So. To hear dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College, Alan Jones, tell it, those folks who criticize the rather obvious and intellectually dangerous “progressive” bias in the modern academy (mostly in the humanities and social sciences) are part of a vast rightwing conspiracy funded by shady conservative sugar daddies.
Which, even were it true (and I don’t think it is) wouldn’t bother me so much, I don’t think—given that the goal of this sweeping conspiracy is to, you know, do away with overwhelmingly leftwing ideological bias in the contemporary university system, a bias that has reduced the humanities and social sciences to bastions of anti-intellectualism and politically sanctioned groupthink.
And on balance, that’d be a good thing, regardless of who funded the effort—though let’s be honest: I rather doubt progressives are crazy enough to fund studies that would indict themselves.
Anyway, one of the prominent conspirators named in Dr Jones’ piece is Cathy Young, who is more than a little taken aback by the allegation:
Jones’s allegation that I am a shill for my right-wing masters is as ridiculous as a right-wing blogger’s charge some months ago that a blogpost I wrote disputing a specific allegation (by the same blogger) of pro-liberal bias in the New York Times’ news coverage was done at the bidding of the New York Times, since I am a columnist for the Boston Globe and the Globe is owned by the Times corporation. It is also a disgusting smear, and I expect a retraction and an apology.
As for Jones’s larger point: Yes, right-of-center critics of the academy tend to drift to institutions that are congenial to their views. That does not invalidate their arguments—any more than Jones’s defense of the academy is compromised by the fact that he himself holds an academic post. Of course, we could also talk about the lavish funding for left-leaning academic projects from the Ford, Rockefeller and Macarthur foundations, to name only three. Ironically, Jones’s diatribe resembles nothing so much as David Horowitz’s attempt to sniff out George Soros’s money behind every left-wing venture. It is pure left-wing McCarthyism.
As regular readers know, I have, on occasion, decried the anti-intellectualism of the modern academy, and yet I remain sadly unfunded—this despite my rather scathing denounciations of specific programs that have insinuated themselves into the foundation of university culture, weakening it from the inside like so many “progressive” termites.
But perhaps my lack of remuneration for services rendered is just an oversight, and the check is in the mail. Otherwise, maybe it’s time I considered suing Olin, Scaife, et al. for back pay…
Ah, yes, the “we’re all shills!” argument. Never can tell if that’s projection, or just envy.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sign for my Cuban cigars. Hand-rolled, of course.
I don’t know Jeff, maybe Kos (see “Tin Foil Hats”) or those guys at Truthout could tell you what evil right wing corporations and groups can provide funding.
You do have what appears to be the full time job of caring for a kid. I don’t think they fund you to do that. Have you tried applying at Heritage, or at ACTA? Or even places like the James Madison Program at Princeton?
Maybe you’re in the wrong field. Maybe Law and Economics is more for you.
But I think anymore they like em young and cheap. It’s all about the interns. Get those Heritage interns living in that Heritage dorm—what possible bacchanal could they be protecting them from in DC of all places—and train away. So you might be SOL as far as attempting a career change now. You’d likely be behind a whole slew of ideologically super-qualified Patrick Henry and Ave Maria grads. Or at least outbid by them.
Then again, you’re already doing what you do for free. Maybe the economics classes you took were awful. Maybe progressives are to blame. The problem with mine was that it was just an offshoot from the business school and thus they just taught textbook theory—Mankiw, monetarism, etc…
Olin is out of business. You might try AEI – just to watch some lefty heads spin like cenrifuges.
A proposal entitled “PNAC – Phase VIII” would be read, maybe not funded but hey, worth a shot. Proposals have to be written in Straussian.
a vast rightwing conspiracy funded by shady conservative sugar daddies.
Remind me again how all these lefty academics get their money? Oh right, government and lefty foundations. Kettle, meet pot.
Oh, and someone tell George Soros his phone is ringing. It’s time to MoveOn again.
You know, people criticize Domenech, and rightly so. But at least he wasn’t running a pay-per-post scam like Armstrong/Kosola.
Jeff, in lieu of banning trolls, perhaps you should consider creating a separate Troll Comment Thread and direct those IP addresses there. That way, the trolls, and those that persist in feeding them, could have their own playground.
Actually, I think the next killer app would be something that allows you to trick trolls into thinking their comments have posted, when actually they are the only ones who can see them.
The shady ones are just for distraction. The sunny ones are far, far more dangerous.
BECAUSE OF THE HARMFUL UV RAYS!
It must be a conspiracy since it’s probabaly not racism or Haliburton. But you never know, maybe a conspiracy led by Haliburton and motivated by racism. Yeah, that’s the ticket…
Jeff,
Just read your web site, and I really like it. I’ve decided to provide some funding for you.
Go get yourself a tub of paste, and send me the bill.
RMS
Hey, Mellonhead—stay off my turf or you know what you’ll get.
And you’ll know you’ve been cockslapped, too.
TallDave4:
I’m with you. I suspect this latest influx of trolls is some kind of initiative developed in the wake of Kos’ meetup in Las Vegas–a homework assignment or something similar.
I don’t know about actual money from Halliburton, but I can send you a really cool, bright red Halliburton can cozy. I think I still have some little flashlights and key chains too, but I can’t find them. It’s not like scoring major funding, but they do have a tendency to make heads spin in certain quarters!
I’m freaking sick of just hearing about these rightwing sugardaddies!!!
WHERE’S MY FRIGGING CHECK?!
Do you know what I’m out of pocket on flags and printing my own counterprotest picket signs? I’m tired of having to keep track of events and my own opinions by myself! I want money, I want a nice weekly set of pre-packaged talking points, professionally printed signs and I WANT THEM NOW.
The usual suspects funded my graduate education, and that of a number of my best friends, with no strings attached. I would think I was roughly in the belly of the beast, and all I saw was people doing good economics. If people want to engage in the genetic fallacy, let ‘em.
I have been reading Jeff for a long time, which means (unfortunately) I have also been reading actus for most of that time.
I’ve wondered what actus must look like in real life and the image that keeps coming up is this guy.
Am I alone in this?
Swen, we need to trade. All i have is scores of Exxon stuff. Mind you these “Great Moments in Drilling” coffee mugs are cool, but i hear that Halibalo has a great “Roughnecks swimsuit calander.”
Nah. That guy is funny.
I mean, not “Duck, here comes the Sledge-O-Matic!” funny or “If that red-haired bastard pulls one more prop out of the trunk I’m going to put a gun in my mouth” funny, but … funny funny.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sign for my Cuban cigars. Hand-rolled, of course.
On the thighs of 16 year old virgins.
I flash back to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure myself when I imagine actus. A shorter, goofier looking Bill.
When I meet them in person, people never turn out to look as good as I had imagined.
marcus, a topical Emo joke:
I can’t wait for the day I’m wealthy enough to be a conservitive sugar-daddy…
Yeah, where were these so-called sugar paters when I was getting my M.A.? I did have two funding sources tho’…my life savings and working. Erk.
You might get somewhere with the money men if you’d stop insisting on that “I get paid by the word” clause.
Something is afoot at the Circle K!
Dammit, these lefties keep talking about all this funding, where’s my check? I’ve been doing right-wing agitation for years, for free! Maybe I should shoot Scaife a memo for a grant . . .
tw: sense as in this prof makes no . . .
Okay, it’s not much like that, and there’d be a striking lack of irony if it were, but the quote’s a perfect example of why Dr. Dots is a few blades short of a grassy knoll.
You have to be a jerky, sweat-spraying paranoid to read a Cathy “Both Sides Now” Young piece and think that she’s taken any kind of stand at all, let alone one chosen for her by shadowy right-wing paymasters.
This conspiracy doesn’t have enough Jews in it to work anyway. Back to the dot-connecting board.
(Spirograph sounds.)
Jeff, in lieu of banning trolls, perhaps you should consider creating a separate Troll Comment Thread and direct those IP addresses there. That way, the trolls, and those that persist in feeding them, could have their own playground.
I’m interested in how conservatives employ the term “troll”. None of the leftists who post on this site have ever, as far as I’ve seen, used foul language (which sets them apart from many of the conservatives who post on the site). They rarely if ever impugn the intelligence of other commenters, or even insult conservatives and Republicans more generally. While you may feel that they are trotting out “standard leftist” talking points, I would argue very strongly that this is not the case; we can get into this if you wish. But in general I think you are abusing the concept of the “troll” when you employ it to refer simply to anyone who does not agree with David Horowitz. As opposed to people whose posts consist substantially of acronyms like “POADYLF” and so forth.
I suppose you missed the one we had over the weekend that insisted it was Jeff’s cock. That filthy little fucker…
Paste eating moron and decider in chief are terms of respect and affection, no doubt.
Hoo boy, here come the standard leftist talking points…
People who disagree with Rumsfeld are trolls. Those who disagree with Horowitz are demons from hell.
IFHT. STFWO, WDY?!? Stupid murderous Americans…
Paste eating moron appears mainly on Atrios; I haven’t seen it here. But I confess as a relatively new troll I may have missed it. “Decider in chief” is hardly an insult; it’s an ironic jibe. If you guys confined your ad hominems to “all you internet-inventors out there” or whatever, it would substantially improve the tone of this site.
What else can we do to make you happy, brooksfoe?
What are you willing to do to make us happy?
OT, directed at brooksfoe:
I dunno, I argued in actus’s favor for a little while because of the value of the dissent and all. But then I realized that he wasn’t bothering to dissent thoughtfully so much as he was out to be a nuisance and get other commenters to direct their comments to his (typically) non-sequiturs and cryptic one-liners, when we all showed up to talk about the post. (Usually.) That is, hijack attempts.
Also, did you miss the Big Brain, Jack Roy, on the thread where we were trying to mourn the two soldiers who were tortured and killed in Iraq, and to discuss what we anticipated and, later, observed Western response to be? The only utility he served on that thread was as a shining (OK, greasy) example of exactly the response we expected: “The US is just as guilty of torture!” with nothing but an un-captioned photo of a bleeding guy and a lot of stuff about Abu Ghraib to back him up. And no denouncement of the torture-murders we were there to discuss, but a whooooole lot about people’s grammatical and usage errors. He was obnoxious.
This is Jeff’s party; he sets the tone, which includes profanity and blue language sometimes but doesn’t include unsupported arrogance, which I also take to read the arrogance of threadjacking. (Supported “arrogance,” post-related and born of actual knowledge, is another matter.) <shrug> That’s my take.
You’re probably right that with a blogger who uses profanity pretty liberally, it’s misplaced to expect commenters not to. But it’s also incredibly hard to combine profanity with any kind of reasoned debate; it’s definitely unrealistic to expect anyone, troll or otherwise, to respond rationally or interestingly to scatalogical insults.
Back on topic, and with a lack of specifics I know will be jumped on: David Horowitz is to the right as Ward Churchill is to the left. Neither the mainstream nor the intelligent people on his side should have anything to do with him. His charges against specific professors are usually libellous nonsense; it’s no wonder he cut his teeth as a vicious, slandering, violent left-wing radical in the early ‘70s. It’s in his character, and nothing about him has changed.
Looks like you’re fucked then.
“Progressives” hate David Horowitz for one simple reason: he’s a heretic from their religiously held political beliefs and leftists still burn heretics at the stake.
It’s that simple.
See Todd Gitlin’s comments on Horowitz’s ill-informed and slanderous attacks on him, this article noting Horowitz’s slanderous misquoting of Eric Foner… Basically, if you’re going to try to charge serious American academics with being “defenders of Communism”, you’re probably going to have to tell some lies to do it.
It’s Jeff Goldstein’s Theory of Pseudo-intellectual Convection!
Or to refute it. Angela Brown, Marcuse, Nicholas de Genova… come on, guys, jump in here…
Crap. Angela Davis (who, okay, is brown…)
Marcuse has been dead for a long time. I don’t believe Horowitz is advocating a purge of the cemeteries. As for Angela Davis, I believe we were talking about SERIOUS American academics. And I’m not sure what her line on Communism is. She was a Black Panther, but then so, at the time, was Horowitz.
Looks like you’re fucked then.
Oh, well played, sir.
In the mean time, Brooks, if you don’t like the tone here, relief is just a click away.
brooksfoe, your Foner link doesn’t work. I’m curious to see how he was “slandered”.
Just tell them, “Flannery will get you nowhere.”
Oh boy! A sanctimonious liberal. Brooksfoe looks to be today’s sacrificial offering from the left. Nicely played indeed, Pablo.
TW: returned, as in to sender.
Scaife?
Richard Mellon Scaife?
That guy still owes me money.
Berube wrote on it.
Berube? When last heard from he was raising the tone by calling me a “wanker.”
Which, what is it with the left’s “intellectuals”, anyway? Even their barbs are derivative of Euro-speak?
Just call me a dick, for Chrissakes! And try some Peirce and William James. They’re a hundred times more interesting than Foucault or Bordieu, though you don’t sound quite so continental when you’re dropping their names in conversation…
I see brooksfoe used the term “slanderous” twice, and yet I don’t see a single fucking example of slander.
Misattributing a quote is goddamned sloppy, not slanderous, especially when the motherfucking error is acknowledged when caught by the assholes who made it. This seems to be the case with Foner, that douchebag. I have no idea how that shitbag Gitlin was slandered. The little prick accuses Horowitz of some cherry picking bullshit, not of slander.
What the fuck, anyway?
Or dropping their u’s.
You mean, aside from having been Gus Hall’s running-mate for president?
Oh … you probably don’t know who Gus Hall was, either.
I don’t htink that’s the same as wanker. And all that you add may be quite nice and true, but berube does list the beef between Foner and Horowitz.
I liked his D-Ho for horowitz.
I know who Gus Hall is, and that’s a pretty conclusive statement on what Angela Davis’s stance on Communism is. The question remains whether you guys can find any serious American academics, respected people with current appointments at major American universities, who “defend” Communism. As in argue that it’s an equally good or superior system to democratic capitalism. I’m not talking about people who don’t sufficiently condemn the evils of the French Communist left, or express moral ambiguity about Sartre’s Communism, or say it was wrong to support the Contras against the Sandinistas, or try to explain how the German Communist Party did some positive things in the early 1930s which won it working-class sympathy. I’m talking about people saying “Communism is good.” As such. Are there any serious American academics who would stand behind the statement “Communism is good”?
If you can find any, I will be interested to hear it.
Pablo:
Hey, man, I dunno either.
Berube is a rude and contemptuous snot who enjoys puffing himself up by denigrating others. Which is the very definition of a wanker in my opinion.
There were thoughts in those dots, brooksfoe. Observations. Arguments, even.
So naughty words must make you blind, brooksfoe. Just as I suspected.
What else blinds you?
We might just make some progress here today, friend.
tw: worked
It certainly did. Little fucker bought it hook, line and sinker.
Alas, gone forever. The tragedy.
Promise?
Wow. They have a Wednesday special on qualifiers or something? You’ve given yourself quite the set of outs there. My guess is you’re not prepared to accept that any of the names you might hear meet those criteria.
There were defenders of both theoretical and Soviet communism where I went to school, sir. Right there in the economics department. Defenders of central planning in all its other guises, too. I mean, unless you think Wassily Leontieff wasn’t close enough to the action to count.
So, Jeff posts about some obsessive lefty trying to connect right-wing dots, and Brooksie shows up with a complaint about the alleged misuse of the word “troll,” and demanding the citation of “serious…respected [academics] with current appointments at major American universities, who ‘defend’ Communism.” (You know, like some guy at I-never-heard-of-before Pitzer College!)
OK, Brooksie, you just outed yourself as a troll. Now go home, hijack a thread on your own blog, and stop stealing Jeff’s bandwidth.
(Apparently, too self-absorbed and unironic to notice, ehh?)
Is Leontieff alive? He’d be 100. And, according to his online bio, left Russia at the end of the NEP period, which is suggestive. But I don’t know anything about him. What did he say in defense of Communism? (And, no, “central planning” doesn’t count, unless you think Japan is Communist.)
What is Pitzer College? I never heard of it before.
No, they’re still right up there. ^^^
Try squinting. Let’s see if that helps.
No, Prof. Leontieff passed away in 1999. I shouldn’t pick on him, as the Soviets allegedly kicked him out (I have no confirmation of this, but it’s what one heard).
His work animated a lot of the discussions of central planning that still go on today, however, and I’m not going to let you separate Soviet communism and central planning with a wave of the hand, since anyone familiar with the economic debates on the feasibility of communism knows that a replacement for the market mechanism is pretty important…
And Japan centrally planned? Please.
Just toyota.
DrSteve, I’ll make an admission which will no doubt be used on this blog to thwack me like a ping-pong ball many times in the future and say that I’ve never taken a course in economics. But I do know a lot about Russian and Soviet history.
None of which relates to my objection to your post, which is: of course a replacement for the market mechanism is incredibly important to communism. But to say that someone who says that the market mechanism should sometimes or even often be replaced, is actually defending communism, is to take the part for the whole. Patriotism is incredibly important to fascism, but I can defend patriotism without defending fascism.
You may argue that Japan is not centrally planned, but you can’t deny that very many major economic decisions in Japan are made in a fashion that ignores market mechanisms. The same has been true of South Korea, Malaysia, and many other successful economies which are definitely not communist. As well as a few economies, like Vietnam and China, which still call themselves “communist” though they are actually largely market-based, and (fortunately) bear little relationship to the Soviet model.
actus, you do understand that planning within a firm and national economic planning aren’t the same—right? I shouldn’t have to explain why.
I understand. But I also understand that similar principles can apply, in terms of being an economics teacher. The matrix operations, etc…
MITI-Men, attack!
Well, brooksfoe, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about how close “argu[ing] that [communism is] an equally good or superior system to democratic capitalism” comes to defending the feasibility of central planning as an alternative to markets for allocating *all* resources. At NYU I can tell you I heard the latter all the live-long day.
I’ll grant you a distinction, but I’m not sure what it amounts to.
OK. I think a lot of the difference, which I think is a really big one, is in the “democratic” part of the equation. But also…was this the ‘70s? Maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t think the total-central-planning argument has been heard in the halls of academe for lo this many a year. And if Horowitz is still battling the radicals of his youth, he’s fighting phantoms.
The optimization problem may look the same. The question is where the prices come from, and whether they can be relied upon to guide the direction of resources to their highest-valued uses if the market mechanism has been replaced. Unfortunately this is a *long* story. Just google “socialist calculation debate.” Well, on second thought you may want to have a hearty meal and a pee first
brooksfoe, congratulations on getting thoughtful people to engage you on your question – but it’s not the same as what Jeff was talking about, I don’t think. He was talking about “leftwing ideological bias in the contemporary university system, a bias that has reduced the humanities and social sciences to bastions of anti-intellectualism and politically sanctioned groupthink,” not “unwavering defense of Communism in the contemporary university system.” It’d be a bold (if obtuse) professor indeed who, today, came right out and taught that Communism was THE thing…
OTOH, it’s easy, easy, to find professors who embrace the idea that the United States, because of its kleptocratic leaders, endemic racism and sexism, and boorish uneducated unwashed masses, is inferior in all its essentials to, say, Denmark, Cuba (esp. wrt health care), or Canada, yet because of a completely unfair distribution of wealth (giving them the benefit of the doubt, I use “distribution” in the statistical rather than the IRS sense), the U.S. enjoys a standard of living that we don’t deserve and should reject both personally and for all our countrymen and -womyn through policy decisions.
Only somewhat on-topic, one of my comm studies profs, a militant vegetarian, once explained patiently to a student that the reason he wore leather shoes (Birks, natch) was that leather was a by-product of the slaughter of animals that was going to happen anyway because so many Americans, unenlightened carnivorous cretins that they were, were never going to care about animals enough to stop eating meat. Seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that if you’re making a philosophical and moral decision not to cause the death of animals by eating meat, you ought to apply the same logic to your clothing choices. After all, your not eating meat is not, itself, going to bring the meat-packing industry to its knees, yet you made that decision anyway. (Not to perpetuate a stereotype, but he was overweight, sloppy, and looked as if he might harbor insects in his giant beard. I did not enjoy his classes, for these and other reasons.)
All true. It’s Horowitz who has actually accused various people of defending Communism, not Goldstein, and I was taking the question in that direction.
It is certainly true that the world is full of idiots. At present, it seems to me that hypocritical vegetarians are rather unthreatening figures, in comparison to people who like to fantasize about warfare; and that’s related to my partisan sympathies. There are also people still willing to assign blame for all the world’s inequities to the legacy of colonialism. But, again, they don’t seem to be in control of anything important in the real world, and in the academy, the worst they do is impede better discussion about how to resolve the world’s inequities.
What I do object to is the tendency to lump people who point to the things that actually are done better in Denmark together with those who think that everything is perfect in Denmark (and perfectly rotten in the US). Scandinavian countries have better reproductive health policies and better drug policies than the US, based on any outcome you could point to. They have better and vastly cheaper health care systems, as do France, Germany and even the UK. The US has a very serious problem with its health care system, and the rational approach would be to move it in the direction of the systems that are working better in other countries. Yet when liberals, progressives, whatever say this, we are relentlessly accused of advocating Communism, hating free enterprise, and on and on. And I simplly do not think that the people Horowitz and Goldstein would target in any purge of academia would be confined to the idiots. In fact, as these things go, it’d probably be a lot of really interesting people who would go first.
Except for Ward Churchill. You want to take him down, by all means go ahead. I understand he’s getting the boot for plagiarism anyway though, right?
I know. Firms price things internally too.
actus, I’m afraid you’re still missing the point. Even firms that price resources internally have a reference point for all other prices, if they’re embedded in a market system. This permits rational calculation. Do all the activity-based accounting you want within a firm, at the end of the day you can tell whether the decisions created or destroyed value by reference to market prices.
Now make nonmarket pricing hold for all resources simultaneously. See the difference? That is, if I’ve understood you—which, well, always in doubt, I’m afraid.
Oh, and brooksfoe, I neglected to respond to a question you raised earlier. I attended graduate school in the early-to-mid ‘90s. And no, not the 1890s, although at the right schools that could have been damned interesting.
What if any college did brooksfoe go to without taking ONE economics class? I would have scarcely thought it possible. I know it’s core curriculum at NYU – Micro and Macro. Unless of course he went to school in Vietnam.
BTW: bf: Nathan Lane is openly gay (I asked my gf just in case I was slandering him; she says it was in Time magazine) and Karen Finley, aside from whatever lesbian tendencies she has, displays her naked body on stage. To be dipped in chocolate, IIRC. Either would I think buy you a stoning in jihad-land. Clear?
And by the way, your qualifiers on just what *kind* of people advocate communism reminds me of black activists defining racism as something only white people do because underprivileged subgroups structurally can’t be racist.
Which, I’m sure, comforted the Central Park jogger no end as her skull was split open by those poor underprivileged utes.
TW: Well, there I go again, feeding the troll.
What if any college did brooksfoe go to without taking ONE economics class?
Let’s just say it was a college which I doubt you think is a bad place to study. Thwack, thwack – we knew it was coming…
Anyway, above, you raised the issue of censoring death metal and pornography, and then asserted that leftists would oppose such censorship because of the effects it might have on Nathan Lane and Karen Finley. You forgot to touch base at islamofascism. The whole argument seems bizarre to me, since plenty of leftists do support restrictions on hate speech in music and on pornography, while rightists of a libertarian bent oppose such restrictions, and the consumers of death metal and pornography are at least as likely to be right-wingers. Putting Nathan Lane into the mix was refreshingly weird, but using Finley in conjunction with “pornography” just reminds leftists of one reason why we should never trust right-wing anti-porn initiatives, which is that the laws inevitably are used not to restrict the actual multibillion-dollar San Fernando Valley porn industry which floods the internet and our kids with vast quantities of material that would probably shock Caligula, but to harass art photographers like Jock Sturges and performance artists like Karen Finley. And, yes, Karen Finley stuck a potato up her ass onstage; and Mel Gibson made a movie consisting entirely of an almost naked man being whipped to a bloody pulp and nailed to a post.
ok, one more time. I’m not doubting that you went to college, if you say you did. However, if you didn;t have to study economics, I in fact question the college’s worth. If you are being sly and intimating that it is an Ivy or some other name school, fine, be coy. I maintain that it is shocking to me that you could get out without one econ class.
Were you a B.A.? Perhaps that explains it; I’m still amazed that even a community college could allow that. But no doubt we must believe you. Actually I don’t see why you couldn’t tell us the name; I doubt it would identify you personally, and I promise not to accuse you of boasting.
Re: Lane, Finley: it does make me wonder at the worth, or at least the selectivity of the school you attended, if you can’t understand my overarching point,
which was that porn, death metal, homosexuality, nudity, vile performance art, statues, bare ankles, shaving your beard, ice cream with the wrong logo, etc., etc., etc., is all pretty much equally worthy of death to Islamofascists,
and that if we must appease them by not making admittedly lame Marine music videos (which I think was the start of that thread?), why not throw you (I’m sure you do *something* that would annoy them) and Karen Finley under the bus (not Lane, unlike you and Finley he has talent and seems a truly nice guy) first?
So now do you understand, and want to agree/disagree from that point, or do we get more of the befuddled act from you? Yeah, no, I fear I must blame you for any reading comprehension issues. I don’t believe I forgot anything. But thanks for playing.
And yes, sticking a potato up your ass (what kind of potato? how big? did she wash it? peel it? was it cooked?) is surely not any kind of porn, nor art, I would enjoy; I believe I can tell the difference, though. Why don’t you go meet up with the killers of PFCs Menchaca and Tucker and ask them what they think about such subtle distinctions? For that matter I wonder how that would play wherever you are in Vietnam, but doing it with some jihadis would ensure that you would get the point.
TW: The ways I waste my time around here…
Well, FWIW, my alma mater didn’t require any econ courses either. But I already question its worth because it gave me a diploma.
I’ll join the FWIW club and say I have regretted not taking an econ course many times. But guess what? There are a lot of fields of knowledge in the world, and many have prospered on Wall St. without an undergrad econ course.
Now, you’ve pinpointed the moment of incoherence, and here it is:
Or why not eat a ham and cheese sandwich on the sabbath in Mea Shearim first, then do a backflip while reciting the collected works of Vanilla Ice? What on earth are you talking about? In there somewhere is a point where your brain erects a moral equivalency between not making offensive anti-Iraqi music videos (which, n.b., offend all Iraqis and Muslims, not just insurgents), and killing theatrical performers and online posters who do things which Islamists might find objectionable. I think the syllogism must be something like: “Not to publicly insult these people and the entire class of humans they belong to is equivalent to surrendering to them and allowing them to slaughter us.”
Maybe you needed to take an undergrad course in logic.
Really? Wow! Imagine that: there are a lot of fields of knowledge in the world. Who knew? Thanks for sharing…I still find it remarkable, but evidently you have coroboration, and I really don’t care that much. One wonders what you did study, though. Whatever.
OK…are you Jewish? I suspect not, in which case we will pass over the intricacies of your notions of sacrilege in the Hebrew faith. However, the odds of your being murdered for it are approximately zero. You know that, don’t you? You wouldn’t really be afraid to walk the streets of Mea Shearim or anywhere else on account of what would happen to you for heterodoxy?
Right, so that is a red herring. You might equally tell me you were afraid to walk the streets of Lynchburg, VA in a dishdasha while sucking on a penis-shaped lollipop. But in neither place would you be in one thousandth the danger of any street in Fallujah while clean-shaven and wearing a Dodgers cap.
Yes, there is at least a rough moral equivalency between suppressing the Marine’s freedom of expression and suppressing Karen Finley’s freedom of expression. While despite your assertion, not every Muslim or Iraqi would be offended at the song (for one thing, the majority would not understand the words); I’m confident that the potato trick would disgust many more.
And further, the equation…ugh. If your college career was dedicated to the refinement of your sophistry, better you had stuck to boilers or whatever it was you did in the Chinese Navy.
TW: Not a chance of you learning anything, is there?
Good god, I hope you folks are done feeding the troll.