on 9/20 @ 6:04 pm #
Boy, was Ann Coulter wicked cruel and unfair to those Jersey Girls, or what?
Comment by MarkD on 9/20 @ 6:14 pm #
I guess “never again” is just another form of “once upon a time.” It’s not like anyone has time to read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” Words like genocide have lost their meaning.
Comment by Jeff Younger on 9/20 @ 6:58 pm #
Wow. That post kicked ass.
Comment by narciso on 9/20 @ 7:10 pm #
Ahmadinejad has been not a only kidnapper of the American hostages, but an IRGC commando,a hitman against minority dissidents like the Kurdish leader Quassemlou in Vienna, under the direction of Interior Minister Fallajian. a warden of Tehran’s Evin prison, which makes Abu Ghraib seem like a country club prison; an academic
censor, holocaust denier; heck he doesn’t need an invitation; he needs a bench warrant.
Comment by Swen Swenson on 9/20 @ 7:14 pm #
Ya think?
And that, in a nutshell, is why I think I’ll keep coming back here.
Comment by Merovign on 9/20 @ 9:02 pm #
Jeff shoots, he scores!
The whole concept of this “visit” will keep bloggers and other critics well-fed on the Meat of the Dumb for months.
It will be one of those “magic hat” moments that will just become part of the language.
Ain’t it sweet when Stupid is Public?
Comment by clarice on 9/20 @ 10:07 pm #
Je-ff, You know how wild and crazy it makes me when you whisper deconstructionist nothings in my ear..(Wonderful riff.)
Comment by naftali on 9/20 @ 11:30 pm #
Best satire I’ve seen, so far as I can remember now. I”m not a member of ‘The’ academic literati, but
there is a lot of satire out there and Jeff’s piece is to my mind as I mentioned above.
Does that mean I agree with every thing in it? Well, if Truth wasn’t visible through it would it be any good at all?
(the rhetorical question is not meant as a statement that to my mind only truth is visible through
Jeff’s satire.
I been reading this site regularly, relative to me.
Great site!
Naftali
Comment by naftali on 9/21 @ 12:42 am #
I posted this promotion at member of Pajamas media, Dean’s World.
http://deanesmay.com/posts/1190356010.shtml
Naftali
Comment by wishbone on 9/21 @ 2:13 am #
“Can you get the visual? Extending hands like an olive branch  saying to the world that it is high time for Iran and the U.S. to join together to end terrorism, root out rogue extremist groups, and combat the injustice that nurtures them?”
It’s been about eight months since I last wrote the following phrase, which is a REALLY long time for a record to stand in the continuing annals of lefty incoherence.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever read.
Someday one of these idiots will utter something so utterly stupid that the space/time contiuum will be ripped and drunken giant armadillos will invade this universe. For PW minions, it will be really cool until we get eaten. You have been warned.
And just to add a little empirical analysis:
U.S. defined extremist groups — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban.
Iranian defined extremist groups — JOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSSS, anyone who answers a Larry Craig foot tap, Salman Rushdie
Columbia defined extremist groups — ROTC recruiters
Trackback by Dean's World on 9/21 @ 2:55 am #
Promotion of mind….
This evening I came across this piece by the extremely well known and thought of Jeff Goldstein. In it, he challenges the commonsense cultural narrative of Victor David Hanson fr……
Comment by Spies, Brigands, and Pirates on 9/21 @ 7:10 am #
Of course, Socrates was suspicious of the written word in general, at least according to Plato.
He believed that writing would impair the memory and produce “thinkers” who did nothing but replay the thoughts of previous thinkers.
I wonder whether he would approve of what we’re doing here? It seems to have elements of both writing (which he didn’t like) and dialogue (which he did).
Comment by Dan Collins on 9/21 @ 7:29 am #
In part he might. He said that the text cannot deliver new answers to modified questions, and this addresses that part of it, presumably. It’s also thought that the insistance on personal interaction and the specific diagnosis of the teacher operates in effect as a lure to bring people to the particular school.
On the other hand, of course, Socrates, whilst an admirer of Homeric Epic, was highly critical of its centrality to paedeia.
Comment by tanstaafl on 9/21 @ 9:59 am #
Ole Soc’s Apology is such a fine thing…
“…So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: conceit of Man, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is, for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him. Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions to wisdom, and my conclusion was exactly the same…”
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/APOLOGY.HTM
Pingback by Jeff Goes All Pomo on 9/21 @ 11:19 am #
[...] the whole thing. Simply brilliant. Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm (though I would have gotten there eventually [...]
Pingback by "Among the Believers" on 9/22 @ 7:40 am #
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Comment by Rusty on 9/22 @ 11:17 am #
omment by Swen Swenson on 9/20 @ 7:14 pm #
… and leave the heavy thinking on cultural collisions to those thinkers who are smart enough to recognize that thinking requires a willingness to eschew thinking in the name of the kind of thinking that doesn’t rely on the kind of thinking that, given how we are culturally inscribed, we invariably find ourselves thinking through.
Ya think?
And that, in a nutshell, is why I think I’ll keep coming back here.
kinda awe inspirin’, ain’t it?
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